Anyone who does SEO knows that backlink is one of the biggest off-site ranking factors as well as a great source of referral traffic.
However, instead of building your links blindfolded, you should be checking your competitor’s backlink to DOUBLE your inbound links’ success!
Start by analyzing your biggest competitors’ backlink profile to identify the benchmark for the type, quality, and the number of backlinks that you need to aim for. Take the chance to also discover link opportunities that you did not know of and reach out to them.
BacklinkGap and some of the features you get to use inside. Basically, these are the features that are worth mentioning:
· A unique scoring system for you to determine the quality of your backlinks.
· Up-to-date stats of your backlinks and referral domains (total backlinks, new, and lost links).
· A disavow checklist for you to keep track of unwanted or low-quality links that you've removed.
· Actionable metrics such as HTTP codes, backlink types, referring platforms, and semantic elements.
· Identify the commonly used anchor texts of each referral domain.
For the best of your SEO ventures, you wouldn't want to miss out on this opportunity to try out our backlink checker tool. Even if you already have subscribed to a backlink tool, where's the harm in trying out BacklinkGap's free access?
Anyways, we don't want you to jump into the tool just to sink later.
So here's one of the users, Ivan, from their few beta testers who shared a case of his link-building and backlink check experience with them.
"Taking the big risk of not knowing what backlinks you have!"
Before our invitation, Ivan had never owned a backlink checker tool or even tried one before. He was more of "on-page SEO" kind of guy. So, when we invited him for a BacklinkGap tryout, he was pretty excited. (well, I assume since he shared the most).
He was pretty lost at the start.
Yes, he knows that backlink is an important ranking factor. He does link-building for his website and uses Google Search Console when needed - a great free tool but extremely limited.
However, while navigating around the tool, he realized something.
"I've always checked if the sites I reached out to are relevant to mine. But I guessed I never actually considered the type and quality of my backlinks, dofollow or nofollow - especially the ones that I wasn't aware of."
Yes, whether Ivan is performing a link-building activity, he would make sure that the sites are trustworthy. But he forgot one thing.
Backlinks aren't necessarily within our control. So, there will be hundreds or even thousands of other sites (good, bad, and horrible ones) pointing to your website.
So it was a huge shock when he found out his website has LOTS of backlinks, but the quality of those links (Friendship score) wasn't looking that pretty.
And when he scrolled down for the complete list of backlinks, there were tons of spammy backlinks from domains he had never heard of! At one point, he was even questioning if the tool was working!
Identifying the worst possible links
What's more, many of the backlinks came from totally unrelated domains. Ivan manages a website related to informational technologies. But he gets tons of backlinks from websites totally different from his niche.
"BacklinkGap scrapes out all the backlinks my site has. it's easier for me to clean up any inbound links that can potentially harm my site's ranking."
Ivan started by filtering out negative links that he needed to remove. We suggested applying all the fitlers in one go instead. Dig out all the backlnks with a low Friendship score while having a dofollow attribute. Since Google crawls dofollow links, things got worse when he found backlinks coming from untrustworthy sites!
Then, just to be sure, he looked through other parameters such as anchor text of the backlinks, page title, and URL as well.
He wouldn't have gone so far as to know all these if he had continued using a free tool to check on his backlinks.
Getting Google to ignore those bundle of bad links
Now that he's ready to get rid of the dirty laundry, Ivan added the lists of backlinks into his "Disavowed List" to export them. He found over 100 unnatural and spammy backlinks that need to be removed. Imagine having more than that... without a feature to compile them easily; he would probably need to manually file them into a spreadsheet.
It would've been a nightmare if it hadn't been that he could just export the whole list after compiling those links:
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And submitting the disavow list on Google Search Console altogether:
Moving forth, Ivan wants to invest more effort in link-building.
He found backlinks pointing to his website, the number of domains citing him, the quality of his backlinks, and how he could easily gather all the links he needed to disavow.
But he needs to do something more, knowing that he can audit for bad backlinks to his website; what about the valuable backlinks that he has? Since we've only told you about backlink checking, wait for part 2 of Ivan's story to find out how you can monitor your backlinks in BacklinkGap.
Knowing that his post had been removed, he was able to reach out for a repost and to recover lost links. It would have been fine if the backlink came from a regular website. But what if it’s a link you paid for? Or a link from a high-authority site that could generate tons of referral traffic?
All I’m saying here is that the backlinks you have for your website could be HUGE rank-driving signals. If you don’t keep track of them, you’re literally losing out on not just the SERP ranks but opportunistic traffic and sales conversions.
After this whole bout of not bothering with his backlinks, Ivan started using BacklinkGap as his go-to monitoring tool for all his backlinks.
Oh, I’ve been talking a lot about lost backlinks. But just so you know, you can also discover new backlinks as well. So, if you find the newly added link to be suspicious, you get to act on it immediately. If it’s a profitable one…start early and tap into the opportunity fast!
Cement the gap in your missing backlinks
One thing Ivan did not mention (but share-worthy tips) was using BacklinkGap to source for new link opportunities! Don’t just use BacklinkGap to profile your OWN backlinks. Branch out to other websites as well.
And when I say other websites, I meant your competitors’.
Sometimes, you may be out of idea on what website you can reach out to for more backlinks. When that happens, look at your competitors’ backlink profiles to discover what other link opportunities you can try to get.
Ivan does work on his website’s link building. But since he doesn’t use a backlink checker tool (in the past), it wouldn’t be possible for him to know what backlinks he doesn't have that others do. Think about the referral traffic your competitors are getting, and you don’t. Wouldn’t skipping it feel like a waste?
Since you’ve read this far, I’ll be repeating this.
Don't pay! Just try it out for free!
It’s going to be all easy for you to discover:
· Your site’s ‘friendliness’ within your niche.
· Who are your biggest fan (I mean…domains that are often pointing to you).
· How your backlink appears to be—anchor, image, redirect, others?
· Share of ‘dofollow’ links that will help your rankings.
· Anchor texts used to describe your site’s backlinks.
· There’s more, in fact too many to list out.
Maybe you knew about this. But if you don’t, let me just remind you that you CAN use BacklinkGap to uncover your competitor’s profile! Just the same why you do for your own website, discover your competitors’ backlinks to find more link-building opportunities.
Get your gears running and sink into your backlink profile today!
Sources: https://backlinkgap.com/