If you need to know where to start with your link-building strategy, you need to break it down into its constituent parts. These include performing a detailed backlink audit, analysing your backlink profile, and examining your competition.
Whether using aHrefs, Semrush, Moz, or Majestic as your keyword tool, this guide will help you create a successful link-building strategy.
For this article, we use aHrefs as an example, but other options work just as well.
These are the key details to watch out for when creating a successful link-building strategy:
Get An Overview of Your Site and your Competitors
The first step you need to take when creating a successful link-building strategy is to understand your website’s current performance and how strong your competition’s link-building campaign is.
An easy way to do this is to use Ahref’s Site Explorer Tool, which helps you examine organic traffic, backlink profiles, and paid traffic research.
Using the Site Explorer Tool, you input your web address, select the ‘*.domain/*’ option and select a specific time period. Your time selection should include the entire period you’ve had the site, but if this is not possible, then a time frame of the past one to two years will still paint a clear picture.
On the tool, you will see two graphs showing your total number of linked websites (referring domains) and referring pages. If the number is unusually high, you could be the victim of an SEO attack, whereas if the number is too low, your site may have suffered a decrease in backlinks).
You will also find a table which displays the most frequent anchor texts used when linking to your domain. It is a crucial detail to study because while receiving links from other websites has a largely positive impact, there may also be spam links that could tank your SEO performance and domain authority.
To ascertain whether your backlinks are natural, you should analyse the types of anchor texts used.
You likely have no issues if the anchors are mostly URL-based or branded. However, if many anchors have no relation to your site or point towards a completely different topic, they may have a negative impact.
You should then conduct the same search for your competitors to understand better how to stand out in the marketplace.
How can you tell if your backlink profile is natural or not
A natural backlink profile will have links from websites related to your niche, relevant bloggers or influencers within your industry, no-follow links, domains like Tumblr and Hubspot, and links from directories.
Overall, your backlink profile needs to make sense for the type of website you have. For example, if you sell cars, then receiving links from other car-focused websites is congruent, whereas if a “get rich quick” site links to you, it is unlikely to be natural.
Optimise your anchor texts
This guide has already touched upon the importance of anchor texts when creating a successful link-building strategy, but now it is time to home in on them in more detail with an audit
You can do this easily using Ahref’s Anchor Report, which gives you a list of anchors and referring domains, as well as follows and non-follow links. The report gives you a full-picture view of your anchor text health.
You’ll also want to understand your anchor text ratio, against the top competitors on the first page. Run an anchor report for your top 5 competitors, average them together and this will give you an idea as to the anchor text ratio needed in your niche. How does your site compare to the competition? This will form your strategy going forward, closing any weak spots in your profile.
As a note, on the types of anchor texts you should use, typically the lions share will come from branded links or URL’s. You’d expect to see a slice of miscellaneous and natural anchors (click here, read more) as well as some exact and longtail ones. While exact match anchors can be used sparingly and used in the right context, you don’t want this to be main driver of your backlink profile, as this will be regarded by Google as spammy. How many you use, will be dependent on your competitor’s anchor text ratio.
Do you have local links relevant to your business?
Another aspect of your profile worth examining is whether the backlinks you currently receive are from other websites within your industry or whether they are entirely unrelated to what you offer.
If it is the former, you are likely to be regarded as a trustworthy information source by search engines (not to mention niche-specific audiences). However, you won’t receive the same benefits if unrelated sources link to you.
Therefore, you should take stock of how many industry-related and local links you currently have, to ensure you perform as strongly as possible.
How can we help?
Of course, creating your link-building strategy – including the complex process of auditing your backlinks – can be time-consuming and confusing.
To help, we offer free link-building strategy and analysis services, which can help you drive more traffic towards your website.
