In this video, we are going down the rabbit hole of endless link building opportunities.
Stay tuned.
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Hey guys, Sam Oh here with Ahrefs and today, we’re going to be building onto our basic
backlink analysis from the last video.
So, if you haven’t seen that yet, then I highly recommend taking a few minutes to watch
that video and then come back to this one right after.
And now, it’s time to get into an advanced backlink analysis tutorial and find tons of
new link prospects.
Let’s jump right in.
If we go to Google and search for the keyword, “SEO”, you’ll see that Search Engine
Land’s “What is SEO” guide is ranking in the number one organic position.
Scrolling down, you’ll see Kissmetrics’ “SEO for Beginners” guide.
Let’s compare these two pages that rank for the same keyword and analyze their
backlink profiles.
Since we know that quality backlinks can significantly help a website rank in Google, the first thing
we’ll look at are the number of referring domains to each page.
I’ve already loaded up two different searches here in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer tool and looking
at them side by side, it’s pretty clear why Search Engine Land is ranking much better
than Kissmetrics.
They have 10 times more referring domains or unique websites linking to their page.
I’ll scroll down a touch and here, you can see the “New and Lost Referring Domains” report.
And if we compare them side-by-side, you’ll notice that SEL has been acquiring backlinks
of up to 100 referring domains in a week compared to Kissmetrics who is usually acquiring them
at around less than 10 per week.
And this makes sense.
If we scroll back up to the top, you’ll see that Search Engine Land gets more than
10 times the organic search visitors from Google alone!
Translation?
10 times more free exposure which leads to more links.
If we wanted to dig deeper we can look for large spikes in the graph and make a note
of these dates.
Like here, you’ll see SEL’s biggest spike back in August of 2017 where they had 107
new referring domains link to their guide.
But looking at these graphs now, I kind of want to analyze the more dramatic spike of
new referring domains that Kissmetrics has recently gotten.
You can see that in March of 2018, they acquired significantly more new referring domains than
they had previously earned.
So we’ll take note of the dates: March 11th - March 31st of 2018.
Next, if we scroll back up, we can click on "New" under the backlinks category.
And then you’ll choose the start and end dates on these calendars.
So I’ll set my start date to March 11th, and the end date to March 31st to see how
Kissmetrics more than doubled their usual link acquisition rate for this post.
Finally, I’ll click “Show New Backlinks” to load up our list.
If we scroll down a bit, you’ll see the new backlinks that were acquired in the set
date range.
The first thing that you’ll notice is that they’re consolidating some of their older
content by using redirects.
And I’m assuming that these were slightly less popular blog posts.
So passing the link equity through 301 redirects is probably a smart move on their part.
Now, I could spend hours going through each spike, but I think this one example shows
you how you can quickly find what your competitors are doing.
And this can be a big time help because as you look at different spikes from different
websites, you’re going to notice that the way websites acquire backlinks today, might
be very, very different from what they did 2 years ago, especially if they’ve been
around for a while like these two sites.
So when you’re doing your backlink analysis, focus your energy on identifying patterns
to decipher how your competitors are getting their good links.
Some common patterns off the top of my head that you might find are guest posting campaigns,
directory listings, resource page link building, forum links, PR stunts, redirects, and links
that seem like natural editorial placements.
From there, you can pick and choose the different strategies that are worth your time and resources
as you plan your link building strategy.
You can also use the New Referring Domains report to quickly assess whether a website’s
link building efforts were legit or just junk.
Just click “New” under the Referring Domains category in the sidebar.
And then we’ll set our dates to the same as we did before.
Finally, I’ll run the search.
From here, you can take a quick peek at the referring domain alongside the domain rating
and you’ll have a rough idea of whether the links are good or not.
And when in doubt, just click on the backlinks dropdown to see the linking pages.
It’s important to note that this report only shows links from new domains.
So you won’t be able to see websites that had linked to the target URL or domain before
or in the past.
But this actually gives unique insights into how a site is building or acquiring links
over a specific period, which adds an interesting layer to your backlink analysis.
