Backlink Gap Analysis for Beginners: Complete Guide You Need to Know

Backlink Gap Analysis for Beginners – is important for your business. Backlinks are a priceless part of SEO. In fact, this is one of the top influencing factors that search engines use when ranking your website. Whether you are developing a new strategy to build new backlinks or revise what you already have now, it is important to do backlink gap analysis. Let’s discuss about it inside this article!

What is Backlink Gap Analysis for Beginners?

First of all, let’s find out what a backlink itself is. A backlink is a link that refers to your website obtained from other websites. These backlinks will help your website to get web traffic as well as increase domain authority. For example, there is a blog website about skincare tips and another website is an online marketplace selling skincare products. And the marketplace links an article from the blog website on one of their web pages. In this case, the blog website gets a backlink from the online marketplace website.

On the other hand, backlink analysis is a comprehensive review of a website’s backlinks to analyse a site’s performance and identify issues that could affect search engine rankings. Backlink analysis is like going to a doctor for check-ups, meaning you have to do it on a regular basis to make sure that everything is fine as well as to see if there is something wrong. Finishing this process is one of the best ways to understand the health of your website as well as understand what factors contribute to your ranking.

You perhaps have noticed a sharp drop in your ranking, or you are not seeing the progress you expected. Backlink analysis will also show you how the scale of your website affects your competitors. You will obtain some insights about the strategy used by your competitors and which one you can apply in your own process. Backlink analysis is like a chance to identify new growth opportunities that you have not explored yet.

Why is Backlink Gap Analysis for Beginners Important for Beginner Business Owners?

Obtaining a backlink from other websites becomes important because backlinks are one of the components that determines the authority of your website. Having high authority will be definitely beneficial for your website, given authority is one of the determining factors of search engine rankings. In other words, the higher the authority of your website, the higher the opportunity for your website to get top rankings on search engines.

As a business owner, you surely want your business website to be on the first page of search engines like Google. By ranking on the first page, your website will have a better chance to attract more customers and visitors. Therefore, it is important for business owners to do backlink gap analysis.

How to Do Backlink Gap Analysis for Beginners Step-by-Step

Below are the steps to do backlink analysis for beginners.

Choose the Site You Want to Analyse

Though it is clear that you will analyse your own website, you also want to narrow down the competitors’ sites you want to review. You perhaps have thought about a few things you most like. But if you haven’t, it is best for you to choose sites that offer the same product or service as your business offers and are currently outperforming you for your target keywords.

Choose an Audit Tool

Though you can do backlink analysis manually by yourself, it is more efficient to use a backlink audit tool that is surely equipped with features you need. There are a lot of backlinks checking tools out there, such as Moz Link Explorer, Ahrefs, SEMrush, and many more.

Get a Quick Overview

Now it is time for you to do the analysis. You will start with a lot of data. In order to get a quick overview of your website’s performance, there are 3 metrics that you have to focus on, which are the total number of backlinks, referring domains, and top linked pages. The total number of backlinks is the number of links directed to a site. If this number is very low, it may be the reason why your page rank is poor.

Referring domains are the total number of websites pointing to your site. Sorting these domains by authority can tell you how valuable these pages are to your ranking as well as give you ideas for upcoming outreach. While top linked pages are pages on a website that gets the most backlinks. This can indicate the best type of content for link building.

Repeat this step with your competitors to set up a benchmark and learn where you fall. Depending on the tool you use, you probably can compare these metrics on the same page.

Analyse the Details

Now it is time to get into the details. Start by taking a look at your link texts, the words used to hyperlink your web page. This is a good way to identify spam-filled backlinks that can ruin your ranking. If you are not sure how to tell if the referring domain contains spams or not, see if the link text is related to the content on your website. If it looks like a piece of junk in your email and contains abusive language, it is probably spam.

Once you have identified these links, you can reach out to the website to request the link to be removed. Dismissing the link is a realistic option as it is basically telling Google to ignore the backlink. It is also essential to identify lost or broken links on your website. If you find one, you can redirect it to new web pages on your website with the same or similar content.

That is what you have to know about backlink gap analysis for beginners. Do not forget to compare your findings with your competitors. For example, look at the referring domain for websites that outperformed yours. If there is a slight overlap between your list and theirs, this can give you a direction as to which domain to go to. This helps you to compare the level of your backlink acquisition with your competitors.