look before you link by annie cushing
TRANSCRIPT
Look Before You Leap Link
How to Build Links Without Blowing Yourself Up
My Well-Worn Path to Pre-Link Building Strategy
Check Out Your Site’s Backlink Portfolio First
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How to Rock the OSE
• You can run your site solo or compare with your top competitor to compare vis-à-vis.
• You need to be a PRO member.
• For newer sites I use Majestic.
Jumping Into the Deep End of the SEO Pool
• I go right for the Anchor Text Distribution.
• I semi-randomly picked Beyond Blossoms, but there’s an SEO opp ripe for the pickin’. :)
History of Link Building?
• Is the site an SEO virgin?
• If it hasn’t, chances are better everything will be organic.
Have They Bought Links?
• Not a value judgment.
• You will just need to be more vigilant in research.
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Get Access to List of Paid Links
• This isn’t always possible but worth asking.
• Have someone go through that list and check for sitewide links.
•They bloat your links/unique domains ratio
Check for Link Acquisition Velocity
• I use Majestic SEO for this.
• This report measures how fast your site has acquired links compared to your competitors.
Breaking the Link Velocity Speed Limit
• Here we have a blatant and indiscriminate use of sitewide links.
Check Anchor Text Distribution
• If your site (or your client’s) doesn’t have a history of link building, jump to this step.
• Watch for unbalanced distributions.
Red Flag That Begs Further Research
• This isn’t enough data to go make conclusions.
• Next step: Export to Excel.
Not the Sexiest Aspect of SEO But …
• Before you touch the data, get your spreadsheet organized.
• I love AutoFilter for that reason.
Setting Up Your Filters
Setting Up Your Filters
• I wanted to see anchor text that contains the words beyond and blossoms.
• But it needed to also catch anchors like beyondblossoms.com.
Do Optimized Anchors Outnumber Branded?
• If your site (or your client’s) doesn’t have a history of link building, jump to this step.
• Watch for unbalanced distributions.
Beyond Blossoms’ Branded Links
• What you see here is you have 868 branded links from 413 linking domains.
Beyond Blossoms’ send flowers Links
• Ouch! 1530/80 compared to 868/413.
Check for Filtering
Beyond Blossoms’ send flowers Links
•The result? SEMRush had the site listed #7 for send flowers. When I checked on Saturday, they were #25.
• However, it’s #8 for buy flowers.
•Conclusion: It’s most likely being filtered for the term it’s over-optimized for but is fine with other keywords they haven’t targeted as aggressively.
Find the Low-Hanging Fruit
Find the Low-Hanging Fruit with SEMRush
• Tells you the keywords your site is ranking on the first two pages of Google for.
• Click on the Full Report link or export to Excel.
Clean Up, Interpret. Rinse and Repeat.
Explain Without Geek Speak
Triangulate the Data with GWT and Analytics
• From GWT you’ll get impressions and clicks for keywords your site is showing up for.
• From analytics you’ll get actual visits for each of these keywords.
Bringing It Home
• One more advantage to arming yourself with data is oftentimes decision makers have their sacred cows.