SEO Workflow

This guide will lead you through the main SEO activities
to help you efficiently organize your SEO process and
achieve top rankings that will generate more sales.

The guide is meant for SEO PowerSuite users, so it tells

where to find or enter data in the SEO PowerSuite tools.

However, the SEO advice you get here will certainly help
even if you’re not using our tools yet.

To try SEO PowerSuite, just download the free

version at [Link]
 SEO Workflow

Contents
Create a winning SEO campaign (your SEO PowerSuite workflow explained) 3

Find the most profitable keywords (with the help of Rank Tracker) 11

Monitor search engine rankings (with the help of Rank Tracker) 23

Fix all technical issues on your site (with the help of WebSite Auditor) 36

Optimize your landing pages (with the help of WebSite Auditor) 59

7 Steps to a Comprehensive Backlink Audit 70

Build quality links (with the help of LinkAssistant) 90

Use social listening to boost SEO (with the help of Awario) 99

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Create a winning SEO campaign

(your SEO PowerSuite workflow explained)

SEO PowerSuite is a comprehensive pack of 4 SEO tools, each dealing with a

particular aspect of SEO. The package has all you need to get top search engine
rankings and see your traffic and sales boost. Check out the step-by-step guide
below to create an SEO campaign that’s a smashing success — and a snap.

1. Find your target keywords

Decide on the keywords you’ll be building your SEO campaign around.

Step 1: Get keyword ideas. Run Rank Tracker and follow the Wizard’s
instructions to create your first project. Switch to the Keyword Research
workspace, and choose any of the keyword research methods to collect
hundreds of great keyword ideas generated for you with the use of 20+ keyword
research tools.

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Step 2: Pick keywords with most profit-generating potential. Look at your

keywords’ KEI (Keyword Efficiency Index) to choose the most profitable keywords.

The terms with a green KEI are frequently searched for and have pretty low
competition. Simply put, these can bring you lots of visitors — while being
comparatively easy to rank for.

2. Check your website’s rankings

Run a ranking check to see where your website currently stands.

Step 1: Select your target search engines and run the check. Press
in Rank Tracker and choose your target search engines to see your website’s
current ranks for the selected keywords.

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Step 2: Identify keywords you need to focus on. Take a look at your current
ranks — you may be ranking well for some terms already. Spot keywords your
website doesn’t rank high for, and concentrate your SEO efforts on those.

3. Detect on-site issues and fix them

Run a site audit to reveal errors and warnings that are holding your rankings
back.

Step 1: Scan your website. Run WebSite Auditor and enter your website’s URL
to start the analysis.

Step 2: Find your site’s weak spots. Take a close look at the factors with error
and warning statuses. Study the Details section to see problem pages and get
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tips.

Make sure you fix errors and deal with warnings accordingly to make your
website search engine friendly.

4. Optimize your landing pages

Create relevant, keyword-rich content using specific optimization tips.

Step 1: Analyze your pages. Go to the Page Audit > Content Audit module in
WebSite Auditor, select the page you‘ll be optimizing, and enter your keywords.
Let the software run a quick analysis of your page to get your page‘s current
optimization rate, details on keyword usage and other SEO stats. Pay attention
to any factors with an Error or Warning status. Switch to the Competitors tab for
details on how your top-ranking competitors are optimizing any given page
element, and the Details tab to get specific, keyword- and page-targeted advice
on how to improve your page‘s optimization.

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Step 2: Edit your page’s content. Switch to Page Audit > Content Editor for an
editable live preview of your landing page. Look at the factors on the left, and
make the necessary changes to your page‘s content right in the right-hand
view. Follow the tips you got at the previous step; the on-page stats and your
optimization rate on the left will recalculate in real time, as you type.

Once you‘ve finished editing your page and reached the desired optimization
score, hit the sign to save the newly optimized HTML to your hard drive,
and upload it to your site to see your rankings (hence visits, hence sales,
remember?) skyrocket.

5. Eliminate harmful links

Examine your backlink profile and get rid of the links that are dragging your
rankings down.

Step 1: Evaluate your backlink profile. Run SEO SpyGlass and enter your
website’s URL to collect your backlinks.

Go to the Backlink Profile > Penalty Risks tab, select your backlinks, and
hit to see if some of them may be doing your website more harm
than good.

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Take a closer look at links with a penalty risk over 40% and examine these pages
to decide which of the links need to be removed.

Step 2: Get rid of bad links. If possible, reach out to webmasters of sites
spammy links come from, asking them to take the links down. If there’s a large
number of harmful backlinks in your profile, or if outreach proves ineffective, you
can tell Google to ignore these links by disavowing them.

To generate a disavow file in SEO SpyGlass, select the links you want to disavow,
right-click them, and hit Disavow backlinks. Go to Preferences -> Disavow/Blacklist
Backlinks to review your disavow file, and hit Export to save it on your computer
when it’s ready.

Submit the file you created to Google Disavow Tool, and voila - Google will know
which links to ingore when deciding on your website’s authority.

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6. Build quality links

Expand your link profile with relevant, high quality backlinks.

Step 1: Discover link prospects within competitors’ backlink profiles. Create

projects in SEO SpyGlass for your best ranking competitors to see where they
got their backlinks from. In a competitor’s project, hit to analyze their
backlinks’ quality. Pay attention to backlink authority factors like InLink Rank and
Domain InLink Rank, Domain Age, Link Value, etc., and identify top link sources.
Export your shortlisted links through File -> Export or by copying them to a
spreadsheet.

Run LinkAssistant and create a project for your site.

Use the File ->Import option to load the link sources you’ve exported from SEO
SpyGlass.

Step 2: Find more quality link prospects. In your LinkAssistant project,

to find relevant link opportunities using LinkAssistant’s new-school
prospect research methods. Select any method you’d like to use, and feel free
to repeat the search for as many methods as you need. As it finds prospects,
LinkAssistant will automatically fetch their email addresses so you can reach
out to them instantly right from the app.

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Step 3: Reach out. In your LinkAssistant project, click to contact

potential partners and inquire if there are link opportunities available, such
as guest posts, listings in quality business directories, or others. Make use of
LinkAssistant’s ready-made email templates or create your own, completely
custom ones.

Tick the prospects

you consider relevant
and click Move to Prospects.

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Find the most profitable keywords

(with the help of Rank Tracker)

Discover traffic- and sales-generating keywords that are easy to rank for

Looking for a product or service, your potential customers turn to search

engines. They type in a search term, or a keyword, and find your site in the top
results — provided you’ve invested some serious SEO effort into this particular
term.

But as people’s habits vafdfry, they can use hundreds of different word
combinations to describe one and the same thing. That’s why the starting point
of any SEO campaign is finding all keywords people may use and picking the best
ones to focus your SEO work on. Here’s how the process goes:

Step 1: Decide on your seed keywords

Seed keywords are terms that will be used as base keywords in your keyword
research. Rather than coming up with the terms yourself, you can get your
seed keywords collected in Rank Tracker right upon project creation from
Google Analytics and Search Console.

How-to: Let Rank Tracker

do the initial search. Run
Rank Tracker, enter the URL
of the website you want to
create a project for, and tick
Enable expert options.

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Click Connect your Google Analytics account (or/and Connect your Google
Search Console account) at Step 2 and enter your credentials for Rank Tracker
to fetch keyword suggestions that are relevant to your site‘s content. This
option will get you keywords right from Google Analytics and Google Search
Console - the ones that are already bringing you traffic. Click Next once access
has been authorized – you‘ll now see a list of ~30 keywords, fetched right
from Search Console and Analytics.

Tip: Think of your own keyword ideas. Consider adding 5 to 10 phrases

yourself. Think of the words that best describe what your product is or does
— keywords you think customers could use to search for your site in search
engines.

Let’s say your website sells digital cameras — in that case, your seed keywords
could be digital cameras, buy cameras online and online camera store.

Step 2: Discover new keywords

Once you’ve created your project, continue the research to get a comprehensive
list of potential keywords to target.

How-to 1: Use Rank Tracker’s powerful research methods. Select and copy
one or several of your seed keywords from your Rank Tracker workspace.

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Then switch to the Keyword Research module, and choose any of the keyword
research methods where you can further select a research tool that will be
used to pull keyword suggestions. If you are unsure about which method to
start with, go to Keyword Planner which is ideal for generating hundreds of
keyword ideas.

Paste the seed keywords in the Enter topic keywords box, click the Search button,
and Rank Tracker will search for new keywords based on the ones you‘ve
specified. If you need to, at this step, by clicking Advanced settings in the top
right corner of the dashboard, you can also specify negative keywords to filter
out certain terms from the research, and ensure you only get relevant, spot-on
suggestions.

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Tip 1: Use multiple research methods. Repeat the process for other research
methods if you feel you could use more keyword ideas — each method will
generate from dozens to hundreds of new suggestions.

Ranking Keywords: discover the list of keywords a site is currenlty ranking for.
You may analyze either your own website or run search for any of your
competitors.

Keyword Gap: find the keywords your competitor (or several ones) rank for but
that are not present on your website.

Search Console: see the keywords pulled from your Google Search Console
account.

Keyword Planner: get keyword ideas from Google Ads Keyword Planner and
Yandex WordStat.

Autocomplete Tools: keyword ideas will be taken from suggestions provided by

autocomplete tools of Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, YouTube, Ask, and Amazon.

Related Searches: find keywords and phrases that might relate to your initial
keywords that people often search for in Google, Bing, and Ask.

TF-IDF Explorer: find what keywords are used most often among your top SERP
competitors.

Related Questions: find out the most popular questions that people ask in the
Internet using your target keywords.

Keyword Combinations: find all possible combinations and misspelled variants

of your target keywords.

Note: All the keywords found with any of the keyword research methods will be
automatically stored in the Keyword Sandbox module (Keyword Research > Keyword
Sandbox). You can revisit this keyword archive a multiple times to continue your
work on keyword ideas.

