It goes without saying (although I realise I have just said it) that with most link building campaigns, the primary objective will be to improve your site's organic search rankings.
By extension this of course means that you are aiming to gain ground on (and ultimately overtake) the rankings of your competitors. After all, if you are aiming to claim the number 1 position for a certain key phrase, it follows that the incumbent site is going to have to lose that same position.
With this in mind, the backlink profiles of your competitors are a great place to start looking for link opportunities.
What to look for
Over time you will develop a sixth sense for picking out the golden nuggets in a competitor's link profile, but when starting out you can use indicators such as: -
When you find a high quality link, you'll want to reverse engineer the strategy that was used to acquire that particular placement (this ties in with several other tactics in this guide).
For example, the link might be a guest post, or perhaps on a links/resources page. These should be relatively easy to replicate.
Pick off the low hanging fruit!
Pro tip: Look for hubs, i.e. sites that are linking to 2/3 of your competitors. These should be fertile ground for link building.
Using Ahrefs to export competitor links
Log in to your Ahrefs account and type the URL of the domain you wish to explore into Site Explorer.
Click on 'SEARCH LINKS'.
Click on the 'Links' button under 'Inbound Links' on the left menu and then choose 'Export'.
This will produce a CSV file containing all the information you need to mine your competitor's links. To make it easier to find the strong links, I would recommend sorting the spreadsheet first by Domain Rating, then referring page URL.
Alternative method
If your competitor doesn't have a huge link profile, you might want to work directly in Ahrefs to find opportunities. I would recommend browsing by 'Referring Domains' and sorting the data by DR.
When you spot a promising domain, you can click on 'Backlinks' to get the actual linking URLs.
So go ahead and get those links!
Further Reading
Recommended Tools