One of my favourite ways to get backlinks and find link opportunities is to find out where competitors are getting their links. When link building, it’s the first thing I do as a link building technique as it’s a great source of opportunities. If a site is linking to your competitor then the chances are you could also get a link.

Even better than finding sites that link to one of your competitors is finding sites that link to more than one of your competitors!

There are many tools available online that can be used for this, but I find that Majestic’s Clique Hunter is the best due to the high amount of competitors you can compare and also because of how vast their link database is.

For the purpose of this tutorial, I’m going to try and find links for an Online Marketing blog.

Once you are logged in to your Majestic account, you have to select Tools > Compare > Clique Hunter.

You will now be shown the Clique Hunter interface. Here you are able to compare up to 10 domains or URLs. You can either manually enter them into the boxes at the top, or in the box below. You then have to click Hunt.

I then like to customise how the link opportunities are shown. I like to set them to be sorted first by Matches and then by Trust Flow. You then have to click Refresh.

You will now be shown the results of the analysis. What this is showing you is where these sites have got links in common. The great thing about this is that if these websites are linking to multiple competitors of yours, the chances are that you’ll also be able to get a link from them as well.

You can either sit there and go through the results looking for link opportunities using the Majestic website, or you can download the data by scrolling to the bottom of the page and clicking Download Data.

You will be given the option to download the data as an Excel file, CSV or TSV.

I often like to analyse the data on the Majestic site as it allows me to see the actual link and not just the domain. This then lets me easily see how they have got the link, be it a Guest Post, Forum Post, Infographic, Niche-relevant directory or something else.

From checking out the backlinks, it seems these are Guest Posts, so what I would now do is take a look on the website to see if there is anywhere that you can submit Guest Post ideas.

From doing a bit of searching around on the website, I was able to find a page where you can apply to become a contributor.

So there we have it – one of my favourite ways to find new link opportunities. It’s not rocket science, but it is time-consuming!