How to Check Competitor Backlinks for Real Estate Websites

Why Competitor Backlink Analysis Is the Starting Point for Real Estate Link Building

Most real estate link building programmes fail not because the links built are low quality but because they target the wrong sites. Without understanding which types of sites link to the properties businesses outranking you, link building outreach is essentially guesswork.

Competitor backlink analysis eliminates that guesswork. When you know which sites are linking to the estate agency, property investment platform, or real estate brokerage currently ranking above you for your most important searches, you know three essential things. First, you know the authority level your site needs to reach to compete. Second, you know which types of publishers accept real estate content in your specific market, because those publishers are already linking to your competitors. Third, you know your most productive outreach targets, because every site linking to a competitor that does not yet link to you is a site that has already demonstrated willingness to link to real estate businesses in your niche.

This is why competitor backlink analysis should precede any link building outreach, not follow it. The data tells you where to invest before you spend time and budget on outreach.

Step One: Identify Your Real Competitors for Link Building Purposes

Your link building competitors are not necessarily your business competitors. They are the websites currently ranking above you for the specific searches that drive your most valuable traffic.

For a Manchester estate agency targeting buyers and sellers, the link building competitors for the search “estate agents Manchester” are the websites currently holding the top five positions for that search, not the estate agencies competing for the same instructions in the local market. These two groups may overlap but are often different. A local estate agency with a small website and fifteen years of local reputation may hold strong positions in Google because of link authority built over years, even if the business is not your primary commercial competitor.

To identify your correct link building competitors, take your three to five most important target searches and run them in Google. The websites in positions one through five for each search are your SEO competitors for that query. Make a list of the top three to five unique domains appearing across your target searches. These are the backlink profiles you need to analyse.

For real estate businesses targeting multiple markets or search types, this exercise reveals different competitors for different searches. The competitor for “estate agents Manchester” may be different from the competitor for “buy-to-let investment Manchester,” which requires separate competitor analysis for each target search cluster.

Step Two: Check Competitor Referring Domains Using Free Tools

Once you have identified your top three to five link building competitors, the next step is to check their referring domain counts using Ahrefs free backlink checker at ahrefs.com/backlink-checker.

Enter each competitor’s domain into the tool and note the following for each:

The total number of referring domains, which is the count of unique websites linking to that domain. This is the primary metric for understanding the authority gap between your site and the sites outranking you.

The domain rating, which gives you an indication of the overall backlink profile strength. Comparing your DR to competitor DRs shows how much authority your site has accumulated relative to the sites you need to outrank.

The top one hundred backlinks visible in the free tool, which shows the types of sites linking to your competitor, the anchor text used, and whether the links are dofollow or nofollow. This sample is enough to identify patterns in where your competitor’s links are coming from.

After checking all three to five competitors, you have a competitive baseline. The average referring domain count across your top competitors is your primary benchmark. The gap between your current referring domain count and that average is the authority gap your link building programme needs to close.

Step Three: Identify the Most Valuable Link Sources

With competitor backlink data in hand, the next step is identifying which specific types of sites and which specific domains represent your most productive outreach opportunities.

Look for patterns across competitor backlink profiles. If multiple competitors have links from the same UK property publication, that publication has demonstrated willingness to link to real estate businesses in your market. If multiple competitors have links from the same regional news outlet covering your target city, that publication is a strong geographic authority signal for local searches in your market.

Sites linking to multiple competitors but not to your real estate website are called link gap opportunities. They are your highest-priority outreach targets for two reasons. First, they have already proven they will link to real estate businesses in your niche, which makes your pitch more likely to succeed than cold outreach to sites with no real estate linking history. Second, earning links from sites that link to multiple competitors in your market directly closes the authority gap with those competitors.

Ahrefs’ Link Intersect tool, available in the paid version, automates this process by showing you exactly which domains link to your competitors but not to you. For real estate businesses using the free tools, you can replicate this manually by listing the top backlink sources for each competitor and identifying the overlaps.

Step Four: Analyse the Quality of Competitor Link Sources

Not all competitor backlinks are worth pursuing. Some competitors have accumulated toxic or low-quality links alongside their valuable editorial placements. Understanding which competitor links are worth replicating and which reflect poor link building decisions that you should avoid is a critical step in turning competitor data into an actionable outreach list.

For each significant referring domain you identify in competitor backlink profiles, check the following quickly before adding it to your outreach list.

Check the site’s organic traffic using Ahrefs free traffic checker at ahrefs.com/traffic-checker. A site with high domain rating but very low organic traffic has likely inflated its metrics. A site with genuine organic traffic from property-relevant audiences is worth pursuing.

