With Google Analytics, one can look up the backlinks pointing to a given website from abroad to evaluate how successful the site's outreach has been at prompting third parties to dedicate backlinks for its benefit. This can be used to study one's own website, of course, but it is also common practice to see what kinds of external sites are linking to one's most direct competitors. Among other advantages, this can give a webmaster valuable insight as to what a given competitor might have done with their respective website's content to elicit such brand awareness. If the backlinks are coming from reputed resources on the industry in question, the webmaster can use Google Analytics to adjust their own site's content and structure to attract backlinks from similar sources.
There are various black-hat methods of getting backlinks to appear on other websites, some of which might involve outright paying other websites in exchange for hosting backlinks. Some instances of this, however, are accepted as more benign sponsorship deals because they are not surreptitiously concealed. The main website for a prominent community representing a particular industry, for example, may publicly list various other industry-related domains as "community partners" and link to them after partaking in some sort of mutual agreement. All one would have to do to get their website's URL into this listing is pay a monetary subscription to the community in order to be awarded the "partner" title, at least for an agreed period of time.
Such lists of partners are ordinarily filled with external links to domains that are household names, but obscure domains can appear just as easily because paying a fee for the sponsorship's sake can do a great deal to improve their relative SEO outlooks. It is plausible for a business start-up using Google Analytics for research to find that several of its own low-key competitors have gotten themselves featured on a particular community for a price. Analytics can therefore be used to determine if paying for a sponsorship on that same community would be a reasonable or worthwhile financial expenditure. For more information click here https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/jlyktu/interestingfindwhenresearchingbacklinks/.