Monthly Archives: October 2020

So, you’ve probably landed on this guide because you’ve heard of backlinks and you heard they’re important but you need an in-depth example of what they are.

Before we get into exactly what backlinks are and show you some examples, it’s important to pay close-attention to this topic being that it is one of the most important ranking factors in Google.

There are not too many things that you have to get completely right but if you make sure your backlinking strategy is in place and execute on it properly, it can mean higher and quicker rankings, which lead to more passive inbound leads for your business.

Backlinks are not the easiest to grasp if you are a beginner but we’ll break each component of a backlink down step-by-step, so even a complete beginner can understand these backlink SEO examples.

What Is A Backlink?

A backlink is a link that is connected from one page to another. If another website is linking to you, this means you have a backlink. Now there are all different types of backlinks, good and bad ones. Strong and weak ones. Natural and spammy ones.

So how do you make sure you are building the right type of backlinks to your website? Keep reading to find out.

What Is The Difference Between A Good Backlink And A Bad Backlink

A good backlink is a link back to your website from a website that Google deems authoritative and trustworthy. A bad backlink is a link from a website that Google sees as spammy.

When you build good backlinks from another site, to your site it not only looks great in the eyes of Google but it also has a number of benefits for your website.

When a bad backlink is built from another website to yours, it can actually hurt your rankings. When google sees a website as spammy, the Google algorithm also picks up any other websites that that website is linking out to and makes an association between the two.

Too many of these links from spammy websites can get your own site penalized by Google.

On the flipside, if you build enough good backlinks to your website, you’ll rank highly in Google for multiple keywords and have the chance to be found by hundreds of thousands of people monthly.

How Many Backlinks Do I Need To Rank?

This is one of those “it depends” answers.

But, let’s talk about exactly what it depends on.

When you are trying to rank for a keyword, one of the first things you should do is analyze how many backlinks it’ll take to rank for that keyword. The way to find this out is by looking at how many backlinks the other sites on page 1 have.

How We Find How Many Backlinks A Website Needs To Rank

What we like to do is take the sum of backlinks from the first 5 Google results and then find the average number of websites for each anchor text group.

We will then use this to guide our backlinking strategy.

Let’s talk about the 4 most important anchor text types.

Branded: The name of the brand used as an anchor text. Example: www.website.com

Generic: A generic word that is used for the anchor. Example: “Learn more”

Exact-Match: An exact match anchor is an anchor that uses the exact keyword that you are trying to rank for. For example: “Chicago Plumbing Service”

Partial-Match: A partial-match anchor is text that includes a variant of your main keyword. Example: “Plumbers that service chicago residents”.

How Do I Find These Backlinks?

Backlinks for your website can be found across the entire internet. But especially with sites that are directly relevant to your niche.

So you may be asking now, “how can I find all of these websites quickly?”

There are a few search phrases you can type into Google and it will bring up all of the websites in your niche that will accept linking back to you from their site. Here is a list of them.

Use a tool like hunter.io, to easily find the email addresses of those blogs that accept backlinks to your site. Once you have your email it is time to craft your pitch.

How Should You Pitch A Website On Securing A Backlink From Them?

There are many methods and strategies you could use to secure backlinks from another site to yours. But the most common method used are guest post.

A guest post is an article that is written by you that is placed on someone else’s website, with the intention of linking back to your site and creating a backlink.

Although it is possible to build a good amount of backlinks through mass emailing, it is also a really good idea to try and build a relationship with blog owners. While this may take longer, it will improve your acceptance rate.

You can use this template when reaching out to blog owners.

Subject: Article placement for [target website name]

Hi [target name or ‘there’],

I heard that you accepted guest posts and I was just checking in to see if you were still accepting them?

I’m a writer that writes about a range of topics in the [your niche] space. I’m looking to expand my name in this area and Guest Posting has been a great way for me to do that.

Do you still accept them?

Here’s some of the content that I’ve written in the past:

[2-3x Previously Well Written article URLs]

If so, I’d be interested in hearing what your requirements are.

Kind Regards,

[your name]

Try to send 20 of these emails per day and you should be able to close a few people within your first month of outreach.

How Long Does It Take For A Website To Rank After It Has Gotten Backlinks?

Google can take anywhere from 2-6 weeks to pick up a new backlink that your site has acquired. Once it does, depending on the quality of the backlink and the anchor text, you should see your website, slowly begin to move up the serps.

