Table of Contents
What is Backcklins?
Backlinks are one of the most important SEO ranking factors if you want to rank high in Google Search. However, when it comes to backlinks, quality is more important than quantity.
So, it is advisable to get good-quality backlinks for your website, while you can’t control which websites link to you on their own, you can control the quality of the backlinks that you acquire on your own.
Here, we want to show you what we do in Lead Genie Pro to make sure that we pick only quality websites when acquiring backlinks.
How to Get Backlinks
Although this is not the main topic of this article, we need to explain a few things. we know that buying or selling backlinks breaks Google’s rules, but:
1. Everyone is doing it, and Google doesn’t do anything to stop it
2. Because everyone is doing it, you can’t rank very high in competitive niches without backlinks
You’ll hear a lot of people say that if you want to get backlinks, you need to create a piece of content that is so good and so useful that people will want to link to it. And we agree with that. But how will they know you wrote it? How will they find it? Simple: by googling about the topic. But guess what? If you want your piece to rank high and get free backlinks, you’ll most likely require backlinks first — which you need to buy or have to do some outreach to the website with the same niche as yours.
Here are the not-so-free methods that everyone uses.
Doing Outreach
This means contacting other websites and asking them to link to your website. Most likely, many of the people you contact will say yes under 2 conditions:
1. You pay them
2. You give them a backlink, too (this is called a link exchange, and it’s also against Google’s terms)
Use Link Building Services
These are websites that have an impressive database of websites selling backlinks like ours(Lead Genie Pro). They also write the article for you. Sure, buying from link building service provider is more expensive, but it also means you lose less time on writing emails and searching for those websites yourself. It’s a good trade-off.
We had a client who was using freelancers to do manual outreach to other websites before taking our services. it’d take the time to identify the websites, a freelancer would do the outreach and another one would write the article. After a few months, He switched to using one link-building service. The costs remained the same but the impact was 4 times higher than the previous service.
Now, here’s why we say Google can easily put an end to this: Anyone from Google can sign up to WhitePress for example, copy the list of websites that are selling links there and then give them a manual penalty for selling links. Next, they can even go after the websites that purchased — they only need to look at the outgoing links. Yet, no one does anything.
Another thing that Google can do is reduce the impact backlinks have on ranking. Then, no one would need to purchase them anymore.
Digital PR Campaigns
These are companies that will write a press release, include a link to your website inside it, and send it out to numerous news outlets, guaranteeing that some of them will also publish it.
Digital PR campaigns are very expensive, but these can land you some of the best possible backlinks, from highly sought news websites like Forbes, The New York Post, etc.
Now that we’ve covered where to get backlinks let me share with you how we analyze a website before asking for a backlink.
Never Buy Backlinks from Freelancer Websites
I’m going to start with the most important rule.
Please repeat after me: ‘I will NEVER buy backlinks from freelancer websites like Fiverr, PeoplePerHour, or Legiit.’
Getting 5,000 backlinks for $100 sounds like a steal, right? Now, let me ask you this: would you buy 5,000 articles for $100?
Most likely not. You’ll probably going to say that there’s definitely something wrong with the quality since the price is so low. The same goes for these backlinks.
All of the backlinks sold on these websites come from PBNs (Private Blog Networks), and when you purchase them, one of the following things will happen:
1. You’ll probably get an increase in rankings and traffic for a short period of time, until Google discovers that they are from PBNs and stops taking them into account because they will be considered unnatural links
2. You’ll get a manual penalty from Google for unnatural links — the probability of this happening is very small
3. Nothing — this is probably the most likely scenario out of the 3
Spread Out Your Links
Another important thing to do to make these links look as natural as possible is to spread them out across multiple pages of your website.
Iwe had a couple of clients in the past who only bought backlinks to the only 2 service/money pages they had on their website. They had around 50 backlinks to each page and almost none to the others. Does that sound natural? No. If it doesn’t sound natural to you, you can be sure that it doesn’t look natural to Google either.
Here’s another reason why it doesn’t look natural. When you do link to an outside domain, what do you go for, a page selling a product or providing some extremely useful information for your reader? we can bet that 90% of the time, you link to informational content. You want to offer your reader something useful. The only reason you’d link out to a product is if you actually swear by it. If it’s super useful for doing whatever it is that you are writing about.
So, what you want to do instead is, obviously, spread your backlinks out as much as possible. But where do you go if you only have a few pages that make you money?
Our approach is to start with bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) pages. Those still provide useful information for most readers, and they have the biggest chance of converting. Plus, you should have lots of BOFU pages on your website. If you don’t know what these should be about, We wrote this guide a while back about how to target keywords for every step of the sales funnel.
Next, move up your funnel slowly, but the higher you go, try concentrating your links on only the most important pages.
