Hey, it's Sam Oh and welcome to the second lesson in the advanced fundamentals of link
building module.
In this lesson, we're going to talk about how to research a page's backlinks to understand
how they were built or earned.
And this is a super important skill to have because if you understand how a page got
its links, then you'll have direction in terms of how to replicate that link profile.
And of course, we'll go through some examples in this lesson.
Alright, so the first thing we need to do is find a competing page to analyze.
Now, if your page is targeting a topic with the intent to rank, a good place to start
finding competitors are the top 10 ranking pages for your target query.
Afterall, backlinks are likely a reason for their high ranking position, especially if
it's a competitive non-local, non-freshness-dependent query.
For example, at Ahrefs, we obviously want to rank high for queries like "link building"
because our tools are essential for this process.
Now, if we look at the SERP overview table in Keywords Explorer for that query, you'll see
that similar guides from Moz and Backlinko have a lot more referring domains than us, which is likely
the primary reason they rank ahead of our page.
So these are two link profiles I'd definitely want to check out.
Now, to see the backlink profiles, just click on the number in the backlinks column
and you'll be able to see the pages that link to these competing guides.
We'll circle back to this in a bit because you won't always be building links to pages
that target a keyword.
For example, topics for linkable assets often have no search volume, but they
have the potential to earn massive amounts of links because of their appeal.
And then SEOs will add internal links from these pages to more commercial pages,
passing PageRank.
Now, if you're working on a linkable asset, chances are you fall into 1 of 2 categories.
Category 1: you were inspired from another page that's generated a ton of links and you
want to create a similar page.
If that's the case, then you already know the URL of your competing page.
So just throw it into a competitor analysis tool like Site Explorer, hit the Backlinks report and
you're in the same place as we were for our previous example.
Now, if you're in category 2, you know you want to create a linkable asset, but you don't know
the exact angle you'll be going with.
If this is the case, then you can use a tool like Ahrefs' Content Explorer
where you can search through billions of pages and get SEO metrics on them.
For example, if you have a personal finance site, you can start with a broad search like
"personal finance."
Next, I'll set a referring domains filter to narrow in on pages that have at least 100 referring domains.
And to filter out a lot of low-quality results, I'll exclude subdomains.
As a final measure, I'll actually set a page traffic filter to only show pages that have
a maximum value of 1,000 organic visits.
Meaning, we don't want to see pages that get a ton of search traffic because these are likely
ones that you've discovered through keyword research and would fall into the first example
of pages with the intent to rank for a popular query.
Now, from here, you just need to skim through the results and look for topics that might inspire you.
And I know that "finding inspiration" sounds kind of cliché, but this is where your expertise
and creativity will guide you to your idea.
For example, this page from Opensecrets.org has collected over 800 referring domains.
And as you can see from the description, it's a page about the personal finances
and net worth of members of Congress.
And if we actually click through to that page, you'll see that it's basically just a curation of
congress members and their estimated wealth.
Now, I won't dig too deep into this, but I will make a couple of points to support why this
could be a good competing page to analyze.
#1. We already know they have tons of referring domains.
#2. Their data is around four years old as the article was published in October 2017
and doesn't appear to have been updated.
And #3. US politics and especially wealth inequality, have become more prominent
topics since the money printers went crazy in 2020.
Alright, so now that we have a potential competing page to analyze, I'll click on
the caret and then go to the Backlinks report to get to where we need to be.
Ok, so we've found two backlink profiles to analyze.
Let's look at one of the competing guides on link building first.
Now remember, our objective is to understand how these targets got their backlinks to see if
we can replicate similar links.
And in order to do that, you first need to understand the context of those links.
Meaning, what are these referring pages talking about and why do they need to link to this target?
So the first place you'll want to look in this report is the anchors and target URL column.
Now, as you can see, this page has thousands of links which will be tough to filter through.
So with big link profiles, I actually prefer to start at the Anchors report because it
summarizes the backlink profile nicely.
So what I'm looking for are specific points that are frequently mentioned because this is usually
a sign of a ‘linkable point.'
In other words, if lots of referring domains are linking to the guide with the same anchor,
then that point likely resonated with readers and the linkerati.
So these are the things that I'd look to replicate in our content.
Now, looking at this Anchors report, I'd generally ignore things like the title of the post, naked URLs,
and branded anchors because these are less likely to be replicable.
