How to Spy on Your Competition and Backlink Checker Tools

Here is some helpful information that will help you to achieve the position you want in search engines today, where you can grab the attention of maximum potential customers and become leader of your industry.

What is a Backlink?

Backlinks are termed as the links pointing to your website. In other words, we can say that backlinks are the hyperlinks that are linked to a particular webpage. To get page rank and high position in the search engine, you need to have quality backlinks. Google considers quality as well as quantity of backlinks.

Also known as inbound links, they also play a great role in determining the popularity of your website. They are also one of the factors considered in enhancing the search engine results. The backlinks to your website can evaluate how much reputation and value you have gained on the web. The more quality and relevant backlinks you have, more your web page is recognized as a worthy destination. If you do not have backlinks, it means you need to work harder in earning credibility on the web.

You must keep in mind that the quality of backlinks matters the most. So, always try to obtain backlinks through organic or White-hat SEO techniques.

To get the top position, every online marketer is required to use certain tools. These tools help in tracking competitors and allow you to optimize your SEO campaigns accordingly. You can find a wide variety of such tools offering different features, benefits, and pricing. All you need is to find the most appropriate competitive analysis and backlink checker tool with the power to make the optimization process easier, faster, and more helpful.

How to Spy on Your Competition with SEO Tools

There are a number of ways to spy on your competition with SEO tools. When you do an SEO competition analysis, you get to know about the most competitive keywords, the content targeting the particular keyword, how a web page is ranking for that keyword, what SEO practices are used, page authority, and website authority. You can also find the weak areas of your competitors that could help you to compete with better SEO strategies and practices.

A number of SEO tools are available that allow online marketers, bloggers, and business owners to spy on the competition. Each website has a different scenario. So, it is very important to know their marketing strategies and several other factors affecting the traffic, leads, and sales. Some people spend large amounts of money on getting traffic for the targeted keywords, but fail to do so without knowing the exact reasons. The free and paid competitive tools help them in doing the perfect analysis and save a lot of time and money in generating more traffic. The tools play a great role in providing them with a path to achieve their goals within short time.

How much organic traffic you are getting, what are the keywords you are ranked for, and numbers of backlinks are the main aspects to become familiar with about the competition in your targeted market. You must know where to get the backlinks with the targeted keywords by maintaining the quality and relevancy of the links.

Traffic to your competitors’ websites is based on several factors. Go through the article, you will find reviews of the SEO tools such as Ahrefs, SEOMoz, Majestic SEO, SEMrush, and SimilarWeb.

Parameters to Check for the Competition

• The very first thing is to identify your competitors, check their websites, and find what they are doing to rank high in the search engines and to get high traffic. Without these, you cannot analyze your competitors.
• You must analyze the keywords your competitors are using. You may have difficulty identifying their exact keywords when you observe that your selected keywords are not on their list. You must be aware of the keywords that are doing great for their websites. Based on the analysis, you can optimize your website with the right keywords.
• Do you know that backlinks are considered as the most important factor of SEO? Therefore, it is very important to thoroughly check the backlinks of the competitors. Examine the number of backlinks, their origin, anchor text, etc. It helps you to know what path competitors are following to get quality backlinks.
• You must also check how your competitors are performing on the social media platforms. Learn what SMM strategies they are using.
• Check whether your competitors are using paid advertising and, if yes, then find what they are doing to drive quality traffic.

The information related to all these parameters can easily be retrieved using SEO tools. They help in obtaining valuable data for the competitive analysis.

What is Backlink Checker Tool?

Backlinks make your website stand out in the crowd. In today’s SEO world, more online businesses are focusing on building quality backlinks. It can be difficult for some online business owners to find all backlinks to their website. In this case, backlink checker tool helps them determine the number of backlinks pointing to their website. It means you do not need to find the backlinks manually, thus saving you plenty of precious time.

The backlink checker tool also provides additional information such as anchor text, page rank of the website, etc. It not only helps you to get the information regarding your website, but also provides the data of the competitors. The tool helps you to know the backlinks source of your competitors. This way, you can modify your link building strategy to reach the target.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is counted at the top list of powerful tools for checking backlinks. The user-friendly interface and effective data analysis make it an effective Site Explorer and Backlink Checker tool. Here, you can find all internal links, domains that link to your website, anchors, as well as quality pages of your website.

Inside Site Explorer tool, you can get information about all referring IP addresses and domains, breaking links with different extensions (.com, .net, .gov, .edu, etc.) to the website, types of backlinks to your website, link charts showing new and lost links, and bar charts showing anchor text breakdowns.

Inside Domain Comparison tools, you are able to find backlink reports with URLs containing social sharing data, 5 domain comparison, and batch analysis of various URLs.

