SEO
What Is Social Listening And How To Get Started
Most marketers now understand the value of social media as a marketing tool – and countless companies have now established their own presence across a variety of social platforms.
But while the importance of creating content and building an audience is well understood, many organizations are lacking when it comes to another key strength of social media: social listening.
Social listening is a strategic approach that can help your brand tap into the incredible breadth and depth of social media to hone in on what your target audience is saying and feeling – and why.
By investing in social listening, you can gain a deeper understanding of conversations happening around not just your brand but your broader industry, and extract meaningful insights to inform multiple areas of your business.
In this article, we’ll explore what social listening is, why it’s crucial for businesses today, and the tools that exist to help you do it before diving into tips for getting started with your social listening strategy.
Let’s get started.
What Is Social Listening?
Social listening is the practice of tracking conversations on social media that are related to your brand, analyzing them, and extracting insights to help inform your future marketing efforts.
These conversations can include anything from direct mentions of your brand or product to discussions around your industry, competitors, relevant keywords, or other topics that might be tangential to your business.
The idea of social listening is that you’re really getting to know your audience by sitting back and listening in to what they talk about – what their gripes are, what they’re interested in, what’s getting them excited right now, and much more.
Gathering this data and then examining it can help you in a number of ways, from uncovering useful product development insights to inspiring new content ideas or better ways to serve your customers.
Here are some of the things you can achieve through social listening:
- Tracking mentions of your brand, products, or services across social platforms.
- Evaluating public perception and sentiment towards your brand by assessing whether mentions are positive, negative, or neutral.
- Spotting trends that are emerging among your target market by noting common themes, topics, or keywords in conversations.
- Gaining a better understanding of your audience, including who they are, where they spend time online, what they want, and how your brand can connect with them.
As such, social listening isn’t just a powerful tool for marketing, but can also be leveraged to improve customer engagement and service, product development, and other areas of your business.
What’s The Difference Between Social Listening And Social Monitoring?
If you’re finding yourself a little confused about the difference between social listening and social monitoring, you’re not alone! The terms are often used interchangeably – when, in reality, they have different scopes and objectives.
Generally speaking, social monitoring is narrower and more focused on your brand specifically, while social listening takes more of a big-picture approach to gaining insights.
If social monitoring is about seeking out brand mentions and conversations to hear what people are saying, social listening is diving even deeper to understand why they’re saying those things.
Social monitoring typically involves tracking social activity directly related to your brand so that you can stay abreast of what’s happening at the moment and tackle any pressing issues.
In this regard, it’s often leveraged as a component of a company’s customer support program to help respond to queries, answer questions, and remedy complaints in a timely manner.
It can also help to identify trending topics or industry moments that might apply to your brand. Basically, social monitoring is all about being aware of what’s happening around your brand on social media so you can respond quickly.
Social listening does all of this, but also takes things a few steps further, expanding the scope of what you’re tracking and focusing on obtaining insights to help with brand strategy, content planning, and decision-making.
Where social monitoring might focus on mentions of your brand, social listening goes beyond that to explore broader consumer behavior and emerging industry trends, and make qualitative analyses of the conversations that are happening in those areas.
One analogy I’ve encountered that I find helpful for understanding the difference between the two: If social monitoring is akin to tending your own backyard, social listening is like taking a walk through your neighborhood and eavesdropping on conversations to better understand what your neighbors are interested in and concerned about.
While we are focused on social listening in this particular article, both social monitoring and social listening are important parts of an effective marketing strategy.
Why Is Social Listening Important?
As we’ve touched on, successful social listening can benefit many areas of your business – from your marketing to your product and your customer support. And all of this means it can have a big impact on your bottom line.
Let’s look closer at just some of the reasons why social listening is an important tool in your business’s arsenal.
Reputation Management
Social listening can help you get a sense of how your audience – and the general public – feels about your brand, products, messaging, or services.
By understanding both the positive and negative sentiments around your brand and where they come from, you can work to fill the gaps and improve perceptions of your company.
Understanding Your Audience
On that note, social listening is a great way to learn more about your audience – from your current customers to your prospects and beyond.
It offers a looking glass into what your target consumer is thinking about, their opinions, pain points, desires, etc. With this information, you have the power to customize your content, message, and products to serve their needs better.