Alright, onto a super cool report that’s a favorite to a lot of Ahrefs users, and that’s
the “Best by Links” report.
For our example, I’ll open up a new instance of Site Explorer and we’ll be examining
the Ahrefs blog.
Next, I’ll click on “best by links” in the left sidebar.
This report ranks the pages of the subfolder, /blog/, based on their total number of backlinks,
which you can sort by clicking any of these columns.
The one filter I’d recommend setting is to set the HTTP code to 200.
And this will weed out some of the 301 redirects as well as the broken 404 pages, which by
the way, we’ll cover in the next video where we’ll talk more about link building.
So now that the filter is set, I’m going to sort the table by the number of referring
domains in descending order.
From here, we can start analyzing these pages to see what topics and types of content are
attracting a ton of links for Ahrefs’ Blog.
As expected, you can see that our main blog URL, ahrefs.com/blog/ is our most linked to page.
And the rest of our top pages are individual posts from our blog.
Just by looking at the top 10 pages here, you’ll notice a pattern on the type of content
that generates backlinks for us.
Half of our most linked to pages are unique research studies!
And the other half are super actionable guides on big topics like keyword research, seo tips,
link building, and outreach.
A key point that we can take from these posts is that statistics tend to drive links to
our site and that big and actionable guides resonate well with people in the SEO and marketing
space.
And that’s because with things like stats, people link to references to show that they’re
not just making up these numbers.
To prove my point, if I click on the caret here with the featured snippets study, and
then I open up the backlinks report, we can get a bit of context as to why people link
to these pages by looking at the anchors and surrounding text column.
Right away, you’ll see that there are numerous mentions of a specific percentage, which resulted
in a link back to our post.
So Boom!
Stats equal links for this particular page and a similar anchor text pattern exists for
all of our other studies too.
Now, I’m not telling you to go and create a unique study on 2 million featured snippets.
Since we have access to a ton of data, we’re able to create these awesome posts, which
the SEO and marketing industry just happen to love and link to.
But what works in our industry may not work in yours and vice versa.
So you’ll need to start digging through some of your competitors’ top pages, see
which types of content attract backlinks, and then look at where those links are coming from.
The Best by Links report is similar to the “Top pages by traffic” report I showed
you in a previous video.
This is a super helpful report to help you understand which pages on a website attract backlinks.
And from there, you can easily research the backlinks of each individual page.
Next, we have the perfect complimentary report to this one.
And that’s the "best by links growth" report.
If we click on it here in the sidebar menu, you can see this table which shows you the
link growth of these pages which you can sort by the last day, 7 days, or 30 day growth.
And you can click any of these links here, which will open up the "New Referring Domains"
report where you can see which new websites linked to this page.
As I mentioned before, the way that a website builds and earns links today may be completely
different than how they did it 2 years ago.
So this report gives you the extra layer of timely insight on the best pages by links
right now.
Looking at this report, the first thing that I notice is that the majority of pages here
are recent articles on the Ahrefs blog.
If we click here to open up the new referring domains report on our White Hat SEO post,
you’ll notice that we’ve acquired links from 19 new referring domains, which is rather
quick considering the post wasn't published too long ago.
And if you investigate a bit further, you’ll notice that there are certain sites like this
one, diyseocourses.com.
Clicking through to the page, you’ll see some kind of RSS feeder that curates new posts
from their favorite blogs.
Let’s look at bluleadz.com.
So when I click here to reveal the backlinks, it shows that they’ve linked from numerous
pages to our post with the same anchor text.
And this is likely a sitewide or some kind of widget link.
And if we open up one of these pages, you’ll see that it seems to be someone who loves
our content and included us in their editor's picks for April.
Alright, so the last report that we’re going to look at, which is likely the first report
you went to when you first signed up with Ahrefs, is the raw backlinks report.
Let’s go back to the best by links page and and analyze our study on how long it takes
to rank in Google.
I’ll click on caret here and then click on backlinks.
Once the page loads, you can see all of the websites that are linking to this page.
There are a few key metrics to note.