Ahrefs can be used by selecting the most suitable package based on a small, medium, or large website. The differences between all these packages are crawl reports, total data rows limit, API limits, etc. You just need to pick the right plan that best fits your needs. You can promote, demote, or cancel your selected package anytime.

You can try it for FREE, which shows 500 results per request, 15 requests per day, and 3 standard reports. Get 20% discount on the given packages when subscribed annually.

Lite – $79/month

Standard – $179/month

Plus – $499/month

Premium – $1,299/month

Features 

• It combines a number of tools that show all required backlink information and help the subscriber to own the data.
• It is updated every 30 minutes, thus provides fresh data.
• The tool works on its own developed metrics and provides the access to the unique index that cannot be found on other tools.
• You get the backlink data that contain newly created links as well as links that have been placed for a long time.
• The exportable backlink report helps you to find and fix the prospective lost link issues instantly.
• Its unique feature, social metrics, allows you to find the breakdown of various domain name extensions for links pointing to these domains.
• You can also check the Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ metrics of the competitors.

SEOMoz/Open Site Explorer

Open Site Explorer is a Moz tool that allows you to analyze the competition with the backlinks. It also helps in finding link building strategies used by your competitors. The number of metrics helps in analyzing the plans and approaches followed by the challengers in the market. You can get the valuable reports in a matter of seconds, containing the results of various metrics. These reports may take a number of days, or even months, if done manually.

SEOmoz offers 30-days free trial to become completely familiar with this competition analyze tool. Apart from Open Site Explorer, SEOmoz also offers various other tools such as rank tracker, Keyword Difficulty and SERP Analysis tool, on-page grader, weekly crawl alerts, and social media statistics to identify how to work up against the competition.

After the 30 day trial, you have to pay $99 per month to continue using the benefits of SEOmoz.

The easy-to-use interface of Open Site Explorer (OSE) enables you to obtain the metrics, including Page Authority, Domain Authority, Linking Root Domains, and Total Links. It also offers four other metrics to sort and display the backlinks of your website. These are links pages, linking domains, anchor text distribution, and full list of link metrics.

Linking pages in OSE provide a list of URLs linked to your website from all pages. It also allows you to display followed, nofollowed, or 301 links, from external or internal, or all pages, to any page or all pages on the sub domain or root domain.

Linking domains allow you to get a list of clear breakdowns of all URLs/domains linking to your website along with associated Domain authority and linking root domains. It is a wonderful tool to evaluate the value of link prospects.

Anchor text distribution displays a list of anchor text along with associated linking root domain containing that particular anchor text and number of links containing this anchor text.

Full link metrics display an overview of additional SEOmoz metrics containing two graphs: percentage of followed vs. nofollowed links, and percentage of followed internal vs. external links.

Features

• OSE tool helps in optimizing the authoritative internal links on your website.
• You can find and fix 301 redirecting internal links to internal pages only.
• You can check the best backlinks of your competitors containing links page title + URL and even take a snapshot of the report.
• Its visually appealing interface helps you to identify how much you have succeeded in your link building efforts.
• The use of 301 redirected domains used by your competitors can also be spotted with OSE tool.

Majestic SEO

Majestic SEO is a powerful tool used in finding the backlinks. It also allows you to get the valuable reports and indexes that help you to compare the backlinks generated in the past. If you want to find each backlink to your website, this tool is helpful to get the desired reports. The tool enables you to find the competitors using the black hat campaign as well as helping you to determine what backlink strategies are used by your competitors.

The tool also helps you to determine the quality of your website’s backlinks as well as the quality of your competitors’ backlinks. It can help you to improve your link building strategy to get the best outcome in the search engine rankings. You can also deal with links created unnaturally. The data in Majestic SEO are taken from its own internal data retrieval tool instead of Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

The Neighborhood Checker tool is used to get the domains with maximum backlinks hosted on any IP or other large network. You can either use fresh data or historical data to get the desired reports. This Majestic SEO tool helps in getting a better idea of the unsafe co-hosted websites.

The price of using this tool starts from $50 to $400 per month. You can also save some amounts of payment when you choose an annual plan. Majestic SEO plans include Silver Quarterly ($50), Silver ($80), Gold ($170), and Platinum ($400). The prices of these plans are also available in ‘£’ and ‘€’. You need to subscribe to any plan based on your needs.