Market Analysis
Social listening is a powerful tool for unearthing insights into your industry – trends, consumer behaviors, opportunities, etc. This is the kind of information that you can use to get ahead of your competitors and deliver the ultimate customer experience.
Competitive Insights
Speaking of competitors, social listening enables you to keep a watchful eye on your competitors and learn from their successes and failures.
You can use active listening to determine how your target market perceives your competitors and apply your findings to differentiate yourself from the pack.
Crisis Management
Let’s face it: Crises happen, no matter what your business or industry. But social listening can help you identify crises before they hit a boiling point, and address them in a timely manner.
Content Strategy
Want to know what content types and formats resonate best with your audience? Try social listening! Once you have the necessary insights, you’ll be able to create more engaging content.
Lead Generation
Social listening can drive lead generation in a number of ways.
You can use it as a tool to discover prospects who are interested in your industry, product niche, or topics related to your business.
Beyond this, by improving your content strategy, reputation, products, customer experience, and more using your social listening insights, you will ultimately boost more leads to your business.
Social Listening Tools
Given that social listening requires pulling data from millions of posts across social media and analyzing it, we would recommend using a tool to help with your efforts.
Here are a few popular social listening tools.
Hootsuite
Known for its social management features, Hootsuite also offers a comprehensive suite of capabilities to help with your social listening efforts.
The platform allows you to create custom streams to track hashtags, keywords, or mentions across a range of social platforms. You can use these to spot conversations in real-time and engage with them.
Using some of Hootsuite’s tools and integrations, you can also do things like track brand sentiment, listen into Reddit conversations, access consumer research, and more.
Pricing:
- 30-day free trial.
- Paid plans start at $99/month for the Professional tier and 249/month for the Team tier (billed annually).
- Hootsuite offers an Enterprise tier with custom pricing.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is another leader in the social media management space that is super useful for social listening.
With Sprout Social’s Smart Inbox, you can pull all your mentions, comments, and DMs from across your social platforms into one single feed – helping you keep on top of what’s happening.
Other key features include audience analysis, campaign analysis, crisis management, competitor comparison, influencer recognition, sentiment research, and much more.
Pricing:
- 30-day free trial.
- Paid plans start at $249/month for the Standard tier, $399/month for the Professional tier, and $499/month for the Advanced tier (billed annually).
- Sprout Social offers an Enterprise tier with custom pricing.
Brandwatch
Brandwatch is a strong social listening and analytics platform that can help you track and analyze conversations online. It pulls data from 100 million sources, ensuring you’re not missing anything.
The Brandwatch tool will sift through brand mentions in real-time to analyze sentiment and perception, saving you a ton of time and manual effort.
Other key features include AI alerts for unusual mentions activity, conversation translation across multiple languages, tons of historical data, and more.
Pricing:
- Book a meeting with the Brandwatch team to learn more about pricing.
Meltwater
Meltwater’s social listening tool monitors data from a ton of different feeds, from Facebook to Instagram, Twitch, Reddit, YouTube, and many more. It can even recognize when your brand is talked about in a podcast!
Key features include topic and conversation trends analysis, custom dashboard and report building, consumer segmentation and behavior analysis, crisis management, and more.
Pricing:
- Contact the Meltwater team for pricing details.
Talkwalker
Another top name in the social listening space, Talkwalker monitors 150 million websites and 10+ social networks to power your real-time listening experience.
It offers AI-powered sentiment analysis in over 127 languages, notifications for any atypical activity, issue detection, conversation clustering, and much more.
Pricing:
- Contact the Talkwalker team for pricing.
6 Tips For Building A Social Listening Strategy
Now that you understand what social listening is and why it’s important – as well as a few of the tools you can use to power your social listening program – it’s time to start considering your strategy.
Here are six steps we recommend when building out your social listening strategy.
1. Define Your Goals & Objectives
As with any big project, your first step before starting should be to set clear goals for what you want to achieve.
Why are you doing this, and what is the desired result? Sit down with your team and talk through these points in order to align with your objectives.
You might have one key objective or several. Some potential options could be:
- Improve your company’s customer service and support.
- Gain insights to help inform product development and enhance product offerings.
- Track brand sentiment across current and potential customers.
- Develop a deeper understanding of the competitive landscape in your industry, and how your competitors are performing with social audiences.
- Stay on top of industry events and trends so you can spot content gaps and opportunities ahead of time.
Whatever your goals are, make sure you have them set from the beginning so you have clarity as you move forward.
