Great content and a strong backlink profile remain the only two primary ranking factors that search engines like Google prioritise when determining organic search engine rankings, regardless of sector.
These aren’t things that are typically thought of as “hard to do” in an SEO strategy. Link building, in particular, seems to have a lot of ambiguity surrounding the best method to go about it.
Why do people still talk about link building?
No way, no how. This is why:
1) Moz’s Search Engine Ranking variables Report demonstrated that the top two variables influencing Google’s website rankings are associated with backlinks.
2) There are many recent examples of the effect that backlinks have had for the websites under consideration, and they can all be found by doing a simple Google search.
3) Any businesses shell out tens of thousands of dollars each month on link building services and direct purchases of hyperlinks. The mere fact that this is occurring says a lot, even if it isn’t the best or safest way of link acquisition.
4) What about some actual evidence? Spend a few minutes researching the best three or five sites for a list of five to ten keywords that you hope to see your site appear in the search results for. Check to see if their website and the ranking page have any backlinks.
Using Rank Tracker in SEO PowerSuite, this is a simple click away. (download the free version here). Simply start a new project in Rank Tracker, enter the URL of your site and the 5-10 keywords you wish to rank for, then click the Keyword Difficulty tab at the bottom of the screen and click update.
How else can you benefit from link building besides search engine optimisation?
Backlinks play a significant part in search engine rankings and have value beyond the gains from improved organic visibility.
1) Referring sites can send you highly qualified visitors if you have good backlinks.
2) Backlinks help with brand recognition because they familiarise your target audience with associating your brand with the solutions they seek.
3) The presence of backlinks suggests that you are an established leader in your field.
Which Links Should You Strive to Get?
While there are many potential answers to the question of “where to get your best backlinks,” competitor backlinks stand out as the most straightforward and consequential choice, despite being the one most often ignored.
To put it plainly, backlinks are often the deciding factor between a site ranking #1 or #8 in the SERPs, even when both sites have similar content and usefulness. (search engine result pages). Therefore, if you want to quickly increase your site’s ranking, you should strive to acquire the same backlinks that not only the top site, but all of the top 10 sites, have.
The Four-Step Process for Acquiring Your Rivals’ Backlinks
1. Find Who Else Is Searching for What You Are
So, what does that entail?
When it comes to search engine optimization, many website owners incorrectly assume that their main rivals are the industry leaders. Sports drinks would be a good illustration of a keyword. It’s natural to presume that Gatorade, Powerade, VitaminWater, Red Bull, and the like are the top SEO competitors in the energy drink market. Gatorade is the only one of the aforementioned four companies to crack the top 20 for that search term, and none of them even make the top 10.
You need to find your true competitors in the search engine, not just the biggest names in your field, if you want to get the most impactful backlinks to help rank on page one for a term.
2. Find Out What Types of Backlinks Your SEO Rivals Are Using
Now we can use SEO SpyGlass to investigate which of these companies have connections worth pursuing. The SEO PowerSuite software suite includes it, and it can be downloaded from this page.
1) Open SEO SpyGlass, make a new project, and input your own website’s URL. To access advanced settings for your link profile assessment, make sure the box is checked next to Enable expert options. When you’re ready, select the Next button.
2) Select SEO PowerSuite Link Explorer as your hyperlink source of choice, and proceed to Step 3.
3) Decide if you want to restrict the software’s overall output of backlinks. It’s capped at 250,000. In this case, we won’t impose any limits.
You can also choose the percentage of links to originate from a single competitor’s domain.
3. Determine Other Sites That Might Link To Yours
After using SEO SpyGlass to generate a backlinks report for your website and finding your primary SEO competition, you can determine which domains are most likely to link to yours by locating those that have linked to at least two of your rivals’ websites.
If you do this, you can begin reaching out to the sites that openly link to multiple rivals, increasing the likelihood that they will also create new backlinks to your site given that the two are in the same industry.
4. Make an effort to get a connection back to your site by asking for one
In our example, we have found over a thousand websites that we would like to approach as potential backlink opportunities because they all link to at least two of our identified rivals. Now we need to find their email addresses and/or other communication details so that we can request a link from them.