Features

• You can check the backlink history, which includes the newly created links, lost links, anchor text distribution, the majority of linked pages, as well as a map showing the hosting IPs.
• It also offers keyword suggestion tool.
• You can even compare your website links, strategies, and other details with the competitors. It can help in determining how powerful your domain is.
• You can get the required information related to sub domain and link profile, which is helpful in generating link building strategy for your website. These metrics are external backlinks, referring domains, citation flow, and trust flow.
• The tool provides more detailed information by creating a backlink report.
• You are also allowed to check the Anchor text results for each keyword and also able to find referring domains and external backlinks with that particular keyword.

SEMrush

SEMrush is a powerful tool used to research competitors’ keyword. It also helps in identifying the traffic driving keyword of any website. Additionally, you can also get more statistical details related to that particular keyword as well as other relevant keywords to your website can rank for.

The keyword and competitor research tool is very helpful in analyzing your website. You can determine what you have done, what you are doing, and how you can improve your website. You just need to enter the domain name and you will get the detailed report regarding the various fields, which include Keyword, Position, Volume, CPC, URL, Traffic, Costs, Com, Results, Trend, SERP source, and Last updates.

SEMrush offers three plans: PRO, GURU, and Business. You need to subscribe with one plan to get the results of desired analytics. The prices are as follows:

PRO – $69.95/month or $699.50 annually

Guru – $149.95/month or $1,499.50 annually

Business – $549.95/month or $5,499.50 annually

These plans include results per report, reports per day, keywords to track, number of pages to crawl, scheduled PDF reports, historical data, product listing ads, multiple user management, etc. You get the access to these analytics, depending on the plan you choose.

Features

• You get a report that shows what keywords you are currently ranking for, how much traffic you are getting, and the entire cost of traffic if paid.
• You can also check the status keyword rankings over time. The tool shows how your keyword is doing in the search engines, whether it is gaining or losing its position.
• It helps you to check your main competitors along with all the keywords you rank for. To what level your competitors are competing with the targeted keywords and other related information helps you to refine your link building strategies.
• You can even analyze the competition directly with the information such as traffic to your website through organic and paid search, total backlinks, top keywords, keyword position distribution graph, main competitors, and competitive positioning map.
• With SEMrush, you can also observe what a particular post on your blog is ranking for.
• Comparison of multiple domains at the same time is the best way to compare the competition. This feature is offered by the tool.
• It also offers complete keyword research tool.
• You can find out how your website and competition with others is performing with Google Adwords. Here, you get to know about the targeted keywords, your ranking in Adwords, and what competition you are facing.

SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb offers a powerful platform that helps you understand your website or app competitors. This tool is one of the most effective ways to get a quick outcome for website analysis and competitive research. SimilarWeb has an easy to use interface.

The tool displays the overall analytics of any website, including traffic sources with total visits per source, referring websites, their keywords, and several related metrics that focus on providing the best possible website analysis report.

The tool offers free version and three paid plans. You need to subscribe to any one plan based on your goals and needs. The minimum subscription period of SimilarWeb is one month. You can upgrade or degrade any plan at any time. The plans include:

Basic – $199/month

Advanced – $499/month

Ultimate – $799/month

These three plans provide different information based on the selection. These include a number of months of data, number of results per website metric, traffic sources and engagement metrics, and full website comparison. Along with them, Advanced and Ultimate plans also offer industry analysis report containing 245 industry categories, data of industry leaders, as well as Traffic Sources and Engagement Metrics.

Features

• Its a feature, Top Sites, allows you to find the top 100 websites depending on their traffic volume by category and location.
• Website Analysis, in SimilarWeb enables you to find the details of specific sites like how they are ranked, how they are getting traffic, etc.
• You can use the website analysis tool to look at specific sites to understand their business model and how they are generating traffic.
• Here, you can find the traffic sources with metrics like Direct, Email, Referrals, Search, Social, and Display Ads.
• When you want to find referral traffic, you will get to know the list of top 100 referral domains, associated category, global rank, traffic share, change, Adsense, and links.
• You can check the traffic from email marketing, social media marketing, and display advertising.

To generate maximum traffic, enhance leads, and increase sales, you need the knowledge of the SEO strategies executed by the competitors. SimilarWeb tool helps effectively in this regard to get the desired information.

Conclusion

The above given SEO tools help you find everything you want to know about your competitors. They are the powerful and effective platform to examine the simple to complex data and linking strategies within a few seconds. These tools are easy to use and understand, and are sure to provide highly valuable data to ease your task of beating the competitors. And don’t forget check out my ultimate post finding Long-Tail Keywords Using Long-Tail Pro and Keyword Package for Sale.

The article will help you to compare the SEO tools available for competitive analysis and for checking the backlinks. The comparison helps you to choose the tool that best fits your current website position. You will surely get valuable information after going through the entire article. You can achieve everything you need with the right choice.