2. Pick Your Tool Of Choice
While social listening can technically be done manually, it will never be as comprehensive as what you can get from leveraging a tool or platform.
Social media listening tools, like the ones we highlighted above, are able to synthesize data from millions of sources at once – not to mention their abilities to analyze sentiment, identify trends, spot activity, and more.
So, while they typically come with a price tag, the good ones are worth their weight in gold.
Do your research and choose a tool that aligns with your objectives and your team’s budget.
Look for something that monitors many different touchpoints, offers comprehensive analytics, is customizable, and integrates with your existing tech stack (if necessary).
3. Identify Target Keywords And Topics
This step is crucial: Take the time to define the keywords, topics, and hashtags that you want to “listen in” to – as these will provide the basis for your listening efforts.
Be sure to include keywords and themes that are relevant to your brand but also your industry, so that you get information that’s most useful to you. You could also discuss any keywords or topics you might want to exclude and why.
These might evolve or change over time, and that’s okay – this is about setting up a well-considered and focused foundation based on what matters most right now, and what will help you achieve your goals.
4. Decide On Your Workflow
Who will be responsible for monitoring your social listening data? Who should be responding to relevant mentions? Whose job is it to analyze the data and report on learnings and progress?
These are all things you should consider early on so that you can develop a clear workflow that outlines responsibilities.
By establishing the process early on, you’ll make sure that your efforts are not in vain and that you’re able to really put your data to use.
One recommendation: Make sure that somebody is regularly monitoring conversations and engaging where necessary. You should be keeping a keen eye on your listening activity – and automated alerts can be very helpful here.
5. Adapt As Needed
As part of the workflow we just discussed, somebody (or several people) should be responsible for routinely analyzing the data you’re collecting – as, unfortunately, it won’t analyze itself.
Set up a consistent process for diving into your data, extracting insights, and then acting on them.
There’s no point in allocating resources to a social listening program if you’re not using the learnings to benefit your business.
So, be sure to adapt your content strategy, marketing efforts, customer service, and so on based on what the insights are telling you.
6. Don’t Forget Measurement
We all know the importance of social media measurement – and this extends to your social listening efforts.
As time goes on, continue to measure the success of your efforts against the goals and objectives you set out for yourself.
This will help you evaluate the impact of your social listening, and whether there are areas you should pivot or refine based on the data you’re seeing.
You can also track social engagement metrics over time to see if your learnings have provided a boost in your social performance as a whole.
In Conclusion
With millions of conversations happening all around us on social media, any brand that isn’t engaging in social listening is missing a major opportunity.
By taking the time to proactively (and attentively) listen to your audience and target consumers, understand them better, and put their feedback to use, you can drive considerable success for your business.
So, take some of the advice we’ve shared here and start building out your social listening strategy today!
More resources:
Featured Image: batjaket/Shutterstock
FAQ
What is the significance of social listening for modern businesses?
Social listening plays a pivotal role for modern businesses by offering critical insights into audience behavior, industry trends, and brand perception. By analyzing conversations on social media related to their brand or market, companies can adequately respond to customer feedback, adapt their marketing strategies, and anticipate consumer needs. It not only aids in shaping product development and content strategy but also enhances customer service, reputation management, and competitive analysis. This strategic approach empowers businesses to make informed decisions based on the direct sentiments and unfiltered conversations of their target audience.
Can you differentiate between social monitoring and social listening?
Social monitoring and social listening are distinct yet complementary components of a comprehensive social media strategy. Social monitoring is more tactical, focusing on tracking and responding to direct brand mentions, queries, and specific conversations related to immediate issues. Its objective is to maintain awareness of what’s currently being said about a brand and to participate in these conversations promptly. Social listening, on the other hand, employs a broader, more strategic approach. It goes beyond mere tracking, analyzing the underlying sentiments, causes, and implications of social discourse to extract actionable insights. This process not only involves engagement but also a deep analysis of consumer behavior patterns and industry trends for a long-term strategy formulation.
Which social listening tools are recommended for businesses to utilize?
For businesses looking to execute an effective social listening strategy, a variety of tools are available that can help streamline the process. These include:
- Hootsuite: Offers custom streams to monitor social conversations and sentiment, alongside integrations for broader consumer research.
- Sprout Social: Features a Smart Inbox to consolidate social interactions for monitoring. It also provides tools for audience and competitor analysis.
