Getting quality backlinks to your site is a great way to raise your page rank and get more visibility in search results.

One way to get better backlinks is to check out your competition and see where they are getting their links. You can easily find out what backlinks your competition has by using on the many tools on the market.

There are both free and paid options to help you spy on your competition. Here are our picks for the top 10 backlink checker tools:

1. Majestic SEO

Majestic SEO actually offers several tools to help webmasters. Its backlink checker crawls the web itself – it doesn’t use third-party data to deliver the information. You can use it to find the backlinks pointing to your own site or to that of a competitor, including the number of referring domains and IPs.

You can also see the anchor text, how many links are set to follow, and more.

Majestic SEO is free, but it offers additional information on a paid subscription.

2. Ahrefs

Register for a free account with Ahrefs and get a complete analysis of your backlinks, including how many you have, where they come from, the anchor text used, and so on.

If you sign up for a paid account, you can get more in-depth analysis and track your progress over time. Of course, you get all the same information for a competitor’s site, and you can compare your progress to see where you can improve.

3. Open Site Explorer

Moz is another giant in the search marketing world, and its Open Site Explorer is considered one of the best tools available for backlink analysis. It gives you the number of links for a site, of course, but also information like the newest links, the page authority, the spam score, and domain authority.

Free searches only get you so much information. The paid account lets you run unlimited reports, track links over time, and more.

4. Google Search Console

The Google Search Console is part of the Webmaster Tools that the search giant provides. Under the Search Console, you can check out “Links to Your Site” under the “Search Traffic” section. There you’ll see the total links to your site, as well as your most linked content, the sites that link to you the most, and the anchor text used.

You can only use the Search Console to check out links on your own site, but it is an important resource that offers up-to-date information right from the source.

5. SEMrush

SEMrush gives you a lot of important information about any URL that you enter, including the backlinks pointing to the site. You can track multiple competitor sites and get comprehensive information about the links. You’ll need to sign up for a paid account for this though, since the site gives you a very limited number of searches for free.

6. Backlink Watch

Backlink Watch is designed specifically to spy on competitors. It gives you information like the total number of links, the anchor text used, the page rank, and more. You can also sort by links that are set to dofollow or nofollow.

Backlink Watch is totally free, and you can use it as often as you like.

7. Rank Signals

Rank Signals is another free backlink checker that provides plenty of useful information. In addition to providing the number of external links, the tool also shows how many followers the site has on social media, its Alexa traffic rank, and its page rank.

The tool is free, but you’ll need to create an account to get a complete report.

8. Open Link Profiler

Open Link Profiler works the way a lot of the other tools do. Put in a URL and get a link profile. The information offered is much more extensive though, including breakdowns of links by age, industries, context, countries, and more. You can also use the tool to analyze what links need to be removed to improve your page rank. There are numerous filters to help you sort the data the way you want.

9. Buzz Sumo

Buzz Sumo is a paid tool, but it provides comprehensive information about who is linking to your competitors, how content performs as a result of those links, and what pages are being shared most often. You can not only identify opportunities for links, but also find out what type of content attracts the most links.

Links are essentials to the success of your site. Use these tools to keep tabs on your own link profile and to spy on competitors to find link opportunities to grow your site.