weaknesses you have as well as discover
new opportunities. Comparing against competitors also helps get projects off the ground because no one wants to lose to their competitors. The Organic Competitors report in Site Explorer is a quick and easy starting point to identify who your competitors are in the SERPs. The Organic Competitors report in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer Check out our post on how to do an SEO competitor analysis for more steps
including: Identify your SEO competitors
Investigate how they’re getting traffic Find and cover content gaps Spy on your competitors’ featured snippets See where your competitors’ traffic is coming from Find backlink gaps Spot link bait opportunities Find your competitors’ broken pages Check your competitors’ Core Web Vitals See what keywords your competitors are bidding on in paid search Learn from your competitors’ PPC ads Link audit In some cases, you may want to do a link audit as well—especially if you have a history of spam or
have a manual action against your website
. I will caution you to be very careful with the disavow file and any “toxic” links that tools may identify, as the methodologies I’ve seen are questionable. Many people end up hurting themselves by disavowing the identified links. For more details, check out our posts on how to do a basic backlink audit and how to perform a competitor link analysis for our process. Here’s a summary: Step 1. Get a high-level view of
your backlink profile See how your
backlink profile compares to the Dominica Email List competition. You can find a more in-depth version of this in our guide: How to Perform a Competitor Link Analysis in 3 Steps Look at your backlink acquisition rate over time, and compare this to the competition Identify negative SEO attacks by looking for link spikes Look for a disproportionate amount of links from “spammy” CTLDs Look for indications of spam in your anchor
text profile Step 2. Delve (a bit) deeper
your site Find the best and worst sites that link to you Check for spam in the full “anchors” report Look for backlinks from the same C-Class IPs (advanced) Step 3. Review the full backlinks report Start with a web page (not the entire domain) Sort by traffic (optional) Look for commonalities between backlinks Internal link analysis Internal links can have a big impact, especially
for enterprise websites where you
may not be allowed Black Ops Cold War Cheaters: A 2024 Requiem for Fair Play (Is the Nuke Option Necessary?) to build external links. The easiest way to see internal link opportunities is with our tool in Site Audit. We look at what your pages are ranking for and suggest links from other pages on your site that talk about those things. Internal Link Opportunities report in Ahrefs’ Site Audit Check out our actionable guide to internal linking for our steps
