Steal Your Competitors’ Link Building Strategy

Author

Alex Horsman
June 2nd, 2024

All right, this week’s email is going to be a short one (yet highly actionable).

With the launch of the Lazy Link Building cohort, I’ve been up to my eyes in work. 

I’m sitting here on a Saturday afternoon writing this. My editor (Hi, Beth!) won’t even have time to take a look before I send this. Please excuse any improper grammar or misspellings.

Today, I’m telling you how to spy on your competitors' link building strategies.

I’m amazed at how easy this strategy is yet how much gold it can uncover.

Whether you’re doing this yourself or delegating to a team member, make sure to do it every week or month.

Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.

Step 1: Find the right competitor(s)

This may seem obvious, but you want to find people you’re competing with that are going after the same money keywords as you.

For e-commerce brands, this is category- or product-page keywords.

If you’re running a blog, this would be your “best of” or “review” keywords.

The idea is to find competitors that are actively building links to pages that wouldn’t naturally attract backlinks.

Hardly anyone on the internet naturally links to an e-commerce category or product page . . . . 

If you see your competitor(s) gaining links to these pages, best believe they are link building.

For instance, if I’m Gym Shark, here are some keywords I’m targeting:

  • athletic shorts

  • biker shorts

  • workout shorts

Here are some competitors that are ranking for those terms as well:

No way does Barbell Apparel or Ryderwear get 200+ backlinks to these pages naturally . . . . 

It just doesn't happen unless they’re link building. 

Next, you want to put your competitor’s root domain into Ahrefs and take a look at their backlink profile. 

Let’s pick on Ryderwear for this experiment. 

I would advise adding a few filters to weed out the noise.

  • DR: 20+

  • Traffic: 3,000+

  • Dofollow

  • NEW

  • Last 30 days

With all these filters applied, this shows you new links your competitor has secured within the last 30 days.

You’ll want to play with that “last 30 days” filter depending on how frequently you’re doing this, e.g., if you check these each week, then change it to the last seven days.

Step 3: Analyze and make decisions

Now it’s time to figure out how your competitor is getting these backlinks and if you should follow suit, i.e., if they got a link from XYZ, should you reach out and get a link from XYZ as well? 

Note: If you want to be a dick (I’m looking at all you in the casino niche), this note is for you. Let’s say your competitor just got a link from XYZ and you want a link from them as well. Reach out to XYZ and then offer to pay them to not only add your link but remove your competitor’s as well.

When looking at the above screenshot, we see two interesting links they’ve gotten.

If we open that page, we can clearly see a guest post. 

About 500 words of copy and only one link on the page. 

If they’re willing to give your competitor a link, they’ll do the same for you.

That said, I would 100% not go for this link. 

If we take a look at this guest post site's contact page, we see this contact info: 

Give “rankbeetle.com” a visit and guess what?

All this tells me is the site is clearly a guest post farm. 

  • High DR with little traffic

  • An “SEO agency” running the site

This link is shit and I’d stay away. 

Honestly, I should reach out to Ryderwear and tell them about this. 🙄 

Here’s the second interesting backlink:

Now this is a good backlink, one I’d want to get.

But guess how Ryderwear got it?

The Blast is linking to https://www.larsapippenfitness.com/about.

This site now redirects to Ryderwear.

Based on our five-minute analysis, we can see our friends at Ryderwear like guest posting and acquiring domains to redirect into their own site.

Imagine what you could uncover in an hour if you did this for multiple competitors?

You’d get an MBA in link building.

Side note: That redirect is actually broken right now. Seriously, who tf is doing Ryderwear’s SEO? Someone reach out and get yourself a new client.

Your next steps

Reading articles and theory are cool, but you know what will actually move the needle for you?

Action. Don’t just read this. 

Implement or send to a team member.

Here’s what to do next:

  1. Find 5–10 competitors that are actively building links within your niche.

  2. Review their link profiles every week or month.

  3. Analyze their strategies and what’s working for them.

  4. If you find a link that they got and you’d like it, reach out to the website.

That’s it for now. 

See you next week and, as always, hit me with any questions you may have.

Much love ✌️

P.S. We’re actually sitting at ~880 words. Not as short as I thought!