How many backlinks it takes to rank all depends on the level of competition of whichever keyword you are trying to rank for. Some keywords are harder to rank for than others so the key to quick rankings would be to find easy-to-rank for keywords and try to rank your website for those first.

If you are competing with higher authority websites, it can take as long as a year and a half to rank alongside them and capture some of the traffic.

How To Check Your Backlinks

There are multiple tools that can be used to check your backlinks. Our favorite is Ahrefs because it gives a complete breakdown of how many backlinks you have and exactly where they are coming from.

Let’s take a big website like Moz.com. Ahrefs shows that Moz.com has 55.2 million backlinks. It also shows that 81% of those backlinks are dofollow.

Dofollow backlinks are links from other sites to yours that pass as “link juice”. Which just means some of that website’s power and authority is passing to you, ultimately helping you rank higher. All backlinks are dofollow by default.

Nofollow links are links that are coded to tell Google not to pass any power from an owners website to yours. These links are great for “anchor pillowing” and making a backlink profile look natural.

How Can I Get Backlinks For Free?

Conducting some blogger outreach like we explained above is one of the best ways to get free backlinks from other blog owners. You just need to make sure you can really provide value to their audience by creating great content for their readers.

Another backlinking strategy that is highly effective is broken link building. This means that you are reaching out to a blog owner that has a broken link on their website that used to lead to someone else’s website.

It’s possible to write a great piece of content (something directly related to what the broken link was ranking to) and ask the blog owner to replace the broken link with a link back to your site instead.

This style of outreach is so effective because it’s almost like you’re doing the blog owner a favor by telling them that they have a broken link.

A broken link can actually negatively impact a website’s ability to rank. So letting them know makes it seem like more of a favor for them than it is for you.

Start Building Links

If you’ve made it this far, you know completely know the basics of link building and what backlinks are.

It’s not hard for outreach to become extremely complicated if not done using a process. Once you have a process for reaching out to new blog owners, you can start to acquire multiple backlinks per week.

It’s not easy to create an outreach process, but our team has done this for a number of our clients and are able to build dozens of backlinks per month in order to achieve high rankings.

If your brand or business has had an online presence for any amount of time, it’s almost a 100% possibility that you’ve wondered how to get a good SEO ranking.

But there are a few problems that may get in the way of you having good rankings. There are two things that can hold you back from good SEO rankings and they are:

• Not knowing enough about SEO or having the time to do it yourself
• Not knowing how to spot a good company that can do it for you

Using the excuse of “oh, I’ll just get to it later” isn’t good enough anymore. 28% of searches that are conducted nearby, result in a purchase. This means that if someone searched a keyword in Google and your brand or physical location showed up first, there’s a high possibility that they’ll choose your company to do business with.

In this guide we want to tackle the two most common problems that businesses face when it comes to SEO and show you exactly what you need to do to start receiving an inbound flow of leads through search engine optimization.

The 2 Most Common Problems With Achieving High SEO Rankings

Not Knowing Enough About SEO

You’re a business owner who has been wanting to learn SEO but is maybe confused about the process of what it actually takes to rank your website in Google. While the process can be very complicated for someone new it can be broken down into two categories:

• On-page SEO
• Off-page SEO

Now, while both of these categories have multiple subcategories within them, this is really all it comes down to.

Let’s go deeper into each one of those.

On-Page SEO

Every business needs effective on-page SEO in order to rank in Google. On-page refers to everything that is directly on your website. At first glance, it may not seem as important as backlinks, but if you get this part wrong, backlinks won’t help much.

There are a few components of on-page SEO that should be executed properly.

Meta Title and Description

Your meta title and description are actually the first things your potential customer will see when they search for whatever product or service they need in Google.

Let’s start with a local example. We’ll use the keyword “Maryland Waterproofing” as our target keyword.

When you do a search for “Maryland Waterproofing” let’s take a look at the first result’s metadata and see what they’re doing right.

The first ranking website has the target keyword in their meta title and their meta description which let’s Google and the searcher know that this website is relevant to the search.

On-page Content

Once a searcher reaches your website, everything that is on the home page, service page or product page should be directly related to the keyword topic.

Including your main keyword a few times throughout your content is enough for Google to understand what your page is about and properly rank you.

Note: Do not try and overstuff keywords throughout your content just to try and rank higher. Always write for the user first and then optimize for the target keyword afterwards.

You can see that the search phrase appears on the homepage 3 times. Once in the title.

