Backlink Gap Analysis: A Complete Guide

A backlink gap analysis is an important part of any SEO strategy. It helps you identify areas for improvement when it comes to building and improving your website’s backlinks. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at the steps necessary to conduct a backlink gap analysis and how you can use the results to improve your own search engine ranking.

What Is Link-Building?

Link-building is the process of creating quality links from other websites to yours in order to increase your website’s visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs). It helps to build credibility as well as boost your ranking on SERPs. The more authoritative sites that link back to your website, the higher your chances of appearing in the top search results. 

During our link-building efforts, there are many backlinks from highly relevant pages that we may leave behind, either due to unawareness or the linking opportunity could be new. Regardless, finding backlink gaps can be an excellent way to ensure your websites have impactful backlink profiles that can improve search engine rankings effectively. Here’s where backlink gap analysis comes in handy. 

What Is A Backlink Gap Analysis?

Backlink gap analysis is a type of link-building strategy that involves analyzing a website’s existing backlinks to identify any potential gaps or opportunities for improvement. This is an important tool for businesses to identify how to improve their link-building efforts. The process looks at the quality of backlinks pointing to your website, compares them to the quality of your competitors’ backlinks, and then identifies where you have an advantage or disadvantage. By understanding what your competition is doing and how they are doing it, you can develop a comprehensive strategy that will help you stay ahead of the competition. 

This type of link gap analysis will help you identify which websites have linked to you in the past so that you can approach them again if necessary or find new sources of backlinks from other websites. This helps improve your overall SEO performance by ensuring that all available sources or referring domains of quality backlinks are utilized.

Steps To Conduct An Effective Backlink Gap Analysis

Performing backlink gap analysis is relatively straightforward. We have outlined the process in detail below.

Identify Your Competitors

The first step in conducting a backlink gap analysis is to identify your competitors. Start by conducting keyword research related to your business and make note of the websites that appear in the top search results. These are likely your main competitors when it comes to SEO.

Gather Data On Your Competitors’ Backlinks

Now that you have identified your competitors, you need to gather data on their backlinks. You can use a backlink analysis tool like Ahrefs, Moz Link Explorer, or Semrush to do this. These SEO tools will provide actionable insights into which websites are linking back to your competitors, how many backlinks they have, and what type of content they are linking to. This information will be invaluable for crafting a successful SEO strategy for your own website. You can also follow a backlink analysis template to keep track of this data in an organized manner.

Compare Your Backlink Profile With That Of Your Competitors

Now that you have gathered data on both your own and your competitors’ backlinks, it’s time to compare them side-by-side. Look at the number of links pointing towards each site as well as the quality of those links (i.e., how credible they are). If you notice any gaps through this SEO competitor analysis (i.e., if there are more or better quality links pointing towards one site than another), then you know where you need to focus your efforts in order to close any potential gaps in SEO performance between yourself and your competitors.

Analyze And Strategize

The final step is to analyze the data from the previous step and strategize accordingly. Look for opportunities where you can build new links or improve existing ones in order to bring yourself up to par with the competition in terms of SEO performance. Then you can utilize various methods to secure these backlink opportunities by reaching out to provide a guest post, claim unlinked brand mentions, or any other type of SEO efforts to secure these good backlinks. Make sure that all new links are high-quality, relevant, and credible—this will ensure that Google takes note! If you find this too complex, you can reach out to link-building experts as it is a vital part of your SEO efforts and must not be put off for later. 

Benefits Of Conducting A Backlink Gap Analysis

There are many reasons why conducting a backlink gap analysis can be impactful for website owners, their businesses, and their sites. We have outlined a few of these benefits below.

Be Ahead Of Competitors

Analyzing your competitors’ backlink profiles can help you understand what kind of links they have, and where they are getting them from. This means that you can replicate their successes and find ways to stay ahead. By conducting this type of competitor link analysis, you can also spot potential link opportunities that you may not have been aware of before. You can also identify if any links are harming your site’s rankings, and choose to remove or disavow bad links accordingly.

Rank Higher On Search Engines

Link building is one of the most important factors in search engine optimization (SEO). Conducting a backlink gap analysis will provide insights into which links are helping your competitors rank higher on search engines than you. With this information, you can adjust your strategy accordingly and start working on building more quality links for yourself.

Increases Domain Authority And Trustworthiness

Conducting a solid backlink analysis will help you identify which websites are linked to by both yourself and your competitors. If a website is linked to by both parties, then it has likely earned trust from those two websites – indicating that it has high authority in its field or niche. By locating these reputable linking domains and building a backlink profile inclusive of these inbound links, your site is sure to improve its domain authority. Having strong domain authority can improve how trustworthy your website appears to search engines and visitors alike, so it’s important to analyze these links carefully.

Drive More Traffic

Finally, a good backlink gap analysis will also help you find highly relevant pages that are driving traffic to both yourself and your competitors’ sites. Knowing this information will allow you to take advantage of these sources for yourself by gathering valuable backlinks that allow for increased website traffic and potentially more customers or leads in the long run!

A Vital Off-Page SEO Practice: Backlink Gap Analysis

Conducting a backlink gap analysis is a critical step in understanding your website’s link-building deficiencies and formulating an action plan to improve them. By taking the time to assess where you stand relative to your competitors, you can develop targeted strategies that will help your site rank higher on search engines, increase its domain authority, generate more traffic, and build trustworthiness. All of these benefits are essential for any business looking to succeed online. If you haven’t already conducted a backlink gap analysis for your site, now is the time!

If you don’t know where to start, reach out to us and let us help you build a strong backlink profile.

FAQs

What Are The 3 Main Features Of A Quality Backlink?

There are three main features that make a backlink “quality”: relevance, authority, and trustworthiness. Relevance means that a backlink should have the context to what it’s linking to — for example, an article about travel may link to a lodging website. Authority means that the source the backlink is coming from is reputable; this is typically measured using domain authority scores. Last but not least, trustworthiness means that the content of the page itself should be reliable and factual. When it comes to quality backlinks, these three features are key ingredients in creating effective SEO strategies.

How Do Backlinks Improve SEO?

Backlinks are one of the most important elements of SEO as they ultimately determine a website’s ranking. Backlinks are links that connect from one website to another, which passes on trust and authority from the linked-to site and can help you rank higher in search engine results. When another reputable website contains a link back to your site, it tells Google that you have something valuable to offer visitors. This can lead to increased search engine rankings for your content, which ultimately leads to more clicks and more people viewing what you have written or created. When done right, backlinking can be an incredibly effective tool for improving search engine optimization.