If you want to rank on Google and other search engines’ first pages, you’ll need a robust link structure. Good links ensure that your web pages are ranked higher. Google may penalize your website if it contains too many poor connections.
As a matter of fact, performing a link analysis is crucial to your site’s long-term health. They can also make a substantial contribution to your domain’s strategic and technical aspects.
Link analysis for the strategy will assist you to identify gaps in your entire plan, which will define the measures you need to do. This strategic study will also be a deciding factor in the success of your SEO campaign.
From a technical point, link analysis will help you detect faulty links that could have long-term negative consequences for your website, with serious consequences if you develop too many improper links.
How to Analyze SEO Links
There are a few basic steps you can take to get started with backlink research on your site or your competitors’ sites if you’ve never done it before:
Decide which websites you’d like to investigate
Selecting which sites to investigate is the first stage in backlink analysis. Your own website should be your main goal, but you may need to perform some research after that. Your main competitors are most likely already known to you. They’re the other businesses in your area that offer similar services if you’re a local business. Numerous sites are selling the same things as you if you’re an eCommerce store. These websites should be at the top of your to-do list.
With a few short Google searches, you may find potential competitors. In the search window, type your top target keywords and look at the sites that rank for them. These are the sites you want to outrank in the end, and studying their backlink profiles will show you where and how to accomplish so.
Choose a tool for analyzing Links
Choose whatever research tools you wish to employ after you’ve chosen the sites you want to investigate. Although this is mostly a question of personal preference, the following are some of the most popular options: SEMrush, Ahrefs, Open Site Explorer by Moz, and so on are available on search engines.
Although these are paid tools, they all provide a free trial, so we recommend trying them all for your first backlink analysis and selecting which one is the best fit for your needs.
Enter each domain and collect the data you require
After you’ve chosen your sites and a research tool, enter each domain into the tool of your choice and begin collecting data. In the next section, we’ll go into the particular metrics you should use for each site, but you must have a plan in place for keeping track of everything as you go.
Backlink analysis entails combing through a lot of data, and you won’t be able to use it to make informed judgments about your Internet marketing plan unless you keep track of it.
In A Link Analysis, What Should You Check For?
Link analysis, like many other Internet analytics tools, gives a variety of data. And, while all of this information is important in some manner, looking at it all would be overwhelming — not to mention time-consuming.
That implies you should select a few critical bits of data to monitor on each site you examine. It’s entirely up to you which ones you choose, but at the very least, we propose the following three:
- The total number of links and the number of distinct domains– The total number of backlinks linking to a site is one of the most fundamental indicators. When you compare this figure to that of a rival, you may get a sense of how your sites compare in terms of authority.
- Referring domains– You should look at the referring domains closely in addition to the number of them. This might help you figure out where your most useful links are on your site, as well as whatever material on your site they point to.
- Top pages- Finally, determine which pages on your site (and those of your competitors) have the most links pointing to them. The top page will almost always be your homepage. This is nearly always where the link will point if your company is mentioned in a news piece or quoted as a source.
Other Important Factors to Check
Check The Page’s Authority
Is the page that links to you a PageRank topper? If that’s the case, the connection will have a significant impact on your rankings. I’ve discovered that the authority of the page connecting to you matters more than any other aspect, based on years of testing.
Because authoritative pages link to your site, it gains greater authority (also known as PageRank). Using Ahrefs, you may quickly examine a proxy indicator of PageRank (“PageRating”). Simply enter a URL into Ahrefs and look at its “URLRating.”
The Site’s Authority
The sitewide authority of a domain also influences the quality of a link. A link from a well-known website, such as NYTimes.com, will have a much greater influence than a link from an unknown weblog. These links are difficult to obtain, but they are well worth the effort.
Ahrefs comes in handy once more. Check out the site’s “DomainRating” by entering any URL from the site into the tool. There are many authority checking tools available on google, you just have to put your website link and within seconds you can know the site authority rank.
Relevancy of the Site
When it comes to links, the authority of a website is important. However, the site’s relevance is also important. Let’s imagine you run a website dedicated to the Paleo Diet. You also get a link from a reputable site regarding unicycles. Is the link still valid? In general, you want authority sites to connect to you. Specifically, authoritative sites with a strong connection to yours.
Link’s Position on the Page
Is a piece of material containing your link? Is it tucked away in the footer of a page?
It turns out that the position of your link on a page matters. Links tucked away in footers and sidebars, in particular, aren’t worth nearly as much as links smack dab amid a page’s main content. What’s the bottom line? You want your links to show in the webpage’s main body.
The location or placement (or whatever you want to call it) of the link also plays a critical role in the amount of link juice it gives out. A link at the top end of the webpage (above the folder per say) is more vital to the website as well as the visitor to that page. These links are always going to pass more value than links present below the fold.
Anchor Text for a Link
The clickable text part of a link is known as anchor text. Google, it turns out, employs anchor text as a ranking factor. Let’s imagine you receive a link to your site with the anchor text “paleo desserts.”
When Google reads the anchor text, it says to itself, “Hmmm.” The anchor text for that page was “paleo desserts.” They must be linking to a page about “paleo desserts.” Keyword-rich anchor text has, like anything else in SEO Content, been overused. Building a large number of exact-match anchor text links is now considered spam.
Ideally the anchor text should use the target keyword of a webpage in a way that’s relevant and natural to the linking site. Remember that negative SEO tactics and blackhat providers often automate their off-page SEO efforts – trying these services out are likely to result in similar anchor and surrounding texts in your links.
Social Share Magnitude
Another way to analyze SEO link quality is to go backward with social sharing. In other words, analyze whether the page linking to your website has engagement, shares and traction on social media networks. The engagement rate is the most significant social media metric. People who share and comment on the page could make a visit to your website and convert if you have the right elements in place. Such links can work wonders for your SEO campaign, so keep them.
Wrapping Up
Link analysis can offer considerable information about your site’s link profile on its own. The health of your link profile, the kind of links it has, and whether or not it breaches Google’s Guidelines are all useful indicators of its overall quality.
If you’re facing a penalty, the link analysis is an important part of any penalty recovery strategy. If you’re experiencing algorithmic devaluation, our study will assist you to pinpoint exactly where the devaluation is occurring on your site.
The fewer violations of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines you have, the better. You don’t want your site to crash due to too many bad links. For everyone involved, that’s a nightmare.