How to Monitor Backlinks?

A backlink (or an inbound link) links a web page to a different page or site. Backlinks are a great way to increase web traffic and are critically important to any SEO strategy. If you want a popular website, they’re one of the best ways. But you should always monitor backlinks if you want to know what’s working and what’s not. Continue reading for a simple guide on how to monitor backlinks. Backlinks from different domains are one of the essential content criteria. They have a significant role in the authority/relevance equation search engines use to rank content. You’ll need to earn backlinks continually to rank well in search engines. Today, we will discuss why backlink monitoring is essential and how to monitor backlinks in detail.

Why Is Backlink Monitoring Essential?

First, if you are curious, check what is a backlink here. Various factors will help Google determine where to place your site among its search rankings. Social signals, your website speed, keyword usage, and content length are some of those factors. Backlinks are yet another significant factor. You will be ranked higher when you get backlinks or guest posting, especially from sites with high traffic.

There are three reasons why monitoring backlinks to your website is essential. You’ll know which marketing strategies work and which don’t. You’ll be able to give better reports to your customers. And you’ll be able to quickly add more social proof to your site.

Because backlinks tell us if people find our content valuable, content marketers need to keep an eye on their links. In many cases, we’re content to leave this task on the SEO experts’ desk. Let’s see the reasons why backlink monitoring is essential.

• Broken Links
• Competitor Analysis
• Website Security

Broken Links

One of the biggest benefits of doing backlink analysis and checking backlinks is seeing and controlling those links’ status. Some links may be broken, and these backlinks will do more harm than good to your site. Therefore, you protect the site’s health by constantly checking the quality and tracking backlinks. It’s up to you to organize your website by removing broken links.

Competitor Analysis

Of course, while monitoring backlinks, you can check backlinks not only your links but also those of your competitors. This will help you both to keep a close eye on your competitors and to make up for their shortcomings. Competitor analysis is a critical process for your own development. So don’t hesitate to analyze your competitors as well!

Website Security

And, of course, one of the most important things you can take advantage of when backlink monitoring is the security and relevance of your links. To put it this way, it is an essential detail for Google that the sites you get backlinks from are related to your website and link page. And if the site from which you got the backlink changes that page and its content is no longer compatible with your page, Google may count that link as spam. A spammy page link will also do you a lot of harm. Therefore, it is essential to regularly check website backlinks and the status of the sites you link to.

How Do We Monitor Backlinks?

Despite the great backlinks, they’re not valuable if you don’t monitor and analyze them regularly. There are two phases on how to monitor backlinks. Let’s see how the two-phase process for accurately monitoring your backlinks works. 

• Backlink Monitoring Should Be In Your Work Scheme
• Applying Gathered Information From Backlink Monitoring

Backlink Monitoring Should Be In Your Work Scheme

You can monitor your backlinks in two ways, either manually or automatically. If manual, you’d need to search all over and add links to a sheet with other relevant information. This method would work, but it’d also take lots of time.

Automatic monitoring is an easier way. With automated monitoring, the software will automatically monitor your backlinks for you for a given amount of money, though. In both ways, you need to set a scheduled time in your work calendar for a regular backlink monitoring time. As it can take several hours manually, it will usually take less than an hour with the automatic method.

A good tip here is that some software will provide you with backlink analyses from your competitor. And not looking only at your backlinks would be a good strategy. Then, you need to categorize your backlinks. Preferably, they would be advisable, unadvisable, and everything else. High-quality websites would get better backlink chances. And building relationships with domain managers will better establish your site and backlinks.

Applying Gathered Information From Backlink Monitoring

Monitoring backlinks is only one thing to do. Now, you need to apply what you learned from it to your reporting. If you are involved in providing marketing or SEO services to customers, then your reporting is essential. Knowing how to accurately and effectively monitor backlinks will show customers how your work benefits your clients’ business.

You should always make the correlation between backlink monitoring and the desired business outcomes of your clients. To improve your reporting, you must focus on the results of your backlinks and check what sites apply to your backlinks.

Backlink monitoring also provides information about how long your backlinks take to increase your outreach. Firstly you need to identify your backlink opportunities. Picking some competitors will help you in this case. To not be overwhelmed by hundreds of potential backlink opportunities here, you need to rank the backlink opportunities by their value and relevance.

For example, you may decide not to pay attention to backlinks from certain publications because it will be too hard to reach the kind of people you’re trying to target. By putting your focus on sites with good Domain Authority scores, you can better optimize your targeting. You also need to make sure that you execute your outreach strategy correctly. There are specific tools online that can help you find email addresses at websites you choose to target.

Practical Backlink Monitoring Tools

Let’s now check some backlink tracking tools. These backlink tools help you do backlink monitoring and analyze backlinks.

• Google Search Console
• Ahrefs
• Semrush

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is one of the first tools you should use in all your SEO processes, from backlink analysis to more. It is a useful resource that you can use, especially in link analysis. Since it is free, you can easily check your site’s links and monitor backlinks and the status of the sites they are connected to.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is one of the most important and most effective tools for SEO. It is a tool that you will find very useful, especially in keyword analysis and link analysis. You can easily see the links, status, lost links, do backlinks check, and many small details from your backlink profile page on this page.

Semrush

Another important tool for SEO is Semrush. With the link services offered by this tool, you can monitor and track backlinks in detail and easily identify the links that adversely affect your site in terms of SEO.

Conclusion

Once you know how to monitor backlinks, you can significantly enhance your SEO efforts and increase your ROI and conversion rates. Backlinking isn’t always easy, but monitoring backlinks will reduce the amount of trial and error and help get you stronger backlinks in no time. Hopefully, this article was helpful for you to understand how to monitor backlinks. See you in another article!