Tip 2: Add local modifiers and brand names. Some of the keyword suggestions
you just got may appear way too general — especially if you’re just starting out with
SEO for your site. It’s a good idea to make the keywords more specific and relevant
to your particular business by combining them with local modifiers and brand names.

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In your Rank Tracker project, copy all keywords you’ve got by now. Go to the
Keyword Combinations research method and select the Word Combination tool
from the drop-down menu. Paste your main keywords into the first box and
enter the relevant brand names and/or locations in the two other boxes — these
will be mixed with your keywords and produce lots of long-tails.

Step 3: Choose the most efficient terms

At early stages of keyword research, the two crucial factors to look at are
keyword demand (aka number of searches) and competition. The former is
the number of times the keyword is searched for monthly, and the latter is the
number of sites competing for the term in search engines’ results.

Search volume to competition ratio lies in the basis of Rank Tracker’s KEI
(Keyword Efficiency Index) formula. The index will let you quickly single out
keywords that can bring you lots of visitors — while being comparatively easy to
rank for.

As Rank Tracker finds keywords for you, it’ll automatically collect their efficiency
stats so you can easily spot terms and topics with the biggest potential.

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How-to 1: Analyze the KEI column. Go through your keywords and keyword
groups and take a closer look at the KEI column to spot the most efficient terms
(the higher the KEI value, the better). You’ll also see the total KEI and expected
visits for each keyword group, which can be handy in evaluating how efficient
will be if you target the entire group with one page.

Decide on the most efficient terms you’ll be targeting — both keywords you
can integrate into the existing content on your site, and keywords you’ll need
to create new pages for. Depending on the size of your site and the time you’re
ready to spend on SEO, the number of terms you’ll want to pick may be different.
It’s totally fine if you only choose a handful of keywords for now – you’ll be able
to go back at any point when you’re ready to target more terms.

Once you‘ve chosen the most efficient keywords, move them to the
Target Keywords dashboard by right-clicking the selection and choosing
the Move Selected Keyword(s) to Rank Tracking option.

How-to 2: Evaluate buying intention. Another useful angle to look at your

keywords from is their profit-generating potential. Some terms may seem
appealing when you look at their search volume, but here’s the twist: most of the
frequently-searched-for terms are purely informational. While ranking for these
will attract visitors to your site, they are unlikely to bring you a lot of sales. Go
through your keyword lists in Rank Tracker and ask yourself about every term: Is
the searcher ready to buy? If the answer’s a definite “yes”, then you are looking at

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a Buy Now keyword — these guys tend to convert like crazy.

To help you evaluate buying intention, Google Ads‘ Cost Per Click can be a useful
metric. Cost Per Click gives you a pretty solid idea of how well a term converts -
basically, the higher the cost, the better it‘ll sell. It‘s pretty intuitive - the more an
advertiser is paying per click, the more valuable that traffic must be for them.

This metric is calculated by default when the tool is collecting keywords. After
the task is complete, you can see the Cost Per Click column in your dashboard.
Click on the header of the Cost Per Click column to sort your keywords by their
Cost Per Click (i.e. their potential conversion rate), and spot the costlier terms
you can incorporate into your organic keyword strategy.

How-to 3: Make top terms your target keywords. When you‘ve picked your
top efficient search terms, click Move Selected Keyword(s) to Rank Tracking
to add them to your main Rank Tracker workspace. You‘ll start mapping and
tracking these keywords soon.

The terms you haven’t added to your target keywords will stay right in the
Keyword Sandbox module, so you can go back and review them anytime later.

Tip 1: Avoid the highest competition. If you are just starting out with SEO
for your website, you’ll probably want to remove all keywords with extreme
competition values (even if the KEI is good) — at least for now. With millions of
sites competing for rankings for a given keyword already, it’ll take you a good

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while to rank high for the term.

Tip 2: Select keywords with the best KEI out of the remaining ones, and ignore
the ones with the worst — these are the terms with crazy competition and not-
so-many monthly searches, so optimizing for them is hardly worth the effort at
this point.

Tip 3: While moving your keywords, you can choose a particular keyword
group for them. Further, in the Target Keywords dashboard, you will be able to
fine-tune your keyword groups. You can automatically regroup your keyword
groups according to different levels of semantic similarity, so you can focus
on entire topics instead of individual terms, and easily manage and navigate
through an uncluttered, organized workspace.

If you need to reorganize the groups a little, you can merge several groups into
one (by selecting the groups, right-clicking the selection, and hitting Merge
groups), or move keywords from one group to another (by selecting the
keywords you‘d like to move and hitting the Move To Keyword Group button).
Plus, it is possible to ungroup or delete your keyword groups.

You can also do the same operations with keyword groups in Keyword Sandbox
prior to moving them to Target Keywords.

Step 4: Analyze keyword difficulty

By now, you have a list of terms with promising KEI values and relatively low
competition under Target Keywords > Keyword Map. It‘s time to calculate
Keyword Difficulty and see if the competition is not just low in numbers, but
also not that high in quality. When Rank Tracker calculates Keyword Difficulty, it
looks at the 10 top ranking pages for every term and analyzes all kinds of SEO
stats about each page: the number of linking domains, on-page optimization
rate, social signals, domain age, and others.

Keyword Difficulty will let you estimate the work required to get your site to show
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up in the top results, and help you decide which page of your site you should
target each keyword group with.

How-to 1: Switch to the Keyword Difficulty tab. Pick a keyword group you‘ll
be analyzing and select all keywords within it. Navigate to the Keyword
Difficulty tab and hit to calculate the value (mind that the check may take
a while, depending on the number of keywords you are updating the value for).
The higher the score, the more SEO work it‘ll take for you to unseat your
competitors.

Tip 1: Analyze individual competitors’ scores. Take a look at competitors’

individual scores and go through the detailed SEO analysis of each site to
uncover your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses and see what it is exactly
that makes them rank high for the term. Below, you’ll see the same metrics for
your own page (the one that is found in the SERPs for the keyword or the one
you’ve matched to the keyword), so you can see how different aspects of your
SEO compare to competitors’.

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Tip 2: Use tags to easily browse through your keywords. By right-clicking your
keywords and selecting Add tags to selected records, assign tags to your keywords
according to their Difficulty score. You’ll probably want to start optimizing for
the easy ones first and save the more difficult terms for later; these tags will also
come in handy at the next step, when you’ll be choosing which keywords should
go on which pages on your site.

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Step 5: Build a keyword map

Now that you’ve picked the most cost-effective target terms for your SEO
campaign, it’s time to build a keyword map and distribute your keyword groups
between your site’s pages.

How-to: Assign keyword to pages. Go through your keyword groups and

assign them to specific landing pages you‘re going to target these groups with.
To do that, select the keywords you‘d like to assign to a page, and hit the
Assign Selected Keyword(s) To Landing Page button. This way, Rank Tracker will
associate specific pages of your site with the keyword groups of your choice,
letting you know if a different page of your site appears in search results
instead of the intended page. Under the Landing Pages tab, you‘ll be able to
easily navigate through your keyword map by landing pages‘ URLs to instantly
see all keywords associated with any given page.

Tip: Consider Keyword Difficulty when creating your keyword map. As you
assign keywords to landing pages, remember to consider the terms’ Keyword
Difficulty. You’ll typically want to target the most difficult terms with the
stronger pages of your site that have more backlinks pointing to them (e.g., your
homepage).

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You’re all set to start optimizing!

Congrats — you’re done with keyword research! In the perfect world, you’d be
looking at a list of high-KEI, low-difficulty Buy Now keywords, but — bummer! —
the SEO world is no bed of roses. That keyword that screams ‘Profit, profit, profit!’
has a difficulty score close to 100, and that one with a promising KEI is unlikely to
ever lead to a sale. Ugh, where do you start? The answer’s simple: start small.

1. Stick with the keywords with lower difficulty scores first — most probably,
those won’t be the outright Buy Now kind of terms, but they may well have some
profit-generating potential anyway. Think digital camera descriptions, or camera
brands. The customer’s looking for information — so they can make up their
mind on a certain product and probably make the purchase. That’s where you
step in — give them the info they are looking for (and perhaps a tiny little push)
so that they stick around on your site and hopefully end up placing an order.

2. Once your site has gained search engines’ trust and respect, and you have
grown more SEO-savvy, you’ll be able to move on with keywords with more
selling potential (thank God you tagged them!), higher difficulty scores and
competition values — after all, the big top-10 guys were once out of the top 100
as well!

Remember, doing thorough research and seeing results will take some time, but
it always (as in, always) pays off.

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Monitor search engine rankings

(with the help of Rank Tracker)

Run accurate ranking checks and track the progress you make over time

Now that you’re done with your keyword research and have a nice list of
promising keywords in your hands, it’s time to get right down to tracking your
site’s rankings. Sounds simple, eh? Well, checking positions itself is no rocket
science. But before you get to the actual rank tracking, there’s some prep you
need to do, as you’ve got to be sure you’re tracking the right stuff, the right way.

Step 1: Select your target search engines

First things first, you need to decide on the search engines you’re looking to
achieve top rankings in with the help of your SEO campaign. Before you do
that, think of your target audience — the visitors you’d like to win over. If you’re
thinking about attracting international visitors, [Link], [Link], and
[Link] are definitely your top three choices. If your target visitors are from a
specific country or area, you’ll need to find what the major search engines for
that location are — and set them up in Rank Tracker.

How-to: Set up your target SEs. Run Rank Tracker and open your project. Go to
Preferences -> Preferred Search Engines and select your target search engines from
the list of over 570 supported ones.

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Step 2: Specify your target location

[Skip this step if you are tracking rankings for your own location — in this
scenario, you’ll get accurate geo-specific ranks in Rank Tracker by default]

If your target location is different from where you actually are, or if you need to
track rankings for several specific locations, you can set that up quickly in
Rank Tracker’s Advanced Search Settings.

