Backlink Gap Analysis: The Complete Guide

SEO is competitive and to rank your content, you must find a way to stand out. One way to do that is to build authority through link building.

But since link building requires resources, if you want to build a successful backlink strategy that helps you outperform your competitors, you must be strategic.

Your key to strategic link building is backlink gap analysis.

Backlink gap analysis is a form of competitor analysis that will help you:

• Uncover link building opportunities
• Find your most valuable link building prospects
• Build a winning link building strategy

In this post, we’ll cover how to perform an SEO competitive backlink gap analysis that will help you boost your site’s authority and win on the SERPs.

What is backlink gap analysis?

Competitor backlink gap analysis is the process of comparing your backlink profile to those of your top competitors. The goal is to understand gaps in your backlink profile so that you can uncover valuable link building opportunities and compete on the SERPs.

A comprehensive backlink gap analysis will help you understand which links are crucial to acquire in your industry, which are easy to obtain, and what content to create to obtain them.

Why is backlink gap analysis important?

Here are four benefits to performing a backlink gap analysis:

1. Makes your site more competitive on the SERPs

Your organic rankings don’t exist in a vacuum. Tens of thousands of sites (sometimes millions) compete for the top spot on any given SERP, and there are many factors that determine which will be chosen for the top spots.

Search engines consider quality backlinks as endorsements, and the greater your authority, the more likely your site will rank for queries in your niche.

Now, we know search is competitive. If your competitors have a lot of quality backlinks pointing to their content and your site doesn’t, they’ll have a distinct ranking advantage over you, even if you have better content.

Backlink gap analysis will help you identify the backlinks you need to build topical authority.

2. Helps you find link opportunities

Sometimes, it’s hard to know where to start when building out a link building strategy and finding high-quality prospects.

Long gone are (or should be) the days of sending out a bunch of cringy LinkedIn DMs to anyone who has the word ‘Content’ written somewhere on their LinkedIn profile.

Instead, professional SEOs use competitor backlink gap analysis to solve this. With banklink analysis, you can create a targeted prospect list. After all, if sites link to your direct competitors’ content, they are likely to link out to yours, too – this should see your response rates increase dramatically.

3. Prioritize your efforts

Backlink gap analysis will help you to prioritize tasks within your link building efforts and make sure you’re working efficiently – because we all know no business has unlimited resources.

As a data-based process, it will help you find and reach out to the biggest and most profitable opportunities first. It will allow you to go after sites that are highly relevant and authoritative, ensuring you focus on the backlinks that are likely to deliver the most impact.

4. Identify content gaps

Sometimes, competitors’ backlinks come from content types you haven’t yet explored. Backlink gap analysis can reveal these formats or topics that are highly valuable to your audience. Websites naturally want to link out to high-value content, and this will help scale your link building efforts.

How to do a backlink gap analysis in 4 steps

Here are the four basic steps to performing a backlink gap analysis:

1. Identify your competitors

Identifying the right competitors is crucial – get this wrong, and all your hard work will go to waste.

SEO competitors are different from regular business competitors because they’re competing for visibility on the SERPs. Even sites that are not in your industry could be competing with your SEO content.

For instance, Wikipedia ranks at the top of search results for almost any niche yet is dedicated to none of them.

Think about your SEO competitors in two ways:

• Direct SEO competitors
• SERP competitors

Your direct SEO competitors consist of businesses that serve a similar organic audience to you. When doing competitor backlink gap analysis, you should look for domains that link to these competitors.

SERP competitors compete with your content on any given SERP for a set of specific keywords, and to outrank them, you must analyze the specific links pointing to these pages.

How to find your competitors on Google

Google is a great place to find SEO competitors. If you are looking for direct SEO competitors, try searching your head terms.

A head term generally represents your topic as a whole. For example, if you have a website dedicated to parenting, your head term will be parenting. If you cover more than one topic on your site, you might have more than one head term.

If, on the other hand, you want to find SERP competitors, simply Google your target keywords, eg. ‘how do solar panels work’. Pick the top URLs ranking on those SERPs and look at what links are pointing to them.

