While the game of SEO has undergone drastic changes over the years, backlinks are still one of the major ranking parameters for the businesses. And keeping an eye on your competitors for their traffic sources, ranking keywords and their backlinks can be a great help to set your ranks high.

By analyzing your competitors you can actually boost up your SEO strategies for great ROI. How? Read on to know more.

“Backlinks, also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links, are incoming links to a website or web page”, according to Wikipedia.

When it comes to brand recognition and search ranking, Backlinks play a vital role. While websites with maximum backlinks were earlier considered for the topmost ranking, today it’s about the quality and authenticity of the backlinks.  And to determine the quality and authenticity of your backlinks, you need some special tools – Backlink Checker Tools.

Why you need Backlink Checker Tools?

When any website links to your site or any webpage via a hyperlink, the link it generates for you is called backlinks.

Backlinks are classified in two ways: Do-follow backlinks and no follow backlinks. Businesses usually emphasize on creating do follow links when it comes to backlinks. Here’s where backlink checker tools come in. These tools help businesses to count how many backlinks they’ve created for their website. In addition, you also get to know the quantity and authenticity of the websites from where you get your backlinks. All these factors help you increase your SEO rankings and you can build effective Online Reputation Management Strategy.

Following are 6 top online backlink checker tools that will help you to see all the incoming backlinks to your website. Have a look and choose the one that fulfills your business requirements.

1) SEMRUSH (Both free and paid)

Earlier this popular SEO tool was used for keyword analysis but now it has added backlink checker to its arsenal.

SEMRUSH tool offers an easy to use interface allowing the users to enter various domain names to look for. It then shows the total number of backlinks, referring IPs, domains and other information in a well-organized manner. The platform also allows you to get an insight of the basic information about your competitors in order to find out the best way to boost your ranking.

If you’re just a newbie SEO analyst, the free version will work pretty well for you. However, for-depth analysis, you can go for its paid version for $69.95/month.

2) Open Site explorer

Open Site Explorer is a tool designed by SEOMoz and is one of the favorite backlink checker tools today. This tool produces a filtered report based on domain authority and the anchor text used in the website.

It offers both premium and free backlink checking service. While the freeware allows for a maximum of 3 searches for backlinks per day, the paid one allows the subscriber to perform an unlimited search for quality backlinks. You also get additional features and diagnostic tools in the premium version.

3) Ahrefs (both free and paid)

Ahrefs is probably the best tool for backlink analysis of any website and is known for its detailed analysis and excellent customer satisfaction.  This tool provides a great deal of detailed information related to the backlinks to your site, and also allows you to determine your progress or degradation (in terms of links) over time.

The platform features various attributes including date/time, number of social shares, number & types of backlinks, referring IPs & domain and other information. It is available in two versions: the free version one offers 10 results, while the paid one offers unlimited results.

4) Majestic SEO (Both free and paid) 

Majestic SEO has a domain of about 10,000 satisfied users relying on it for their backlink check. This platform has a broad database of indexed backlinks. It conducts many updates almost every day to offer its users with quality web searchers and fresh backlink report on their website data.

Easy to operate, Majestic SEO provides valuable diagnostic report on your website’s backlink profile. You just need to your website on the search box to initiate checking quality backlinks on your website.

The basic advantage of this tool is that you can download the link profile of your competitor for free and can spin them as you proceed to get a clear view of the their backlink strategies.

5) RankSignals (free)

Rank Signals is a clean and cutter free tool that can be used to check the total number of backlinks, Page ranking of the source from where you’re getting backlinks and link anchor text. You can get a count of the no-follow, do-follow links and the number of unique domains pointing to your site. It provides you with the backlink report and also shows you, your current Page Rank and Alexa Rank. The only drawback is that it does not give you an extensive report.

6) Cognitive SEO (both free and paid)

Cognitive SEO is a tool that has become popular today for evaluating various aspects of the backlinks sources. It offers features like advanced competitive research showing unnatural link profiles, multi-user access with authentication levels, to-do lists for project management, link previews with snapshots highlighting exact positioning of the link. This platform comes with perfectly designed dashboard and interface that offers everything on a single page.

Use the above tools and keep an eye on your competitors so that you can stay one step ahead from them.

If any of tool that seems to be missed in this blog, feel free to share the same in the comment section given below.

About the author

Internet Marketing Analyst, present Director @kvrwebtech.com Since 2009. Providing Internet Marketing as a medium for all kind of businesses to achieve the modern era goals. Have been highly successful in cultivating projects in Real Estate, Financial and Education Sector.