As a link builder, we all come to the point some days when we literally feel as if there are no more quality, third-party sites we can approach regarding having our client listed. Particularly when you work with a client’s site for a long period of time, you begin to feel as if you’ve exhausted every search term, link clean up opportunity and directory possible.
Lucky for us, some of these targets are actually right under our nose. Our link building team uses referring domain reports from our clients’ analytics platforms to determine which sites are referring traffic to client web sites on a daily basis. Basically, our methodology is to identify new referring sites (even if they refer just one or two visitors) and use this insight to identify link clean up targets that we can reach out to immediately.
At first, I was frustrated by this process. After all, what do you do when a client’s referring traffic is solely coming from email referrals and other internal sites? Keep digging. I started having a daily referring traffic report sent to me for a few of my clients. The first few times I looked through the reports, I found nothing. Not a single target. I was beginning to think this exercise in target pulling was going to be more hassle than it was worth. However, viewing the report on a daily basis allowed me to eventually begin finding even small traffic referrals that would have been lost to me in a larger monthly report.
That’s the best part about having this report sitting in your inbox daily: the process becomes less overwhelming, allowing you the time and insight to really find quality sites that normally would have been buried in a larger export file. It’s become second nature for me to come in every morning, look over this report, check out a few sites that I have not seen in the report before, and add them to a target list to begin outreach.
Want proof of this technique’s effectiveness? For one particular client, this technique has netted over 20 viable targets in just the last week or so. This is just another way in which analytics can help super charge an SEO program.
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Valarie, I share in this frustration when trying to obtain quality links. What source did you use to obtain a daily referring traffic report? Thanks for sharing!
Forgive my ignorance here, but I don’t quite understand what you did. It seems you looked for sites that refer a few visitors. Then what? Asked them to link to you? Aren’t they already linking to you if they sent a referral? Can you elaborate a bit on what action you took?
@CMarch: Glad to hear someone else shares in this frustration! I’ve been relying heavily on Google Analytics to provide insight into our clients referring traffic data. However, any analytics platform would provide the same data in the form of a daily referring sites report.
@Bill Cook: You are correct in that we do look for sites that are currently linking to our clients and resulting in a few visitors. Once we identify these sites, we approach them and request an update to the anchor text they are using when referencing our client. As you probably know, varying anchor text is one of the most important SEO elements. For this reason, we want to make sure that sites linking to our clients are providing the most value possible.
@Bill – I would also add that in my experience, a simple thank you email to the referring site owner will often lead to a long-term relationship with that site. And those relationships can lead to ongoing inbound links (instead of just one random link).
It’s like that old “teach a man to fish” analogy (sort of).
This is a great way to find backlinks that the search engines may not report in a link audit, as well as giving you real traffic data for your link buiding effort instead of just using alexa. More posts on link building and analytics please!
@cybernaut International SEO: Agreed. Analytics platforms really add great value to a link building program. Most posts to come!