Prioritize Website Topic Instead of Domain Authority
Here’s another phrase that we often hear from clients: ‘I need links from websites with high Domain Authority’.
If you don’t know what Domain Authority is, it’s a made-up metric by Ahrefs and has nothing to do with Google, which judges how good a website is, in terms of SEO, based on its backlink profile. we wrote more about domain authority in our article about SEO vanity metrics.
The problem with using this metric when analyzing a website is that it’s easily manipulated. This is what those people selling links on Fiverr do.
The answer is simple: relevancy.
Think about it this way: who would you rather have to praise your writing to a publishing house? Is it Virat Kohli or your college creative writer professor? Sure, having Virat Kohli in your corner is awesome, but what does he know about Content Writing. Right?
So, the first thing you need to check is whether the content on that website is relevant to your business.
If you’re selling travel pillows, a backlink from a website about traveling with your pet is going to be much more valuable than a backlink from a website that teaches you how to take care of your plants.
Thus, the first thing we do when deciding whether we should acquire a backlink from that website is to understand the niche. we do that by simply visiting the website and looking at the homepage, about page (if they have it), and a few blog titles.
But we don’t read any further than that. Not yet at least. Instead, we analyze other, more important metrics.
The Metrics You Should Be Analyzing
After we visit the website, go to Ahrefs, SEMRush, or any other SEO tools that you know of, and add the domain to the site explorer to start analyzing it.
The image below shows the domain’s overview. For this example, we picked a random domain from the traveling with pets niche. we’ve never visited this domain before.
The first thing we look at is the ‘Organic Search’ area. we want this to be a real website with real traffic. Now let us show you an example of a website you should avoid.
we want this website to have as much organic traffic as possible, and we want to see a steady increase or at least stagnation (orange line of the graph). Next, we look at where the traffic is coming from (Traffic by location section). If my website is targeting a US audience, we want to make sure that the other website gets most of its traffic from the US as well.
Next, we look at a website’s backlink profile. Obviously, we want them to have as many backlinks as possible, coming from as many websites as possible. we also want to see a steady increase, just like with organic traffic.
Sometimes, we analyze their backlinks as well, but only if we see some red flags. These are:
- They are ranking for many keywords, but they don’t have a lot of traffic
- India is 2nd or 3rd country in terms of where they are getting traffic
- Organic traffic has been declining
- A huge overnight increase in referring domains
If there are no red flags, we move on to the next item on my checklist, which is organic pages (yellow line). Like with all the other metrics, we want to see a steady increase. This means that the website owner is constantly creating new content — an almost clear sign that this is a legitimate website.
Now, we say an almost clear sign because the owner might also increase the number of pages because he or she is selling lots of backlinks, which is something you want to avoid. Luckily, there’s an easy way to check for this using Ahrefs as well. we just navigate to the ‘Outgoing links’ report and sort them by ‘First seen’.
This gives me a clear image of what websites they are linking to, how many, and what anchor text they are using. Here’s what we look for:
1. They don’t create too many new pages each day — think about your own publishing frequency when judging. One article every day or every other day is all right. Sometimes, publishing 2–3 articles per day can mean that they either have a bigger writing staff or they are selling backlinks.
2. How many backlinks each article has to the same domain, and what pages are going to — sometimes, people buying guest posts are getting 2 links in an article, one to the homepage and the other to the page they want to rank higher.
3. What anchor texts are they using? If those are highly competitive keywords, it’s clear that they are guest posts.
If we don’t find anything suspicious while looking at the metrics, we get back to reading the website.
But before we do, we want to show you the metrics of one of those websites advertised on Fiverr. See the difference?
How to Spot a Good or Bad Website While Reading It
Now, it’s time to read the website. Obviously, I’m not going to read the entire website. we generally go for 2–3 pages: the best article in terms of organic traffic, a sales page, and one of their latest blog posts. What we look for is:
1. Similar content quality across all pages
2. Up to date information
3. Original images or other elements (check out this article for more)
4. Good UX
5. Fast loading speed
If all of these look good, that website is a great candidate for getting a backlink from.
In Conclusion
In conclusion, if you want to make backlinks, you need to be careful where you buy them from — you don’t want to spend your money on useless backlinks.
First of all, don’t buy them from freelancers on Fiverr or other similar websites. Next, look for websites in your niche, or as close to it as possible, and analyze the most important metrics: organic traffic, organic traffic locations, backlink profile, and number of pages.
Lastly, you also want to read a few articles to make sure that the content on that website is of high quality. You don’t want to buy a link from a website that will probably lose most of its organic traffic after the next Google update.
And don’t forget to spread out the backlinks to as many pages as possible, starting with sales pages and bottom-of-the-funnel ones.
Want more marketing tips and tricks? Subscribe to the Lead Genie Pro newsletter The Marketing Agency