What's a Backlink Analysis and How to Perform One in 4 Easy Steps - uSERP

What’s a Backlink Analysis and How to Perform One in 4 Easy Steps

You can write the perfect blog post and it still might not rank first on Google.

Despite all your planning and optimization techniques, your post could still fall short.

Like everyone, your content needs support.

And the best way to give your content support is through backlinks.

But how do you know how many to aim for or which backlinks are worth the most?

That’s where a backlink analysis becomes useful. And here at uSERP we take pride in our backlink analysis that why we are a leading link building agency.

In this post, we’ll review all the major components of a backlink analysis and the necessary steps you need to take to perform one.

Before we dive in, let’s take a look at what’s in a backlink analysis and why it’s important.

What is a Backlink Analysis and Why Does It Matter?

A backlink analysis is a thorough evaluation of the number and quality of websites that are linking to your domain or a specific piece of content.

The analysis reviews more than just the number of backlinks you have leading to your page. It examines the entire scope of quantity, quality, anchor text, and recency of your backlinks while taking into account other factors for improved SEO. (We’ll cover these factors more in a minute.)

A backlink analysis can be conducted for your company’s blog or even a competitor’s blog to understand how each is faring when it comes to acquiring coveted backlinks and improving keyword rankings.

With backlink data, you can identify backlink opportunities as well as competitors’ backlinks you need to target.

Plus, you can identify toxic backlinks you might need to get rid of, like a spammy link or a low quality backlink to disavow.

A complete backlink analysis gives you a wealth of performance data that can be used to improve your post and site performance and see how your business stacks up against a competitor.

The insights will be invaluable for your content and SEO strategy.

The significance of a backlink analysis

There’s a lot of value in conducting a backlink analysis. First, a backlink analysis will give you perspective on how useful others find the content located on your site.

Typically, sites will link to yours if they appreciate your content and trust your brand. A large number of backlinks could indicate a loyal follower base that wants to share your brand or content with their own.

Secondly, a backlink analysis can define one of your SEO objectives.

If you analyze a top-ranking competitor, it will provide you with the number of high-quality backlinks you need to acquire (as well as direct target sites) to improve your SEO and surpass them.

Of course, backlinks aren’t the only factor contributing to your success in the search rankings, but Google has stated time and time again that they are a top-two ranking factor.

Research shows that 91% of all websites don’t get organic traffic from Google, largely because they lack the necessary backlinks to improve their rankings and compete in SERPs.

That’s why backlink analyses are so critical in ensuring the success of your site’s organic channel.

With your new link portfolio, you can assess your link equity (value) and fix any broken links you find.

Plus, as you move your link building strategy into the offensive mode, an SEO professional or your current link building agency can use the link profile as a resource to increase backlinks and improve your SEO metrics.

Let’s start laying the groundwork for conducting a backlink analysis by highlighting the top SEO tools you’ll need to use.

Preparing for your backlink analysis

By conducting a backlink analysis, you will understand what you’re up against and how you’ll need to improve your backlink outreach efforts.

However, you don’t have to conduct one alone. We’re here to help, and you can always use third-party software.

Thankfully, you don’t have to manually search for backlinks tied to your site. There are numerous SEO-focused tools available to help.

My three personal favorite tools for backlink analysis are, in order:

  1. Serpstat
  2. Ahrefs
  3. Semrush

These are the industry-leaders when it comes to SEO software and backlink analysis assistance, and many of them offer a free version of their software.

The SEO software market is largely driven by the growing need for time-efficient search engine optimization, but once you select your software, what metrics should you be looking for?

We’ll outline the main components of the analysis and why each is important.

Components of a backlink analysis

Backlink analysis can be completed in a variety of ways, but there are four components that every analysis absolutely needs to have.

These components include:

Link data is invaluable. And it can only be sourced if you take the proper time to build a link profile, complete the link analysis and extract insights.

That’s why each step is so critical. They create a holistic view of the health of your backlinks, while shining light on areas that need attention.

Let’s get into each in more detail and walk through a full backlink analysis for your site.

Performing the 4-Step Backlink Analysis

Now that you know the importance of a backlink analysis and what tools you can use, we’re ready to dive in.

To illustrate the process, we’ll be using Serpstat, our preferred tool, to examine our own site.

