Traffic From Backlinks
The more traffic from a backlink the better the backlink, correct? No, it has to be quality traffic to be of any good. On your own site, you can just look at the analytics of your website and examine things like Time on Page, Bounce Rate, etc. to determine the quality of the traffic from the backlinks. The paid version of this course will help you decipher and understand what to look for and is beyond the scope of this course.
Just remember that the data from SEO Software is a ‘Best Guess’ on their part and some software is better than others. One way to test the software is to enter in your own website into it and compare it to the results of Google Analytics of your own website. I have some articles under the marketing research section of my blog.
Although it is hard to determine which backlinks send the most traffic to your competitor’s website you can still manually visit these backlinks and get an idea for yourself.
Comparing Shared Backlinks
One way to do this is to examine the SERPs. Do a search on what you would like to rank for and make note of the top 10 websites that rank for this keyword phrase. Do a backlink analysis on all of these websites and throw them into a spreadsheet for easier viewing.
Note: The paid version of this course will give you the spreadsheet and more detailed instructions on how to do this.
Then look for commonalities. This is called ‘Link Intersection’ in SEO Powersuite, ‘Link Intersect’ in Ahrefs, ‘Backlink Gap’ in SEMRush, etc.
If you see that each of the 10 competitors has backlinks from one particular website then that is the one to go after and get a backlink from.
Using Social Media Data
Another idea is to see which backlinks get the most upvotes, shares, and likes from social media platforms. This gives you an idea of the people’s ideas of great backlinks and of course, Google has in their algorithm to give backlinks more weight in ranking by getting the data from the number of likes, shares, upvotes, etc. that people give on this. That is why it is important to add those social media buttons on the pages and blog posts of your website.
Using SEO Software
SEO Software will help you know how much traffic they get from backlinks but you can also determine the quality of that traffic to see if it is worth going after as well.
The SEO Software will also give you a score on the value of a backlink. Not just a spam score but an SEO score as well to take the hard work of the manual labor. Neil Patel uses a toxic score, Moz uses a spam score, SEO Powersuite uses a spam score, etc. But some of these tools also have an SEO Score that is pretty impressive. SEMRush has a backlink audit tool that does just this for you.
But as always manually check the website it says it has a high SEO score just to make sure.
With this information, you can help determine which backlinks get the most traffic and which of those give you the most quality traffic which may or may not be the most traffic.