In search engine optimization (SEO), your success depends on how effectively you can strategize and implement that strategy.
There are several ways to plan poorly or set the wrong goals, and there are multiple ways you can poorly execute your vision.
You can analyze your progress by reviewing several different metrics.
You can analyze your rankings for target keywords, organic traffic, and your backlink profile.
But what exactly is your backlink profile, and how can you evaluate your backlink profile?
Let’s start with the basics first.
What are natural/organic backlinks?
“Organic backlinks or Natural Backlinks” are nofollow and dofollow backlinks that are given from a web page to another web page without any link building collaboration between the two sites.
These are the backlinks naturally positioned by a real individual on their website when they consider that backlink beneficial for their audience and adds value to their site.
What are Not natural/organic backlinks?
Simply put, the backlinks that are not organic are unnatural links or inorganic backlinks.
Of course, You wouldn’t want inorganic backlinks in your backlink profile.
But why?
Because search engines hate them. If they see multiple of those backlinks leading to your site, there’s a high chance they’ll penalize you. So, your rankings will suffer immensely!
However, the good news is inorganic backlinks are relatively easy to track. They primarily consist of:
- Paid links
- Links from link swaps
- Links from low-quality directories
- Advertorials
- Exact-match keyword anchor text
If you find any of the above backlink types in your profile, the best thing to do is remove them as soon as possible.
What is a backlink profile?
Simply put, a “backlink profile” is a synopsis of all the backlinks pointing to your site.
These backlinks might come from various sources like publishers, nonprofit organizations, and partnered establishments, but they all point to your domain somehow.
Using the right backlink audit tools, you can easily see how many backlinks you have, where those backlinks are coming from, the quality of those links, and other factors.
Why are Organic Backlinks important to SEO success?
Backlinks are the primary ranking factor for Google or other search engines.
A search engine’s algorithm analyzes a web page’s backlink profile to determine whether to rank it for a specific search phrase.
A backlink profile consists of the number of links and the quality of those links.
Here’s a few important benefits organic backlinks bring to your SEO program:
Improves your website’s authority
The most crucial benefit of acquiring natural backlinks is that it can positively impact your site’s domain authority (DA).
A website might have a few pages that perform organically better than others, which can improve the website’s DA as a whole.
Helps get higher rankings
Natural or organic backlinks are links that help boost your ranking and the organic traffic to your site.
Simply put, the more organic links and organic keywords you have, the more your likelihood to appear on the first page of results on a Google search.
Helps gain referral traffic
Another great benefit organic backlinks bring to your site is that they can help you earn referral traffic.
Earning organic backlinks from web pages or sites with a lot of traffic on their own can boost your referral traffic through that page.
Minimizes your link building investments
The white hat link building strategies can highly benefit your website’s rankings.
Also, organic backlinks can come even when you aren’t actively investing in backlink building for a while.
It’s not to say there’s no need to invest in link building.
But to say that, for some reason, if you choose to pause your link building exercises, you must put your time and effort into creating great content that will pay off.
How to evaluate your backlink profile?
The simplest way is to use a backlink audit tool. This tool will give you an in-depth evaluation of every link pointing toward your website. You’ll have to provide your domain or any specific web page, and the tool will do the analysis independently.
What do you need to check?
In a backlink audit tool, you’ll want to check several variables, like:
The number of backlinks
The first thing you can do with this tool is figure out the number of links pointing to your website and to the individual pages (if you want to get that in-depth analysis).
Usually, the more backlinks you have, the better it is for your backlink profile.
However, sometimes you might discover that your strategy is focusing too heavily on one page of your website and not sufficiently on another, the most crucial page of your site.
It’s also possible to have excessive backlinks pointing to your domain if those links are low-quality or indicate spam.
Current domain and page authority ratings
You can analyze your current domain authority and the page-level authority ratings for your most crucial internal pages. The higher these ratings are, the higher you’ll rank for your target keywords or phrases.
Number of unique referring domains
It’s a poor idea to depend only on a few collections of domains for all your link building requirements.
In that case, you might see diminishing returns from backlinks coming from the same source.
You need links from multiple unique sources if you want the best outcomes.
Competitor Insights
Know where you stand against your top-ranking competitors on domain rating, number of backlinks, number of referring domains, and links to domain ratio.
Backlink Relevance
The relevance of the external backlinks pointing to your selected domain is a critical factor that can improve or hurt the authority of your website immensely.
The Relevance is calculated between the text on the backlink URL and the landing page.
Your domain should have more backlinks with high relevance and less with low relevance.
For example: If you’re into Finance business, and you’re getting multiple backlinks from Fifa.com, it would not be of any help for your authority. Whereas, being in a finance niche, a single backlink from Wall Street Journal, can help you build greater authority over the topic “finance.”
So, analyze the tool, to figure out how relevant the backlinks pointing to your website are, and how relevant are the backlinks pointing towards your competitors.
Health of your referring domains
Find the overall health of each unique referring domain pointing to your website.
This will help you analyze the health status of your referring domains divided into three categories, Healthy, Warning, and Critical.
The better the health status of the unique referring domains, the stronger your backlinks will be.
Optimize your link building campaign to get even stronger unique referring domains linking to your backlink profile.
Links to Domain Ratio
Figure out the exact ratio of total external backlinks to the number of unique referring domains.
This can help you analyze whether the backlinks that you’re getting are coming from the same domain or from varying domains.
The more the number of varying domains providing backlinks to you, the better it is for you.
Therefore, the lower the links to domain ratio is, the better.
Most frequently occurring anchor texts
Analyzing the anchor texts is a crucial aspect of your backlink evaluation. You can figure out the top anchor texts by occurrence amongst all external backlinks for the selected domain.
Your domain or individual pages should not have a lot of common or similar anchor texts. In this case, these can inform search engines that these are paid or spammy backlinks that are present in your website.
Therefore, search engines can severely penalize the websites with spammy or paid links.
The more varying the anchor texts are, the better it is for your authority over a particular niche.
Look out for spammy or toxic backlinks
Spammy links are the biggest concern for any SEO campaign. Irrespective of whether you consciously built the backlinks, a link that appears unnatural, spammy, or low-quality can bring a penalty to your website.
Fortunately, backlink audit tools are equipped with spam analyzing features, so you can flag and remove those before they become a problem.
Patterns
Your backlinks are growing, but how quickly is it growing? Are the same publishers linking to your website over and over?
You must start following the patterns in your link building strategy and avoid making your links too aggressive, repetitive, or predictable.
Final Thoughts
Now that all essentials of backlinks are covered, it’s entirely up to you how to take action on what you learned.
To see the best SEO results, you must conduct a backlink profile analysis monthly, if not more often.
This way, you can check the backlinks you’re building, make sure you’re not violating Google’s terms of service, and address problems before they become hurtful enough to endanger your SEO strategy.
But before you go, remember the law: even if you don’t naturally acquire backlinks or you’ve decided to purchase backlinks from the private PBNs, you must continue to create amazing content, no matter what.
This is one of the most critical rules to rank higher and get users to your website. If you want to learn more about Backlinks, sign up for our free Demo here!
