Although search engine optimization (SEO) has been in the industry for quite some time, it still remains one of the sought-after digital marketing strategies for both startup and established businesses. Essentially, SEO involves the process of using certain techniques designed to optimize websites for high search engine rankings.
It can be considered an essential part of every successful digital marketing campaign because of its ability to generate more traffic to a website.
However, there are still more things to learn about search engine optimization so that you can use it to your advantage. For example, SEO is about a lot more than just keywords and content. To win the favor of search engines, today’s business leaders need to build meaningful connections, through backlinks and mentions which enhance site authority.
Building an SEO-focused link strategy is a crucial part of establishing your presence online, but it’s also an extremely complicated process.
Finding the right opportunities in a digital landscape isn’t easy, with millions of potential websites to consider targeting for backlinks.
A solid traffic analytics tool can provide a great deal of help for SEO analysts, marketing professionals, and business leaders to assess the value of potential link building connections.
With these tools, you can evaluate the quality of each potential relationship, to ensure you’re pursuing opportunities which give your site more credibility, authority, and attention.
How Traffic Analysis Highlights Better Linking Potential
To leverage the power of links for your SEO strategy, it’s important to be able to differentiate between connections that add value to your website, and links which may detract from your authority.
For instance, a link from one of the most popular websites about food to your restaurant website gives your business credibility, while showing Google what kind of content it should associate your pages with.
A backlink from a spammy directory, on the other hand, tells Google your site should be associated with other, low-quality content which doesn’t provide value to customers. When this happens, the website won’t rank highly on the search engines and generate more web traffic.
To avoid these issues, it may be a better idea to hire a link building expert who knows how to develop a solid SEO-focused link strategy that delivers positive results. They usually conduct quantitative and qualitative research to make sure they build links that are valuable to the business’ bottom line.
However, while working with professionals can be helpful to your link strategy, it may still be important if you’re familiar with certain processes on how to highlight better linking potential. This is where the website traffic analysis fits into the picture.
Primarily, website traffic analysis tools help you to analyze various factors about a website, to determine whether it’s a good linking opportunity, or not.
Here are a few key factors to look at.
Authority Ranking
The category or “authority” rank of a website often indicates how much value that particular site has in a specific industry or sector.
This can help you to pinpoint potential linking opportunities specifically within your chosen industry.
Attracting links from other companies in your sector shows Google what kind of niches you’re connected to and what keyword clusters to rank you for.
Activity and Engagement Insights
Activity insights, like whether customers tend to bounce away from a certain page, show you what the quality of the content is like.
If customers constantly bounce from that page, there’s a good chance you don’t want to be associated with it.
High bounce rates often indicate irrelevant or poor-quality content.
Alternatively, if a site shows high levels of engagement, like comments, clicks, shares, and lots of “time spent on page,” this indicates it’s a high-quality site.
Audience Data
Traffic analytics can show you information about the kind of traffic a website gets, and where visitors come from.
Backlinks to your website can help guide other visitors from a different page to your content. However, those visitors will only be valuable to you if you’re capable of converting them.
Audience data like insights into the location of visitors on another website will help you to determine whether the customers on this site match your target audience.
Organic or Paid Search
A good traffic analytics tool can also offer an insight into how some of the websites you might be considering getting links from have obtained their traffic.
While paid traffic can still be valuable when driving new attention towards your website, organic traffic indicates the site is effective at capturing customer interest with nothing but high-value content.
High levels of organic traffic often ensure you’ll continue to get opportunities from the backlink for months or even years into the future, long after any paid ads have stopped running.
Keyword Data
Keyword data from traffic analytics shows you what kind of terms and phrases Google is indexing those prospective websites for.
This can give you an idea of what kind of content you might want to write about if you’re posting a guest blog for your backlink, or what kind of anchor terms you might benefit from using when implementing your link.
Keyword analysis will also give you a further insight into whether the target audience of the website you’re looking at resonates with your buyer personas.
If you’re targeting similar keywords, there’s a good chance you’re reaching out to an audience with shared interests and priorities.
Using Traffic Insights for SEO Opportunities
When the authority, credibility, and ranking potential of your website relies so heavily on the connections you make with other brands, it’s important to get your strategy right.
Backlinks, and your ability to cultivate them for your business, can make or break your online presence.
Unfortunately, a huge number of business leaders still struggle to separate the right linking opportunities, from those that might hold them back.
Any business considering engaging in their own SEO strategy with a focus on link building opportunities, will benefit from investing in analytics first.
The right traffic insights, focusing on everything from audience demographics to keyword data, will ensure you’re investing your time, money, and effort into the right links.
Conclusion
SEO can help position a website on the front page of the search engine results page. It can help increase a site’s domain authority and build a strong online presence.
It can also be an excellent way of improving customer engagement and conversion rates. All these benefits can be achieved by implementing an SEO-focused link strategy with the help of traffic analytics tools.
Moreover, by keeping the information mentioned above in mind, SEO professionals will understand the importance of these analytics tools in building valuable links and finding the best linking opportunities for websites.