My honest take on how to find backlinks, receipts first: finding is the easy half — the opportunities are everywhere once you know the six places to look. This is the exact method I'd hand a friend.
| Way to find backlinks | What it finds | Effort | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Your own profile (Search Console) | Links you already have | Low | Free |
| Competitor link gaps | Sites linking to rivals, not you | Medium | Tool tier |
| Unlinked brand mentions | Near-won links, one email away | Low | Free–low |
| Resource / round-up pages | Pages that exist to link out | Medium | Free |
| Journalist requests (HARO-style) | Editorial links from expertise | Medium | Free–low |
| Supplier / partner / membership pages | Warm, relevant, easy links | Low | Free |
The Method, Handed Over
Ten years of finding links distils to this: the opportunities are everywhere, and the only scarce input is the discipline to look and the honesty to qualify. My method is embarrassingly simple — check my own profile monthly, reclaim mentions weekly, autopsy a competitor quarterly, keep a running eye on resource pages and journalist requests, and never let a flattering-but-junk prospect onto the list. Everything I've found that lasted came from the same few places, and everything I chased from a cold 'opportunities' export aged badly. The finding is genuinely the easy half; the earning — the real pitch to a real human — is where the work lives, and it's covered in the free book. But you can't earn what you haven't found, so start with the six sources, run them on their cadences, and let the prospect list grow. Then go earn them.
How to Find Backlinks: The Step-by-Step
- Map what you already have — open Search Console > Links and read your current backlinks; you can't find gaps without the baseline.
- Find unlinked mentions — search your brand name and your best content's title; anywhere you're named without a link is a link one polite email away.
- Reverse-engineer competitors — run two or three rivals through any backlink tool's free tier and list the sites linking to them but not you.
- Hunt resource pages — search your topic plus 'resources', 'useful links' or 'recommended'; these pages exist to link out.
- Answer journalist requests — expertise on record earns editorial links volume never will.
- Mine warm relationships — suppliers, partners, associations and clients all have pages that can link you, and they already trust you.
- Qualify every prospect — real audience, genuine site, on-topic page; a found link is only worth earning if it passes that gate.
- Prioritise by value — sort the qualified list so the highest-return sources (reclamation first, then competitor gaps) get worked before the slower plays, because your outreach hours are finite and should land where the earned links are worth most.
- Set alerts to keep it flowing — a free brand-mention alert plus a competitor-backlink alert turn one-off finding into an ongoing feed, surfacing new unlinked mentions and fresh rival links automatically so the prospect bank refills itself between sessions.
- Log it — prospect, page, angle, contact, date and outcome; the list is the asset, and the log is what stops you finding the same prospect three times.
The Finding Habit I Actually Keep
Since it's my name on this, here's the finding habit I genuinely run rather than the one that sounds good. Monday morning, ten minutes: new brand mentions to reclaim, and a glance at whether any competitor earned a link worth chasing. Once a quarter, a proper competitor autopsy on my two closest rivals — an afternoon that refills the prospect list for months. And a standing rule I never break: nothing goes on the list that fails the gate, no matter how flattering the metric, because a list padded with junk just wastes the outreach hours that are the actual scarce resource. That's it — no secret tool, no clever hack, just consistent looking in the few places editors make real decisions, logged honestly, worked steadily. The finding was never the hard part for me; the discipline to qualify ruthlessly and the patience to earn what I found is where the results live. Everything I've built that lasted came from that boring loop, and everything I chased from a cold 'opportunities' export I eventually regretted. Find widely, qualify hard, earn patiently, log everything — and go read the free book for the earning half, because finding without earning is just a nice list.
The Finder's Mindset
The last thing I'll say about finding backlinks is that it's a mindset before it's a method. The people who are good at it walk around seeing opportunities — a podcast they could guest on, a round-up they belong in, a supplier who should link them, a journalist who needs their take — because they've trained themselves to notice where editorial decisions get made. It's the opposite of the buyer's mindset, which sees link building as a transaction to purchase; the finder's mindset sees it as relationships and value waiting to be connected. That shift is worth more than any tool, because it turns every industry event, every piece of content you read, every business relationship into a potential source. Build the mindset by practising the method — work the six sources until noticing opportunities becomes automatic — and finding backlinks stops being a task you dread and becomes a lens you see your whole market through. The method gets you started; the mindset is what makes it effortless, and it's available to anyone willing to look at their niche as a web of earnable connections rather than a list of sites to spam.
FAQ
Julian, the one-line method?
Check your own monthly, reclaim weekly, autopsy a competitor quarterly, qualify ruthlessly, log everything.
Easy half or hard half?
Finding's easy; earning's the work.
Book or call?
The whole thing in a word?
Qualify.
Go Find Them
My closing word on finding backlinks: the opportunities are genuinely everywhere, and the only thing between you and them is the decision to look and the discipline to qualify. Check your own profile monthly, reclaim mentions weekly, autopsy a competitor quarterly, keep an eye on resource pages and journalist requests, and never let a junk prospect onto the list. That's the whole method, and it's free. Finding was never the hard part — earning takes the work, and that's in the free book — but you can't earn what you haven't found, so start with the finding. Search your brand name tonight, find the first mention, and you're already doing it. Everything else is repetition and patience. The links are out there in your niche right now, waiting; go find them.
Conclusion
My how to find backlinks method, handed over: qualify hard, work six sources, log everything — the rest is in the book.