“Backlinks are a critical component of any SEO strategy. While it may be okay to have links from a variety of sources, it’s much better if a high proportion of them come from sites in your industry. It’s also important that the links come from sites trusted by Google – non-spammy, real websites linking to your site because you have good and/or relevant content that they want to share with their readers.

So how do you find sites that are inclined to link to sites like yours?

How do you get ideas about what type of content they might want to link to?

How do you see what your competitors are doing that gets them links?

If any of these questions resonate with you, read on…

How to Find Competitor Backlink Opportunities

When you find competitor backlinks, you may also find opportunities for your own site. Since your competitors operate in the same industry, target similar audiences, and probably create content about similar topics, you’re likely to find link placements that would be relevant to you too.

Here are eight ways you can use the Alexa backlink tool, the Competitor Backlink Checker, to find backlinks from sites in almost any industry and get ideas for highly linkable content.

We’ll use various sites as examples so you can see how this might apply to your site or industry. To get started, you’ll need a list of similar sites that your audience visits, that are likely to link to your content.

Using your Alexa account (or an Advanced trial), you can quickly get a set of sites for any industry by going to to the Audience Overlap Tool (to learn more about finding similar sites with the Audience Overlap tool by reading this tutorial).”