Once in a featured review.

The keyword is also used in the footer as well.

This is enough on-page SEO to get you headed in the right direction, especially if you have a local website where the competition is less competitive.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO refers to any optimization that is done for your website to rank that does not take place directly on your website.

The most common type of off-page SEO you can do is link building. Simplified, link building is just someone else linking back from their website to yours. This can be considered “votes” to Google and lets them know that other people see your website as a resource.

So, how do you get backlinks?

There are actually a few different ways you can go about getting backlinks. Doing manual outreach to other website owners can be effective if done the right way.

The days of sending a pre-written, non-personal email and securing a backlink are long gone.

Now outreach requires building a relationship with other website owners. This does take time, but once done can be extremely effective in helping your website rank.

So which form of link building should you start with? Guest posting.

Guest Posting

We touched on this briefly above, but here we’ll get more into the strategy side of things.

Before trying to secure a post on a website, you should always run an audit on the site you are trying to link from.

You want to make sure that the website has:

• Real traffic

• Relevance

• Good metrics

• Balanced anchor text

Let’s get deeper into each one of these.

Real Traffic

Any website that you consider obtaining a backlink from should have a real source of traffic. Fake traffic can be purchased from a number of vendors online. They’ll usually advertise it at a price that is “too good to be true”, and if it sounds “too good to be true”, it usually is.

Try and also target websites that get at least 50 visitors per month. This is an indicator that Google has found the site useful and has given it some authority. Authority is needed to effectively pass ranking power from one website to another.

To check a site’s traffic you can use a tool in Ahrefs called the “Site Explorer”

When vetting for backlinks, you want to try and make sure that you are racing out to bigger blogs in your space. That way they are still relevant to your company without being a direct competitor.

But for this example, we will use a direct competitor.

Once we have the url, place the site link into the “Site Explorer” and do a search.

Once the data has populated, you should be able to see an estimated value of monthly traffic.

This would generally fit our criteria in this area because the traffic is estimated at over 50 visitors per month.

A free way to check to see how much traffic a site has is to use a Chrome extension called “Similar Web”.

It’s as easy as going to the extension store and typing in, similar web.

Once the extension is added to chrome, you can visit a potential target website, to get the traffic count. Sometimes if a site has really low traffic, you’ll get this message here.

Notice that Ahrefs showed data that this website gets around 70 visitors per months while Similar Web could pull no data. Free tools will not always show the most accurate data. Which is why it is much better to use a paid tool if you can.

Relevance

Seeing if a site is relevant to yours is just as simple as taking a look at the site and seeing if the articles are related to what your product or service is. The more a site is related to yours, the more relevance Google will detect between your site and there’s.

Note: Relevance is important in Google’s eyes because the more relevant to websites that are linking between one another, the more of a “push” you can see in your rankings, once Google detects the link.

Good Metrics

When we say search for a site with good metrics we mean a site that has a strong amount of domain authority, referring domains and domain authority. Let’s take our example competitor website we used earlier.

When searching for the site in Ahrefs, you can see the metrics you need to see using “Site Explorer”. In this specific example, the information tells us that our competitor website has 27 referring domains (websites linking to it) and a DR (domain rating) of 9.

Note: Look for a DR over 5 to go after and a minimum of 10 referring domains, if you are trying to rank a local business.

These stats look good to be a local website. So if this site was not a direct competitor, this would be an ideal website to go after, based on the metrics.

Anchor Text

The anchor text is referred to as the text of the link leading back to your site. If your anchor text looks unnatural, Google can spot this and penalize your site which can actually prevent it from ranking.

Your target website should have a natural anchor link selection. This just means there isn’t too much of one anchor type.

Our target website has a natural linking pattern. Notice, there aren’t too much of just one kind of anchor, they are spread out across multiple anchors.

This would be a great anchor text profile of a website we’d want to try and reach out to.

After this research is done, it’s time to start emailing the website owners and building relationships to try and get a link placed on their site.

Are You Ready for Higher SEO Rankings?

We have broken down the two things that need to be focused on when it comes to getting a good SEO ranking.

If you follow our guide and take the necessary steps laid out on this guide, you’ll have an optimized website and be on your way to getting the guest post to help rank your site in the search engines.

Our team has a systemized process to obtain a number of high-quality backlinks that will help move your site up the engines onto the first page of Google along with a team of experts that make sure your on-page SEO is perfectly done.