While this is a quick method that generally works well, it’s important to understand that some SERPs are more volatile than others. If you Google a keyword, the results you are seeing today might not be the same as tomorrow. This means you must pick stable competitors to analyze. The Similarweb Rank Tracker tool solves this elegantly by showing you how the top 10 results are progressing over time.

Above, we are tracking the keyword ‘milwaukee’. As you can see the results below position #5 are highly volatile. For this keyword, your top competitors are the URLs in the top five positions.

How to find your competitors using competitive data

A data-driven approach to finding competitors will help you see your entire competitive landscape, and cut down hours of Googling time.

Let’s explore how to do this using the Similarweb Organic Competitors report. To get started, drop your domain into the tool and scroll down to the Organic Competitors table. Below you can see the organic competitors for parents.com.

The tool brings a list of sites that have overlapping keywords. This means, as we mentioned above, they might not all be in the same industry as you are – which is made clear in the Industry column.

Since parents.com is in the Children’s Health niche, we can filter all other industries out with the Industry filter.

If the results are still not direct competitors, you can filter the results further with the Website Type and Search Type filters. The more granular you filter the results, the closer they will be to your business.

2. Analyze your site and your competitors

Now, we’ve covered how to find your competitors, it’s time to take a look at what backlinks your top competitors have to truly understand where your backlink gap is. This process is similar if you are looking at direct SEO competitors or SERP competitors.

Before looking at your competitors’ backlinks, you need to get your own backlink data using a tool like Similarweb Backlink Analytics. Then, you can go ahead and do the same with your top competitors.

To work out where your backlink gaps are, download the lists into Excel and compare the results, as you search for links that your competitors have that you don’t.

3. Analyze referring domains

A referring domain is a website that has at least one hyperlink pointing to one or more pages on your website, so by analyzing them, you can uncover many link opportunities

The number of referring domains indicates how many unique websites are linking to your site. Generally, links from a diverse set of authoritative and trustworthy domains carry more weight in search engine algorithms. If your backlinks come from a variety of reputable sources, it can positively impact your site’s credibility and authority.

The Similarweb Referring Domains report will show you all of your referring domains, and you can apply the same process as above.

Make sure you’re prioritizing your link building efforts by focusing on the highest quality domains, indicated by a high  Domain Trust Score (DTS.) 

Definition: Domain Trust Score or DTS is a metric designed to tell you how authoritative a domain is – the higher a domain’s authority, the more valuable it is to your site.

4. Prioritize your link opportunities

Time is one of your most important resources, but also one of your more scarce resources. Prioritization is crucial to working efficiently, so make sure you’re focusing on the right links.

Make sure to focus on:

• Links that occur frequently

Links that appear on the majority of your competitors should be your top priority. If they are willing to link out to your competitors consistently, they are likely to link out to your site. What’s more, if they link to all of your competitors, they might be a major factor in competitors’ SEO success.

• Links that are relevant

Focus on links that come from sites that are relevant to your industry. There are two advantages to relevant links:

1. They increase your authority in your niche
2. They bring targeted referral traffic to your site

• Links with high authority

When building links, it’s more important to focus on quality rather than quantity. This means focusing on the links with the highest Page Trust Score (PTS) in the Similarweb Backlinks report. PTS is a metric designed to tell you the strength of the page where the backlink comes from.

The quickest way to do that is to sort the data so that it shows the results with the highest PTS first. To do that, click PTS at the top of the table.

Create a link building plan based on your link gap

After going through the steps outlined above, you’ll have all the data you need to create a successful link building plan – and now it’s time to put that plan together following these three steps:

1. Planning

Before jumping in and reaching out to link prospects, it’s important to first plan your efforts.

Always remember that your link building plan should fit into your overall SEO strategy, so think about the tangible goals and outcomes you want from your link building. This will help you to understand how successful your link building efforts are.

