How to Find Your Competitor's Most Important Links

[megri]

As a true marketing blogger, I decided to do terrible marketing by publishing a new blog post & sending this email out at an absurd hour for most of my readers (4am EST) who are here in the US.

Regardless, I just published a new blog post on Point Blank that's important for a couple of reasons:

It outlines a simple Excel hack to figure out the most important link opportunities
It shows you the kinds of reports that I run A LOT
The first is straightforward, and is outlined in a process-driven manner in the blog post. The second, however, may be overlooked; these are the types of reports I generate fairly often, because I do the majority of my link prospecting via backlink analysis (as opposed to using search queries, i.e. Keyword "guest post", to find opportunities).

Here's the blog post: http://pointblankseo.com/prioritize-link-opportunities
As outlined, I'll grab a list of competitor URLs (rarely direct, same-head-keyword competitors; could be for specific content assets, or other horizontally related niches, etc.), throw them into Ahrefs, merge their CSV exports, and find the highest number of occurrences of both URLs and domains.

But after that, I also use URL Profiler (mentioned in the post) to grab other metrics on those URLs, which is quite helpful as Ahrefs' data points (Ahrefs Rank & Domain Rank) aren't the best. I usually pull Domain Authority, homepage PR, and URL PR most often, then use those to filter my lists.