Whether you are an online marketing specialist for your own business, a consultant or an SEO agency for multiple clients, or a business that has outsourced their SEO work, backlink monitoring is something you need to be doing for sure!
Take your digital marketing to the next level by creating a backlink monitoring strategy, and here;s what you can do with it:
Reputation Monitoring & Contact Building
Whenever someone gives you a positive mention (and a link), you should definitely thank them for it. This helps solidify your relationship with the blogger / reporter in question, making them that much more likely to link to you again.
Likewise, make sure to follow your competitors’ link building tactics.
Try to get to know people behind the links you or your competitors are acquiring, follow them on social media, discover what their interests are and what type of content they tend to write and share.
Relationship building is the only way to keep generating great backlinks without any active outreach. So use backlink monitoring to get to know your niche link amplifiers and become friends with them.
It is always a good idea to follow relevant link amplifiers on Twitter and add them to a separate Twitter list to be able to keep up with what they have to say. That is easy to do using Tweetdeck on desktop: Simply create a new column for that Twitter list:
Check this column on a regular basis to interact with important niche bloggers and journalists and keep your brand in front of them.
New Opportunities
As you receive new emails with links to your competitors, you can evaluate them quickly to get a feel for your competitor’s overall link building strategy and if particular links have potential for your own domain. These opportunities could include:
- Potential expert column opportunities. As your competition starts getting featured, follow up with those blogs to see if they would be interested in an article from you.
- Blogs to reach out for product / service reviews. Instead of spending countless hours researching and reaching out to bloggers for a chance to get a review, see the blogs that are actually publishing reviews about similar products and services.
- Journalists who may be interested in similar stories and expertise. Make sure you create a separate Twitter list to keep in touch with these reporters and be ready to become a source when they need one!
- High quality directory listings. If your competitors are getting a lot of directory links, you can use backlink monitoring to see which ones are the highest quality and make sure you are there as well.
- Local search listings. Don’t miss out on local business – make sure your business is listed wherever your competitors are in local directories and review sites.
- New social networks. It’s hard to choose which social networks to join, especially with new ones that seem to pop up every day. Use your competitor’s new backlinks to show you the way.
- Advertising opportunities. Are your competitors buying banner ads? This tool will let you find the ones with direct backlink building potential.
Also, don’t just look at the opportunities your competitors are getting. Look at how they are using these opportunities. What kind of content are they publishing as guest posts? What calls to action do they include on their profiles? What images are they using in their ads?
Use some extra time that you would have spent finding all of their new backlinks to really examine their strategy so you can make yours even better. Keep a detailed spreadsheet with all the backlink opportunities you were able to discover and always do additional research to see if it is worth your time.
A good backlink building tactic is the one that drives relevant traffic, so take some time to estimate future traffic generation potential before investing your time into any new tactic.
Potential Problems with Google
The monthly email notifying you about your highest and lowest ranking backlinks can be especially helpful if you want to stay on top of an in-house or outsourced SEO link building team.
Any links that are identified as low ranking should be manually evaluated to see if they should be removed or not. This can help prevent your domain from getting penalized or bumped during an algorithm update.
This report, along with your daily notifications, can also help you identify whether you are being targeted for a negative SEO campaign.
While it’s debatable on whether this can have an effect on your website’s rankings, it’s still good to know if someone is slamming your domain with bad links in high volume.
A well set-up Google Penalty Recovery service always includes backlink profile analysis, so prior backlink monitoring will make this task much easier and faster to complete.
Lost Links
In addition to being notified when new links appear in your backlink profile, you’ll also get notified when links have been lost. If you see a valuable link disappear, see if it is something you can follow up on to get added again.
If not, it’s a good time to go out and find an equal or higher quality replacement.
Alternatively, if you are in the process of requesting removal of low quality links from your website, this tool can notify you when those links have been removed.
Stolen Content
If you have a business blog, be sure to link to older pieces of content in each post. If another website scrapes your content, there’s a good chance those links will remain intact.
As you review your emails, if you notice new links to your old blog posts that happen to have the same title as your blog posts, you might want to check them out – they could be content thieves!
There are multiple benefits of keeping an eye on your and your competitors’ backlinks. A comprehensive SEO service could help with that so that you don’t have to figure it out!
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