When creating a website promotion strategy, many questions arise: how to prioritize, how to promote a website, how to create an anchor list, and many others. We advise you not to reinvent the wheel and first of all, carefully study your niche and competitors' websites. This way you will be able to prioritize your website promotion and avoid repeating the mistakes of your competitors.
Sequence of competitors' link profile analysis
In the process of analyzing the link profile of competitors, you will be able to:
- establish the dynamics of link growth;
- determine the methods of building a reference profile of competitors;
- create a link strategy and anchor list for your website.
We will use Ahrefs and Serpstat services for reference analysis of competitors' websites.
Analysis of dynamics
First of all, we study the dynamics of domains using the Ahrefs service. Here you can track the dynamics for the last year, month, or the entire time of the site's existence, as well as the types and volumes of purchased links. We recommend analyzing the data for the last year.
Analysis of fresh links
Ahrefs allows you to sort links by date. If the reference profile of your site is large, you should study the links for the last 2-3 months; if it is small, it is advisable to analyze the links for the entire period. By the way, at this stage, you can look at another interesting report - new backlinks. The data from these two reports allow you to analyze how often and what type of links are added to competitors' websites.
You can see the dynamics of your link profile in the Serpstat service. A good link profile dynamics does not have sharp jumps and drops. If there are significant jumps, the search engine takes them as an attempt to artificially influence the search results.
*An example of good link profile dynamics
*This is what a bad link profile dynamics looks like: the graph shows sharp drops
Analysis of anchor lists
To determine the link dynamics, you need to analyze anchor and nofollow links and their sources (affiliate materials, crowd marketing, eternal links). Study the report with the highest number of backlinks.
Spammy methods of link building use the words "sale", "inexpensive", "price" in commercial anchors. If there are a lot of such phrases, you may receive penalties from search engines.
Analyze your own website
It often happens that you know more about your competitor's website than about your own. This is not correct. To analyze your own website, use Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
If your site is not new and already has a history, pay attention to the volume and quality of the reference profile and the promotion strategy. You can analyze your own website using the Google Search Console report. For a convenient analysis, sort the pages by the number of backlinks from highest to lowest.
Which links to use?
Use commercial anchors with the phrases "buy," "price," and "sell" in a measured way. Search engines may impose penalties for the excessive use of commercial anchors. If your site is young, it is advisable to use anchorless links or anchors of an informational nature.
We recommend that you carefully choose donor sites so that they correspond to the country in which the site is being promoted. An important indicator when choosing a donor site is traffic, trust, and spam. These indicators can be checked with the help of SimilarWeb and CheckTrast services. A good donor site should have fewer outgoing links than incoming ones.
*checking the site using the CheckTrast service
If you have a choice between hosting a website in another region but with good content, traffic, trust, and spam, or using a website in your region with poor performance, you should choose the former.
The purchased link should be relevant to your topic. For example, if you are promoting a metallurgy website, look for a donor site on industrial resources. If you are promoting a metallurgy website and the donor site is a floristry website, the link will be useless.
General tips for building a link building strategy for your website
There is no exact plan for building a link building strategy - it is created individually for each website. We have prepared some tips for the initial promotion of a link profile:
- post links on forums;
- use dofollow and nofollow links (indicate to the search engine crawler that the links should be indexed or banned from indexing);
- use non-commercial links (especially when promoting young sites);
- build up your link strategy gradually, otherwise your website will be sanctioned by the search engine;
- check the trustworthiness of the donor site using Google Chrome browser plugins (you can use MajesticSEO. A good trust score is more than 30, spammy - no more than 10);
- do not post links on the same websites.
Which pages to use for promotion
To promote your website quickly, we recommend focusing on specific pages that are relevant to your niche. Choose the most profitable categories and products on your website. To do this, use the Serpstat service: in the positions section, set the filter to search for medium-frequency queries. In the report, identify the keys that can be strengthened.
Is it possible to copy a competitor's reference profile to promote your website?
No, you can't. The analysis is carried out only to determine the tactics of promoting the competitor's pages in order to apply them to your site in the future. Search engines closely monitor the promotion strategy of young sites, so you can immediately fall under filters (most often these are low positions in the search results, selective exclusion of your site pages from the search results).
After the analysis, you can create your own link building strategy. In the process of website promotion, increase the number of links gradually, do not chase a quick result.
