Every year, marketers and webmasters bury SEO in a noisy crowd. Somewhere nearby, in a mass grave, links and linkbuilding are buried. But despite the requiems, link building remains an important tool for website promotion.
In this article, we’re going to talk about an important part of linkbuilding strategy – analysing your competitors and creating a link profile for your site. Let’s go!
The first rule of link promotion: it is impossible to promote websites with links only. Sure, when there are so powerful link building services like Needmylink – it’s hard not to use links for website promotion. But, Before you select anchors and donors, ask yourself whether the resource is optimized, whether everything is OK with the “technique”, whether there are any serious errors. If you are just at the beginning of the SEO-road, you should not rely on backlinks. They will help make a decisive leap to the top, but do not replace all the grunt work.
If the answer is yes, then let’s continue the conversation. The basic steps in link strategy are as follows:
Analyzing your competitors’ link profiles.
Drawing up a work plan for linking.
Selection of donor sites.
Actual placement.
Why this order? An effective strategy is based on the link profiles of your competitors, who are advancing on the same requests as you are. In other words, you should first look at how many and which links are using your competitors. And then do at least as good (rather better) and take the top spots in search results yourself.
Competitor analysis is also important because search engines scrutinize the quality and quantity of links. Excessive number of the same type of anchors from low-quality resources will quickly drive the resource under sanctions and provide a merry life for months ahead. In this case, focusing on competitors from the top – a kind of guarantee of trustworthiness link strategy.
Step 1 – Gather competitors
First of all, we must collect a list of competitors with whom the site has common semantics. This can be done with the help of special services. There is a simpler way: enter a query into a search engine and collect data from the top 10.
Step 2: Analyse the number of donors and links
Once the list of competitors is obtained and fixed, we will see how many donors they use, what links they buy, what pages they strengthen with them. Also of interest will be the share in the total link mass. To find all this information will help special services for link analysis.
Here are the most popular:
Ahrefs.com.
Majestic SEO.
Open Site Explorer.
SeoLib.
Serpstat.
We will analyze the link mass with Ahrefs. This is a convenient and functional tool for analyzing web resources, of possible minuses – paid. The cheapest subscription costs $99 a month. Ahrefs helps to track many indicators of the “health” of a resource. But today we are only interested in links.
Two numbers to watch first from competitors: the number of donor domains and the total number of backlinks. In the Ahrefs service, go to the “Overview” report and pull the information from the counters.
Summing up
Links work! Despite considerable disapproval from many webmasters. On the other hand, SEO works in combination. Badly optimized “dinosaur” will not save a thousand anchors.
There are no universal algorithms for link promotion. You can often find some figures or proportions on the Internet – close such sites. You only need to focus on competitors from the top 10.
A sufficient number of automated tools have been invented to analyze the link mass of sites. We considered Ahrefs, you can use Serpstat or any other service.
Choose similar sites and businesses to analyze. Do not look at the link mass of aggregators, large online shops, federal services. The exception – you yourself are a major aggregator.
Developing a link strategy is the first and theoretical part of working with links. What to do with this data next, where to look for donor sites, work with exchangers and how to check the quality of links, we will consider in the next article
By the way, there more nice articles like this one. So go on reading us.