---

How to Use Backlink Extractor to Analyze Competitor SEO

Let's talk about a classic strategy from the world of sports. Imagine for a moment that you are the coach of a football team, and your team is about to play a huge and a very important match against your biggest and your most fierce rival. What is the very first thing that you would do to prepare? You would almost certainly go and you would watch hours and hours of their old game tapes. You would meticulously study their strategy, you would analyze the strengths and the weaknesses of their star players, and you would look for any hidden patterns or vulnerabilities that you could possibly exploit.

In the highly competitive, digital world of SEO, we do the exact same thing. It’s called "competitor analysis." And the single most important and most insightful "game tape" that you can possibly watch is your competitor's backlink profile.

A website's backlinks are like a secret and a closely guarded list of all of their most powerful and most influential supporters. These are all of the other websites on the internet that are "voting" for them, and that are telling Google that they are a trustworthy and an authoritative resource. But how can you possibly get a look at this secret list? You don't have to guess. You can use a powerful, digital detective tool to be able to uncover every single one of their backlinks, and this can give you a complete and a perfect blueprint of the strategy that they are using to be able to succeed.

The "Digital Votes of Confidence": What Are Backlinks, Anyway?

Before we get into the "how," let's just do a super-quick refresher on what backlinks actually are and why they are so incredibly important. In the simplest terms, a backlink is just a link from one website to another website.

The best way to think about it is that a backlink is a "vote of confidence" or a "recommendation." When a very high-quality and a very authoritative website, like a major news publication or a respected university, decides to link to your small, personal blog, it is like they are giving you a massive and a very powerful recommendation. They are, in effect, telling their own, large audience, and more importantly, they are telling the Google search algorithm, "Hey, this other website over here is a trustworthy and a valuable resource on this topic, and you should pay attention to it."

It is absolutely crucial to understand that in the modern world of SEO, the quality and the relevance of your links are far, far more important than the sheer quantity of them. A single, powerful link from a highly respected university website is worth so much more than a thousand, different links from a bunch of spammy and low-quality, online directories.

The SEO Goldmine: Why You Should Be Obsessed with Your Competitors' Links

So, why should you, as a smart marketer or a business owner, be so completely and totally obsessed with the backlinks of your competitors? The reason is that analyzing their links can give you an incredible and an almost unfair, competitive advantage.

First and foremost, it is a roadmap to your own success. By being able to see exactly which websites are linking to all of your top and your most successful competitors, you are getting a literal, a step-by-step, and a proven roadmap of the exact link-building strategy that is already working in your specific and your unique niche. You can see the exact blogs, the specific news sites, and the industry directories that are already willing and are already interested in linking to content that is just like yours.

This, of course, allows you to find new link-building opportunities. This is the most direct and the most actionable benefit of all. You can essentially "steal" your competitor's strategy. If you see that a major and a very popular industry blog has written an article and they have linked to one of your competitor's posts, then there is a very good and a very high chance that they might also be willing to link to your own, and hopefully even better, article on that same topic. It gives you a perfect and a ready-made list of new websites to reach out to.

The Manual Method: An Impossible Detective Story

Now, you might be thinking, "Okay, this sounds great. Can't I just go and try to find these links myself?" The simple and the honest answer to that is no, it is completely and totally impossible.

You can't just browse the web and hope that you will magically and accidentally stumble upon all of the different and the diverse websites that are linking to your competitor. A single, reasonably successful website can have thousands, and in some cases, even millions, of different backlinks that are pointing to it from all over the world.

This is not the kind of information that is publicly available. This data is hidden away, deep inside the massive and the constantly changing indexes of the major search engines. This is not a task that a human being can possibly do. It requires a massive amount of data and a very powerful and a sophisticated tool to be able to analyze that data. And this is what reinforces the absolute and the undeniable necessity of using a specialized tool.

The Digital Sleuth: How a Backlink Tool Works

So, how do these amazing, digital detective tools actually work their magic? It is important to understand that these tools are not just simple websites; they are, in fact, massive and private search engines in their own right.

