You could hear multiple times that not all links are beneficial to your website. Backlinks or inbound links are created when someone else links your website in their content. These links can come from anywhere, which is why not all of them are good for your website. For that reason, an occasional check of these is essential to ensure the growth of your SEO. Link building is one of the most important aspects of a healthy SEO, so it’s essential to check all the factors from time to time and understand how to make the most out of the backlinks in SEO. This guide will teach you how to conduct an in-depth inbound link analysis to maximize your link-building strategy and give the best results.
Inbound links – why you should care about them?
Before we continue to a more detailed analysis, we should go through some basics on inbound links. Backlinks or inbound links are links to your website from some other place on the web. These links should be something to worry about as they represent one of the crucial factors for your ranking. Google values these links and considers them before placing a website somewhere in the search results list. Backlinks can be such a beneficial factor for the growth of your business for several reasons:
- they drive people from other websites to visit your pages which increases organic traffic
- Google ranks your pages higher, making them more visible to users
- backlinks are a shortcut to potential business opportunities and therefore the growth of your brand
- high-quality websites that refer to your business or page are increasing your authority and relevance, which means stronger trust of users.
In general, if your website is connected to other relevant websites with high authority, it will receive some of their trust and other benefits. This web of good-quality links is useful for everyone involved, and that’s one of the reasons to invest some effort into building good connections with relevant websites.
In-depth Inbound Link Analysis – the main aspects
As you could see from the text above, backlinks can come from any place on the web. Sometimes there are so many of them, and not all links bring the same benefits. For that reason, website admins should do link analysis to check the status of the website. This analysis will tell you the number of links connected to your website, but also their quality in terms of relevance and authority. After you get the result, you’ll be able to tell if there’s something you need to do to improve the situation or the status of your website is great and you should keep up the good work.
Details of checking your links
We explained the basics of link analysis. However, what are the details you should check by conducting it? The main aspects of every detailed inbound link analysis include:
- a number of links to your website – even though it’s better to have more links, the higher number will not necessarily guarantee you quality.
- quality, on the other hand, is far more important than quantity. This means you should check the relevance and authority of websites linking to your pages. They should have a good reputation, not only drive a lot of traffic to your pages;
- the number of dofollow and nofollow links – a strong link profile reflects in the number of followed links. That’s why you should always check the ratio between the followed and nofollowed links to see if your backlinks are getting all the benefits from the websites they are coming from.
- analysis of the linked pages – it can be very useful to know what are the pages on your website that get the most links. This could be a certain blog post, home page, or certain product/service. Either way, analyze the pages that get the most links and see if you can improve them for better results.
- anchor text details – anchor text can also be a helpful aspect of inbound link analysis. This is important as some of the anchor texts examples are not within Google’s guidelines and can earn you penalties.
How to perform a detailed Inbound Link Analysis?
It’s actually quite simple to do that. You can use some of the great free and paid tools to help you out. Google Search Console is free of charge and can assist you with a basic, initial review of your link situation. And it’s great for beginners!
Ahrefs’ basic tools are also free and you can test its features without having to pay. However, Ahrefs provides amazing detail analysis services, but you’ll need to spend some dollars on it.
Also, you can use SEMrush to perform the analysis of your inbound links, but also use some of the other great functions of the tool.
Ways to keep your backlink game strong
After analyzing your link situation, it’s time to review the results and see what to do next. In general, it’s wise to remove links that bring no benefits to your score. However, be sure to learn more on how to disavow links before letting go of a perfectly good link by mistake.
Another great method is to let a professional help you with your backlink strategy. This way you can avoid spammy links, irrelevant niches, and links from websites with low authority.
Finally, do your best to raise the quality of your website and make it interesting to relevant websites that will bring you more authoritative and beneficial links. Maintaining a good link status takes time and effort – and inbound link analysis is the way to start.