Search engine optimization can be divided into three parts; On-page, Off-page and Technical Seo.
On-page mostly refers to things you can do on the website to optimize it, such as title tags, H1, meta description, content optimization. In On-page SEO you are looking at the best way to serve your page for the users to provide as much information as possible while capturing the keywords that will drive traffic to your page.
Technical SEO involves making fixes to your site, optimizing site speed, log analysis, understanding how your pages are crawled and optimizing it. Technical SEO ensures you are fixing 500 errors, handling redirects properly. Technical SEO can go very in-depth and requires technical expertise to execute. Technical Seo mostly involves a collaboration with the developers to implement the fixes.
Off-page SEO involves link building and outreach. Link building is a very important part of establishing authority. Link building is a very important signal and requires near flawless execution.
While there are many black hat methods of building backlinks out there, you have to be careful with your link building approach as spammy links does your website more harm than good. You need to come up with a great backlink strategy and be able to execute it.
In this post, I will explain how you can use Ahrefs and Google sheets to analyze your competitors' backlink profiles, piggyback off that and come up with your own backlink strategy!
Ahrefs is an SEO tool that helps content marketers and SEO specialists to audit their websites, do competitor analysis, keywords research, check for content gaps, etc. It is a multipurpose tool and highly recommended for any organization or agency serious about organic growth.
One of my favourite feature by Ahref is the backlinks and referring domain report. The backlinks report shows a list of backlinks gotten from your competitors and the referring domain report shows a list of domains that gave them backlinks.
Let us assume you own a travel site and you want to compete in Kenya, your site generally has a www.example.com/kenya-hotels subdirectory. You now want to get backlinks from Kenyan sites to grow your authority in Kenya. A quick “Hotels in Nairobi” search shows that Booking, Jumia travel, and tripadvisor are the major competitors for that high intent query.
Now that we know the major players, we can go to ahrefs and type in the URLs into the site explorer tab
Once this is done we have a dashboard that looks like what we have below.
This dashboard shows Backlinks gotten by Booking, the referring domains, the organic keywords. We are mostly interested in the referring domains.
The referring domains here refers to the sites that have given Booking a backlink. We will export this data as a CSV and repeat the process for the other competitors (in this case Jumia travel and Tripadvisor)
We can then import this data into google sheets and have different tabs for each of the competitors. This will enable us to analyze each data a bit more in-depth.
Now that we have all three of our competitors in one big master sheet, we can decide to look at “low hanging fruits” , these are sites that gave all three of our competitors a backlink. A referring domain that has given backlinks to all three sites is more than likely to give you a backlink, hence making them easier to reach out to.
Important to note: The ahrefs data doesn’t export the specific page the backlink was given, so you’ll have to still refer to ahrefs to check for RD you want to get backlinks from.
To be able to get these low hanging fruits, I performed a vlookup to check for referring domains Booking had with Jumia Travel, then a vlookup for referring domains Booking had with Tripadvisor.
I have a final column called link type which is as a result of checking how the backlink was gotten. This will give you a clearer insight into how to replicate this technique.
Going after competitors’ backlinks can be very rewarding as it helps you start out your link building campaign, especially when you have no clue how to start. It also stops your competitors from having any unique backlinks * evil grin*.