Link building is the bread and butter of an affiliate marketing campaign. As much as Google can keep developing and evolving its ranking algorithm, one element has always been delivered through every change: link building. And the best way to ensure link building is working for your brand is with a backlink checker.
Link building is the most effective way of ensuring SEO, giving the best opportunity to drive traffic to your target site and climb the ranks of Google search results. By spreading links to your site over various articles and blog posts throughout the web, you will organically build clicks from users reading the content.
And the best part is that not all links need to be created by SEOs for marketing purposes. Links can be made organically by bloggers and journalists citing sources or referring to products or brands. All of it sends traffic into your site. You can prompt this a little more by keeping your business site as informed as possible on your brand and workings.
But you can’t rely on the off chance that a journalist or blogger is going to reach for your particular brand when writing about your industry, especially if you aren’t as well known. So, how do you get around that?
Why use a backlink checker?
A great way to help is with a backlinks checker. Once you’ve spread your links across the internet, you will want to be sure of where your traffic is coming from for a number of reasons.
For one thing, as an affiliate manager, you will want to know that the links you commissioned in various pieces of content are receiving results. If a certain content creator you have commissioned to promote your site with link building isn’t giving a return on investment, whether it’s due to their expected audience lacking, suggesting bots, or you’re not attracting the demographic you were expecting, you can use your backlink checker to make sure you’re getting results, and pull your commission if not.
Plus, as hinted at there, they can be useful in determining your demographic. If you have a good backlink checker, you can see where your audience is coming from and determine the type of users you are attracting. From there you can tailor your marketing campaign to specifically target a certain demographic but target new sites for link building or removing commissions from content that doesn’t fit the demographic.
You can also use a backlink checker to avoid any negativity around your brand. If your anchor texts or site links are showing up in any negative articles. These negative articles can have an effect on your SEO, so spotting them and dealing with them will allow your brand to rise up the ranks of Google search results.
Using a backlink checker will make sure that you have trustworthy and reliable sites to link to, and that you’re not spamming your brand name everywhere expecting results.
What are the best backlink checking tools?
- Majestic SEO
The Majestic SEO is a popular option due to its “link intelligence” database which offers a mapping out of the internet. You can use the Fresh Index or Historic Index offered to monitor your backlink activity.
The Fresh Index will show you a list of links and pages that mention your anchor in the past 120 days, plus a list of links that you might have lost since then so that you have a fresh perspective on the effect your link-building campaign is having on your immediate rankings. Meanwhile, the Historic Index is far more extensive and covers the past 5 years. Trillions of unique URLs are covered, which will allow you to measure your SEO’s highs and lows in the past.
There is a free plan that covers all of this, but also a $49.99 a month plan with extra features and a $399.99 API plan which is useful to developers and agencies.
- Mozbar
Mozbar is designed to analyse keywords and is simply a convenient Chrome browser extension for easy, user-friendly analysis or backlink research and metrics from your own search results.
You only need to search for a keyword and Mozbar will present you with an analysis of the competitiveness of the keyword. Plus, you’ll be able to analyse the domain authority and page authority. The domain authority, developed by Moz, measures the strength of the entire website and offers a ranking that correlates with Google ranking. Page authority does the same but with a specific page of the site in question.
This is the simplest format, which is free, but with a payment plan, you can use features like more backlink data for $99, $149, $249, and $599 a month.
- Ahrefs
Ahrefs’ specialty is broken links. It does plenty more, including keyword research, rank tracking, backlink building, etc. but its additional perk is its broken link checker.
Avoid users being met with a 404-error page by checking for any broken inbound or outbound links to your site. It can keep doing it automatically on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis so you won’t ever miss out on a sale because a user can’t get to your site.
But the catch is that the free version of Ahrefs only shows a portion of the broken backlink data. To get all the data, you can sign up for the $99, $179, $399, and £999 versions, with up to 5 users and the full spectrum of backlink data available.
For more information on affiliate marketing, or for a more personalized approach, book a free call with a member of our team.