How-to: Set up the location in search engines’ settings. In Preferences >

Preferred Search Engines, hit the Add Custom button next to one of the search
engines you target. You‘ll see an advanced settings window, offering you to
set up a number of language and location settings. Type in your target
location in the Preferred Location field (feel free to enter a state, town, or even
an exact street address). Click Apply to see your location displayed on the map
and hit OK to save the localized search engine you‘ve just created.

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Repeat if you’re targeting several locations.

Back in your Rank Tracker workspace, you’ll need to add respective columns
for the custom, geo-specific versions of search engines you just selected. To do
that, right-click the header of any column, select the columns you need to add
from Available columns on the left, and double-click each one to move it to Visible
columns.

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Step 3: Decide on your landing pages

Simply put, a landing page is a page that you’d like your site’s visitors to ‘land’ on
— and a page you’d like to rank in search results for a given term. You can hardly
have one and the same page optimized for all your keywords, so you’ll need to
look through your list of keywords carefully and decide which page is the best
fit for each word or phrase. That page’s content should be useful and engaging
and, most importantly, relevant to the term — ensuring that the searcher finds
exactly what they’re looking for on your landing page, and sticks around your site
rather than bounces back to the search results.

Making sure the right pages are ranking for the right keywords is an
indispensable part of rank tracking, and (lucky you!) Rank Tracker offers a simple
way to do that. Rank Tracker’s Advanced Search Settings.

How-to: Assign your keywords to landing pages. In Rank Tracker, select the
keyword(s) you’re optimizing a certain page for, right-click the selection, and hit
Assign selected keyword(s) to landing page

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Whenever the wrong page comes up in the search results, you’ll see a warning
sign along with the page’s URL in your Rank Tracker workspace.

Tip: See if any of your pages rank for your keywords already. If one of your
site’s pages ranks for a given keyword already, it may be a good idea to work on
that page’s content instead of trying to get a brand new page to rank. After you
run a ranking check in Rank Tracker, see if any of your pages are ranking already
for some terms — and keep on optimizing those to take them to the top.

Step 4: Set up SERP history tracking

If you’d like to track your site’s positions in different search result types, like
Featured Snippets, Images, Local Packs + 12 more Google result types, along with the
organic listings, you can set that up in Rank Tracker‘s settings.

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How-to: Enable recording of SERP history. Go to Preferences > Rank Checking

Mode in Rank Tracker and make sure that the Track organic results only box is
unchecked, and the Track multiple results for keyword box is checked. Once
you’ve done this, SERP features will be tracked along with the regular organic
results every time you check rankings.

Whenever your site is found within any of SERP features as you check your
rankings, you will see an icon of the SERP feature your site was found in (if any).
The three dots you can see in the same column mean that your site was found
in the SERP more than once. You can click them to see all the results.

Plus, you have the SERP Features column (that you can add by right-clicking any
column’s header) where you can see all SERP features present on the page; the
green ones are those your site ranks in.

Your SERP history is recorded in SERP Details which you can switch to in the
lower part of the screen. The history table will consolidate the data after each
check is complete. In the drop-down menu in the top left corner, you can pick
the search engine you’d like to see history data for.

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Right under the header with a rank check date, you can see icons for the features
present in the SERP that aren’t assigned a position. Icons along a URL mean the
SERP feature is found at a certain position

Step 5: Add competitors’ sites

Along with your own site, you’ll probably want to track competitors’ rankings —
so that you can see exactly how you compare to them, and how your online
rivals’ ranks change over time.

How-to: Specify your competitors’ URLs. Go to Preferences > Competitors in Rank

Tracker, press to add a competitor, and fill in the competitor’s details.

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In your Rank Tracker workspace, you’ll be able to include or exclude competitors’

data from the tables and graphs by simply clicking Show Competitors.

Step 6: Set up the preferences

Do you need to check search engines’ top 100 results for your ranks — or
maybe top 50 or just the top 10? If your site is found in SERPs for a given term
more than once, would you want to see all of the site’s rankings for each
keyword, or are you only interested in the highest rank? In Rank Tracker, you
can set these options up — along with other useful prefs.

How-to: Set up the rank checking mode. Go to Preferences > Rank Checking
Mode and specify whether or not you’d like to track multiple results per keyword.
Here, you can also set the number of results you need checked.

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Tip: Adjust the search safety settings. As you probably know, search engines
can be sensitive to automated requests, throwing in CAPTCHAs and occasionally
even blocking IPs to prevent their servers from overload with queries sent
by robots. In Preferences > Search Safety Settings in Rank Tracker, you’ll find a
number of prefs that will help you stay search engine-friendly and keep your IP
undetected as you check your ranks. If you check rankings regularly for a project
with up to 100 keywords, we recommend using the following combo of settings.

In Preferences > Misc Global Settings, reduce the number of simultaneous

tasks to 3 or 4.

In Preferences > Search Safety Settings > Human Emulation, check the first two
boxes.

In Preferences > Search Safety Settings > CAPTCHA Settings, check the Show
CAPTCHA for ranking checks in Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc. box.

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For bigger projects and more frequent ranking checks, you may want to consider
using an anti-CAPTCHA key in Preferences > Search Safety Settings > CAPTCHA
Settings and/or a list of reliable private proxies in Preferences > Search Safety
Settings > Proxy Rotation.

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Step 7: Check the rankings

Now that you’re done with the prep, you can (finally!) start what you came here
for (just to remind you: that’s tracking your site’s positions in search engines).

How-to: Check ‘em! In your Rank Tracker workspace, click to update

your site’s positions in your target search engines. Once you’ve checked your
positions more than once, you’ll see a Difference value calculated to reflect your
ranking progress.

You’ll also see your progress graph changing (hopefully upwards) over time to
give your ranking growth a visual form.

Tip 1: Set a date for comparison. Click to select which results

you want your current ranks to be compared against — or even set a custom
date for comparison.

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Tip 2: Schedule your ranking checks. Rank Tracker gives you an option of
automating your ranking checks so that you don’t have to run them manually
each time. To set scheduled check-ups, go to Preferences > Scheduler and
Alerts, and click to create a new scheduled task.

Go through the steps, selecting the type of the task, the projects it will run for,
and the task’s time and regularity.

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You’re a rank checking Pro now!

Congratulations! With a list of efficient keywords and your rankings checked, you
can now get down to tracking the amazing progress your site’s about to make in
SERPs.

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Fix all technical issues on your site

(with the help of WebSite Auditor)

Do away with tech problems that are holding your rankings back

It’s important that you spot and eliminate technical problems on your site before
they grow into an SEO problem. Otherwise, apart from creating a not-so-smooth
user experience for your visitors, you also risk losing your search engine rankings
— or even not getting your whole site crawled and indexed by search engines at all!

That is why before you start optimizing your pages for target keywords, you need to
run a comprehensive site audit to identify and fix issues that can cost you search
engine ranks.

Step 1: Run a site scan

First things first, you need to run a comprehensive site scan to collect all of your
site’s pages and resources (CSS, images, videos, JavaScript, PDFs, etc.) so that you
can later audit and analyze your entire website.

How-to: Collect your site’s pages. Run WebSite Auditor and enter your
website’s URL to start the scan.

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Tip: Crawl your site as Googlebot (or any other bot). By default, WebSite
Auditor crawls your site using a spider called SEO-PowerSuite-bot, which
means it will obey robots instructions for all bots (user agent: *). You may want
to tweak this setting to crawl the site as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. – or discard
robots instructions altogether and collect all pages of your site, even the ones
disallowed in your [Link].

To do this, create a WebSite Auditor project (or rebuild an existing one). At Step
1, enter your site’s URL and check the Enable expert options box. At Step 2, click
on the drop-down menu next to the Follow [Link] instructions option. Select
the bot you’d like to crawl your site as; if you’d like to discard [Link] during
the crawl, simply uncheck the Follow [Link] instructions box. Finally, hit Next to
proceed with the crawling.

Step 2: Check crawlability and indexing issues

It’s crucial that users and search engines can easily reach all the important pages
and resources on your site, including JavaScript and CSS. If your site is hard to
crawl and index, you’re probably missing out on lots of ranking opportunities;
on the other hand, you may well be willing to hide certain parts of your site from
search engines (say, pages with duplicate content).
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The main aspects to pay attention to are proper indexing instructions in your
[Link] file and proper pages response codes.

How-to 1: Check if your [Link] file is in place. If you’re not sure whether
you have a [Link] file or not, check the status of the [Link] factor in Site
Audit.

How-to 2: Make sure none of your important pages are blocked from
indexing. If your content cannot be accessed by search engines, it will not
appear in search results, so you need to check the list of pages that are currently
blocked from indexing, and make sure no important content got blocked by
occasion.

Switch to the Resources restricted from indexing section in Site Audit to revise which
of your site’s pages and resources are blocked by:

the [Link] file itself

the “noindex” tag in the <head> section of pages

the X-Robots-Tag in the HTTP header

How-to 3: Revise your [Link] file (or create it from scratch). Now, if you
need to create a [Link] file, or fix its instructions, simply switch to the Pages
module and click and choose in the menu that pops up, you can
either fetch your [Link] from server to revise it, or create a [Link] file
from scratch and upload it to your website.

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How-to 4: Take care of your pages’ response codes. Indexing issues can be
also caused by HTTP response codes errors. Under Indexing and crawlability in
the Site Audit module, go through Resources with 4xx status code, Resources with
5xx status code, and 404 page set up correctly. If any of the factors have an error
or warning status, study the Details section to see problem pages and get how-
to’s on fixing them.

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Tip: Look for orphan pages (pages that are not linked to internally). WebSite
Auditor can help you find the pages on your site that aren’t linked to internally,
and thus impossible to find for both users and search engines.

To find orphan pages on your site, you’ll need to rebuild your WebSite Auditor
project. To do this, go to the Pages module and click .

