Efficient organization is a crucial skill in SEO and one of the best you can possess. By diligently tracking your actions, you can make informed decisions about your next steps, ensuring optimal effectiveness in your SEO strategy.
Each week, I conduct SEO consultations for different clients. However, when someone arrives without a list of the links pointing to their site, it becomes challenging for me to diagnose their offsite SEO issues effectively. With this crucial information, there’s more we can discuss.
To make your life and mine easier, I’ve created this post to guide you on how to track and manage your backlinks accurately. Following these steps, you can ensure we have the necessary data to improve your SEO strategies How to Manage Your Backlinks:
The importance of staying organized in SEO
Staying organized in SEO is of utmost importance due to the complexity of Google’s ranking signals. Understanding your SERP placement becomes challenging with over 200 variables constantly changing in the ranking equation.
It would help to minimize as many variables as possible to make sense of this equation. By keeping track of your backlinks and confidently answering questions about the presence of nofollow links pointing to your site, you take a significant step toward unraveling the mysteries behind your rankings. Proper backlink tracking is essential to gaining insights and improving your SEO strategy effectively.
To Ensure Effective Tracking
I suggest maintaining one comprehensive master spreadsheet for each of your projects. Within these spreadsheets, be sure to include the following essential data:
Backlinks:
Your top priority should be tracking your backlinks, including links from PBNs, Web 2.0s, Press Releases, blog comments, and more. Precisely monitor every indexed link pointing to your site, excluding social signals, which have a distinct role in ranking.
Be sure to record the following information:
- Placement date of the link.
- Referring domain that the link originates from.
- Target URL of the linked page on your site.
- Anchor text is used in the link.
- Dofollow or nofollow attribute of the link.
- Verification of whether the link is indexed or not.
Anchor Text Distribution:
Undoubtedly, your anchor text distribution is one of the most critical monitoring aspects. Maintain a continuous record of how your overall anchor text profile aligns with the niche-specific target anchor text pointing to your site. To accomplish this effectively, consider utilizing an automatically-updating pie chart, allowing you to stay informed about the distribution trends over time.
Rankings:
Whenever you add or acquire new links, monitoring the rankings before their placement is essential. This practice enables you to assess which links or anchor texts have potentially contributed to positive or negative movements in rankings.
A rank tracker is the most convenient way to achieve this, but I recommend complementing it with weekly ranking notes in your spreadsheet each time you add a backlink. This simple addition will significantly streamline your SEO efforts, providing valuable insights that will prove invaluable in understanding the impact of your backlink strategies on your site’s performance. You’ll find it incredibly beneficial and insightful.
Keywords and Target Pages:
It is crucial to maintain a comprehensive list of the keywords your site is targeting, along with the corresponding pages that are optimized for them.
To ensure a well-diversified approach, using a different anchor text at most 1-2 times is generally advisable. Record each instance of using a keyword’s exact anchor text in your spreadsheet, helping you maintain a healthy and balanced anchor text profile. This meticulous record-keeping will aid in better SEO decision-making and enhance your site’s overall performance.
Social Fortress Tracking:
Create a comprehensive list of all your social fortress profiles, which may include platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and others. Additionally, indicate whether each profile is indexed or not.
Furthermore, if you’re employing trust-pulling techniques and linking to your social fortress, carefully track the links and anchor text directed to each social profile. This meticulous record-keeping will prove invaluable in optimizing your social fortress strategy and maintaining a strong online presence.
Weekly Action Log:
Maintain a weekly log detailing the actions you took throughout the week and the recommended actions for the following week. This practice will enable you to make quicker and more informed decisions, as you won’t need to re-familiarize yourself with your goals each time.
The actual value of a well-kept weekly log emerges when you start managing multiple websites and dominating a niche. Once you’ve successfully ranked one site in a particular niche, you create a blueprint for ranking other sites moving forward. By following the same weekly actions, you can replicate your success and achieve page 1 rankings for your second, third, and subsequent pages.
Scaling becomes much more manageable as you can outsource high-level responsibilities, such as anchor text selection, to a Virtual Assistant (VA) with minimal SEO training. As long as they can follow the instructions outlined in your weekly log, they can effectively rank a website. This streamlined approach opens up immense possibilities for growth and success in your SEO endeavours.
If you’re still finding it challenging to manage, consider exploring our monthly SEO packages, where industry experts can handle everything. Let the experts take care of your SEO needs and ensure optimal results for your online presence.