Visit the actual site and check whether it publishes property-relevant content with genuine editorial standards. Does the content read as produced for real readers? Are there identifiable authors and genuine publication patterns? Does the site cover topics relevant to your real estate market and audience?

Check the link type. Is the competitor’s link a contextual editorial link within a well-written article, or is it in a sidebar, footer, or list of unrelated outbound links? Contextual editorial links are worth replicating. Non-contextual placements on low-quality sites are not.

Step Five: Build Your Outreach Priority List

With competitor backlink analysis complete and link sources evaluated for quality, the final step is building a prioritised outreach list that organises your link building investment for maximum impact.

Priority one includes sites that link to three or more of your top competitors, have genuine organic traffic, publish property-relevant content, and have DR above 30. These sites represent the highest-confidence outreach targets because they have repeatedly demonstrated willingness to link to real estate businesses in your market.

Priority two includes sites that link to two of your top competitors with strong quality signals. These are valuable targets but with slightly less certainty about acceptance than priority one sites.

Priority three includes high-quality property publications, regional news outlets, and adjacent niche sites that appear in competitor backlink profiles but only once. These may require more effort to secure placements but represent the kind of high-authority editorial links that move competitive rankings significantly.

Sites from competitor profiles that have low traffic, no topical relevance, or obvious quality problems should be excluded from the outreach list entirely rather than treated as lower priority targets.

Free Tools for Real Estate Competitor Backlink Analysis

Several tools provide meaningful competitor backlink data without a paid subscription, though all have limitations compared to the full functionality of paid SEO tools.

Ahrefs free backlink checker at ahrefs.com/backlink-checker shows the top one hundred backlinks for any domain with domain rating, anchor text, and dofollow/nofollow status. This is the most widely used free option for initial competitor backlink analysis and provides enough data to identify the main referring domain types and patterns for most real estate competitors.

Ahrefs free website authority checker at ahrefs.com/website-authority-checker shows the referring domain count and DR for any domain. Use this to quickly check the total referring domain count for each competitor before doing the deeper backlink analysis.

Google Search Console shows which sites link to your own domain but does not show competitor backlink data. It is useful for identifying your own current link sources but cannot be used for competitor analysis.

Semrush free tier provides limited backlink data for competitor domains alongside traffic and keyword data. The combination of backlink and keyword data in a single tool is useful for connecting competitor link sources to the specific searches those links are helping to rank.

Moz Link Explorer free tier at moz.com/link-explorer provides three free domain analyses per day with basic backlink data including Domain Authority and Spam Score alongside referring domain counts. Useful as a secondary verification tool for assessing quality of competitor link sources identified through Ahrefs.

For real estate businesses running active link building programmes across multiple markets, a paid Ahrefs or Semrush subscription provides the full competitor backlink data, Link Intersect functionality, and historical link velocity data that makes competitor analysis significantly faster and more comprehensive than free tools allow.

What to Do With Competitor Backlink Data

Competitor backlink analysis produces actionable outputs in three areas that directly improve real estate link building results.

The referring domain gap calculation tells you how many new referring domains your link building programme needs to earn before you are competitive for your target searches. Subtracting your current referring domain count from the average of your top three competitors gives you the gap number. Dividing that by the number of months in your target timeline gives you the monthly acquisition rate needed to close the gap.

The publisher category insights tell you which types of sites are effective link sources in your specific real estate market. If the majority of competitor links come from regional UK news outlets, that tells you regional news outreach should be a primary focus. If competitor links are concentrated in property investment publications, that tells you the topic category and publisher type that is most accepted in your market.

The specific outreach list gives you named domains to target with personalised pitches, each of which has already demonstrated willingness to link to real estate businesses in your niche. This is more productive than cold prospecting because every site on the list is a proven potential link source rather than an untested cold contact.

Frequently Asked Questions

Making Competitor Backlink Analysis Part of Your Ongoing Strategy

Competitor backlink analysis is most valuable when it is a regular part of your link building process rather than a one-time exercise conducted before a campaign begins.

Running a new competitor analysis every quarter tells you which new sites have started linking to your competitors since your last check, whether the authority gap between your profile and competitors is narrowing as your link building programme accumulates referring domains, and which competitor link sources have emerged as particularly effective for your specific market.

The real estate businesses that most consistently close authority gaps against established competitors are those that treat competitor backlink analysis as an ongoing intelligence process that continuously refines their outreach targeting, rather than a starting exercise that produces a static list to work through once.

At The Core SEO, competitor backlink analysis is part of every real estate link building campaign we run. We identify the specific referring domains linking to our clients’ top competitors before the first outreach email goes out, and we update that analysis quarterly to keep the programme targeting the highest-value opportunities as the competitive landscape evolves.

Talk to us about running a competitor backlink analysis for your real estate website.