- Brandwatch: Analyzes brand mentions from an extensive range of sources, offering AI-powered sentiment analysis and trend spotting.
- Meltwater: Monitors various feeds, from mainstream social media to Reddit and podcasts, enabling comprehensive analysis.
- Talkwalker: Provides monitoring and analytical capabilities over a broad spectrum of online platforms, backed by AI sentiment analysis.
Businesses should select a tool that aligns with their specific needs and objectives, focusing on features like comprehensive analytics, broad monitoring capabilities, and the ability to integrate with existing technological infrastructure.
SEO
Google Answers Question About Toxic Link Sabotage
Google’s Gary Illyes answered a question about how to notify Google that someone is poisoning their backlink profile with “toxic links” which is a problem that many people have been talking about for at least fifteen years.
Question About Alerting Google To Toxic Links
Gary narrated the question:
“Someone’s asking, how to alert Google of sabotage via toxic links?”
And this is Gary’s answer:
I know what I would do: I’d ignore those links.
Generally Google is really, REALLY good at ignoring links that are irrelevant to the site they’re pointing at. If you feel like it, you can always disavow those “toxic” links, or file a spam report.
Disavow Links If You Feel Like It
Gary linked to Google’s explainer about disavowing links where it’s explained that the disavow tool is for a site owner to tell Google about links that they are responsible for in some way, like paid links or some other link scheme.
This is what it advises:
“If you have a manual action against your site for unnatural links to your site, or if you think you’re about to get such a manual action (because of paid links or other link schemes that violate our quality guidelines), you should try to remove the links from the other site to your site. If you can’t remove those links yourself, or get them removed, then you should disavow the URLs of the questionable pages or domains that link to your website.”
Google suggests that a link disavow is only necessary when two conditions are met:
- “You have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site,
AND- The links have caused a manual action, or likely will cause a manual action, on your site.”
Both of the above conditions must be met in order to file a valid link disavow tool.
Origin Of The Phrase Toxic Links
As Google became better at penalizing sites for low quality links and paid links, some in the highly competitive gambling industry started creating low quality links to sabotage their competitors. The practice was called negative SEO.
The phrase toxic link is something that was never heard of until after the Penguin link updates in 2012 which required penalized sites to remove all the paid and low quality links they created and then disavow the rest. An industry grew around disavowing links and it was that industry that invented the phrase Toxic Links for use in their marketing.
Confirmation That Google Is Able To Ignore Links
I have shared this anecdote before and I’ll share it here again. Someone I knew contacted me and said that their site lost rankings from negative SEO links. I took a look and their site had a ton of really nasty looking links. So out of curiosity (and because I knew that the site was this person’s main income), I emailed someone at Google Mountain View headquarters about it. That person checked it and replied that the site didn’t lose rankings because of the links. They lost rankings because of a Panda update related content issue.
That was around 2012 and it showed me how good Google was at ignoring links. Now, if Google was that good at ignoring really bad links back then, they’re probably better at it now, twelve years later now that they have the spam brain AI.
Listen to the question and answer at the 8:22 minute mark:
Featured Image by Shutterstock/New Africa
SEO
How To Build A Diverse & Healthy Link Profile
Search is evolving at an incredible pace and new features, formats, and even new search engines are popping up within the space.
Google’s algorithm still prioritizes backlinks when ranking websites. If you want your website to be visible in search results, you must account for backlinks and your backlink profile.
A healthy backlink profile requires a diverse backlink profile.
In this guide, we’ll examine how to build and maintain a diverse backlink profile that powers your website’s search performance.
What Does A Healthy Backlink Profile Look Like?
As Google states in its guidelines, it primarily crawls pages through links from other pages linked to your pages, acquired through promotion and naturally over time.
In practice, a healthy backlink profile can be divided into three main areas: the distribution of link types, the mix of anchor text, and the ratio of followed to nofollowed links.
Let’s look at these areas and how they should look within a healthy backlink profile.
Distribution Of Link Types
One aspect of your backlink profile that needs to be diversified is link types.
It looks unnatural to Google to have predominantly one kind of link in your profile, and it also indicates that you’re not diversifying your content strategy enough.
Some of the various link types you should see in your backlink profile include:
- Anchor text links.
- Image links.
- Redirect links.
- Canonical links.
