Competitor backlinks: How to find the backlinks that put your website on track for SEO success

A 2026 guide to competitor backlink building

Competitor backlinks

As all seasoned SEO experts would know, backlinks are still a crucial and pivotal part of a business’s SEO success.

Without the right links, well a business could languish on say page 7 of Google.

However, the business in the same niche, you has had secured better links, well they could be occupying the number one spot for this reason.

Time consuming

As we all know building backlinks takes a ton of time, this is something that even the businesses with the deepest pockets cannot afford.

Even the biggest and best UK companies cant afford for example a team at a SEO agency to spending weeks on end looking for that high quality link.

Therefore time savings need to be made, a key way of doing is to use tools such as Arefs, or lets say SEMrush to check your competitors backlinks.

 

Votes of confidence

Businesses and SEO consultant all over the globe, since the days of Google PageRank have been referring to backlinks as “votes of confidence”.

The reason they simply say this is because a do-follow link is exactly that. If it comes from a top brand, a well know business which is relevant to yoru companies niche, this is all you need to increase your rankings.

However, gaining links from high value referring domains, that’s not a walk in the park!
In matter of fact its extremely difficult to say get a link from The Guardian newspaper in the U.K because, well they need a reason to link to that business.

Now, okay if your business is say a fish and chip shop and you are voted as the best chippy in the country, then a national newspaper may run a story, plus link to your say take-away website.

But, its exactly that, often the newspaper or the other business need a reason to link to you.

 

What exactly are competitors backlinks?

Competitors backlinks, can be links, often also referred to as backlinks, which send direct traffic to a website. You need links from high quality domains.

What you definitely want to avoid is spam links. Low quality links don’t help your SEO, they will actually massively hinder it. It will most likely, if you build too many, result in what SEO consultant refer to as an Google manual action penalty or an algorithmic penalty being applied.

Trust us, when we say if a business receives a link penalty, it can be difficult and a long road to recover from.

Your competitors, whether they are in Cardiff or anywhere in the world, often rank 1st, 2nd and 3rd on Google because they have high quality links. Now don’t get us wrong, that wont be the only reason why the business ranks in those positions, its often because they have technical SEO sorted, and written helpful content marketing.

However, they often have super high quality links. Therefore, to same time, a business will often hire a local SEO agency, which often uses backlink checking tools, such as Arefs, to start working out where your competitors have built links.

 

Replication of links

This is where the agency then ascertains if it can also obtain the same links, so that they can get that link juice flowing to their clients website as well.

Sometimes its impossible to replicate the links, the simple reason is, yoru direct competitor might have signed an exclusivity agreement, meaning that they are the sole retailer for that product in the U.K.

Therefore, this link from say the manufacturer, well that would then be rendered as impossible to replicate. The reason being they have exclusivity agreement in place.

 

How do I identify our main competitors?

Before you conduct backlink building, what you have to do is some keyword research.

Because it’s only when you use say Google Search Console, or another quality SEO tool such as MOZ that you gain an appreciation for keyword search volumes.

Now, this is important, because there’s no point in going after a keyword that only 10 people ask Google per month.

That’s when there could be a keyword that 1 million people ask Google per month. However, this is where the skill of the marketing company comes in, because sometimes, some keywords will be too difficult for that business to rank for on Google.

For example, someone with a 10k budget for search engine optimisation services per year, cant rank for “car insurance” because well, the main companies will be throwing millions at ranking for that highly competitive keyword.

Therefore, what you have to do, is be realistic which keywords can your business rank for with your marketing budget?

Then you have to come up with a content marketing strategy. Plus, you also have to then see who ranks number say 1 for that keyword, then look at their backlink profile.

 

Perform a backlink audit

Now, here once again is where the skill set of the SEO agency comes into its own.

Because when you look at a business such as B&Q in the U.K, they have say 30,000 links leading to their website.

Now, although they have so many links, you often cant build all of these, therefore the skill of the SEO company is working out which links that you can actually replicate.

 

Toxic links

Then the skill set of the link builder is in deciphering which links are quality, which are spam and toxic.

It could be that even if a competitor is ranking number 1, that they still have some toxic backlinks. therefore you most definitely don’t want to replicate these, as you could gain a Google Penguin Penalty.

Therefore you need the quality links, therefore the link builder needs to extract from the list the backlinks which are high quality not spam,

 

Referring domains

In an ideal world, what you want is quality backlinks, but just one or two from each high-quality website.

For example, you want say just 1 link from a high-quality website, such as Bloomberg, if you sold lets say stock and share management in the U.K.

Now, what you don’t want is too many referring domains coming from just one source. For example, if you have 10,000 links and 80% of these links come from just one business website this is no good.

You want diversified referring domains.

 

High DA High quality score

A word to the wise, you need to use the DA score as pinch of salt.

You need to employ link builders that really know what they are doing.

You want to employ highly experienced link builders that can recognise a spam link from a quality link from a mile off.

This means use the SEO tools for sure, but also, the SEO consultant should have other ways of checking if the referring domain is high quality before they build it.

Relevant

All of the backlinks that you build in 2026 must be relevant. If you run say a financial business, the links should come financial websites which are high quality.

So, for example, if you sell insurance products, you might want a link that is do-follow from the FT newspaper for example.

Relevance of the links are important, its all right to have one or two that are not relevant. But on the whole the backlinks need to be relevant.

Therefore, lets say that you run a solicitors practice, the links need to be relevant to offering legal advice.

 

Placement of the links

Its also super important where the links are placed, for example if it’s a really well written article, you would want to appear at the top, with anchor text that is written into the paragraph.

Not too many links on the page

You don’t want to gain links, that’s backlinks where the article is crammed full of other outbound backlinks.

This looks massively spammy.
Ideally you want the links from a high-quality website, but in the article where your business backlinks appear, you want only a few outbound links to other companies to be included.

If it’s a article that’s crammed full of outbound links, it often looks like your company has paid for a link insertion, which just looks spammy.

This could trigger a Google Penalty if you build too many spammy links.

 

Add value

The best backlinks to build are links which offer real value.

For example, let’s say your business is mentioned on The Sunday Times, that could be because you sell healthy meal kits.

The article for example, could be talking about more people in 2026 are turning vegan, and want vegan meal kits delivered to their door.

Therefore, if your business is mentioned in article like this, it helps the shopper locate your vegan meal kit business, so it helps the shopper, which is the best type of backlink to build.