- The Importance Of Rank Tracking Local Keywords In 2018 - June 5, 2018
- How to Spot Opportunities from your Competitors’ Backlinks - July 19, 2017
- Why You Should Monitor Your Brand Daily - May 26, 2017
Link data can be a powerful metric for your online efforts. This provides you insights on how you should approach your SEO strategies and gain an edge on the digital landscape. This is where competitor backlinks analysis comes into play.
It’s one thing to know who are outranking your site, but it’s a completely different story to find out what they’re doing. Running a backlinks analysis on competitors can help you identify potential linking opportunities that others might not have touched on. More than that, this helps you recognize how your own website is faring against competitor sites.
At Siteoscope, we provide you the resources and pointers that will make it easier to dig deeper into your link profile and break down your backlinks competition.
It’s Important to Know Who You’re Up Against
In-depth backlinks analysis makes it easier to gauge the level of competition in your particular niche. This gives you an understanding of how competitor websites are building new links. This will provide you the opening to align your site’s metrics and see where you’re over or underperforming.
To get started, look at your main competitors. You can categorize your competition by industry or by the keywords you are targeting—the latter is easier because you only need to make a list of the sites that pop up first on the Search Engine Results Pages.
Building your competitor list is easy with Siteoscope. Simply input the URL of your competitors, and you’re all set. Based on the nature of your site, the keywords you’re trying to rank, and the competitors you’ve added, our tool will provide other suggestions to build your competitor list.
You Should Look at Your Own Backlinks Profile
The idea of having a good backlinks profile is simple—if there are more reliable, relevant links pointing to a specific site, that site must be valuable. As such, it warrants higher rankings. This is why you need to look at your own backlinks profile.
So, what makes a good backlinks profile? Contrary to what most site owners believe, it’s not just about links; these links only make a fraction of the picture. A good backlinks profile is one that has many high value, high Domain Authority links.
Other aspects you have to look into when it comes to your link profile are:
- The ratio of your backlinks and referring domains: There should be a balance between these aspects. For example, 14 referring domains against 30 backlinks provide at least a 1:1 ratio.
- CTLDs Distribution: Your Country Top-Level Domains should be relevant to your target audience. If you’re targeting for a US audience and you have a high number of distributions in Russia, there is something wrong with your backlinks profile.
- Follow and No Follow: The number of Follow and No Follow links should have an equal distribution; otherwise, your backlinks profile will look unnatural.
- Citation and Trust Flow: Citation flow gauges how influential a website or page is based on the number of sites that link to it. Trust flow, on the other hand, refers to how trustworthy a website or page is based on the quality of the backlinks that point to it. The best practice is to have at least a 1.0 ratio for your Citation and Trust Flow.
- Spam sites: Watch out for web directories, social bookmarking sites, and article sites that do not have credibility or appear suspicious.
The most important thing to remember when looking at your backlinks is to make sure they are relevant to your niche.
It’s Not Bad to Have a Diverse, Diluted Anchor Texts
Most website owners stick to a standard pattern for their anchor texts, failing to realize how Google can see through this tactic. Diversifying your anchor texts is a great practice, as this makes your backlinks profile look more natural.
- Branded terms (Example: Siteoscope provides measurable metrics for website performance.)
- Brand name combined with keywords (Example: Siteoscope’s website performance tracking tool offers great value.)
- Keywords (Example: Looking at your backlinks profile can help with improved website performance tracking.)
Siteoscope provides you a quick look at how your anchor texts are measuring with your website’s performance. This can show you a new approach for your linking strategies when launching new campaigns.
Analyzing your website’s linking performance can give you an idea of what is going on behind the scenes. Think of it as looking at your website’s history—before you can apply new methodologies in the future, you have to look at your past performance and use that information to move forward.
Siteoscope’s streamlined dashboard will be your guide for your all your backlinks analysis needs. Sign up today and experience 30 days free trial for tracking your website’s performance.