Looking at the backlinks pointing at your site is important. You can determine what links you already have and any new ones that are wanted (or unwanted). It’s also possible to perform competitor analysis to see what the strongest sites in your niche or industry are doing to get links and where they’re getting them from too. Most SEO companies & SEO Experts Like HP Sangha Toronto use the below top 5 backlink analysis tools for competitor analysis.
Here are the top 5 SEO backlink analysis tools:
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- SEMRush
SEMrush aims to be a single-solution online SEO tool. It provides effective backlink analysis and does find links that AHrefs misses out on. Their snapshot analysis of a website including the estimated traffic, keywords indexed and the types of keywords ranking adds considerably to its value. The traffic estimates are usually 1-2 times less than reality for small niche sites but get closer with larger traffic sites where estimates have more data to work with. Their filtering system to drill down to the results you wish to find within a competitor’s site is particularly effective for looking at what backlinks are present and what keywords are worth going after.
- SEMRush
- AHRefs
AHrefs is the premier backlink analysis tool. It’s generally more inclusive with a greater number of found links with its index getting updated often. They’re also communicative with their customers about re-indexing the web and updating their backlink data. Currently, they’re also looking to index and provide useful data on interlinking within a website.
Their dashboard and feature set go well beyond backlinks. They include keyword analysis, page-by-page analysis, traffic estimates (the same underestimation is present on smaller sites), and more.
For purely backlink analysis alone, they probably beat out SEMrush. However, for a broad range of useful SEO tools with an online SaaS, they’re a good single tool. - Majestic
Majestic – previously known as Majestic SEO – makes a big show of their backlink analysis and indexing. They have both a historical index and the latest, fresh index too. The fresh index is a daily update, so quite likely they have the latest links here. The historical one usually gets updated monthly.
Their Site Explorer feature provides some competitor analysis. For SEO practitioners with a preference, some are used to Majestic and stick with it. - SEO Spyglass
SEO Spyglass is often used by SEOs to perform SEO audits of a client’s site. It provides tools that can find relevant backlinks and provide information about them. The SEO jobber can then determine whether new links are good quality or disavow them.
The tool can also confirm which links are acting as referrals that generate new traffic too. Nice-looking reports for clients are possible with this desktop software too. The software is available on several desktop platforms. - Backlink Watch
Backlink Watch is a rough around the edges online tool. It can provide a lengthy list of backlinks for a domain. The backlinks are marked whether they are nofollow or not.
The usefulness of Backlink Watch is often to find links like PBN links that where spider bots are blocked from crawling AHrefs and SEMrush but often leave out Backlink Watch, so they show up there.