Here is an example of the breakdown of link types at my company, Whatfix (via Semrush):
Most links should be anchor text links and image links, as these are the most common ways to link on the web, but you should see some of the other types of links as they are picked up naturally over time.
Mix Of Anchor Text
Next, ensure your backlink profile has an appropriate anchor text variance.
Again, if you overoptimize for a specific type of anchor text, it will appear suspicious to search engines like Google and could have negative repercussions.
Here are the various types of anchor text you might find in your backlink profile:
- Branded anchor text – Anchor text that is your brand name or includes your brand name.
- Empty – Links that have no anchor text.
- Naked URLs – Anchor text that is a URL (e.g., www.website.com).
- Exact match keyword-rich anchor text – Anchor text that exactly matches the keyword the linked page targets (e.g., blue shoes).
- Partial match keyword-rich anchor text – Anchor text that partially or closely matches the keyword the linked page targets (e.g., “comfortable blue footwear options”).
- Generic anchor text – Anchor text such as “this website” or “here.”
To maintain a healthy backlink profile, aim for a mix of anchor text within a similar range to this:
- Branded anchor text – 35-40%.
- Partial match keyword-rich anchor text – 15-20%.
- Generic anchor text -10-15%.
- Exact match keyword-rich anchor text – 5-10%.
- Naked URLs – 5-10%.
- Empty – 3-5%.
This distribution of anchor text represents a natural mix of differing anchor texts. It is common for the majority of anchors to be branded or partially branded because most sites that link to your site will default to your brand name when linking. It also makes sense that the following most common anchors would be partial-match keywords or generic anchor text because these are natural choices within the context of a web page.
Exact-match anchor text is rare because it only happens when you are the best resource for a specific term, and the site owner knows your page exists.
Ratio Of Followed Vs. Nofollowed Backlinks
Lastly, you should monitor the ratio of followed vs. nofollowed links pointing to your website.
If you need a refresher on what nofollowed backlinks are or why someone might apply the nofollow tag to a link pointing to your site, check out Google’s guide on how to qualify outbound links to Google.
Nofollow attributes should only be applied to paid links or links pointing to a site the linking site doesn’t trust.
While it is not uncommon or suspicious to have some nofollow links (people misunderstand the purpose of the nofollow attribute all the time), a healthy backlink profile will have far more followed links.
You should aim for a ratio of 80%:20% or 70%:30% in favor of followed links. For example, here is what the followed vs. nofollowed ratio looks like for my company’s backlink profile (according to Ahrefs):
Screenshot from Ahrefs, May 2024You may see links with other rel attributes, such as UGC or Sponsored.
The “UGC” attribute tags links from user-generated content, while the “Sponsored” attribute tags links from sponsored or paid sources. These attributes are slightly different than the nofollow tag, but they essentially work the same way, letting Google know these links aren’t trusted or endorsed by the linking site. You can simply group these links in with nofollowed links when calculating your ratio.
Importance Of Diversifying Your Backlink Profile
So why is it important to diversify your backlink profile anyway? Well, there are three main reasons you should consider:
- Avoiding overoptimization.
- Diversifying traffic sources.
- And finding new audiences.
Let’s dive into each of these.
Avoiding Overoptimization
First and foremost, diversifying your backlink profile is the best way to protect yourself from overoptimization and the damaging penalties that can come with it.
As SEO pros, our job is to optimize websites to improve performance, but overoptimizing in any facet of our strategy – backlinks, keywords, structure, etc. – can result in penalties that limit visibility within search results.
In the previous section, we covered the elements of a healthy backlink profile. If you stray too far from that model, your site might look suspicious to search engines like Google and you could be handed a manual or algorithmic penalty, suppressing your rankings in search.
Considering how regularly Google updates its search algorithm these days (and how little information surrounds those updates), you could see your performance tank and have no idea why.
This is why it’s so important to keep a watchful eye on your backlink profile and how it’s shaping up.
Diversifying Traffic Sources
Another reason to cultivate a diverse backlink profile is to ensure you’re diversifying your traffic sources.
Google penalties come swiftly and can often be a surprise. If you have all your eggs in that basket when it comes to traffic, your site will suffer badly and might need help to recover.
However, diversifying your traffic sources (search, social, email, etc.) will mitigate risk – similar to a stock portfolio – as you’ll have other traffic sources to provide a steady flow of visitors if another source suddenly dips.
