How to Improve Your Link Popularity (the Competitor Method)

There’s no secret trick to ranking well in search engines. But there is one repeatable method that has worked for as long as we’ve run this site: find out who links to your competitors, and earn those links yourself.Sites that link to businesses like yours have already shown they’re willing to link to businesses like yours. They just haven’t met you yet.

Step 1: Pick the right competitors

Choose two or three sites that compete with you for the same customers or the same search results. Not the giants of your industry, but sites roughly your size that rank where you want to rank. If a site is vastly bigger than yours, its link profile will be full of opportunities you can’t realistically win yet.

Step 2: See who links to them

Run a free link popularity reporton each competitor. You’ll see how many sites link to them and which linking sites carry the most weight. The Premium Report pulls the full list (every linking page, with anchor text) and delivers it as a spreadsheet you can work through.

Step 3: Sort the prospects

Not all links are worth chasing. Prioritize, in order:

1. Sites that link to more than one of your competitors. They link to everyone in your niche but you. That’s the easiest yes you’ll ever get.
2. Resource and links pages. Their whole purpose is linking out; a polite suggestion often works.
3. Blogs and publications covering your topic. They need material constantly. Offer expertise, data, or a quote.
4. Organizations and academic pages. Hard to get, heavily weighted, and they age beautifully.

Skip social profiles, giant platforms, and anything that looks like a link farm. Those either carry no weight or actively hurt.

Step 4: Ask, like a human

Write a short, honest note: you noticed they link to a similar site, here’s what yours offers, would they consider adding it. Three sentences beat three paragraphs. Mention the specific page you saw. It proves a person wrote the email. Never send the same text to a hundred sites; a 10% response rate on 30 personal notes beats 0.5% on a thousand blasts.

Step 5: Give them a reason

The ask works far better when there’s something worth linking to: a genuinely useful guide, a free tool, original data, a glossary. If your site is only product pages, build one great resource page first. It will earn links for years.

Step 6: Repeat quarterly

Link profiles change constantly. Sites gain and lose links every month. Re-run your competitor reports every few months: new linkers are fresh prospects, and if a competitor losta link, the site that dropped them may be open to a replacement. (That’s also why monitoring your own backlinks matters: you can’t fix a lost link you never noticed.)

What about buying links?

Tempting, risky, and usually unnecessary. We wrote an honest guide to what link buying really costs if you’re curious. The competitor method above gets the same result with none of the risk; it just takes effort.