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What benefit is there in knowing how to check backlinks from your competitors?

As the great Chinese military strategist, Sun Tzu, said; “Know yourself, know your enemy, and you shall win a hundred battles without loss”.

In this instance, we are talking about the war of SEO over your competitors but the proverb rings true. By finding out what backlinks your competitors are using, you could help to boost your own search rankings. Not only that, but finding out how similar companies in your industry are using backlinks can also inform your marketing strategy, help boost customer engagement and increase traffic. In this guide, we take a look at some of the best tools to check backlinks that your competitors are using.

Best Tools to Check Backlinks

1 – SpyFu

With this powerful keyword monitoring tool, you can check backlinks for free using any domain. Whilst subscription services give you a lot more, the basic search data returned is quite detailed. You can access the top five most valuable keywords, the sites ranking history as well as see an overview of the backlinks of any site.

Subscription fees with SpyFu start at $299 for a year (approx. £235) and gives you unlimited searches, downloads and domain overviews.

2 – Monitor Backlinks

A relatively new piece of software to hit the SEO monitoring market, Monitor Backlinks does exactly what it “says on the tin”; it checks backlinks for any domain. Not only can you run and download a report detailing Nofollow and Follow status against any backlink complete with anchor text information but you can also receive regular weekly reports on your competitors top backlinks. You can access a free trial to evaluate the software before subscribing, Monthly costs start at $24.90 which allows you to register one domain and track two competitors.

3 – SE Ranking

Offering a free 14-day trial so that you can evaluate the software, SE Ranking allows you to specifically monitor the performance of your competitors by region and by search engine. You can manually add your main competition or use the system to identify top performing sites in your niche using a range of keywords.

For a small fee, you can run an extensive search to check the backlinks of any site including a breakdown of unique domains.

4 – Moz: Open Site Explorer

From one of the world’s largest marketing software companies, Moz, comes Open Site Explorer. As with many of these tools, you can access basic data to check backlinks for free or utilise the free trial to get more detailed information. The tool is easy to use and gives a great at-a-glance overview of important metrics such as anchor text and domain authority for all backlinks checked.

Subscription with Moz Pro is charged at $149 per month and also provides analysis of keyword data to offer keyword opportunities, competitor suggestions and crawl error data.

5 – Backlink Checker

This tool by Small SEO Tools is very basic but free to use. With Backlink Checker you can input any domain and return the top 100 most recent backlinks. Though the data isn’t very useful to perform detailed analysis, run on a regular basis you can use it to run your own reports and provide a snapshot of real-time searches to check backlinks of your competitors.

The Importance of Strategy to Check Backlinks

Knowing how and where to check backlinks is just one element of a successful SEO strategy, for other great SEO tools read our Link Builder Tools post.

Here at Opace, we know the importance of consistency and creativity to keep the momentum for online marketing. If you need help planning and managing your SEO campaign then get in touch or call us today on 0845 017 7661 or by email at [email protected].