At Step 1 of the rebuild, check the Enable expert options box. At Step 2, select
Look for orphan pages, and proceed with the next steps like normal. Once the
crawl is complete, you’ll be able to find orphan pages in the Pages module,
marked with the Orphan page tag.

Step 3: Visualize your site structure

Unnecessary redirects and broken links can be a warning sign to search engines;
orphan pages and isolated parts of your site can hide good stuff from your
visitors. In many cases, the most efficient way to instantly spot such problems in
your site architecture is to visualize the site’s structure.

How-to 1: Visualize an overall structure of your site. Go to Site Structure >

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Visualization. In your workspace, you will see a graphical map of your pages and
relations between them. Blue nodes are redirects. Red nodes are broken links.
Isolated nodes are orphan pages.

Tip 1: By default, the tool shows 1,000 pages (which can be adjusted up to
10,000 pages) that are arranged by Click Depth. If you have a large website, it is
better to visualize it part by part (e.g., main categories, a blog, etc.).

Tip 2: All the nodes’ connections are shown as arrows (either one-way or two-
way) that represent the exact state of relations between pages. It is also possible
to drag any node to any place on the graph (to visualize a better picture) as well
as zoom in and out.

Tip 3: You can hover on any node to reveal additional information:

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How-to 2: Click on any node to reveal only its connections:

Or click on the Display all pages’ connections button to see all the connections, not
only the shortest ones:

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How-to 3: Visualize your site structure by Internal Page Rank. Choose Internal
Page Rank in a drop-down menu on the top right. Here the size of nodes reflects
the value of Internal Page Rank — the importance and authority of a page within
your site. The bigger the node, the higher the value.

By looking at this graph, you can understand whether your main pages have that
level of internal authority that they are supposed to have: homepage should
have the highest Page Rank, main categories should have a higher value than
their subcategories, etc.

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How-to 4: Visualize your site structure by Pageviews. Connect your Google

Analytics account. You can do it in Preferences > Google Analytics Account. Update
your data in Site Structure > Pages and then in the Visualization dashboard, rebuild
your Pageviews graph. Here the size of nodes reflects the value of Pageviews. The
bigger the node, the higher the value.

By looking at this graph, you can see the traffic flow to certain pages. Find your
conversion pages on the graph and check whether your main traffic pages point
to them.

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How-to 5: By using tools on the left panel, you can edit your graph to make
your site structure perfect. Click on any node to enter the editing mode. Use the
action buttons on the left to add, remove, and create different kinds of links.
Customize your graph by marking and pinning the nodes and coloring your
graph by tags.

When all changes are done, you can click button at the bottom of your
action panel and export them as a to-do list, or export a final list of changes in
CSV:

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Plus, you can save a graphical map of your site in PDF.

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Step 4: Fix redirects

Redirects are crucial for getting visitors to the right page if it has moved to a
different URL, but if implemented poorly, redirect can become an SEO problem.

How-to 1: Check pages with 302 redirects and meta refresh. Under Redirects
in Site Audit, see if you have any 302 redirects or pages with meta refresh.

A 302 is a temporary redirect, and though it’s a legitimate way to redirect your
pages in certain occasions, it may not transfer link juice from the redirected URL
to the destination URL.

A meta refresh is often used by spammers to redirect visitor to pages with

unrelated content, and search engines generally frown upon the use of meta
refresh redirects.

Using any of these methods is not recommended and can prevent the
destination page from ranking well in search engines. So unless the redirect
really is temporary, try to set up permanent 301 redirects instead.

How-to 2: Make sure the HTTP/HTTPS and www/non-www versions of your

site are redirecting correctly. If your site is available both with the www part
in its URL and without it (and it should be), or if you have both an HTTP and
an HTTPS version of the site, it’s important that these redirect correctly to the
primary version.
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To make sure HTTP/HTTPS and www/non-www versions of your site are set up
correctly, take a look at those factors in the Site Audit module, under the Redirects
section. If any problems are found, you’ll get detailed how-to-fix advice in the
right-hand part of your screen.

How-to 3: Check for issues with rel=”canonical”. Canonicalization is the

process of picking the best URL when there are several pages on your site with
identical or similar content. It’s a good idea to specify canonical URLs for pages
on which content duplication occurs, so that search engines know which of the
pages is more authoritative and should be ranked in search results. Canonical
URLs can be specified in either a <link rel=”canonical”> element in the page’s
HTML or a canonical link in your HTTP header.

To see which pages of your site have a canonical URL set up, and what that URL
is, click on Pages with rel=”canonical” under the Redirects section of your Site Audit
dashboard. On the right, you’ll see the pages’ titles and canonical URLs.

Instances of more than one canonical URL on a single page can happen with
some content management systems, when the CMS automatically adds a
canonical tag to site’s pages. Multiple canonical URLs will confuse search
engines and likely cause them to ignore them altogether. Check if there are such
instances on your site under the Encoding and technical factors section of your
site audit, by clicking on Pages with multiple canonical URLs.

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Step 5: Brush up the code

Coding issues can be an SEO and user experience disaster, affecting your
pages’ load speed, the way they are displayed in different browsers, and their
crawlability for search engine bots. So the next step of your site’s audit is to make
sure your pages code is free from errors, is perfectly readable to search engines
(not hiding your content with frames) and is not too “heavy”, skyrocketing your
page load time.

How-to: Make sure no pages use Frames, contain W3C errors, or are too big.
You’ll find this data under Encoding and technical factors in Site Audit.

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For any factors with an Info, Warning, or Error status, go to Details to explore the
problem pages and see recommendations on how to get the issue fixed.

Tip 1: See if your site is mobile-friendly. The Mobile-friendly factor shows

whether or not the site’s homepage passes Google’s mobile friendliness test.
Mind that failing that test can cost you losing positions in Mobile search — and
that may mean a sharp decrease in traffic.

Tip 2: Look out for unreadable URLs. Check with the URLs section in the Site
Audit module and make sure you fix URLs that are too long and not user-friendly.
As for dynamic URLs, make sure you only use those when necessary: dynamically
generated URLs are hard to read and not descriptive. Though unlikely, several
versions of the same URL with different parameters might also cause duplication
issues if search engines find them.

Step 6: Check for linking problems

Internal linking problems not only negatively affect your visitors’ user experience,
but also confuse search engines as they crawl your site. Outgoing external links
should also be paid attention, as pages with too many links may be considered
spammy by search engines.

How-to 1: Find all broken links. Broken links are links that point to non-existent

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URLs – these can be old pages that are no longer there or simply misspelled
versions of your URLs. It is critical that you check your site for broken linking to
ensure search engines and visitors never hit a dead end while navigating through
your site.

To get a list of all broken links on the website you’re auditing, click on Broken links
under the Links section (still in the Site Audit module). Here, you’ll see the pages
where broken links are found (if any), the URL of the broken link, and its anchor
text.

How-to 2: Find pages with too many outgoing links. Too many links coming
from a single page can be overwhelming to visitors and a spam signal for search
engines. As a rule of thumb, you should try to keep the number of links on any
page under 100.

To get a list of pages with too many outgoing links, go click on Pages with excessive
number of links under the Links section in your site audit. Here, you’ll see the
pages that have over 100 outgoing links (both internal and external).

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How-to 3: Identify links that are being redirected. Redirected links can pose
a problem as they will typically cause the destination page longer to load and
waste your search engine crawl budget on pages with a redirected status code.
Look out for these links and fix them by changing the links so that they point to
the destination page right away.

In the Site Audit module, look for Pages with 302 redirect and Pages with 301
redirect under the Redirects section. If any such pages are found, you’ll see a list
of them on the right, along with the URL they redirect to and the number of
internal links pointing to them. Click on the three-line button next to the number
of links to the page for a full list of pages that link to it.

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Tip: Get details on any internal/external link. For detailed info on any link
(anchor/alt text, directives, etc.), switch to the Pages module in WebSite Auditor
and click on one of the pages in the table. Below, click on Links from page to see
every link on the page along with its HTTP response code, anchor text, and
robots directives (nofollow/dofollow).

Step 7: Audit your images

Issues with images on your site can not only negatively affect your visitors’ user
experience, but also confuse search engines as they crawl your site. Search
engines can’t read the content in an image, so it’s critical that you provide them
with a brief description of what the image is about in the alternative text.

How-to 1: Find all broken images. Broken images are images that cannot be
displayed – this can happen when image files have been deleted or the path to
the file has been misspelled.

To get a list of problematic images on your site, check with the Broken images
factor in the Images section (under the Site Audit module).

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How-to 2: Spot images with empty alt text. When an image’s alt text is
missing, search engines won’t be able to figure out what the image is about and
how it contributes to the page’s content. That’s why it’s important that you use
unique alternative text for your images; it’s also a good idea to optimize it for
your target keywords as long as they fit naturally in the description.

To get a list of images with no alternative text, click on Empty alt text in the Images
section (under the Site Audit module).

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Step 8: Review your titles and meta descriptions

Through your title and meta description tags you can inform search engines
what your pages are about. A relevant title and description can help your
rankings; additionally, the contents of these tags will be used in your listing’s
snippet in the search results.

How-to: Avoid empty, too long, or duplicate titles and meta descriptions.
Check the On-page section of the Site Audit module to see problem pages, if any,
and get info and tips.

Duplicate titles and descriptions can confuse search engines as to which page
should be ranked in search results; consequently, they are likely to rank none.
If your titles or meta descriptions are empty, search engines will put up a
snippet of the page themselves; more likely than not, it will not look appealing to
searchers. Lastly, too long titles and descriptions will get truncated for your SERP
snippet, and not get your message across.

Step 9: Check PageSpeed and user experience

As Google has made Core Web Vitals a ranking factor, you have to make sure
nothing prevents users and Google from accessing your pages and interacting
with content. Bad user experience (i.e. slow pages, excessive pop-ups, too big
images or/and videos, etc.) will affect your pages‘ positions in search.
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How-to: Check what pages don’t pass Core Web Vitals assessment. Check
the Page Speed > Pages that do not pass Core Web Vitals assessment section of
the Site Audit module to see the pages that require improvements.

