It’s no secret that an enormous component of any SEO campaign’s success comes from link building. What is a secret, however, is the reason that so many webgraders don’t track it. They’ll crawl your site and let you know what’s going on with your onsite SEO, but they don’t focus on the most important element of optimization: backlinks. Backlink tracking is the major component that many webgraders are missing. Here, we’ll take a look at what it can do and why it could be the assessment tool that saves your SEO campaign.
SEO Benchmarking
Website benchmarking sounds really confusing, but it’s really quite simple. It’s about two major metrics: how many links do you have, and how many links do competing companies have? The fact is that a site with fewer links has a reduced chance of showing up higher in the rankings than a site with more links. What some webgraders offer is website benchmarking that compares your site’s backlink number with the numbers of related sites. All you have to do is enter your domain name, and the webgrader does the rest. Here’s how it works:
- Graphs a distribution of how many root domains are linking to your site, compared to other related domains. A good website benchmarking tool will have at least 200,000 sites available for comparison.
- Uses an equation incorporating web traffic, your site’s rank, and the estimated cost per click to determine a site’s score.
- Shows which keywords are driving high scores for you and for your competitors.
Why It Matters
It’s not difficult to see why that information could be useful. Let’s use an example. Image that one of your competitors consistently ranks higher than you for your head term. Pouring all your time and attention into building links for that keyword would be time consuming and, probably, a little frustrating. With a webgrader that breaks down keyword research, you might find out that although your competitor has the edge on that one keyword, your keyword portfolio is in fact much broader. In such a situation, you might find it more effective to focus on building links for other keywords.
Using a website benchmarking webgrader can also help you get a feel for how your backlinks compare to those of your competitors. It can be difficult to understand why your site is consistently ranking seventh, but it might become very clear when you see that your competitors have three times the number of backlinks.
Assessment is an incredibly important tool in all facets of business, and SEO is no different. With the marketing of your company at stake, it seems foolish not to seek a complete understanding of your site’s performance in search engine rankings. Try out a free benchmarking webgrader and see how you stack up. It can only help!