A website is made of many parts of which links are a vital section. These links can broadly be divided into external links and internal links.
Either are important, but SEOs may tend to give more attention to external links, commonly known as backlinks.
Websites need links, especially backlinks and link building is a major part of SEO. Links are so important that it is one of the top factors that search engines look into when ranking websites.
Given its importance, every website must have a link-building strategy. But before you update your link-building strategy or use a new strategy, you’ll need to run a website backlink analysis.
By making a backlink analysis, you’ll get an idea of your website standing and what steps need to be taken to further improve it.
What Is Backlink Analysis?
Backlink analysis may be defined as a comprehensive review of a website’s backlinks which helps in analyzing the site’s performance and identifies issues having a direct effect on the website’s search engine rankings.
Simply put, backlink analysis in SEO is a regular activity carried out to check if there’s anything wrong with the website SEO. By the end of the process, you’ll know your site’s health and find out the factors contributing to its ranking.
Sometimes you may find a sharp dip in your website ranking. Or your website is not doing the progress you’ve been expecting.
This is when you use backlink analysis to find out what’s causing the issue with the website. Besides, the analysis will also show how your website is measuring up against your competitors.
In the process, you’ll also find the strategies that they are using and what can be implemented in your strategy.
How to Do a Backlink Analysis?
1. Analyze Competitor Websites
Yes, you first need to analyze your website. But you won’t get a clear picture of where you stand without comparing yourself with your competitors.
So you need to choose some top competitor websites and review them as well. Generally, you would know who your competition is, but if you don’t, just pick up sites that offer similar services or products. Check for websites outranking you for your target keywords.
2. Choose an Auditing Tool
Manual backlink analysis is possible but it’s only more efficient to make use of a backlink tool that already has the required built-in features you require.
This will save time and increase accuracy. There are numerous backlink checker tools that have different capabilities relative to their price tag.
Usually, SEO tools like Majestic and SEMrush have backlink analysis in them. Some recommended backlink analysis tools are Google Search Console, Ahrefs, and MOZ.
3. Run a Quick Overview
After you’ve finalized your website backlink analysis tool it’s time to start the analysis. Just enter the domain name into the search bar and check the results.
The search will give you a ton of data, but observing three metrics will give you a quick idea of how your site is performing.
First, check for the total number of backlinks pointing to the site. If this number is low, then it might be the reason why the website is getting ranked low.
Then check for the referring domains, which means, the total number of websites that are pointing to your site. Sort these domains based on their authority and you’ll know how much your ranking depends on these pages.
Besides, it also gives you ideas for future outreach. Finally, check for the top linked pages on your site. Websites have certain pages that get the most backlinks.
This is an indication of what type of content works best for link building. Having conducted these steps on your website, repeat them with your competitors. This will help in setting a benchmark and finding out where and what you lack.
4. Detail Analysis
You’ve got the data, now start the in-depth analysis. This is when you look at metrics and find answers to your questions. Start with a check for spammy backlinks for they may be hurting your ranking.
This check is done by looking at your anchor texts. Note that the anchor text of spammy referral domains includes crude language and typically resembles the junk section of your email.
You can reach out to such websites and request them to be removed but an easier way would be to tell Google to ignore those backlinks. That is, you are disavowing those links.
Further, you will need to look at your country code top-level domain (ccTLD) distribution. This is necessary to identify websites indulging in malicious practices meant to negatively impact your SEO.
A simple example would be getting a load of traffic from Haiti, which would be a .ht backlink. This is a red flag. You might also get unfamiliar TLD, which will need deeper analysis. Simply put, it is suspicious if a website on cricket attracts too many backlinks from Russia.
Last but not the least, hunt and repair broken and lost links. Such links can cause a loss of link juice, which is the sharing of authority from a higher rank page to a lower rank or new page on the website.
Broken or lost links also impede the functioning of search engine spiders crawling to find new information and indexing.
5. Know What Your Competitors Are Doing
In your analysis of your domain, you delve deeper and gather more information. Meanwhile, you also need to compare your findings with your competitors.
Comparing with other websites will weed out certain factors that will give an idea or direction for your domain to aim at.
Additionally, the comparison also shows the backlink acquisition rate of your website w.r.t. your competitors. It shows who is growing and at what pace.
6. Backlink Profile Analysis
Your website’s backlink profile has a direct effect on your website’s position in the search, its authority, and the site’s quality.
Search engines use links as votes or endorsements for a website, and that is one of the chief factors that decide website ranking.
Your website grows stronger and ranks higher when you have more trusted domains in your backlink profile. Domain diversity and quality backlinks are essential to achieving good SERP.
Hence, website backlink analysis is very important and will help in creating a smart link-building strategy.
7. Backlink Gap Analysis
SEO is a very active field with search engines updating their rules frequently. Thus SEO tactics have become more sophisticated and backlink gap analysis is a result of this hard competition. It is a part of competitive analysis in SEO.
Backlink gap analysis analyzes your competitors’ external link profiles to identify backlink gaps which essentially means finding backlinks present in your competitors’ external profiles but not in yours. Simply put, it gives a list of websites that have links to your competitor’s websites but not yours.
This does not mean you should aim to get all the websites that link to your competitors. During analysis, you’ll find websites that may link to two of your competitors. What you need to check is if those links are relevant to your website. If not, then simply ignore them.
Not all links are valuable and only a few valuable links can strike gold. So aim to get such backlinks through backlink analysis.
Then get in touch with the webmasters but with a concrete plan. Start the ball rolling with an email. Sometimes it will work and sometimes it won’t, but your proposal must give the recipient some value. Also bear in mind to get straight to the point. Be short and concise and do not waste the recipient’s time.
Conclusion
In conclusion, backlink analysis is an essential part of your SEO strategy and cannot be ignored. Besides, it requires continuous maintenance.
This article is a perfect guide about conducting a backlink analysis, but you can always make use of professional services to get the best efficiency and results.
Get in touch with the experienced SEO team of OneCity and have all your SEO concerns resolved with complete satisfaction.
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