Tip: To get more details on the page‘s Core Web Vitals and see the hints on
what to improve on an exact page, go to Page Audit > Technical Audit > Mobile
Friendliness and Page Speed. Check both Mobile and Desktop sections to see how
to make both versions‘ performance better.

To see the exact page items that prevent the page from good CVW parameters,
expand the list of items in the Details column of the Performance audit table.

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You’re done with the tech part!

Congrats — you’ve fixed all technical issues that may have been holding
your rankings back (and that in itself puts you ahead of so many competitors
already!). It’s time you moved on to the (more) creative part, namely creating and
optimizing your landing pages’ content.

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Optimize your landing pages

(with the help of WebSite Auditor)

Optimize your HTML & create the right content for better rankings

If you followed our guide on keyword research, you probably already have a nice
list of target keywords on your hands, as well as the URLs of landing pages you’ll
be optimizing for these terms. That means you’re all set to start creating some
great content to make sure search engine bots understand what your landing
pages are about, acknowledge their value, and give them a high ranking in
search results. Sounds simple? Well, on-page SEO really is no rocket science, but
it does require some effort and patience on your part. In this guide, we’ve split
the process of landing page optimization into 7 actionable steps to make it as
smooth and straightforward as possible.

Step 1: Determine the status quo

Before you start optimizing a landing page for your target keywords, you’ll need
to determine how well it is optimized at the moment, and which specific areas of
on-page SEO you should focus on in the first place.

How-to: Scan your landing page. In your WebSite Auditor project, go to the
Page Audit > Content Audit module, and select your landing page from the list of
the site’s URLs. Type in the keywords you’re optimizing the page for, and select a
target search engine. In a moment, you will see a dashboard populated with all
kinds of optimization stats, and an overall optimization score to show you just
how well-optimized your landing page is compared to top-ranking competitors.

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Look through the stats on the left, and spot any factors with Error, Warning, or
Info statuses. Now that you know which areas you need to focus on, it’s time
to edit your content and get rid of any on-page issues that are holding your
rankings back.

Step 2: Work on your title tag

SEO-wise, the title tag is one of the most important page elements. It lets search
engines know what your page is about, and the tag’s contents are commonly used as
part of your listing’s snippet is search results. If the page has no title tag, search
engines will fill the snippet with content they’ve picked on their own, which may not
appear appealing to searchers and result in lower click-through rates.

How-to: Use a title that is concise, to the point, and includes your keywords.
Go to Page Audit > Content Editor and focus on the Title section.

Here, you can type any title tag you‘d like to use and see what it‘ll look like in your
Google snippet right away. What‘s more, the tool will show you your SERP benchmarks,
so you can compare your snippet to those of your competitors.

Once you come up with a per

fect title, check with the title-
related on-page factors in Page
Audit > Content Audit. Make sure
the parameters in the Title section
are all marked with a green tick.

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Tip 1: Employ techniques that are proven to work. If you feel you could use
some inspiration for your title tag, go to Page Audit > Content Audit, click on
Keywords in title, and switch to the Competitors tab to see how your 10
topranking rivals optimize their titles so you can borrow some of their tried
and tested tactics. In this tab, you‘ll see stats like keyword count, keyword
density, TF-IDF scores, and total word count in your competitors‘ titles, as well
as the exact wording of their title tags. You‘ll also find competitor averages for
these values as well as the min and max total word count, keyword count and
density among your rivals.

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Tip 2: Place keywords at the beginning of your title when you can. The closer
your target keyword is to the beginning of your title tag, the more keyword-
relevant your page will be considered by search engines. Try to always start your
title with your keywords to emphasize their importance.

Tip 3: Mention your location in the title to help local SEO. If relevant, include
the name of your town or state in your title tag to show search engines which
geo-specific searches your listing is most relevant to.

Step 3: Brush up your meta description

Just like the title tag, meta description is an important indication to search
engines of what the page is about. Meta descriptions are often used as preview
snippets for sites’ listings in search results — so for pages with no meta
descriptions, the snippet will include the content picked by search engines, which
may be unclear and unappealing to searchers.

How-to: Create a meta description that is in line with SEO best practices. In
Page Audit > Content Editor, in the Meta tags tab, try entering various variants of
your description and preview your Google snippet below.

Make sure your final meta description meets all SEO [Link] sure the
parameters in the Meta tag section in Page Audit > Content Audit — Keywords in
meta description tag, Meta description length, Multiple meta description tags, and
Keywords in meta keywords tag – are all marked with a green tick.
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Tip: Use tailor-made advice on writing meta descriptions. If you feel like you
could use a couple of examples of meta descriptions that work in your niche,
go to Page Audit > Content Audit and switch between the Competitors and Details
tabs to see how your top 10 rivals optimize their meta description tags, and
get specific guidelines on writing yours.

Step 4: Create your killer content (and don’t forget

the keywords!)
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We can’t stress it enough: it is uber important for your content to be valuable and
unique, and creating pages that are engaging and useful to the reader should
always be your primary goal. However, clever use of keywords in your content
is also important — it lets search engines understand which search queries that
content is most relevant to. Remember to use keywords naturally though, as
human visitors should always be your top priority.

How-to 1: Use keywords in the page’s content cleverly. In Page Audit > Content
Editor, check the optimization rate of your page‘s content. You can edit the
content right in the tool and see how optimization rate changes as you make
edits.

How-to 2: Optimize your headings. Your page’s heading tags are strong
relevancy signals to search engines, so it’s a good idea to include your keywords
in some of them. H1 is your page’s main heading, and by far the most important
one; but if your content is long enough to have H2-6 headings as well, these are
all good spots to include your keywords in. Remember not to use the same term
overly though; think of synonyms and related phrases to diversify your content,
and try to target topics or concepts rather than exact-match keywords.

In Page Audit > Content Analysis, check the Body section to make sure all the
parameters in it are ticked green.

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Tip: Learn from the best. The best way to ensure that you‘re going in the right
direction with your content optimization efforts is to look at pages that already
rank in top 10 for your keywords. Go back to Page Audit > Content Audit and
click through the factors under the Body section. Every factor lets you switch to
the Competitors tab to see how each of your top 10 rivals are optimizing their
content.

Feel free to also consult the Details tab for optimization advice and SEO best practices.

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How-to 3: Employ TF-IDF. In short, TF-IDF is the formula of how often a keyword
is found on a page (TF - term frequency and how often it is expected to be
found on an average web page, based on a larger set of documents (IDF - inverse
document frequency.

As TF-IDF compares a keyword usage of a separate page to a larger set of

documents, it becomes obvious how important a given term can be to a page.
The TF-IDF tool in WebSite Auditor uses the similar algorithm and can help you
optimize your pages for topical relevance – which is important in the age of
semantic search. The tool analyzes the pages of your 10 top-ranking competitors
for your target keywords and looks for topically-relevant terms and phrases that
are used by them.

In Page Audit > TF-IDF, select a page you would like to optimize, enter your target
keyword, and further analyze the Recommendations column:

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Step 5: Use the right alt texts for images

Search engines can’t analyze images or read text off them — so your images’
alternative attributes are a way of telling search engine bots what the image is
about.

How-to: Use relevant keywords in the alternative text. In Content Audit,

check the Images section to see if any of your images lack alt text (Empty alt
texts), and how often your keywords are used in the alternative attributes on
the page (Keywords in alt texts). It‘s recommended that all of your images have
alternative text, and that relevant keywords are used within it when possible.

To change your alternative texts, go to Content Editor and view the page in the
Document mode. Click on any image to see the alt text it has and edit it or
create a new one.

Step 6: Go through technical factors

Although you’ve (hopefully) already run a full site audit with the help of
this guide, quickly double-checking the tech side of the specific page you’re
optimizing won’t be superfluous — especially given that you made some changes
to your HTML in the previous steps, when you were optimizing different page

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elements for your keywords.

How-to: Make sure the page is fully crawlable and readable. In Page Audit
> Technical Audit, go through Page availability to see if anything could be
making the page problematic to access. The Mobile Friendliness and Page Speed
will inform you if passes the Core Web Vitals assessment or not and if it has
any user experience issues. The Encoding and technical factors will show you if
there are any issues in your code that may make the page harder to crawl,
and its content harder to read. The URL section will tell you whether the URL
is user- and search engine friendly. Under Links, you‘ll immediately see if
there are any broken links on the page, and whether or not it‘s got too many
links overall, or too many do-follow external links specifically.

Step 7: Take the newly optimized page live

Once you’ve optimized your page’s content and HTML in WebSite Auditor, it’s
time to save and upload it to your website. No worries – it only takes a few clicks.

How-to: Upload your page to your site. When you’re done editing your page,
hit Save page to save the optimized HTML file to your computer. Next, simply
upload the page to your site like you normally would – e.g. using an FTP client –
and you’re done!
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You’re an optimization guru!

You’ve just completed the full process of page optimization. With all your page
elements optimized for your keywords and your content all around brilliant, your
landing page is probably a perfect example of on-page SEO done right. Now it’s
time to go off-page and audit your website’s backlinks!

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7 Steps to a Comprehensive
Backlink Audit
Discover all links to your site & get rid of the ones that are hurting your
rankings

Backlinks are one of the most important ranking factors to search engines. And
it’s a pretty simple idea: the more reliable, relevant resources link to a page,
the more useful and valuable that page must be (and the higher rankings it
deserves). Similarly, ‘bad’ backlinks are links from spammy or irrelevant sources
that probably appeared from old negative SEO techniques you don’t even
remember of. Such links are treated as indicators of poor quality, diminishing the
page’s value and authority in search engines’ eyes and often resulting in ranking
penalties.

