How to build backlinks using competitive intelligence

The Digital Marketing Podcast with Mandar Marathe

What are backlinks?

Backlinks are hyperlinks from external websites that point to web pages on your websites. Why are backlinks important? They have been the core or crux of Google's PageRank algorithm. Google give a lot of importance to links from external websites to your website. Even today, backlinks are considered as one of the important factors for ranking your page in search results.

How can you build backlinks using competitive intelligence?

First and foremost, I'd like to say that link building is very tough. In today's time its one of the toughest job to get someone else to link back to your website. Lets look at it smartly. What I am going to do is, I would go to Google and search for the keyword for which I want to build a backlink. I would type in the keyword phrase - for e.g. "seo company in india" is a keyword for which I would want briefkase.in as a website to rank higher in SERPs. I will see the top 10 results in SERPs. You can also use UberSuggest and type in the keyword there. You can get a list of pages that are ranking for this keyword.

From what I understand, there are 8100 searches happening for the term "seo company india" every month. If we rank on position 1, then we would be getting 35-40% of the clicks i.e 3500 - 4000 visits to our website, just for ranking for this keyword. The traffic analyzer tool by Neil Patel gives you the backlinks for websites. Just type in the domain name of the top ranking websites. For "seo company in india" we have ezrankings.org and techmagnate.com are the top 2 websites that rank. EZrankings gets 21k visitors for /seo-company-india page and 9k visitors for /seo-services page on their website. So 30k visitors to their website for just these 2 pages. If we consider a 1% conversion rate, they generate close to 300 leads from their website.

You can export the back link profile of the pages that rank high for your focus keywords. For "seo company india", EZRankings has 166 back links and for "seo services" they have 66 back links. You can also use SEMRush / ahrefs to get the backlink profile of specific web pages. Export this data to a spreadsheet. Now this data will have domain authority, page authority score for all the URLs from where the competitor has received backlinks. It will also have the anchor text on which they have received back link. Make a list of unique domains. Do this for all the web pages that are ranking on top - EzRankings, Techmagnate, SEO.in and so on. Combine all the data in one table to find out the unique domains and then categorize these domains based on DA / PA. We now have a prioritized lists of domains from where you can build links.

For some domains, you can go ahead and build links all by yourself. These are may be company profile websites such as Goodcompany or Clutch. Go ahead and build these company profiles or list your business on Google Maps. Start with content outreach to all the websites from where your competitors have received backlinks. Try to fill in the gaps to improve your backlink profile using competitive intelligence.