What do you think of when you hear the term “competitive link building”? Do you grin with excitement at the thought of poaching linking opportunities from your competitors? Or do you shudder at the thought of picking through hundreds of low quality links for that one needle in the haystack?

For too many SEOs, competitive link analysis is worse than simply not productive, it is a tedious, soul-sucking task that can derail your linking campaign, waste your time, and even get your site sent to Penguin jail. How do you keep this from happening?

Nine Step Process for Better and Faster Results

SEOs need a good strategy for filtering out all the junk so they can find the best opportunities and gain insights into their competitors linking and marketing strategy. That is why I developed a process; individual results may vary, but these nine simple steps will not only give you better results, but you will also be able to review competitor profiles four to five times faster than before.

1. Pick the competitor you want to analyze

Over the course of a linking campaign, you are likely going to want to analyze dozens of competitors, but you have to start somewhere. Pick a competitor whose site is similar to yours in content and messaging.

2. Download the competitive link profile from Open Site Explorer

Search your competitor's backlink profile using SEOmoz's Open Site Explorer. Filter the results to include only followed and 301 redirected external links, and download the report by clicking on the 'Download CSV' link. (Word to the wise - make sure you click the 'Filter' button before exporting your results to CSV; otherwise your results will be messy and you will just create more work for yourself).

Screenshot of an Open Site Explorer report for LL Bean showing filter options for download.

3. Check the HTTP status codes of all URLs in the link profile

Use a tool like Screaming Frog to crawl all the URLs in the competitor link profile. Eliminate any URL that returns a 404, 302, or some other funky HTTP response. Screaming Frog is a great tool for this step because it can make it easy to find soft 404s and domain parking pages.

4. Review the URLs again

Don't waste your time on URLs that already link to you or don't link to your competitor any more. Eliminate them by using Screaming Frog (or another scraper) to find URLs that either contain your domain or don't contain your competitor's. Delete all those URLs from the profile.

5. Establish a minimum Page Authority (PA) score and remove all URLs that don't meet it

To ensure you are focusing on authoritative links (relatively speaking) set a minimum PA for your review and eliminate all the URLs with PA scores less than your floor. I usually set my floor between 19 and 25, depending on the sites and the sample size. For those of you not familiar with PA, it's SEOmoz's numeric authority score of a page. Broadly analogous to Google PageRank, it is a great at-a-glance measure of the quantity and quality of links pointing to a page.

6. Clean up the report

Removing all the low PA sites from your competitor's link profile will get rid of a lot of noise in your competitor's link profile, but not all of it. There are a lot of URLs you will still want to remove due to multiple links from the same site, canonicalization issues, language issues, and more.

Now is the perfect time to clean up all those URLs with a little excel handiwork. There are countless ways to accomplish this, but this process works best for me:

1. Create a new column that uses the lcase() function to convert all URLs to lower case and the left() and find() functions to remove all URL parameters.
2. Use find and replace to on that column to remove "http://", "https://", and "www." from all the URLs in the column
3. Sort your spreadsheet alphabetically
4. Use conditional formatting or Excel's if() function to highlight possible duplicate URLs.
5. Manually review each potential duplicate and delete all the offending URLs

7. Get Google cache information on all remaining URLs in the profile

Looking at cache frequency is a great way to get a sense for how ‘valuable’ Google thinks a page is; after all Google wouldn’t waste resources crawling a worthless URL would it?

There are several ways to get Google cache data. I prefer to use Google docs and copy/paste into Excel (Kahena Digital has a great tool for this).

Whichever way you do it, record the last cache date for all the URLs in your competitor link profile. Any link that isn’t cached, or hasn’t been in the last six weeks gets deleted.

Screenshot of the Google cache page for Golf Bags Unlimited, which, according to the grey bar at the top of the screen, was last visited by Google on January 25, 2013

8. Manually review each remaining URL

At this point, you are going to have to go manual and review each URL in your link profile. Looking at the URL, you are going to want to score it on its attainability as well as note what kind link it is (directory, blog roll, curated list, paid link, etc). Speed is key here; you want to review the URLs as quickly as possible.

9. Lastly, sort the final list by attainability, page authority, and cache date

You are now free to start your submission process confident that these are pages with some authority and Google thinks they are important enough that to crawl and cache them.

What This Process Can Accomplish

By the end of this process, you should have a list of strong linking opportunities after eliminating between 70% and 95% of the sites from your competitor’s link profile. While the list is great, what makes it really valuable is the tactical information added in step 8. You now have a list of the linking and marketing strategies that are driving your competitor’s success, which you can use as a blueprint to beat them at their own game.

For example, maybe your competitor is getting a lot of traction with site sponsorship – all you need are some advanced link building queries and not only will you close the gap between you and your competitor, you can actually turn the tables on them.

For too many SEOs, competitive link building is a laborious process with little to no payoff. If you are one of those SEOs, I suggest you try these steps and see if they can dramatically improve both the speed and results of your competitive linking efforts.