This is why evaluating the status quo and auditing your site’s backlink profile is
the first off-page step to take. It’s crucial that you do backlink analysis before you
even consider a link building campaign — this way you’ll be able to eliminate all
links that may threaten your rankings, and then start clean with building fresh,
high-quality links. Here is our complete guide to quick and easy link profile audit.

Step 1: Get the most complete list of your

backlinks
To run a comprehensive and accurate backlink audit, you should definitely start
with getting a complete list of web pages that presently link to your site.

How-to: Find backlinks with SEO SpyGlass. Run SEO SpyGlass backlink audit
tool, enter your website’s URL, and let the software collect all your backlinks.

Tip 1: Pull backlinks from Google Search Console and Google Analytics.
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By default, SEO PowerSuite Link Explorer is used to collect backlinks – it‘s our
inhouse link index that‘s updated non-stop, in real time. For an even more
comprehensive backlink picture, you may want to use all 3 backlink sources
integrated into SEO SpyGlass. To do this, go to Preferences > Google Analytics
Account and enter your account credentials. To pull backlink data from Search
Console, go to Preferences > Google Search Console Account.

Tip 2: Check if all the links are still in place. It’s not always possible for link
indexes to keep up with all the changes on the Web, and some backlinks that
no longer exist in reality may still be kept in SEO PowerSuite Link Explorer,
Google Analytics, or Google Search Console. Thus, when you analyze your site’s
backlinks, you may have some non-existent backlinks messing up your stats.

That‘s where SEO SpyGlass‘ real-time link checks come in handy. To check your
backlinks in real time, go to Backlink Profile > Backlinks, select the backlinks in
your workspace, and hit to update backlink page data. Check only the
Backlink Page Info box and hang on a little while your link data is being
refreshed. When the backlink audit is complete, examine the Links Back
column: it will show whether each link is indeed found on the page with either
dofollow tag or nofollow tag attribute. If the link or the linking page has been
removed, you will see the link missing or page not found value.

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Once you’ve found such non-existent links, you can safely remove them from the
project completely (right-click the link and hit Remove backlinks from project) to
make sure you aren’t wasting your time on analyzing links that no longer exist.

Step 2: Assess your backlink profile as a whole

A link profile is made up of individual links — but before you look into the
details of each of your links individually, you need to understand how they are
performing together, and identify the core strengths and weaknesses of your link
profile as a whole. You can do that in the Summary section of the Backlink Profile
module in SEO SpyGlass. Here, you’ll find your total number of backlinks and a
wealth of important stats on them.

How-to 1: Compare your Total Links vs. Linking Domains. The total number
of backlinks your site has is a good starting point in understanding how strong
your backlink profile is. Yet multiple links coming from one and the same domain
are considered to have lower value, so unique linking domains are typically a
more reliable metric than link count.

Your link profile will obviously have considerably more total links than linking
domains, but your aim is to have as even a ratio as possible.

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How-to 2: Check the dofollow vs nofollow ratio. While it’s true that nofollow
links do not have SEO weight, a natural link profile can’t consist of dofollow links
only, so your best option is to have a natural mix of nofollow and dofollow links.

If nofollow links prevail in your backlink profile, it’s a signal to rethink your link-
building strategy and try to focus on acquiring more SEO-valuable dofollow links.

If there aren’t any nofollow links in your profile, this may be a flag that your
links were acquired in an unnatural manner and you need to further investigate
your profile for other traces of spammy techniques.

How-to 3: Assess your link profile growth over time. Go through the Live
Backlinks History to get an overview of how your backlink profile changed over
time. Review the backlink history to see if your site‘s number of backlinks has
been growing. Look for spikes to figure out which of your marketing activities
(content, campaigns, etc.) have been especially successful in attracting links.

How-to 4: See the SEO strength of your backlink profile. The audit tool
compiles a brief overview report into the PageRank and the authority of the
referring domains. InLink Rank is a metric to estimate the authority of the page

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or of the domain according to a number of search engine ranking criteria. This

metric is crucial to consider in your link building strategy to secure your site
against link penalties.

How-to 5: Analyze how many backlinks are coming from homepages. As the
homepage is the most authoritative page of a website, links appearing there can
be easily deemed as paid links — especially if their number is excessive.

If links from homepages considerably exceed links from internal pages in your
link profile, pay extra attention to these links and make sure they were built
naturally.

How-to 6: Check backlink countries. When it comes to backlink countries,

just like with other aspects of link profile audit, you should keep in mind your
links’ diversity. Yet the rule of a thumb is that if you optimize your website for a
specific geo-location, your aim is to get maximum location-relevant backlinks.

Say, if you’re a UK-based business that targets a local market, but most of your
links are coming from USA-based websites, it’s high time for you to switch to
getting good backlinks from local sites.
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How-to 7: Check top anchor texts and keywords. Irrelevant anchor text,
keyword stuffing, or too many identical anchors can get you in trouble with
search engines and cause a ranking drop.

If your obvious anchor text leaders are commercial anchors with lots of money
keywords, it’s high time to start an anchor-text diversification campaign.

Further down, you will see the Anchor texts cloud which is a visual presentation
of your anchor text density. The top anchors (often this is a branded anchor of a
company), are highlighted in larger fonts and different colors.

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How-to 8: Examine the linked-to pages. Most links your site receives will
typically point to your homepage — the first level in the structure of your
website. However, you need to balance those links by a number of other links
going to deep internal pages of the website.

If you have very few links pointing to your internal pages, it may be a good idea
to launch a thought-out content marketing campaign that earns more backlinks
for your deeper pages.

Step 3: See how your links compare to

competitors’
The next crucial step in your link profile audit is checking how it compares to
your main competitors — to identify your site’s strong and weak points and see
what will help you outrank your competition.

How-to: Add competitors’ sites for comparison. In your SEO SpyGlass project,
navigate to the Domain Comparison module and specify the URLs of your top
SEO competitors. Voila! The tool analyzes backlinks of your top ranking rivals,
comparing them against a bunch of crucial link factors, with a 1 to 5 overall rating
assigned to each site.

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Tip 1: See where your competitors’ links intersect. Looking into the
intersection in your competitors’ backlink profiles can give you insight into their
link strategy — and help spot some valuable link building opportunities for your
own site.

To do this, go to the Link Intersection submodule (still under the Domain

Comparison module) to see the domains that link to two or more of your
competitors but not to you. Such referring domains are your best candidates
in terms of link acquisition, as they are relevant to your niche, and pitching a
backlink from them will be quite natural.

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Tip 2: Explore competitors’ links in-depth. When you were adding competitors
to the competitive backlink analysis, SEO SpyGlass created a project for each of
them in the background. In the Projects drop-down menu, select a competitor
you’d like to look at in detail, and hang on a moment while SEO SpyGlass loads
all the data. Switch to the Summary module for an overview of the competitor’s
link profile. The anchor-related part can be especially useful for ideas on new
anchors for your links. Anchor diversity (unique anchors divided by backlink
count) is also an important metric to consider — it’ll give you a solid idea on how
many of your anchors you need to optimize for your target keywords.

Step 4: Pinpoint potentially dangerous backlinks

Now that you’ve reviewed your link profile as a whole, it’s time to spot potentially
dangerous links in it that may end up with link penalties. The most convenient
way to go about this is to analyze link quality by domain — it is considerably
quicker and no less effective. Especially if you have a few thousand links or more,
evaluating them by linking domain is going to save you tons of time.

How-to: Calculate Penalty Risk. In SEO SpyGlass’ Backlink Profile module, switch
to the Penalty Risk submodule — here, you’ll be able to review and analyze the
domains that link to your site. Select all referring domains and hit the Update
button to refresh on the Penalty Risk stats.

Hang on a moment while SEO SpyGlass is checking the domains. When it’s
done, click on the header of the Penalty Risk column to sort the domains by their
riskiness.

Roughly, a link with a 0 to 30% risk value is usually considered safe. A link in the
30 to 70% range may potentially be harmful, so it’s recommended that you take
a closer look at it. A Penalty Risk of over 70% is considered high and calls for
immediate action to prevent link penalties.

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For details on why any one of the domains is considered risky, click the info
button next to the domain’s Penalty Risk value. This will reveal a list of factors
that make links from this domain potentially risky.

Step 5: Re-check suspicious backlinks manually

It’s up to you how “strict” your backlinks cleaning-up will be, but removing lots of
backlinks at once may cause a ranking drop, so, not to overdo with link removal,
you need to smell-test the suspicious links manually and get rid of your links in
the most “glaring” cases only.

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How-to: Examine the risky linking domains. Still in Backlink Profile > Linking
Domains submodule, in the Linking domains tab, go through the available
columns to double-check all the suspicious links you’ve found. Select the
domains and click the update button to check if the domain is relevant to
your topic, and if the website itself is trustworthy.

Tip 1: Check how much traffic each backlink brings. Although not an SEO
factor, stats on traffic through backlinks let you see which of your links bring
actual visits to your site.

The data on referral traffic is driven from Google Analytics. So, you need to
specify your Google Analytics credentials, if you haven’t done it at the beginning,
and the audit tool will sync with your GA account and gather the traffic stats. You
can add the Referral Sessions column by clicking on the Edit visible columns button
in the upper right corner of the workspace and quickly see if the backlink pages
and referring domains bring you page views. (Alternatively, in your Backlink
Profile, switch to the Referral Traffic submodule that will give you a breakdown by
referring domains and by backlink pages).

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Now, you can see how many visitors each of your backlinks has brought in the
last 30 days in the Referral sessions (GA) column.

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Tip 2: Check InLink Rank. This metric, being an alternative to Google’s

PageRank, shows the value of your backlinks. The higher InLink Rank score
means that these links (or domains if you check Domain InLink Rank) are the
most valuable in your profile. And a low score helps you to identify low quality,
spammy links. If you see that there are such links in your profile, you should
consider removing them to stay safe from link penalties.