Part of building a diverse backlink profile is acquiring a diverse set of backlinks and backlink types, and this strategy will also help you find differing and varied sources of traffic.
Finding New Audiences
Finally, building a diverse backlink profile is essential, as doing so will also help you discover new audiences.
If you acquire links from the same handful of websites and platforms, you will need help expanding your audience and building awareness for your website.
While it’s important to acquire links from sites that cater to your existing audience, you should also explore ways to build links that can tap into new audiences. The best way to do this is by casting a wide net with various link acquisition tactics and strategies.
A diverse backlink profile indicates a varied approach to SEO and marketing that will help bring new visitors and awareness to your site.
Building A Diverse Backlink Profile
So that you know what a healthy backlink profile looks like and why it’s important to diversify, how do you build diversity into your site’s backlink profile?
This comes down to your link acquisition strategy and the types of backlinks you actively pursue. To guide your strategy, let’s break link building into three main categories:
- Foundational links.
- Content promotion.
- Community involvement.
Here’s how to approach each area.
Foundational Links
Foundational links represent those links that your website simply should have. These are opportunities where a backlink would exist if all sites were known to all site owners.
Some examples of foundational links include:
- Mentions – Websites that mention your brand in some way (brand name, product, employees, proprietary data, etc.) on their website but don’t link.
- Partners – Websites that belong to real-world partners or companies you connect with offline and should also connect (link) with online.
- Associations or groups – Websites for offline associations or groups you belong to where your site should be listed with a link.
- Sponsorships – Any events or organizations your company sponsors might have websites that could (and should) link to your site.
- Sites that link to competitors – If a website is linking to a competitor, there is a strong chance it would make sense for them to link to your site as well.
These link opportunities should set the foundation for your link acquisition efforts.
As the baseline for your link building strategy, you should start by exhausting these opportunities first to ensure you’re not missing highly relevant links to bolster your backlink profile.
Content Promotion
Next, consider content promotion as a strategy for building a healthy, diverse backlink profile.
Content promotion is much more proactive than the foundational link acquisition mentioned above. You must manifest the opportunity by creating link-worthy content rather than simply capitalizing on an existing opportunity.
Some examples of content promotion for links are:
- Digital PR – Digital PR campaigns have numerous benefits and goals beyond link acquisition, but backlinks should be a primary KPI.
- Original research – Similar to digital PR, original research should focus on providing valuable data to your audience. Still, you should also make sure any citations or references to your research are correctly linked.
- Guest content – Whether regular columns or one-off contributions, providing guest content to websites is still a viable link acquisition strategy – when done right. The best way to gauge your guest content strategy is to ask yourself if you would still write the content for a site without guaranteeing a backlink, knowing you’ll still build authority and get your message in front of a new audience.
- Original imagery – Along with research and data, if your company creates original imagery that offers unique value, you should promote those images and ask for citation links.
Content promotion is a viable avenue for building a healthy backlink profile as long as the content you’re promoting is worthy of links.
Community Involvement
Community involvement is the final piece of your link acquisition puzzle when building a diverse backlink profile.
After pursuing all foundational opportunities and manually promoting your content, you should ensure your brand is active and represented in all the spaces and communities where your audience engages.
In terms of backlinks, this could mean:
- Wikipedia links – Wikipedia gets over 4 billion monthly visits, so backlinks here can bring significant referral traffic to your site. However, acquiring these links is difficult as these pages are moderated closely, and your site will only be linked if it is legitimately a top resource on the web.
- Forums (Reddit, Quora, etc.) – Another great place to get backlinks that drive referral traffic is forums like Reddit and Quora. Again, these forums are strictly moderated, and earning link placements on these sites requires a page that delivers significant and unique value to a specific audience.
- Social platforms – Social media platforms and groups represent communities where your brand should be active and engaged. While these strategies are likely handled by other teams outside SEO and focus on different metrics, you should still be intentional about converting these interactions into links when or where possible.
- Offline events – While it may seem counterintuitive to think of offline events as a potential source for link acquisition, legitimate link opportunities exist here. After all, most businesses, brands, and people you interact with at these events also have websites, and networking can easily translate to online connections in the form of links.
While most of the link opportunities listed above will have the nofollow link attribute due to the nature of the sites associated with them, they are still valuable additions to your backlink profile as these are powerful, trusted domains.
These links help diversify your traffic sources by bringing substantial referral traffic, and that traffic is highly qualified as these communities share your audience.
