A backlink is when a webpage links to a different page or site. Backlinks are powerful, well-proven ways to increase web traffic and they are a crucial part of any SEO strategy. They’re one of the best ways to make your website more popular.

But if you don’t monitor your backlinks, then you’ll have no idea what’s working and what’s not. Luckily, we’re here to help you. Continue reading and we’ll walk you through a dead-simple guide on how to monitor backlinks.

Why Monitor Backlinks?

There are a variety of factors that will help Google determine where to place your site among its search rankings. Some of these factors include social signals, the speed of your website, keyword usage, and the length of your content.

Another major factor is backlinks. When you have backlinks from other sites, especially ones that are authoritative and receive high amounts of traffic, you’re likely to rank higher.

There are three primary reasons as to why it’s important to monitor backlinks to your website. First, you will be able to know which of your marketing strategies are working and which are not.

Second, you will be able to give better reports to your customers. And lastly, you’ll be able to quickly add more social proof to your site.

When you monitor your backlinks regularly, you will see where you were successful and you can share that information with your clients. You can then repeat those strategies and build off of them to make your backlinks and overall marketing strategy even stronger.

The Two Phases of Monitoring Backlinks

As great as backlinks are, they’re not that valuable if you aren’t regularly monitoring and analyzing them. Let’s look at our two-phase process for how to properly monitor your backlinks.

Phase One: Make Backlink Monitoring Part of Your Work Schedule

There are two approaches to how you can monitor your backlinks. The first way is the manual method. With this method, you would perform search after search and add links to a spreadsheet as well as other important information.

This approach can certainly work but it’s also quite time intensive.

The other method is to do automated backlink monitoring. With this solution, the system will automatically monitor your backlinks for you. This kind of solution typically costs money, however.

Either way, after you’ve chosen your preferred approach, you want to schedule time in your work calendar for when you will regularly monitor your backlinks. It can take several hours if you with the manual approach. However, it will usually take less than one hour if you go with the automated method.

A good thing to keep in mind is to not just look at your own backlinks. Some automated solutions will also provide analyses of backlinks from your competitors. This is a handy tool that can help you optimize your own backlink strategy.

You’re then going to want to divide your backlinks into different categories. These categories will be split into desirable, undesirable, and everything else.

High-quality websites will result in better backlink opportunities. Also, strive to build relationships with domain managers in order to better establish your website and backlinks.

Phase Two: Apply What You Learn from Backlink Monitoring

Your work doesn’t just stop at monitoring your backlinks. You then have to take what you learn and apply it to your reporting and outreach.

If you’re at all involved in proving marketing or SEO services to customers, then your reporting is extremely important. By knowing how to properly and effectively monitor backlinks, you’ll be able to show customers how your work is benefitting the business of your clients.

Whenever you can, make the correlation between backlink monitoring and the desired business outcomes of your clients.

In order to improve your reporting, it’s important that you focus on the outcome of your backlinks. Not sure what sites are applying your backlinks.

You can also use backlink monitoring to see how long it takes for your backlinks to increase your outreach. The first thing you want to do here is to identify your backlink opportunities. You can do this by picking some of your competitors in order to find the best backlinking opportunities.

Then, go ahead and rank the backlink opportunities for their value and relevance. You might become overwhelmed if you end up with hundreds of potential backlink opportunities. To prevent this problem, you’ll want to rank the backlinks for their relevance.

For example, you may decide to not 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 attention 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 certain tools online that can help you find email addresses at websites you choose to target.

The Importance of Knowing How to Monitor Backlinks

By knowing how to monitor backlinks, you can greatly enhance your SEO efforts as well as 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.

Having an experienced company help manage your backlinks is one of the best ways to quickly and effectively increase your web traffic.

Are you interested in buying backlinks? Consider getting a free SEO consultation to help with your link building!