Look Before You Leap Link

How to Build Links Without Blowing Yourself Up

My Well-Worn Path to Pre-Link Building Strategy

Check Out Your Site’s Backlink Portfolio First

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How to Rock the OSE

• You can run your site solo or compare with your top competitor to compare vis-à-vis.

• You need to be a PRO member.

• For newer sites I use Majestic.

Jumping Into the Deep End of the SEO Pool

• I go right for the Anchor Text Distribution.

• I semi-randomly picked Beyond Blossoms, but there’s an SEO opp ripe for the pickin’. :)

History of Link Building?

• Is the site an SEO virgin?

• If it hasn’t, chances are better everything will be organic.

Have They Bought Links?

• Not a value judgment.

• You will just need to be more vigilant in research.

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Get Access to List of Paid Links

• This isn’t always possible but worth asking.

• Have someone go through that list and check for sitewide links.

•They bloat your links/unique domains ratio

Check for Link Acquisition Velocity

• I use Majestic SEO for this.

• This report measures how fast your site has acquired links compared to your competitors.

Breaking the Link Velocity Speed Limit

• Here we have a blatant and indiscriminate use of sitewide links.

Check Anchor Text Distribution

• If your site (or your client’s) doesn’t have a history of link building, jump to this step.

• Watch for unbalanced distributions.

Red Flag That Begs Further Research

• This isn’t enough data to go make conclusions.

• Next step: Export to Excel.

Not the Sexiest Aspect of SEO But …

• Before you touch the data, get your spreadsheet organized.

• I love AutoFilter for that reason.

Setting Up Your Filters

Setting Up Your Filters

• I wanted to see anchor text that contains the words beyond and blossoms.

• But it needed to also catch anchors like beyondblossoms.com.

Do Optimized Anchors Outnumber Branded?

• If your site (or your client’s) doesn’t have a history of link building, jump to this step.

• Watch for unbalanced distributions.

Beyond Blossoms’ Branded Links

• What you see here is you have 868 branded links from 413 linking domains.

Beyond Blossoms’ send flowers Links

• Ouch! 1530/80 compared to 868/413.

Check for Filtering

Beyond Blossoms’ send flowers Links

•The result? SEMRush had the site listed #7 for send flowers. When I checked on Saturday, they were #25.

• However, it’s #8 for buy flowers.

•Conclusion: It’s most likely being filtered for the term it’s over-optimized for but is fine with other keywords they haven’t targeted as aggressively.

Find the Low-Hanging Fruit

Find the Low-Hanging Fruit with SEMRush

• Tells you the keywords your site is ranking on the first two pages of Google for.

• Click on the Full Report link or export to Excel.

Clean Up, Interpret. Rinse and Repeat.

Explain Without Geek Speak

Triangulate the Data with GWT and Analytics

• From GWT you’ll get impressions and clicks for keywords your site is showing up for.

• From analytics you’ll get actual visits for each of these keywords.

Bringing It Home

• One more advantage to arming yourself with data is oftentimes decision makers have their sacred cows.