How To Avoid Developing A Toxic Backlink Profile
Now that you’re familiar with the link building strategies that can help you cultivate a healthy, diverse backlink profile, let’s discuss what you should avoid.
As mentioned before, if you overoptimize one strategy or link, it can seem suspicious to search engines and cause your site to receive a penalty. So, how do you avoid filling your backlink profile with toxic links?
Remember The “Golden Rule” Of Link Building
One simple way to guide your link acquisition strategy and avoid running afoul of search engines like Google is to follow one “golden rule.”
That rule is to ask yourself: If search engines like Google didn’t exist, and the only way people could navigate the web was through backlinks, would you want your site to have a link on the prospective website?
Thinking this way strips away all the tactical, SEO-focused portions of the equation and only leaves the human elements of linking where two sites are linked because it makes sense and makes the web easier to navigate.
Avoid Private Blog Networks (PBNs)
Another good rule is to avoid looping your site into private blog networks (PBNs). Of course, it’s not always obvious or easy to spot a PBN.
However, there are some common traits or red flags you can look for, such as:
- The person offering you a link placement mentions they have a list of domains they can share.
- The prospective linking site has little to no traffic and doesn’t appear to have human engagement (blog comments, social media followers, blog views, etc.).
- The website features thin content and little investment into user experience (UX) and design.
- The website covers generic topics and categories, catering to any and all audiences.
- Pages on the site feature numerous external links but only some internal links.
- The prospective domain’s backlink profile features overoptimization in any of the previously discussed forms (high-density of exact match anchor text, abnormal ratio of nofollowed links, only one or two link types, etc.).
Again, diversification – in both tactics and strategies – is crucial to building a healthy backlink profile, but steering clear of obvious PBNs and remembering the ‘golden rule’ of link building will go a long way toward keeping your profile free from toxicity.
Evaluating Your Backlink Profile
As you work diligently to build and maintain a diverse, healthy backlink profile, you should also carve out time to evaluate it regularly from a more analytical perspective.
There are two main ways to evaluate the merit of your backlinks: leverage tools to analyze backlinks and compare your backlink profile to the greater competitive landscape.
Leverage Tools To Analyze Backlink Profile
There are a variety of third-party tools you can use to analyze your backlink profile.
These tools can provide helpful insights, such as the total number of backlinks and referring domains. You can use these tools to analyze your full profile, broken down by:
- Followed vs. nofollowed.
- Authority metrics (Domain Rating, Domain Authority, Authority Score, etc.).
- Backlink types.
- Location or country.
- Anchor text.
- Top-level domain types.
- And more.
You can also use these tools to track new incoming backlinks, as well as lost backlinks, to help you better understand how your backlink profile is growing.
Some of the best tools for analyzing your backlink profile are:
Many of these tools also have features that estimate how toxic or suspicious your profile might look to search engines, which can help you detect potential issues early.
Compare Your Backlink Profile To The Competitive Landscape
Lastly, you should compare your overall backlink profile to those of your competitors and those competing with your site in the search results.
Again, the previously mentioned tools can help with this analysis – as far as providing you with the raw numbers – but the key areas you should compare are:
- Total number of backlinks.
- Total number of referring domains.
- Breakdown of authority metrics of links (Domain Rating, Domain Authority, Authority Score, etc.).
- Authority metrics of competing domains.
- Link growth over the last two years.
Comparing your backlink profile to others within your competitive landscape will help you assess where your domain currently stands and provide insight into how far you must go if you’re lagging behind competitors.
It’s worth noting that it’s not as simple as whoever has the most backlinks will perform the best in search.
These numbers are typically solid indicators of how search engines gauge the authority of your competitors’ domains, and you’ll likely find a correlation between strong backlink profiles and strong search performance.
Approach Link Building With A User-First Mindset
The search landscape continues to evolve at a breakneck pace and we could see dramatic shifts in how people search within the next five years (or sooner).
However, at this time, search engines like Google still rely on backlinks as part of their ranking algorithms, and you need to cultivate a strong backlink profile to be visible in search.
Furthermore, if you follow the advice in this article as you build out your profile, you’ll acquire backlinks that benefit your site regardless of search algorithms, futureproofing your traffic sources.
Approach link acquisition like you would any other marketing endeavor – with a customer-first mindset – and over time, you’ll naturally build a healthy, diverse backlink profile.
