It’s difficult to deny how a website can benefit a business. Aside from the branding aspect, a well-made and marketed website can drive leads or function as a point of sale. It can reach customers who never would have walked into your physical establishment.
However, setting up, maintaining, and marketing a website can be a huge undertaking if it’s not your field of expertise.
While setting up the site is a frontloaded task with distinct starting and ending points, maintenance and marketing are ongoing tasks. And monitoring your website’s backlink profile is one incredibly important part of these tasks.
What is a Backlink Profile?
A backlink profile is an overview or report of the other websites that have linked to yours. Some of the information contained in this overview includes:
- Websites linking to your website
- What pages of your website they’re linking to
- What anchor text or words the links use (e.g., “Click here” or “Check out Stream Companies’ website”)
You can also get a general idea of the authority level of the sites linking to yours.
Why Does it Matter?
Maintaining a healthy backlink profile is an important aspect as far as how well your website ranks in search engines such as Google. A strong, authoritative backlink profile can push your site to the first page of Google search results. On the contrary, a weak profile may do nothing, and a toxic one can actually harm your site.
Whether from bad links built with good intentions or toxic links sent to your site with malicious intent, too many low-quality links can cause some serious damage, such as making your site to drop in search engine rankings.
How Do You Monitor it?
Fortunately, there’s no reason to fly blind regarding your link profile. Many tools have been created with the main purpose of monitoring the source of your backlinks, such as Moz’s Open Site Explorer.
By regularly checking some of these tools, you’ll get a good idea about who has linked to your site and whether your site is gaining any new links, healthy or toxic.
Can’t I Do That Myself?
You can definitely monitor your backlink profile, but it’s a little more complicated than checking one tool once a month.
Each major tool requires a paid subscription to access full use of its service. And to get the best view of what’s going on with your profile, using more than one of these tools is ideal.
Second, you need the knowledge and experience to accurately determine whether a backlink qualifies as high quality or toxic. If not done properly, the results could be devastating to your website. Incorrectly removing quality links could result in lower search engine rankings and therefore less traffic. On the contrary, not removing toxic links could lead to a Google penalty and destroy most of your organic traffic.
Finally, trying to remove toxic links is a considerable process. Having an expert handle it dramatically improves the chances of success while saving you countless hours of work.
Summary
When it comes to ranking well in search engines, you can’t overlook the importance of the other websites that link to yours. In the past, the more links you had, the better. However, in the landscape of how today’s search engines function, link quality also is a factor.
Keeping a close eye on your link profile is essential. Too many toxic links can make your business’ website sick and cause it to lose organic traffic. Having a professional who knows exactly what to look for can help you maintain a healthy and well-performing website that drives more leads and initiates more sales for your business.
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