In looking at SEO for 2020, SEO tactics were broken down into content, technical and user experience. Where does the task of acquiring links to your website fall in there? Not sure and it’s not work that we love to do… but it needs to be done just like creating content, invoicing and any other task that we may not enjoy.
What if we only had to do this once per month and it did not take very long? We’re going to spend 2020 working on obtaining a minimum of one link per month and we’ll share our tactics (and ask you to share too!) – together we’ll crowdsource to find the easiest, most effective ways of getting links to our websites!
First up, we’ll need to measure – how many backlinks do you have currently and what is your overall domain rating (strength) – while theoretically, this number is out of 100, only the likes of Google and Facebook have a domain strength of 100. Your goal is to improve, not get to 100!
How to Measure Your Incoming Links
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- Use Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker for free. Enter in your domain, keep the option of subdomains and click Check Backlinks. You’ll have to check the popup “I’m Not a Robot”.
This is a tremendous paid tool that provides amazing detail, but for now the free portion will allow you to create a table like this:
| Domain Rating | Total Backlinks | Referring Domains |
|---|---|---|
| 15 | 744 | 93 |
One of the shortcomings of the free tool is that it does not show all of your backlinks (fair enough – it is free, right?) and you can’t sort by strength of domain or country of domain (not shown).
If you are wanting to know if a certain site links to you before you ask them to link to you, you can use Google Search Console to see WHO links to you:
How to Use Google Search Console
You have to have this set up already of course – if you do not, and want help, this is part of the Google Dance we do at the beginning of all new projects.
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- Log into Google Search Console
- Select your site (in the event that you have access to multiple sites)
- Scroll down to Links
- On the right side of the page, find the box that says Top Linking Sites and click on the More button in the lower right of this box. From here you can export your links to Google Sheets for example so that it is always faster to check for a specific link before going through the effort to ask for a link.
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Now that you have documented your starting point, together we will aim to acquire at least one new link per month – so you may as well go ahead and put that date on your calendar right now! This blog post will be updated monthly with the tactic that DriveTraffic chooses to pursue so you can decide if this is the right tactic for you!
How to Get More Links (updated monthly with most recent at the top):
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- Update your social media profiles to link to your website (how-to).
- About the Author
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Darlene is a search marketer, analyst, speaker, trainer, and owner of DriveTraffic Digital Marketing. She has been working in the digital marketing industry since the mid 90s and has narrowed her specialty to SEO, Google Ads and Google Analytics. She is especially interested in Google’s new Search Generative Experience and how businesses will need to adapt to remain visible. Want to see how DriveTraffic can help? Let’s chat!