These professional SEO tools have their own, very powerful "bots" that are constantly and are tirelessly crawling the entire, public web, in much the same way that Google's own bots do. As these bots are crawling from one website to another, they are building a colossal and a constantly updated index of which pages are linking to which other pages.

The best analogy is to think of it like you have your own, personal, and private intelligence agency that is completely and totally dedicated to creating a massive and a constantly updated, relationship map of the entire internet. You can then, at any time, query that incredible map and you can ask it a very simple but a very powerful question: "Can you please show me a list of every single website in the entire world that is currently pointing a link at my competitor's site?"

The Power of a Dedicated Backlink Extractor

This pressing need for a fast, for a comprehensive, and for a completely and totally accessible way to be able to see this secret, and this incredibly valuable, relationship map is exactly why every single, professional SEO in the entire world uses a Backlink Extractor.

This type of tool is a specialized, and a very powerful, search engine that has been designed to be able to give you a complete and a comprehensive list of all the different backlinks that are pointing to any domain or to any specific URL that you give it. The workflow is an absolute dream of simplicity. You just go to the tool. You enter the domain name of your competitor, for example, competitor.com. You click the "Find Backlinks" button. The tool will then query its own, massive index of the web and, a few moments later, it will give you a detailed and an in-depth report that lists all of the different websites that are currently linking to them. And the fantastic thing is, with the kind of powerful and user-friendly tools you can find on toolseel.com, you can get access to this high-level and this incredibly valuable, competitive intelligence in a matter of seconds.

What to Look For in a Great Backlink Analysis Tool

As you begin to explore these wonderfully powerful and insightful tools, you'll find that the best and most useful ones are designed to be fast, accurate, and incredibly easy to use. They are built to be your personal, competitive intelligence dashboard. A really top-notch online tool for extracting and for analyzing your competitor's backlinks should have a few key features. It should include:

• A large, a comprehensive, and a frequently and regularly updated backlink index to ensure that the data that it is giving you is as complete and as accurate as is possible.
   
• A clean, a simple, and an easy-to-read report that shows you the exact page that is linking to your competitor, the "anchor text" that is being used in the link, and some important, quality metrics for the linking domain.
   
• The ability for you to be able to analyze both an entire domain and also a specific, individual URL.
   
• The crucial functionality for you to be able to easily and quickly export the entire list of the backlinks as a CSV file for your own, further and more detailed analysis.
   
• A simple and an intuitive interface that is very easy for even an SEO beginner to be able to use and to be able to understand.
   

A tool with these features is an invaluable asset for any modern and for any data-driven marketer.

The Human Strategist: From a Long List to a Winning Plan

Now for the golden rule, the part of the process that turns a simple, long list of data into a real and a winning, SEO strategy. The online tool has done its incredible, data-driven job. It has given you the raw data: a long and a comprehensive list of all of your competitor's backlinks. Now what? This is where you, the human, must step in as the strategist.

Your job is to carefully and to thoughtfully analyze that list and to turn it into an actionable, and a powerful, link-building plan for your own website. You need to look for the patterns. Are most of their most powerful links coming from guest posts that they have written? Are they coming from interviews that they have done on popular podcasts? Or are they coming from a specific type of an online directory? This will tell you which of their strategies is working the best. You also need to find the "low-hanging fruit." Look for the high-quality and the highly relevant blogs that are on that list. These are your absolute, top targets. You can now reach out to them with your own, and hopefully even better, piece of content and you can politely ask them for a link.

It's Time to See What's Working

Let’s be honest, trying to guess what it is going to take to be able to rank in your industry is a frustrating and an often very expensive way to do SEO. It is time to stop flying blind. By using a simple online tool to be able to analyze your competitors' backlinks, you can get a data-driven and a proven roadmap for your own, future success.

You can see what is already working for them, you can find all of the hidden opportunities that they may have missed, and you can start to build a powerful and an authoritative backlink profile that will help you to be able to dominate the search results. The game tape is out there, and it is just waiting for you to go and to watch it.