Tip 3: Use tags. You may want to tag some of your backlinks at this stage, so that
you can quickly sort out all the links that require further action (e.g. if you plan
to contact the webmaster to ask for link removal). To tag a backlink, right-click it
and choose Add tags to selected record(s).

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Then, use the filter tag to sieve away the bad links from the rest of non-spammy
links.

Step 6: Have harmful links taken down

Once you’ve identified dangerous links in your backlink profile, it’s time to get
rid of them without waiting for actual link penalties. The most commonly used
method of doing that is by contacting the webmasters of sites that link to you,
and simply asking them to take the links down.

How-to 1: Get webmasters’ contact details. To save time on digging up contact

info manually, you can get webmasters’ email addresses right in SEO SpyGlass.
To do that, in your SEO SpyGlass workspace, right-click the header of any column
to open the workspace editor. Add a Contact Info column to your workspace
(by double-clicking it in the list of available columns on the left), and click OK.
Now, select the links you’d like to get contact details for, hit the Update button,
and select Contact Info to be updated. The column you’ve just added will now
populate with email addresses of webmasters (if available on the website).

How-to 2: Reach out to webmasters via email. Copy the email addresses SEO
SpyGlass found for you, and send out emails to webmasters. If you only found
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a couple of spammy links, you can easily do that by composing a personal email
for each of the webmasters — but if we’re talking about dozens or hundreds of
harmful backlinks, you may want to create an email template requesting link
removal. In either case, make sure you introduce yourself in your email, mention
your position (e.g. SEO or site owner), explain that you are trying to prevent (or
recover from) a search engine penalty and would appreciate it if the link was
removed, specifying the URL of the page you found the link on.

Step 7: Disavow spammy backlinks you’re unable

to remove
If you have a large number of spammy links to your site, or if you don’t hear
back from the webmasters you contacted asking to remove the links, you can
tell Google to ignore these links by disavowing them. You can easily generate a
disavow file right in SEO SpyGlass.

How-to 1: Add links to the disavow list. In your SEO SpyGlass project, select
the backlinks you’d like to disavow. Right-click the selection, and hit Disavow
backlinks.

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How-to 2: Decide if you’re disavowing the spammy backlink only or the

whole referring domain, and add comments. In the menu that pops up,
choose whether you’ll only be disavowing the backlink page you just added
(Backlink), or the whole domain that links to your site (Entire Domain). At this step,
you can also add a comment to the records you’re disavowing. Comments are
useful for your own future reference - whenever you review or edit your disavow
file later, you’ll instantly see what kind of referring domains you were disavowing
and why.

How-to 3: Export your disavow file. After you’ve added all links you’re about to
disavow to the list, go to Preferences > Disavow/Blacklist Backlinks. At this stage,
you can edit the comments by double-clicking any comment to make changes.
Clicking Add lets you add links to your disavow links, and clicking Remove deletes
selected records from the list. In the Choose the action menu, you can select
whether you’d like to simply disavow the backlinks, disavow and exclude them
from all future updates you make in the project, or disavow and blacklist the
links (have them removed from the project completely).

Once you’re happy with your disavow list, hit the Export button and select the
folder to save the file in so that you can upload it to Google Webmaster Tools.

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How-to 4: Upload your disavow file to Google. In the Google Disavow Tool,
select your website and upload the disavow file you generated. That’s it — you’ve
told Google which of your backlinks to ignore, and your site is all set to start
clean!

Tip: Mind that every new disavow file you upload to Google will override the
previous one. If you’ve already submitted a disavow file for your site, make sure
your new file includes the previously disavowed links in addition to the ones
you’re disavowing for the first time.

Advanced SEO tips for a complete link audit.

Diversifying anchors
Link anchors is something you should have in mind in your future link building
strategy. Switch to the Anchor Texts module to have an in-depth review of your
anchor phrases. Use the drop-down arrow to filter text links and image links.
Look through the Anchor Text column. Once you find a spammy anchor or an
empty text link, check the details in the Backlinks column. See if you can request
from the referring domains to remove or alternate the surrounding link text.
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Fixing dead backlinks

For fixing dead backlinks, go to the Backlinks report and review the Linked Page
Status Code. Pay attention to Page Not Found value. If there are any domains
linking with dofollow tags to 404 pages, create such pages for the available link
or redirect such URLs to other relevant pages.

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Alternatively, switch to the Linked Pages module and filter the pages by Linked
Page Status Code to get the overview report for all your broken links. Pay
attention to linked pages with the largest number of dofollow backlinks and
referring domains. Fixing dead backlinks is a surefire way to accumulate more
link juice by a simple and timely link profile audit.

Monitor backlinks regularly not to overlook an SEO attack

Sometimes, intruders resort to negative SEO practices to hurt someone’s
rankings. If you feel there’s a high probability for an SEO attack, consider auditing
your backlinks regularly. For a professional link profile audit, SEO SpyGLass link
auditor allows scheduling tasks and alerts.

Go to Preferences > Scheduler & Alerts, click to Add a task, and select the task type
as Update backlink data. Following the wizard, define the type of backlink data to
be updated, frequency of backlink checkups and the delivery method.

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For example, you can define an alert for too many new backlinks coming from
one or only a few referring domains (which is a signal of negative SEO link-
building). You will be alerted about a sharp increase in backlinks, and you will
have time to review them and disavow before link penalties hurt your rankings.

Your link profile is all clean and shiny!

Now that you are done with backlink audit and free from spammy links, you’ve
got a clean link profile to start working on. It’s time to start building relevant,
high-quality backlinks to win search engine’s trust and respect.

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Build quality links

(with the help of LinkAssistant)

Discover the best link building opportunities & grow your link profile

Link building is perhaps the most challenging part of SEO. With Google’s growing
concern for the quality of a site’s link profile, researching link opportunities can
get incredibly hard and time-consuming. But as backlinks remain the strongest
ranking signal to search engines, link building, when done right, will bring you
better results than any other SEO effort. Follow the steps below for best working
ways to find link prospects and get them to link to your site.

Step 1. Choose your link building techniques

Review the commonly used link prospecting methods below, and choose the
ones that suite your niche best. Click on any option for a detailed description.

How-to: Review the commonly used techniques. Take a look at the link
prospecting options below, and choose the ones that suite your niche best
(click on any option for a detailed description). Don’t worry if you don’t find the
technique you’d like to use – you’ll be able to create your own, using the Expert
Mode function.

Guest posting
Writing posts or expert articles for someone else’s blog is common practice.
If the blog is an authoritative resource, a link to your website included in the
post can be of big SEO value. However, mind that large-scale guest blogging
is officially outlawed by Google. This does not mean you cannot guest blog
at all; but as a rule of thumb, it’s recommended that guest posts should
only be published on relevant sites. Avoid guest blogging networks and
websites created purely for posting articles. Detecting such sites may be
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tricky; here are the common qualities you can recognize them by:

- The site uses a standard or free design template;

- Articles and posts are not centered around any particular topic;
- There are no signs of user engagement (no comments or social shares);
- There are no real author bios;
- There are no contact details.

Online reviews
Most probably, there are hundreds of posts online written about things
related to your business. Quite often, a review of your product, company,
or service is a win-win. The blogger gets an idea for a new post that might
be useful to the blog readers, and you get quality links (as well as exposure
and additional traffic). Besides, other bloggers will see the review, and some
of them may want to write about your business, too. Once you’ve found
bloggers that are willing to write about you, make sure you collaborate with
them: send in a clear explanation of what you do and how you do it, help
with visuals and design (logo, pictures, etc.), and provide product samples if
needed.

Bloggers often publish comparison reviews. A comparison that you feel

could include your product or service can be a good spot for a [Link] can
also look for outdated reviews of products or services that are similar to
yours. These can be great places for backlinks: the page’s author may be
willing to update the copy with a description of your product and a link to
your site.

Commenting
Industry blog posts and news articles can often offer opportunities to raise
brand awareness by jumping in to the comments to share your content or
information about your products/services. However, make sure you are
careful enough not to look spammy; remember that your comments should
look natural and bring some value to the table rather than shamelessly
advertise your brand.

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Giveaways
Giveaways can be great for brand exposure and link building. Almost in any
industry, there are popular blogs and resources that run competitions and
giveaways to boost user engagement and get some extra traffic.

Offering your product or service in a giveaway is a win-win – the platform

organizing the giveaway gets something to offer, and you get brand
exposure and links from a reputable source.

Forums
Topical forums can be great spots for links and raising brand awareness.
Like with commenting, it’s important to keep your posts on forums natural
looking and bring value to the table instead of purely promoting your
product and stuffing your posts with links.

Links Pages
A lot of sites have useful resources pages. If you choose this technique,
make sure to avoid link directories created purely for link exchange. You
can easily spot such pages: typically, they’re full of all kinds of links that are
not related to a single topic, and can often include hundreds of links. Look
for non-spammy links pages that only include resources on a certain topic.

Links Submission Forms

If you wish to harness the potential of link development networks, you
can use this method to find relevant link exchange partners that use link
submission forms, and fill in these forms for you automatically. With this
feature you can get lots of link exchange partners very fast.

Directories
This method is more applicable to brick-and-mortar businesses —
make sure you don’t miss out on this opportunity if you are one. Find
local business directories, chamber of commerce listings, and business
association websites: these are good places to have links from. As a
tangible bonus, these links will bring you some extra traffic, too!
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Topical blogs
One of the most effective strategies is finding industry blogs that cover
topics related to your business, and reaching out to them asking to
feature your product or service in their posts. You can either find some
of their existing posts where you believe a mention of your product could
be included, or suggest mentioning it in a future post. Mind that such
opportunities can be paid or imply that you offer something in return to the
blogger, just like with giveaways.

This method also lets build relationships with authors that can grow into
lasting partnerships.

Competitor backlinks
Uncovering the link profiles of your top ranking competitors is perhaps one
of the most effective link building tactics. Looking at a successful
competitor’s links lets you easily spot hundreds of potential link
opportunities of all kinds – reviews, blog posts, forum threads, and what
not.