The first is Domain Rating, or DR, which represents the overall strength of a backlink profile
of an entire website.
The next 3 columns go hand-in-hand.
The URL rating is one of Ahrefs’ proprietary metrics that represents how strong a backlink
profile of a target URL is, which is largely determined by this number here, the total
number of unique domains pointing to the referring page.
The third factor on this page that plays a factor in the UR calculation is the Ext. column.
And this column tells you the total number of external links on the referring page, which
dilutes the URL rating.
Then we have traffic!
We recently added this column to the backlinks report and it’s an absolutely killer feature
unique to Ahrefs and instantly loved by the good people in the Ahrefs Insider Facebook group.
Not only are these pages passing link equity to the page, but there’s a good chance that
they’re sending some quality referral traffic to the outbound links on their page.
Then we have this column which is going to help you skim through these reports rather
quickly.
The surrounding text and anchor text column is a very cool feature that gives you some
context of a link without ever having to visit the page.
And then there’s the first seen and last checked column which tells you when Ahrefs
first found the link and when we last recrawled the page to see if it still existed.
Now, for smaller sites and pages with just a few backlinks, you can quickly skim through
the titles and URLs in this column, and then look at the surrounding text and anchor over
here to get context on the backlink.
No problem.
But with larger websites with a ton of backlinks, it would take days, weeks, or months to get
through the list.
So the solution?
Filters.
So here are a few cool hacks you can use to narrow down your results to a smaller list
of relevant link prospects.
As a basic setup, I would change the link type to dofollow and set the language to English
or whatever language your website is in.
After setting these two filters, you you should see the total number of backlinks narrow down
quite a bit here.
The platform filter here is a pretty helpful one too.
You can set this to just Wordpress sites, which further brings down the results and
gives you a pretty clean list of links that are most likely editorial links.
Alternatively, you could set this to message boards to find easy to get links, but I should
note that message board links are generally nofollow and sometimes just pure spam links.
A highly unique filter is to set the link type to ‘content’.
This is going narrow down the results to identify links that are found within a big chunk of
text, which makes it super easy to discover quality editorial links.
The last thing I want to leave you with is a super cool hack that can save you hours
in your link building process.
You may have heard of resource page link building.
Basically, you find pages that have curated lists of links on a page with helpful resources
related to a topic.
If you’re familiar with this link building tactic, then you know that scraping through
Google’s search results using search operators like these, often leads to a ton of irrelevant
results or pages that have zero outbound links.
Well, a cool thing you can do in Site Explorer is to do a domain search on a website in your
niche that you know has a lot of backlinks.
So I’ll open up a new instance of Site Explorer and, I’ll type in contentmarketinginstitute.com,
which we all know writes about...
content marketing.
Next, I’ll click on the backlinks report here.
And then I’ll set our basic filters again.
So link type will be dofollow, and the language will be English.
And then I’ll type in the word, “resources” in the search bar.
This is going to narrow down the backlinks results to only ones that have this word in
the titles, URLs, or anchor/surrounding texts.
If we scroll down a bit, you’ll see that this one here is called, “The essential
list of startup marketing resources.”
And if we click the link and scroll down a bit, you’ll see that this is literally the
perfect example of a typical resources page.
The best part about using this hack is that right within Site Explorer, you can quickly
look at the metrics like the number of external links on the page as well as the organic traffic
numbers to see if the site is worth reaching out to.
You can use this exact prospecting hack with other keywords like “round ups”, “links”,
or whatever words people in your industry use to define a ‘resource like’ page with links.
Rinse and repeat for some of the top sites in your industry, and you can literally find
more than enough link prospects than you’ll be able to handle.
That’s it for this SEO tutorial.
I’m sure you’re anxious to dig into Site Explorer and to start using some of these
techniques to find more prospects for your next link building campaign.
Make sure to give me a thumbs up and let me know in the comments which prospecting tip
you’ll be adding to your link building strategy.
The third and final video in this series is all about combining everything that we covered
in the first two videos and turning it into a workflow full of link building hacks.
So I’ll see you in the next video.
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