Tracking your links is an important part of your SEO strategy and can not be neglected. That’s why we decided to show you everything we can about this so you can perfect your skills and work on your links. We will do our best to explain the basics and make a simple guide for you. And if all else fails we will show you who can help you. This is something everyone can learn but not everybody has the time for it. Handling a business and a website at the same time can be quite hard work. That’s why most people outsource SEO. If you decide to do it Link Department will be glad to help you out. Now, let’s start with some basics.
Backlinks are a powerful tool and will increase your online visibility
External SEO relies heavily on link building, also known as obtaining backlinks. Return links are only as valuable as their originating resource’s reputation for quality and usefulness. You will gain more from links pointing to your site if the external resource is more relevant to your topic.
To simply put it, a link with which a page links to a different page we call a backlink. In your case, a link to your page from other sources. Honestly, they are a powerful way to increase your traffic generally and are a necessary part of any SEO strategy. You will need to pay close attention to the implementation of backlinks. If you want your website to have better rankings and a rise in popularity, this is a must. However, be careful when tracking your links. By all means, it’s necessary so you know exactly which part is working and which is not, to build an effective SEO strategy.
The reason for monitoring backlinks
Quality backlinks are an important part of SEO, but just obtaining them doesn’t indicate that the job is finished. Backlinks are dynamic, and as a result, your backlink profile will be affected by any changes. A single day can see dozens of changes to a website’s link profile, so it’s important to check backlinks regularly and focus on the most significant ones first.
You might, for example, receive backlinks from a resource with which you have a long-term relationship. A change from dofollow to nofollow status in the history of backlinks indicates that you should reevaluate the terms of collaboration or stop using this resource. If you don’t keep an eye on your backlinks, you may miss out on a problem that will eventually harm your link-building strategy.
Each day, the number of sites is growing. And with it, grows the competition in search engine results. Today, websites have to put a lot more effort to obtain quality backlinks. Unfortunately, no matter how good your product is, without backlinks, people will have a hard time spotting you. Generally, there are many factors that will influence your site rating. Most of them are grouped in these categories:
- Domain factors
- Backlink factors
- Site-level factors
- Page-level factors
- Brand signals
- User interaction
- On-Site webspam
- Off-Site webspam
- Google algorithm rules
And here, the results are showing that backlinks are one of the major factors. Ideally, you want only high-quality authoritative backlinks pointing back to your site. But in reality, this is hard to accomplish. For those reasons, you need to continuously monitor your backlinks. To what purpose? To see what strategy is giving the best results. Also, to give a better response and explanation to your clients. Surely, regular monitoring will provide you with enough insight to successfully make corrections when it’s necessary.
The reason why you need to monitor backlinks regularly
Monitoring backlinks is very important and you need to do it regularly. We can show you some of the reasons why doing regular backlink checks will help you:
- monitoring backlinks regularly will help you to track the total and check for the most important links
- you will also be able to check for any changes that might have occurred in page indexing and backlink attributes
- you will be able to detect spam attacks in time and prevent search engine fines (Google is very strict about it)
- also, you will be able to use the most current data for reporting.
Now, the ultimate question – How to monitor backlinks?
Monitoring and evaluation of backlinks take time. For observation, most people are dividing them into these groups:
Outreach backlinks – links from guest posting and exchanging with other websites.
Organic backlinks – natural links from other people.
Backlinks ranked by quality – domain and page authority links from highly valued sources.
To monitor, you will probably need to use and combine several tools. But in general, there are two main approaches.
The manual backlink monitoring approach
It can take several hours to manually monitor, search, research, analyze, and add data this way. This is often a very slow approach but it works. On the other side, SEO takes patience and nothing should be done with haste. Especially since not all backlinks are giving the results after the same amount of time. Some could take long before they start showing the results. And a good strategy implementation accompanied by patience sometimes gives the most quality backlinks. This strategy has the potential to be very effective, but it is time-consuming. Automated backlink monitoring is another option. The system will monitor your backlinks for you automatically. However, this kind of solution is typically expensive.