Your Backlinks
Find backlinks that already point to your site and analyze their value.

Step 2: Discover quality link opportunities

Now that you know which research methods you’d like to use for your link
prospecting, it’s time to get down to the actual search.

How-to: Run the search in LinkAsssistant. Create a project for your site in
SEO PowerSuite‘s LinkAssistant, hit Start a New Search, and select a method
you‘d like to use.

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At Step 2, enter your keywords and select the search engine you‘d like to
search for link prospects in. For keywords, use industry-related terms ỳ both
generic and long-tail - and even your competitors‘ brand names. If you feel you
could use some keyword ideas from Google Keyword Planner, click Get keyword
suggestions.

Right below, select a search engine you‘d like to look for prospects in, and hit
Find.

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Hang on while LinkAssistant is looking for link prospects and collecting their
contact email addresses. Once the search is complete, select the prospects to add
to your project (you can keep all selected for now) and click Move to Prospects.

2. Check the value of potential links. To see how reputable your prospects are,
switch to the Prospects > Prospect quality tab, select all records in your workspace,
click , and choose factors you‘d like to update to determine the quality
of the potential link (like InLink Rank, Page/Domain Authority, Domain age, or all
kinds of social signals) and click OK.

Examine the stats and pick the top prospects. Delete the ones that you decided
against by right-clicking them and hitting Remove Link Prospect(s).

Step 3: Get in touch with link prospects

Now that you have a list of pages you’d like to get links from, it’s time to contact
the potential partners you found. Follow the steps below to learn how to
automate the process and maximize the efficiency of your outreach.

How-to: 1. Customize email templates. In Preferences -> Email Management ->

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Edit Mail Templates, you’ll find a bunch of ready-made templates that you can
customize. Pick a template that suits your niche and the nature of your request
(eg. Guest Posting Inquiry), and hit to add some details about your website
and business to make the email more personal and engaging. You can also
create your own templates from scratch – just hit to do that.

2. Email potential partners. Select the partners you’d like to contact (make sure
you select partners that belong to the same partner group). Click , pick
the email template you’ll send out to this group, and hit the OK button.

Step 4: Manage your links

Keep an eye on the links you’ve built as your link profile keeps growing.
Remember to regularly check that your links are in place, have the right anchor
text, and don’t get under a Nofollow tag.

How-to: Verify links. To check on the links you’ve built, select them in your
LinkAssistant project and hit . Select Scan only current page and click
OK.

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Once the verification is complete, right-click the header of any column in your
LinkAssistant workspace, select Verification Passed from the list of available
columns and hit OK.

In the Verification Passed column, examine the verification status of each of your
partners. Look out for links that come back with a No status (these links are no
longer found on the backlink page), get under a Nofollow tag, or have wrong
anchors. When necessary, contact your link partners right from LinkAssistant (by
selecting the partner in your workspace and hitting ) and shoot them a
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message explaining your problem or request. Remember to regularly check your

inbox in LinkAssistant’s Email module, and try to promptly respond to partners’
emails.

Remember to regularly check your inbox in LinkAssistant’s Email module, and try
to promptly respond to partners’ emails.

Enjoy top rankings!

Congrats - you’ve set your link building campaign in motion! This is the last
step in our SEO Workflow series, so if you followed the instructions from the
previous guides, you should be starting to see your rankings grow very soon.
Do not forget that that all the work you’ve done requires maintenance though:
remember to track your rankings in Rank Tracker, regularly check your site
against all kinds of issues in WebSite Auditor, monitor your link profile’s growth
in SEO SpyGlass, and verify individual links in LinkAssistant.

Happy SEOing!

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Use social listening to boost SEO

(with the help of Awario)

It’s more or less established that social media signals have an indirect impact
on search results. This is the result of Google striving to become more objective
in its rankings and see content as people do. And people care a lot about what
social media says. Imagine looking up and finding out it has tons of negative
feedback on social networks. Would you go with it? This is why Google is looking
at both volume and sentiment of brand mentions online, and SEOs strive to take
care of both.

Having said that, link building hasn’t gone anywhere — it is still at the core of any
SEO strategy. And it makes sense to use the ever-expanding social media simply
to get more links.

Let’s see how social listening can help make your SEO strategy truly
comprehensive.

Step 1. Keep an eye on your brand’s reputation

Since Google uses sentiment analysis of mentions and reviews to prevent
negative advertising, it’s necessary to take care of how your brand is perceived
online. Also, it’s important to prevent your brand from getting into social media
crises, as it can cause not only reputation problem, but also a sudden ranking
drop.

How-to: 1. Find all mentions of your brand keywords. Open Awario and type
in your brand name to create an alert. Feel free to add several keywords: your
company’s Twitter handle, hashtags, and alternate versions of the brand name.

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Once you create an alert, Awario will gather mentions of your brand in real time
from all major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit,
etc.), blogs, forums, news sites, and the Web.

How-to: 2. Look at the sentiment of your brand. Go to the Dashboard to

see the Sentiment analysis along with all the other main information on your
mentions.

You can check the sentiment analysis at any time. If at some point you notice a
spike in negative mentions, then you might be at risk of a social media crisis. Just
click on the negative mentions in the chart, and you’ll be taken straight to your
Mentions Feed so you can see what’s going on in real time.
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Step 2. Grow brand mentions

There’s enough evidence to suggest that “implied links” or “linkless mentions”
already play a role in rankings and will play a much bigger one in the future. To
grow brand mentions, you’ve got to know where your existing mentions come
from.

How-to: 1. Look at your mentions’ stats. Go to the Dashboard and see which
sources your mentions come from and what the languages and locations of your
mentions are:

How-to: 2. Find your social media influencers. Go to the Influencers report

to see the list of people who’ve already mentioned your brand sorted by their
number of followers.

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How-to: 3. Find new social media influencers in your niche. Click next
to the Mentions module in the sidebar to create an alert for your industry. Insert
keywords that best describe your field of work.

And go to Influencers to see the list of influencers in the niche.

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How-to: 4. Engage with influencers. Influencer marketing is based on building

a relationship with your influencers. This comes down to engaging with chosen
influencers on social media (“liking”/sharing their posts), mentioning them and
linking to them in your posts, and commenting on their blog. You can do that
straight in the app:

Keep in mind that it’s usually more fruitful to target micro-influences — people
with a couple of thousands of dedicated followers.

How-to: 5. Reach out to influencers. Give the influencers a short explanation

of who you are and what your brand is (hopefully, they’ll recall you from your
interactions), what you would like the influencer to do, and what’s in it for them.
In some cases, after you’ve engaged enough, you can just ask for a mention of
your brand. In others, influencers won’t do that without a monetary reward. But
in most cases, it’s about some mutual favors, like an extended software trial.

Step 3. Find unlinked mentions and turn them

into links
Link building is still at the core of every SEO strategy, meaning that it’s important
to use every opportunity for getting a backlink. One of the apparent ones is
taking unlinked mentions on blogs, forums, and news sites, and asking the
webmasters and authors to turn them into links. The problem is, SEO tools don’t
look for linkless brand mentions. But a social media monitoring tool does.

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How-to: 1. Find unlinked mentions only. Click on . Then choose Boolean

in the Choose Alert Mode window. Boolean search is an advanced way to work
with almost all search engines. It allows users to combine keywords with
Boolean operators (AND, OR, AND NOT and etc.) and find exactly what you‘re
looking for.

In text:
(+”Link Assistant” OR +”SEO PowerSuite”)
AND NOT
link:”*.[Link]/*”
AND
lang:en
FROM web,news-blogs

If you write one exactly like this, you’ll find all mentions of Link Assistant or SEO
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PowerSuite that don’t link to our website [Link]. We’re only

interested in mentions in English that come from news/blogs and other websites
(excluding social media). your brand. In others, influencers won’t do that without
a monetary reward. But in most cases, it’s about some mutual favors, like an
extended software trial.

How-to: 2. Reach out to the mention’s author and ask about the link. Thank
the author for mentioning your brand and ask to link to your site. In most cases,
it’s not a problem for the author, and they’ll gladly add the link.

Step 4. Find guest blogging opportunities.

Guest blogging is an SEO technique that essentially never dies. However, it’s
not as easy of a task as it seems: popular blogs are easy to find and hard to get
published on; smaller blogs are hard to find because they don’t pop up in your
Google search. Social listening helps you find blogs that are less popular but
equally relevant.

How-to: 1. Find relevant blogs. Click on . Then choose Standard. Fill out
the form using keywords that best describe your niche and other fields if
relevant, and choose News/Blogs in the sources.

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Then click . While social media accounts are monitored in Awario

in real time, it may take longer for websites. It’s better to let the search run for a
couple of days, so that it finds you more news sites and blogs to contact.

Once you have enough results to work with, you can sort your feed by Reach to
see the most popular blogs first.

How-to: 2. Find social media influencers in

your industry. Jump to How-to: 2. Find your
social media influencers.

How-to: 3. Choose individual users, click on

their account, and look at their bio. In the bio,
you’ll very often see a link to the user’s niche
blog.

How-to: 4. Reach out to the blogger. Follow

the link to see if the blog is relevant, and reach
out to the influencer asking for a guest post.

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Step 5. Learn from your competitors.

In SEO, competitor research is an undoubtedly an important aspect. It’s the same
when it comes to the intersection of SEO and social media marketing. You’ve
got to know where your competitors guest post, what influencers they work
with, what’s their growth strategy. For that, you’ve got to create an alert for your
competitor(s).

How-to: Create an alert for your competitor(s). Click on and specify

the brand name of your competitor. Go to Alert Comparison to see how
you compare in terms of mentions’ volume, sentiment, locations, sources,
influencers, etc

Do not neglect Social Media, and it will work for you.

Social listening is the easiest way to know the impact social media has on your
brand and to control this impact in the way that helps your rankings.

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 Start rocking SEO with
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