Hi everyone,
I recently had a workshop about what you should consider when thinking about your backlink strategy for off-page SEO - I would like to share some insights with you. This post is probably more interesting for the SEO-beginners, but I hope some more advanced SEO-guys (and of course ladies) will find something new as well. I apologize for my English, I have to translate everything since the workshop was in German.
Backlink Strategy for Off-Page SEO
Preamble: Backlinks (Linkbuilding) is one of the most important factors for your Google-Ranking. As it is for most of your marketing activities, it might be a good idea to come up with a strategy before starting to actually build Backlinks. With this post I would like to give you some ideas, that will help you to create a solid strategy for your off-page SEO before you start the Linkbuilding process. You will need access to a couple of SEO-tools - I work a lot with ahrefs, MOZ and searchmetric but you can use whatever tool you like.
- Clean up your own profile
Pretty much every SEO-Tool offers the opportunity to either Crawl your site (to get detailed information) or simply check your own Backlinkprofile.
e.g. for Ahrefs: Site explorer > enter your domain > Backlinks > (filter)
Especially take a closer look at Domains linking to you with a low DR/UR or high Spam-factor. You don't want these kind of links:
- Links you've paid for to manipulate Google
- Links from link-farms
- links from spun articles
- Links from low quality web directories > which doesn't mean that you should delete every link from a domain with DR < 15 or something like that. Take a closer look at these domains. For example they might be very young domains and therefore have a low DR. (just enter the URL in your SEO-Tool Site Explorer)
- Links from sites with illegal or explicit content
- spammy Blog comment Links
Additionally take a closer look at Broken Links and Redirects. 301 - redirects are ok, but keep an eye on the temporary redirects (302). You definitively have to fix your Broken Links tough.
- Competitive Link Analysis
Google compares your website within your industry / niche with all your competitors and everyone else who is part of your industry. That basically means, if you sell fish, it doesn't matter to you, how the Linkprofile of your favorite computer store looks like. This means compare yourself to as many competitors as you can. Have a look at the "best" and at competitors that operate on your level.
- Keywords: Compare your Keywordset with your competitors'. It makes no sense to compete with the whole industry just to rank for a certain keyword everyone tries to rank for. Try to find out, which long-tail Keywords might be interesting for you.
- Backlinks: In my opinion quality always goes first. A couple of high quality Backlinks is worth more than tons of low quality backlinks. Use something like ahrefs' Link Intersect to create a list of Backlinks your competitors get but you don't. Afterwards you can create a list (e.g. in excel) with target-domains you want to reach out to.
What makes a Backlink a good one:
(1) DR
(2) Link is DoFollow
(3) Good Content, that fits your niche / industry - which means relevant content
(4) Google Ranking: sometimes it's just a simple but good idea to have a look at how the domain ranks for certain keywords to get an idea if they are doing good ;)
(5) Social Signals
Tipp: Quantity of Linking Domains > Quantity of total Backlinks - which means, try to find as many different relevant domains as you can to give you a backlink instead of trying to get 1000 links from a single domain.
- Domain Ranking: Every SEO-Tool provides you with a indicator that helps you to compare the quality of domains. See this factor (domain authority, domain ranking, domain popularity whatever) as the main factor when you have to decide if a Link is good or bad. But keep in mind that it is not the only indicator for a good / bad link.
Tipp: When it comes to Linkbuilding try to concentrate on domains with a DR (10),20-40. If you have the resources to gain links with a higher DR contratulations. But for most SEO-Managers this nearly impossible - so don't waste to much time with trying to get something you probably won't.
- Ratios: Compare the following ratios to your competitors' (particularly to the "best):
- Do Follow/No Follow Ratio: Some people might tell you that NoFollow Links are worthless - they are not! They don't give your domain the so called Link-Juice but they make it look more natural for Google.
- Ratio of Links to your Home and Deeplinks: Figure out how many Backlinks are linking to the home and how many are linking to some subpages (product pages, blogs etc.)
- Textlinks/Picturelinks/Videolinks-Ratio: Some industries are more likely to get a lot of Image-Backlinks while others are almost Textlinks only.
- Anchor Text Distribution: There are 4 different anchor text types:
- Branded with the name your company
- Using a specific Keyword
- Others (e.g. "for further information click here")
- Combination of the ones mentioned above
Again take a look at the ratio your competitors are using. Most of the SEO Tools are not able to construct these ratios for a quick export. But that is simple maths that can give you great insights.
- Where Do I want to link to on my Website?
You have to define where exactly you would like to link to on your website befor reaching out. This highly depends on what you actually want to achieve with your website. If you want to sell a service or product it's always a good idea to push product subpages by linking to them. You want the subpages of your website rank well where people are likely to convert, right?! Concentrate on those subpages that already have some searching volume since it's pretty hard to rank with a subpage that has no search volume at all.
Tipp: Emerging Subpages (close to Google page 1 or Rank 1-3) are often worth pushing them.
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