Most of you are familiar with the traditional way of finding competitors. You simply use your target keywords, analyze SERPs for them, and add websites that show up there to your competitor list. While being quite simple and widespread, this method is often ineffective: if a website ranks for one of your target keywords, that does not necessarily mean that it is your direct competitor.
That’s why today we want to introduce a more advanced way to search who you compete with — by using backlinks.
With the new Competitors endpoint in Backlinks API, you can receive a list of domains that share some part of the backlink profile with the website specified in a POST request.
How to use the new endpoint
1 Call the Competitors endpoint.
POST https://api.dataforseo.com/v3/backlinks/competitors/live
2 Specify the domain, subdomain, or webpage you wish to find competitor domains for in the target field.
Note that domains or subdomains should be specified without https://, http://, and www.. Webpages should be specified with absolute URLs, including https://, http://, and www..
3 Indicate the number of domains you wish to receive in the API response by using the limit parameter.
Default limit value: 100.
Maximum limit value: 1000.
4 You can also use various filters to get more specific results. For instance, you can receive domains with more than 100 intersection only by adding the following filter: "filters": ["intersections",">","100"]. You can also filter domains by rank. Example: "filters": ["rank", ">", 100].
Your POST request should be structured as in the following example:
[
{
"target": "dataforseo.com",
"filters": ["rank", ">", 100],
"order_by": ["rank,desc"],
"limit": 10
}
]
The API response will return competitor domains, along with a number of backlink intersections and the rank of every competing domain.
{
"version": "0.1.20220720",
"status_code": 20000,
"status_message": "Ok.",
"time": "4.9002 sec.",
"cost": 0.0203,
"tasks_count": 1,
"tasks_error": 0,
"tasks": [
{
"id": "07211149-1535-0461-0000-583da4215b2d",
"status_code": 20000,
"status_message": "Ok.",
"time": "4.1549 sec.",
"cost": 0.0203,
"result_count": 1,
"path": [
"v3",
"backlinks",
"competitors",
"live"
],
"data": {
"api": "backlinks",
"function": "competitors",
"target": "dataforseo.com",
"main_domain": true,
"exclude_large_domains": true,
"order_by": [
"rank,desc"
],
"filters": [
[
"rank",
">",
100
]
],
"limit": 10
},
"result": [
{
"total_count": 390,
"items_count": 10,
"items": [
{
"type": "backlinks_competitors",
"target": "muskatli.hu",
"rank": 368,
"intersections": 4
},
{
"type": "backlinks_competitors",
"target": "kani.hu",
"rank": 333,
"intersections": 2
},
{
"type": "backlinks_competitors",
"target": "dnsstuff.com",
"rank": 333,
"intersections": 2
},
{
"type": "backlinks_competitors",
"target": "keyboost.co.uk",
"rank": 310,
"intersections": 83
},
{
"type": "backlinks_competitors",
"target": "mapmyuser.com",
"rank": 302,
"intersections": 71
},
{
"type": "backlinks_competitors",
"target": "ahrefs.com",
"rank": 288,
"intersections": 257
},
{
"type": "backlinks_competitors",
"target": "seopageoptimizer.co.uk",
"rank": 286,
"intersections": 61
},
{
"type": "backlinks_competitors",
"target": "linkremoval.net",
"rank": 285,
"intersections": 59
},
{
"type": "backlinks_competitors",
"target": "saijogeorge.com",
"rank": 282,
"intersections": 32
},
{
"type": "backlinks_competitors",
"target": "ipower.eu",
"rank": 280,
"intersections": 58
}
]
}
]
}
]
}