The automated backlink monitoring approach
As you can assume, you have systems that automatically analyze your backlinks. Mostly, this is expensive but also the fastest way. There are also many solutions that efficiently analyze not only your but your competition’s backlinks as well. As a matter of fact, if you plan to invest and save time, this might be the best option. Meanwhile, all you have to do is to classify your backlinks into categories, from the best to the worst.
Which method will work best for you?
Once you’ve decided on a strategy, you’ll need to set aside time in your work schedule to monitor your backlinks. The manual method can take several hours. However, if you opt for the automated method, it will typically take less than an hour. Keep in mind that you should not only focus on your own backlinks. Backlinks from your rivals can also be analyzed by some automated solutions. Use this tool to improve your own backlinking strategy.
There is more at it than just tracking your links
The monitoring is worth nothing if you don’t know what to do with the collected data. First, you can use that information to identify opportunities. Especially to correct mistakes and to further develop and upgrade your strategy. Second, this information can be of great value to showing your clients every type of progress you are making. To stand out, attract more clients, and increase the outreach, you need to show what is giving the best results.
Rank the links after analyzing
Google is observing several things to determine the quality of backlinks:
- Authority – the credibility and knowledge of referring sites
- Relevance – of the subjects that are mutually connected
- Trustworthiness – the level of spam in the content
Having this in mind, not every backlink is good and beneficial. Depending on the quality of content and links, Google might improve ratings, or implement penalties. It’s important to categorize your backlinks so you can eliminate the negative effects that can occur. Or, to focus on those with good Domain Authority scores for better optimization.
Tools you can use to for tracking your links
To start with, Google Analytics is a good tool for tracking your links. It’s easy to use and access, really comprehensive, and it makes things easier. However, for the best results, you will also need to include other tools like:
- Serpstat
- SEMrush
- Ahrefs
- Majestic
and many more!
In fact, a certain combination of tools is necessary if you need to get into deeper analytics and get more detailed conclusions. In addition, it’s sometimes impossible to draw all the important and relevant information without additional tools.
Another way for tracking your links
Tracking your links is very important as we already stated. After all how else will you find out if you have toxic backlinks? With that being said we never said that you are the one who has to do all the hard work. It’s completely understandable if you don’t have the time to do all of this hard work by yourself. After all, you have a business to run. That’s why we suggested outsourcing SEO as an option.
Outsourcing SEO
As a rule, link building and everything that goes with it (like monitoring your links) are extremely time-consuming. Not everyone has the time for it. If you outsource your link building to a third party, you can save money by not needing to hire a new employee. As a result, you’ll have more time and energy to invest in building better client relationships. All you will need to do is keep checking that the company you hired is helping your site and your SEO and the rest will be up to them. If you find a good and reputable company chances are your business will be in good hands.
Why does all this matter?
There are many misconceptions regarding what matters the most. Indeed, while some may claim that the quality of content is prevailing, others will disagree. However, one thing is certain, backlinks are important. With this in mind, if you are careful about all the aspects of SEO, you will hardly make a serious mistake. Don’t give priority to one type over another. Plan and include everything that might help. To point out, every element in relation to your content and links is important if your aim is an improvement. From keywords, tags, and content to backlinks can add little something to your benefit. Be aware though, that Google can easily change the rules of the game in a blink of an eye.
For the most part, even though tracking your links sounds terrifying at first, it’s not. You can always strive to learn more, implement various strategies, and experiment. Sometimes, it’s just a few things needed to make progress. With advanced knowledge of SEO and backlinks, you can greatly enhance your business. It will not always be easy, but through trial and error, you will definitely accomplish something.
Some parting words
You can greatly improve your SEO efforts, as well as your return on investment (ROI), conversion rate, and other metrics, by learning how to keep track of backlinks. Backlinking isn’t always simple, but keeping an eye on your backlinks can cut down on the amount of time you spend experimenting and instead allow you to focus on building quality backlinks quickly. With the help of an experienced backlink company, you can quickly and effectively boost your website’s traffic. We hope that we show you why tracking your links is important and now you have the tools (and the steps) to do it right remember – if you can’t handle that right now – outsource. We can help you! If you have any more questions don’t forget to check out Link Departments blog. You will find a lot of useful information there.