More resources:
Featured Image: Sammby/Shutterstock
SEO
Google On Traffic Diversity As A Ranking Factor
Google’s SearchLiaison tweeted encouragement to diversify traffic sources, being clear about the reason he was recommending it. Days later, someone followed up to ask if traffic diversity is a ranking factor, prompting SearchLiaison to reiterate that it is not.
What Was Said
The question of whether diversity of traffic was a ranking factor was elicited from a previous tweet in a discussion about whether a site owner should be focusing on off-site promotion.
Here’s the question from the original discussion that was tweeted:
“Can you please tell me if I’m doing right by focusing on my site and content – writing new articles to be found through search – or if I should be focusing on some off-site effort related to building a readership? It’s frustrating to see traffic go down the more effort I put in.”
SearchLiaison split the question into component parts and answered each one. When it came to the part about off-site promotion, SearchLiaison (who is Danny Sullivan), shared from his decades of experience as a journalist and publisher covering technology and search marketing.
I’m going to break down his answer so that it’s clearer what he meant
This is the part from the tweet that talks about off-site activities:
“As to the off-site effort question, I think from what I know from before I worked at Google Search, as well as my time being part of the search ranking team, is that one of the ways to be successful with Google Search is to think beyond it.”
What he is saying here is simple, don’t limit your thinking about what to do with your site to thinking about how to make it appeal to Google.
He next explains that sites that rank tend to be sites that are created to appeal to people.
SearchLiaison continued:
“Great sites with content that people like receive traffic in many ways. People go to them directly. They come via email referrals. They arrive via links from other sites. They get social media mentions.”
What he’s saying there is that you’ll know that you’re appealing to people if people are discussing your site in social media, if people are referring the site in social media and if other sites are citing it with links.
Other ways to know that a site is doing well is when when people engage in the comments section, send emails asking follow up questions, and send emails of thanks and share anecdotes of their success or satisfaction with a product or advice.
Consider this, fast fashion site Shein at one point didn’t rank for their chosen keyword phrases, I know because I checked out of curiosity. But they were at the time virally popular and making huge amounts of sales by gamifying site interaction and engagement, propelling them to become a global brand. A similar strategy propelled Zappos when they pioneered no-questions asked returns and cheerful customer service.
SearchLiaison continued:
“It just means you’re likely building a normal site in the sense that it’s not just intended for Google but instead for people. And that’s what our ranking systems are trying to reward, good content made for people.”
SearchLiaison explicitly said that building sites with diversified content is not a ranking factor.
He added this caveat to his tweet:
“This doesn’t mean you should get a bunch of social mentions, or a bunch of email mentions because these will somehow magically rank you better in Google (they don’t, from how I know things).”
Despite The Caveat…
A journalist tweeted this:
“Earlier this week, @searchliaison told people to diversify their traffic. Naturally, people started questioning whether that meant diversity of traffic was a ranking factor.
So, I asked @iPullRank what he thought.”
SearchLiaison of course answered that he explicitly said it’s not a ranking factor and linked to his original tweet that I quoted above.
He tweeted:
“I mean that’s not exactly what I myself said, but rather repeat all that I’ll just add the link to what I did say:”
The journalist responded:
“I would say this is calling for publishers to diversify their traffic since you’re saying the great sites do it. It’s the right advice to give.”
And SearchLiaison answered:
“It’s the part of “does it matter for rankings” that I was making clear wasn’t what I myself said. Yes, I think that’s a generally good thing, but it’s not the only thing or the magic thing.”
Not Everything Is About Ranking Factors
There is a longstanding practice by some SEOs to parse everything that Google publishes for clues to how Google’s algorithm works. This happened with the Search Quality Raters guidelines. Google is unintentionally complicit because it’s their policy to (in general) not confirm whether or not something is a ranking factor.
This habit of searching for “ranking factors” leads to misinformation. It takes more acuity to read research papers and patents to gain a general understanding of how information retrieval works but it’s more work to try to understand something than skimming a PDF for ranking papers.
The worst approach to understanding search is to invent hypotheses about how Google works and then pore through a document to confirm those guesses (and falling into the confirmation bias trap).
In the end, it may be more helpful to back off of exclusively optimizing for Google and focus at least equally as much in optimizing for people (which includes optimizing for traffic). I know it works because I’ve been doing it for years.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Asier Romero
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