So for this page, something that stands out is "The Most Creative Link Building Post Ever,"
and seeing as it's title cased, it likely means that there was a redirect that happened at some point
when the article had a different title because that's not the title today.
And if we click to see the links to the target, you'll see that it was indeed from a redirect
from the acquisition of Point Blank SEO.
Now, that page is responsible for over 130 referring domains.
Meaning, the 130 websites that are linking to this guide through a redirect are likely
irrelevant today.
So there's an opportunity for an outreach angle and prospects to back it.
Now, if we continue scrolling through the anchors, you'll see this one that says "Download ebook."
And if we look at the links to the target, it is indeed going to the original guide.
But if you look at the actual page itself, there's no mention of an ebook or to download anything.
So these are also irrelevant links and we could technically package up our post in
a downloadable ebook pretty easily.
Let's dig deeper.
If I click on that anchor, it'll open the backlinks report with some filters set.
And you'll see that there are only a few decent sites within this small list of prospects.
So you might conclude that it's not worth turning our guide into an ebook for a maximum
of 3 links, right?
Not necessarily.
A commonality among these pages is that they're all list posts on free SEO ebooks.
So as a link builder, you need to follow the rabbit hole to see if there's a bigger opportunity here.
So I'll go to Ahrefs' Content Explorer and search for "seo ebook" in the search box
and I'll set the mode to a title search.
Now, seeing as we won't want to pitch the same website multiple times,
I'll set the One page per domain filter.
From here, I'll set a couple metric filters like a minimum DR of 20 and a minimum website
traffic of 1,000.
And now we're left with over 300 link prospects to filter through.
Not bad.
But if we wanted to expand this list, all we need to do is change the word "seo"
to something like "marketing."
And now you have nearly 1500 more prospects.
So is it worth creating a link building ebook?
It's probably worth a shot.
And we'll build onto this example throughout the course.
Alright, now let's look at the second example which was a link-baity post
on the wealth of congress members.
To jog your memory, the data from the post is from 2017 to 2018, meaning, it's pretty outdated today.
So if we were to create a similar page, we'd want to create something with up to date data.
Now, because we know that content and links are inseparable as I had shared in the previous
lesson, we need to figure out which parts of the content are attributable to the backlinks.
So we're going to be looking for linkable points.
Because this page has a ton of links pointing to it, I'm going to go to the anchors report as
a starting point.
And again, I'll ignore things like naked URLs and branded anchors as it's generally tough
to replicate these unless it's on listicles like "best [product type]" i.e. "best SEO tools."
Now, if we look at the first anchor, you'll see that it has something to
do with financial disclosure forms.
And if we look at the actual links, you'll see that probably all of them are from
content syndications, seeing as the date of publishing is pretty much the same for all links.
Plus the anchors and surrounding texts are identical.
So we need to ask ourselves, based on this point, can we replicate these links?
Well, in order to do that, you'd need a big news publication to write a story and link to your page.
Then other publications would need to syndicate that content – and no guarantees there.
You'd basically need to carefully plan and execute a successful PR campaign.
So in my opinion, it's not easily replicable.
But as you continue to scroll through the report, one interesting thing that stands
out for me are a lot of links that include a dollar figure amount:
"five members worth $100 million or more," "$79 million," "$148.4 million,"
and "$251 million" to name a few.
So, I'll go to the backlink report and I'll enter the dollar sign in the search box.
Then, I'll set the filter to search in the anchors with surrounding text.
And now we have a list of around 50 link prospects.
Let's dig a bit deeper.
The first backlink is anchored on US Rep Darrell Issa.
But his name isn't on the page.
The same goes for this one on Scott Peters.
Now, if you continue to dig through the reasons for these links, you'll find that a bunch of the people
mentioned are actually not on the page.
And for those that are, their net worth has likely changed over the past few years.
So with these things in mind, if I were to create a post on this topic, I'd probably
include wealth estimations on both current and past members of congress.
I'd dig up as many financial disclosure forms as I could find on each person and link them up.
And design and UX would probably be a top priority to make this information searchable
and easy to digest.
Now would this work to generate a ton of links?
No one really knows.
And that's the thing about link building.
We need to make informed decisions based on a blend of data, creativity and some common sense.
And by ensuring that your content supports both your link outreach pitches and the reason
why people link to a page, you'll increase your chances of having more successful campaigns.
And we'll wrap things up here because in the next module, we're going to be talking
about link prospecting and how you can do it efficiently for scale.
And no, I'm not talking about spamming random people.
I'll see you in the next module.