This guide walks you through the process of identifying your SEO competitors, adding them to LinkRocket, and reading the Comparison Dashboard for the first time. By the end, you'll have a clear picture of where you stand and what to focus on next.
Step 1: Identify Your True SEO Competitors
Before you add any domains, take a few minutes to find the right competitors to track. This step matters more than most people realize — analyzing the wrong sites leads to irrelevant data and wasted effort.
Your SEO competitors are the domains that consistently appear in search results for the keywords you want to rank for. They may or may not be businesses you compete with directly. A blog, a news site, or a large marketplace could be your biggest SEO rival even if they don't sell what you sell.
Here's how to find them:
List your 10–15 most important target keywords. These should be terms that drive (or would drive) meaningful traffic to your site.
Search each keyword in Google. Use an incognito or private browsing window to avoid personalized results.
Note which domains appear repeatedly. If a domain shows up in the top 10 for three or more of your target keywords, it's a strong SEO competitor.
Look beyond the big brands. Enterprise sites like Amazon or Wikipedia may appear, but they're rarely useful comparison targets. Focus on sites that are realistically within reach — domains with authority levels you could match within 6–12 months.
Tip: If you're just starting out, prioritize competitors whose Domain Rating (DR) is within 10–20 points of yours. These are the sites where competitive insights will be most actionable.
Step 2: Add Competitors to LinkRocket
Once you've identified 3–5 competitors, adding them is straightforward:
Navigate to Competitors from the main menu.
Click the + Add Competitor button.
Enter the competitor's domain (e.g.,
example.com— no need forhttps://orwww).Click Analyze. LinkRocket will pull backlink data, authority metrics, and ranking information for the domain.
Repeat for each competitor you want to track.
Analysis typically takes a few moments depending on the size of the competitor's backlink profile. Once complete, each competitor will appear in your Comparison Dashboard.
Step 3: Read the Comparison Dashboard
After adding competitors, the Comparison Dashboard gives you a side-by-side view of the metrics that matter most. Here's what you're looking at and how to interpret it.
Overview Metrics Table
The top of the dashboard displays a table comparing core authority and link metrics:
Metric | What It Means |
|---|---|
Domain Rating (DR) | A score from 0–100 measuring the overall strength of a domain's backlink profile. Higher is better. |
Domain Authority (DA) | Similar to DR but calculated using a different methodology. Useful as a secondary reference point. |
Total Backlinks | The total number of individual links pointing to the domain from external sites. |
Referring Domains | The number of unique domains linking to the site. Generally more important than raw backlink count, since 100 links from one domain are worth less than one link each from 100 different domains. |
Trust Flow (TF) | A metric reflecting the quality and trustworthiness of a site's backlinks. |
A typical comparison might look like this:
Metric | Your Site | Competitor A | Competitor B | Competitor C |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Domain Rating | 35 | 52 | 41 | 38 |
Total Backlinks | 1,200 | 8,500 | 3,200 | 2,100 |
Referring Domains | 180 | 620 | 290 | 210 |
What to Look For
When reviewing the dashboard for the first time, focus on three questions:
How far behind are you? If your DR is 35 and your closest competitor is at 52, that's a meaningful gap — but not an insurmountable one. Gaps of 10–20 points can typically be closed within 6–12 months of consistent link building.
Who's closest to your level? The competitor nearest to your current authority is often the most useful to study. Their strategies are more likely to be replicable at your current stage than those of a competitor with 5× your referring domains.
What looks achievable in 6–12 months? Rather than trying to match your strongest competitor immediately, set a realistic target. If Competitor C has 210 referring domains and you have 180, closing that gap is a concrete, measurable goal.
Radar Chart Visualization
Below the metrics table, the Radar Chart provides a visual snapshot of how you compare across multiple dimensions. Each axis represents a different metric, and the shape of each competitor's polygon shows their relative strengths and weaknesses at a glance.
This is especially helpful for spotting patterns — for example, a competitor might have high DR but low content coverage, suggesting they've built authority through links but haven't invested in content.
Saved Competitor Sets
If you manage multiple projects or clients, you can save competitor groups for easy reuse. This lets you switch between competitor sets without re-entering domains each time. Look for the Save Set option in the dashboard toolbar.
What to Do Next
With your competitors added and your baseline comparison in hand, you're ready to dig into the specific analyses that drive action:
Run a Link Gap Analysis to find sites linking to competitors but not to you — these are your most promising outreach targets. → Link Gap Analysis
Explore Content Gaps to discover keywords competitors rank for that you're missing entirely. → Content Gap Analysis
Compare backlink profiles in detail to understand growth trends and anchor text strategies. → Comparing Backlink Profiles
Set up monitoring so you're alerted when competitors gain or lose significant links. → Competitive Monitoring