How to build backlinks using competitive intelligence

08/13/19 • 8 min

The Digital Marketing Podcast with Mandar Marathe

What are backlinks?

Backlinks are hyperlinks from external websites that point to web pages on your websites. Why are backlinks important? They have been the core or crux of Google's PageRank algorithm. Google give a lot of importance to links from external websites to your website. Even today, backlinks are considered as one of the important factors for ranking your page in search results.

How can you build backlinks using competitive intelligence?

First and foremost, I'd like to say that link building is very tough. In today's time its one of the toughest job to get someone else to link back to your website. Lets look at it smartly. What I am going to do is, I would go to Google and search for the keyword for which I want to build a backlink. I would type in the keyword phrase - for e.g. "seo company in india" is a keyword for which I would want briefkase.in as a website to rank higher in SERPs. I will see the top 10 results in SERPs. You can also use UberSuggest and type in the keyword there. You can get a list of pages that are ranking for this keyword.

From what I understand, there are 8100 searches happening for the term "seo company india" every month. If we rank on position 1, then we would be getting 35-40% of the clicks i.e 3500 - 4000 visits to our website, just for ranking for this keyword. The traffic analyzer tool by Neil Patel gives you the backlinks for websites. Just type in the domain name of the top ranking websites. For "seo company in india" we have ezrankings.org and techmagnate.com are the top 2 websites that rank. EZrankings gets 21k visitors for /seo-company-india page and 9k visitors for /seo-services page on their website. So 30k visitors to their website for just these 2 pages. If we consider a 1% conversion rate, they generate close to 300 leads from their website.

You can export the back link profile of the pages that rank high for your focus keywords. For "seo company india", EZRankings has 166 back links and for "seo services" they have 66 back links. You can also use SEMRush / ahrefs to get the backlink profile of specific web pages. Export this data to a spreadsheet. Now this data will have domain authority, page authority score for all the URLs from where the competitor has received backlinks. It will also have the anchor text on which they have received back link. Make a list of unique domains. Do this for all the web pages that are ranking on top - EzRankings, Techmagnate, SEO.in and so on. Combine all the data in one table to find out the unique domains and then categorize these domains based on DA / PA. We now have a prioritized lists of domains from where you can build links.

For some domains, you can go ahead and build links all by yourself. These are may be company profile websites such as Goodcompany or Clutch. Go ahead and build these company profiles or list your business on Google Maps. Start with content outreach to all the websites from where your competitors have received backlinks. Try to fill in the gaps to improve your backlink profile using competitive intelligence.

What are backlinks?

How can you build backlinks using competitive intelligence?

Previous Episode

How to respond to online reviews

If you might have see that there are a lot of websites that review your business. For example you have Google My Business which lists you on Maps or you have Bing Places. People can visit your listings and review your business. If you are a restaurant, people can review you on Zomato. If you are a spa, you would have a listing on Trip Advisor or a listing website like Just Dial or Sulekha. People might go and review your business on these sites. So how do you actually tackle these reviews online?

Monitor brand presence: You need to make a list of all websites where your brand has been mentioned or a list of websites where your company profile has been created. Lets say you have Google My Business, Trip Advisor, Bing Places, Just Dial, Sulekha, Zomato. Keep a track of all the listings of your business across these sites in a spreadsheet. Every week pull up this sheet and check whether there are new reviews that have come in on the company profiles.

If you have received a good review, then you should definitely pat yourself on your back. But, if its a bad review or negative review, you need to take cognizance of it. Lets say you have a company profile on Glassdoor and people have negatively reviewed your company there, what should you do? I would say that you should welcome and embrace negative reviews. Its the negative reviews that will help you do better with your business. Someone who writes positively about your business, then there is no scope of improvement for your business. But if someone speaks negatively about your business - about your company culture, the service you provide, your customer service interactions - its an opportunity to improve that area of your business.

Categorize negative reviews: Make a note of all negative reviews you have received across all different platforms and try to categorize these negative reviews to understand whether the negative review is related to your service or is it related to people who work in your organization or the negative review has to do with you as a founder of the company. You should definitely categorize these negative reviews and put them in different buckets and focus on the bucket that has the most negative reviews. Try to improve your service. If you observe, the products that you prefer to buy on Amazon are the one's that have received the most positive reviews. You always go through reviews on Amazon or Flipkart before you buy the product. Amazon's algorithm also takes into consideration the reviews and ratings that people have put in for your products.

Respond to reviews: Make sure you are responding to the reviews received on such platforms. If its a dissatisfied customer for a product that they have received, then promise to your customer that you will send the right product. Try to appease the customer by doing a little bit beyond what's promised. Make him comfortable by responding to the negative reviews. Take these negative reviews positively - Treat negative reviews as bugs in your system and log them into your project management system. Become a better company by resolving these bugs.

Next Episode

How to create content clusters to boost organic traffic

Major search engines like Google have made fundamental changes to their algorithms to favor topic-based content. Google makes minor changes to its algorithm every single day. Most major search engines roll out 500-600 updates a year and release 2-3 major named updates. With Search algorithms evolving to the point where they can understand complex search queries and also the connections between searches (similar search queries), SEOs and Content Marketers need to adapt to these changes ever faster.

What are content clusters? Content clusters are a group of pages that revolve around a central topic. They are similar to a Hub-and-Spoke model used in transport, telecommunications, freight or distributed computing. To simplify my analogy, we need to create a central page that acts as the “Hub” for the content cluster and several “Spoke” pages that are related to the central hub page.

All of the spoke pages are interlinked to the hub page and the hub page links back to each of the spoke pages. The hub-spoke interlinking action signals to Search Engines that the “Hub” page is an authority over a topic.

Anum Hussain and Cambria Davies launched content cluster experiments in 2016. The findings from their extensive research tell us that the more interlinking we do, the better we are placed in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) for a set of keywords related to a topic.

How to create content clusters to boost organic traffic? Creating content clusters for your website is a huge task. Not only would you have to restructure your website or your existing blog, but you would also have to build a lot of internal links from spoke pages to a hub page and vice versa.

Let’s get started with “Weight loss” as our central theme for creating a content cluster. The typical way of creating a content cluster is to start with a piece of content that covers the core topic and then branching out.

Listed below are the steps you need to follow to build your content cluster and rock your SEO!

Identify central topic You need to identify your core topic using keyword research. There are multiple tools out there – you can use Moz Keyword Explorer, SEMRush.com’s Keyword Tool or KeywordTool.io. AdWords Keyword Planner will also do the job. Simply plug in your core topic and a few variations into any tool to find our search volumes, competition, CTR Opportunity and other relevant metrics.

Check SERP results for topic competitiveness

This is more of a qualitative analysis of your competition on Search. Type in the core topic in Google or Bing and find out which websites are ranking for your topic? Will you be able to compete with these websites? Are you up against giants or can you easily rank for these keywords? Take a good look at all search results. Visit each and every competitor’s website and understand the depth and quality of their content marketing strategy around the topic you have chosen.

Find supporting topics for the core / central topic The key to finding supporting topics to your chosen core topic is to go back to your keyword research tool. A quick glance will tell us that there are a few supporting topics related to weight loss including “tips”, “supplements”, “diet”, or “food products”.

Now it’s time to turn to your favourite content recommendation tool. If you are clueless, you might want to look at HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator

Distribute content via publishing platforms By now you have figured out your core topic and have a list of supporting topics for which you need to create content. Before you go ahead and start churning out content, it is imperative to identify where you would be publishing the supporting content.