Have you ever heard of backlink gap analysis? If you do SEO, you probably know what we’re talking about, but if you don’t know then read on to find out. In this short guide, we’ll show you what backlink gap analysis is, why you should integrate this practice into your everyday SEO tasks, and how you can use SERPed.net to get the most out of this data. Let’s dive in.
What is Backlink Gaps Analysis?
To understand backlink gap analysis, we first need to understand what backlinks are.
Backlinks are links that point to your website (homepage or inner page) from external sources. Unlike internal links, which you can set up inside your website architecture by yourself, external links are usually organic – i.e., they result from a positive action taken by someone else outside your website. You can check our video to find out in detail what backlink gaps are:
Since backlinks are considered by Google’s algorithm as upvotes for your website, the more backlinks you have, the better. However, it’s not just about quantity; the quality of these links also matters. You want your backlinks to come from websites with a low spam score and a high authority in their field.
Therefore, since backlinks are necessary for your website to rank higher, you need to have a backlink strategy that includes tactics on how to make sure your website gets external links that matter.
Backlink gap analysis is a part of competitive analysis in SEO and is something that has developed as a result of the ever-increasing sophistication in SEO tactics. Essentially, a backlink gap tool will analyze your competitors’ external link profiles in order to identify backlink gaps, that is, backlinks that are present in your competitors’ external profiles which are not present in yours. A backlink gap tool will provide you with a list of websites that link to your competitors, but not to you (yet).
But how does this benefit you? We’ll answer this question in the next section.
Why You Should Use Backlink Gaps Analysis
So why should you do backlink gaps analysis? It’s not as complicated as it seems. Basically, if you find two of your competitors (or more) have links from a website and you don’t, getting that link is probably easy to do. If you run out of ideas when it comes to link building, this is something you should definitely try.
When performing backlink gaps analysis, you’ll find links that can help you with your SEO strategy. Some links may come from websites that are not as relevant for your website, but by reviewing these links carefully, you should be able to determine the links you should get and the ones you should ignore.
Thus, in order to benefit from this practice, you need to spend some time analyzing these links. SERPed.net makes it easier to strike gold, by giving you metrics that help you understand if that link will improve your website SEO or make it harder for you to rank.
Once you have your list of websites that you’d like to get a link from, you would probably have to get in touch with the webmasters. It is very important to plan your approach. We recommend sending an email to get the ball rolling.
Of course, your email needs to get the attention of your target recipient. Sometimes, you’ll hit a wall either because you don’t get a reply from your recipient, or because your email doesn’t get to the right person.
Tips For Outreach Emails
There are a few things you can do in your outreach email (the message you send to the webmasters) in order to increase your chances of getting that link. We’ll go through a few tips that might help.
First of all, make sure you know your target recipient. If you get a few details about your recipient’s interests, you can use them to create common ground between you two and enhance your chances of success.
Don’t use a template to copy and paste your email. Different people require different approaches.
Offer something in return. Your recipient will always think “what’s in it for me?” and you need to make it clear what they’re getting from you. Ideally, you should be able to get their cooperation without having to pay for the link, as paid links can damage your reputation online.
As a final note about outreach: get straight to the point. Don’t waste your recipient’s time. Be short and concise. If your email is over 200 words, you need to cut it down!
And now that you have a few tips about how to contact webmasters for backlinks, we’ll explain how you can use SERPed.net to analyze your backlink gaps.
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Backlink Gaps on SERPed.net
To carry out a backlink gap analysis, use the Backlinks Explorer tool. You can find it on the Tools menu, under SEO Analysis.
Once you open the Backlinks Explorer tool, click on the blue “+” button to create a new analysis.
To explore competitor backlinks, click on the “Start” button under “Backlink Gaps”.
Fill in all the fields. At the top, add your website URL; on the bottom fields, add three competitors that specialize in the same product or service that you sell.
Now, once you’re done, click on “Find Backlink Opportunities” to run the analysis. As you can see, this search will cost you 4 credits – one for each website analyzed. And here are the results:
In this screen, you’ll see the number of matches (number of websites out of the total four that have backlinks from that specific domain). Under each website you analyzed, you’ll see another number: this is the number of backlinks that each website has from the domain on the left.
To find out the exact link, hover on the number and a “+” sign will appear. Click the “+” sign and you’ll see the exact URL for those backlinks.
We always recommend “100 links from 100 domains” rather than “100 links from one domain”. Variety is also key in backlink strategies.
When it comes to matches, you can order the results to start with the domains that link to one of your competitors only. At the right of “Matches”, you’ll find a tiny arrow. Click on it to re-order match numbers.
You can click one each website URL to visit the websites and determine whether that's a link you should have as well or not and how hard it would be to get this link.
Wrapping Up
Using backlink gap analysis, you can improve your rankings by getting a list of highly authoritative links that your competitors already have but you do not.
Competitive analysis is part of SEO, and using SERPed.net you can make sure your off-page SEO is on point. On-page SEO is also important, and the best approach you can take when doing SEO is to think about each task as part of a whole.
SEO is a lot of work, but a boost in your ranking on Google SERPs (search engine result pages) will help you get more visitors to your website, and, therefore, more sales.
However, you must remember that SEO does not bring results overnight. Patience (and a bit of stubbornness) is the best trait you can have when doing SEO work.
What are your thoughts? Did we forget something? You can send suggestions or questions our way using the comment box. If you prefer to reach out on social media, you can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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