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One of the important components of any website promotion is its link profile. Search engines evaluate the quality and quantity of links leading to the site and, depending on this, rank it according to search queries. The more authoritative resources links are placed, the more confidence it inspires in search engines and the higher the site will rank for search queries. There is nothing surprising in this, and this logic is understandable even for an inexperienced promoter: the more links from authoritative resources, the better the site, the more you can trust it, the more users it should be shown.
But if you dig deeper, a number of questions arise, which we will answer in this blog article. For example, which links are more priority, with which anchors (anchor is the text that is a link), from which donors.
You can study the effectiveness of any promotion method using the most elementary strategy that you can imagine, namely, competitor analysis. The calculation of the optimal link profile is no exception. This is a rather laborious process and most SEO promotion companies save their time resource at this stage. But this is not about us, we like to approach any promotion method as correctly and meticulously as possible. Let’s talk about this in more detail.
At the stage of working with any client, we identify the 10 strongest competitors and analyze their sites in sufficient detail. Competitors should be chosen correctly by driving in search queries that are targeted for us and writing out sites in the search results. As far as link building is concerned, we unload all competitors’ backlinks, for example, from a service like Ahrefs. We collect them in one table for analysis.
It is important to note here that duplicate donor sites do not need to be removed from this table in order to obtain the most representative result.
When we have collected all the links of competitors in one table, we need to cluster the received data. We separate link types into:
Next, for each link we put down its type
And we display the overall result in the form of a resulting table with the calculated shares of each type of link
Everything is done using elementary Excel formulas or Google spreadsheets, we will not stop our attention on this.
Voila, the result is obtained, now we have a portrait of anchors of the TOP-10 link profile of our competitors. We will analyze this data a little later, but now let’s consider the question of which pages of the site our competitors link to.
You can link to:
In our case, it was enough to analyze how many links our competitors have to the Main page and how many to other pages of the site.
Analyze the data on the competitors of our sample and get the result of the optimal share of links to the Homepage
To determine by how many donors you should pull up your landing pages, look at how many links purchased from competitors for similar categories.
From such an analysis it is immediately clear where there is a need to strengthen the link weight.
When we start working with a project and it is not a market leader, we are faced with the task of becoming a leader. To do this, we are building a strategy for buying links and increasing the number of donor domains at a speed that will help us become a leader in the future.
As usual, everything starts with a competitor analysis and it’s good that good old Serpstat and Google Docs are at hand.
From the data obtained, we see and calculate how many links we need to purchase for our project in order to catch up, for example, with the main competitor. The table shows what we lack: 496-247=249 donor domains. If we set ourselves the task of catching up with the main competitor in 9 months, then we need to purchase additional 249/9=28 links per month. Also, don’t forget that:
Based on this, we adjust our purchase rate for dumps, and they can be viewed in Ahrefs or Google Search Console. And we adjust our speed to the rate of monthly link growth of the TOP competitor. We will evaluate this speed in 1 month, by capturing new data in Ahrefs.
It is also worth noting that competitors can change their link building strategies, so they need to be analyzed at least once every six months, and for traffic projects – once every 3 months.
In total, as a result of several hours (or maybe days:) of analysis, we received the data:
In the next blog post, we will talk about the quality of links and the main strategies for selecting donor sites. All top positions and more targeted traffic, see you soon.