1. Analyze the total backlinks linking to your site

First, we’re going to complete the main objective of your backlink analysis: finding the total number of backlinks currently linked to your site.

Once we pull this data, we’ll get more specific and examine aspects of it closely to source new insights. But, we’re going to start broad to get a high-level look at where everything currently stands.

SEO software can quickly aggregate your total backlinks for you, so you can get the cumulative number of sites linking to your page or domain.

This is a helpful—and essential—starting point for your backlink analysis.

Finding your total backlinks

Within Serpstat (or a similar tool), you can input your domain to perform a high-level analysis.

Once completed, you can view the total number of backlinks linking to your domain and get granular with the data located in your backlink profile:

The starting point is always to assess your total backlinks. However, that number alone doesn’t provide a comprehensive picture of your current performance.

After all, what exactly does the total number of backlinks tell you?

Well, alone, it doesn’t tell you much. With nothing to compare it to, how do you know if 700 backlinks is good or bad?

But if you compare it to a competitor’s total backlinks, you can understand where you rank.

You need to look at your total number within the context of everything else, including your competition and how they’re spread across your site.

If you’re examining the total number of backlinks to your entire domain, you can see which pages are most valuable to your audience. You can segment blog posts that are performing exceptionally well and double down on those topics.

2. Segment unique domains

The high-level backlink objective is to get as many high-quality, unique backlinks from multiple different domains.

To understand how many of your total backlinks are from different websites, you need to segment based on unique domains.

You need to go beyond the total number of backlinks you have and understand how many unique domains are linking to your site.

Google doesn’t always reward sites that simply have a high number of backlinks.

Over the years, companies have simply bought backlinks and had artificial ones generated. Google put a stop to this and began placing the emphasis on unique domains. Multiple backlinks from different reputable sites is a strong signal that your content is valuable.

Thus, you need to have a varying number of backlinks from different domains.

Finding your unique backlinks

Within the Serpstat tool, you can click on your total backlink number to open up a more granular view of each individual backlink and referring pages, as well as lost backlinks:

In this dashboard, you can view each individual backlink, anchor text, link type, and when it was indexed.

3. Check domain authority for high-quality backlinks

Let’s keep going deeper. You know your total backlinks and unique domains.

But are they valuable? Are they white hat or black hat?

Google looks for high-value sites with high domain authority and rankings.

You need to review how many unique domains are actually high-quality domains with high domain authority ratings.

To put it another way: it’s quality over quantity when it comes to backlinks. But what makes a link a high-quality backlink?

Factors of high-quality backlinks

Two main factors contribute to high-quality backlinks: domain authority and the age of the backlink.

Domain authority is a metric used to assess the validity and reputation of the domain linking to your site. After sites started to artificially increase the quantity of their backlinks, Google increased its emphasis on quality backlinks from unique, relevant domains.

However, you also want to have fresh backlinks to ensure not all of them are old and stale.

Finding quality backlinks

In Serpstat, you can examine the quality and recency of your backlinks by looking at their domain score.

More than 48% of marketers assess the quality of their backlinks by checking their domain rating:

4. Assess the quality of your anchor texts

Now it’s time to examine how sites are linking to your page.

Let’s specifically look at the anchor text that sites are using to add their link into their website copy or blog post.

Anchor text is the words or phrases on the site that are hyperlinked to your website. These can be indicators that improve the quality of the backlinks you receive. They should be monitored and improved if needed.

Finding your backlinks’ anchor text

The process to analyze your backlinks is simple. Thankfully, your SEO tool will easily source all your backlinks’ anchor text for you.

In the individualized view, you can see a column titled “Anchor and backlink.” This will list all the individual anchors text variations that are used for your backlinks.

Next steps: Page vs. site analysis, outreach, and more

So you’ve completed a backlink analysis for your entire site. Now what?

It’s time to do one for a specific page on your site. This can provide you with more detail on which content your target audience finds most valuable.

Comparing posts or pages with a lot of quality backlinks to those that are underperforming will also help you focus on actionable steps to start building more valuable backlinks.

Conclusion

Everyone wants to rank high on Google, but how can you actually make that happen?

The answer may lie in your backlink analysis, an audit that highlights all the pages linking to your site.

Backlink analyses provide critical information that can help you benchmark against and surpass competitors in your ranking.

To conduct one, you need to analyze your backlinks, segment unique domains, review domain authority and assess the quality of your anchor texts.