Measurable goals could include:

• Enhancing your domain quality metrics, such as DTS
• Building on your page quality metrics, such as PTS
• Boosting your organic traffic
• Improving your keyword rankings

Once you know what you want to achieve, look at your backlink gap analysis to estimate what types and how many links you need to build to reach your goals.

Some of your goals will be achievable in a short space of time, while others might take longer. Building out a timeline and creating milestones will help you to track your progress.

2. Audit your content

Now that you understand what links you need to build, you must ensure that you have the right content on your site. Use your backlink gap analysis to understand what content types attract the most links. Then, perform a content audit to see if you need to update old content or build new content.

Your key focus in creating linkable content is to create content that is of higher quality than that of your competitors.

For instance, if you see that your competitors are earning links by offering free tools on their sites, and you want to do the same, make sure that your tools provide a better user experience or have more features.

3. Outreach and social sharing

Once you have the right assets, your next job is to let the world know that your content exists. One way is to share your content on social media. Share valuable, informative, and engaging content that people want to read and share. This builds trust and authority and could earn backlinks naturally.

But, if you only rely on social sharing, you’ll be missing out on some big opportunities. This is where link outreach comes in. To have success with your link outreach, instead of spamming your prospects with generic link outreach emails we highly recommend first building a relationship with your prospects. When done right, this does take time, but it might result in some high-quality links.

Track your link building efforts

Whenever you do any form of SEO, you want to track your efforts. As we all know, it takes time to see results from SEO, and if you don’t track it, there will be no way to understand if your efforts were successful. We recommend that you do this in two ways:

1. Track your referring domains and backlinks

As your site grows over time, you will begin to see more and more sites linking to your site. The Similarweb Backlinks report will show you this.

Below, you can see the trajectory of both backlinks and referring domains to expedia.com. Using tools like these, you will be able to see if your efforts are paying off in the long run.

2. Keep an eye on new and lost links

As time progresses, you will gain and lose links. You can easily do this with the Similarweb New vs. Lost report.

Using a report like this, you can see:

• New links: See the immediate success of your link-building efforts
• Lost links: Stay on top of lost links caused by content updates

For example:

If you find you’ve lost a link, you can usually save your link by just reaching out to the site owner. What’s more, doing this may benefit you in ways that you didn’t imagine.

For instance, if they are updating their content, it’s likely that they are looking to rank higher in search results. If they are successful, the link might pass more link equity as it’s coming from a better page. You might even get some highly targeted referral traffic from an up-to-date piece of content.

3. Keep an eye on your rankings and traffic

While an increase in website traffic could be caused by many factors, it’s worthwhile looking at your website metrics and rankings alongside your backlink metrics.

You can see your sitewide traffic and ranking metrics in the Similarweb Rank Tracker, which shows you your rankings, as well as your traffic.

If you have been working on building links to a specific page, you can see how it is progressing in the Keywords report.

Backlink gap analysis: Strategic link building

Although links are at the heart of a robust SEO strategy, link building is arguably one of the hardest parts of SEO.

How exactly do you convince a site owner to link out to your content?

Backlink gap analysis is the answer to this in so many ways – but successful backlink gap analysis starts with the right tools.

Similarweb Backlink Analytics is there to help you:

• Perform competitive backlink analysis
• Find the right prospects
• Build high-performing link bait

Use this data to create a link building strategy that closes your link gap one step at a time.

FAQs

What is SEO backlink gap analysis?

SEO backlink analysis is the process of examining and evaluating the backlinks that point to a specific webpage. Since backlinks are considered a vote of confidence or trustworthiness from one site to another, they can potentially boost your SEO and increase your search engine rankings.

Define a backlink gap.

A backlink gap is the amount of backlinks your site lacks that your top competitors have. A backlink gap often results in a site not ranking as well as it should in search results. By identifying these gaps you’ll uncover strategic link building opportunities that help you rank higher and gain more organic traffic.

How do you do a backlink gap analysis?

There are four steps to doing a backlink gap analysis:

• Identify your competitors
• Analyze your site’s backlinks
• Analyze your competitors’ backlinks
• Evaluate link quality and quantity
• Build a link building plan