Introduction
As your brand builds its presence online and continues to create newsworthy content, it’s important to track the backlinks acquired via company content and news.
This will help to prove the value of the content that is being produced as well as help measure brand awareness & the impact that your company is having in industry and across news-sites globally.
How to Find Backlinks: Globally & Campaign-Specific
There are several tools & resources that can be used to locate backlinks (check/pull data in the following order):
- Resource #1 – Google Analytics
- Resource #2 – SEO & PR Tools (like Ahrefs, SEMRush, Muckrack, etc.)
- Resource #3 – Google Search Results
Let’s dig into each of the tools & methods for finding backlinks in order of priority/accuracy for locating backlinks.
Google Analytics
Follow the steps below to locate backlinks through Google Analytics (GA) for a specific campaign:
- Login to your GA account
- Make sure that the correct domain is being searched
- Within the left-hand panel, select:
- Acquisition > all traffic > referrals
- From the referral traffic page, you’ll want to select:
- Landing page as the Primary Dimension + Add a secondary dimension for “Full Referrer” & select “Advanced filters”
- Within the advanced filters make sure you have this set to “include” “Landing Page” “containing” and within the “containing field” type in whatever landing page you’re looking to track backlinks from & click “apply” for results.
- From here, you’ll need to examine the list of URLs that show up after you select “apply” as you’ll likely see some examples here of several link types.
- Full domain URL: If a full domain is displaying it’s likely because a story discussing your campaign topic may have been located on the domain’s homepage for a short amount of time and someone clicked the campaign link from the homepage to our SimpleTire landing page.
- We won’t want to include any full domain links since they aren’t permanent, so this link will require a site search to locate the specific URL with a backlink tied to it.
- To complete a site search, open Google and type in “site:” and after, paste the full domain URL with no spaces. Add a space & then in quotes type in the name of the campaign LP you’re looking for and hit enter.
- This will display results of all backlinks to a given SimpleTire page from this domain.
- Specific URLs: If a specific URL is displaying, visit the specific URL and make sure that you can locate the backlink associated with your website. Note, just like with full domain URLs showing in the GA report, sometimes you’ll see category, tag, or archive pages listed. For these, additional searching on the website for the actual article containing the link is necessary
- Short links: Links developed by internal teams for things like social share-outs, etc.). Do not include these types of links as backlinks.
- Full domain URL: If a full domain is displaying it’s likely because a story discussing your campaign topic may have been located on the domain’s homepage for a short amount of time and someone clicked the campaign link from the homepage to our SimpleTire landing page.
- You’ll only want to include the specific URLs that contain the link back to SimpleTire.com for tracking, so this will take a bit of eyeballing to determine which links you’ll want to include on your list of total links.
- After you’ve located all of the backlink URLs for your campaign, add them to your backlink tracking file & fill in all of the columns for additional information about the links.
- Notes:
- If ever you have a question about whether or not to include a URL as a backlink, contact the SEO Team or the Marketing Team to verify.
- If there is ever a desire to use GA to help verify which backlinks are providing the most value outside of pure SEO value, instead of using the advanced filters to look at specific landing pages & full referrer names, you’d simply look at total “referrals” and eyeball the “source” results by whichever metric you’d like – i.e., users, new users, etc.
SEO & PR Tracking Tools
Depending on the SEO tool used, you might locate backlinks in different ways. We’ll focus on the most reliable and used tools for this process. For additional information, or other helpful tools you can use, contact the SEO Manager.
SEO Tool #1 - Ahrefs
- Login to your Ahrefs account & follow these steps:
- In the search field type-in the full landing page URL you are searching for backlinks for without the https:// or www. Note: If doing a global search to see all backlinks to the domain as a whole, simply type in “example.com” without any specific landing page reference
- Select “Backlinks” from the top panel to see all of the backlinks pointing to this landing page
- Record each of the backlinks that display here making sure to avoid duplicates with links you’ve already pulled from GA (you can also just record all links and remove duplicates at the end if that’s easier)
- Note: Backlinks take a bit of time to display under ahrefs.com (they are crawling the entire internet to find these – smaller or lesser known sites that link to your domain will take longer to show in reports) so you’ll want to wait ~1-2 weeks before searching for links using this method. Ideally, you would check back after one month as well to catch any stragglers.
SEO Tool #2 - SEMRush
- Login to your SEMRush account & follow these steps:
- In the search field type in the full landing page URL you are searching for backlinks for without the https:// or www.
- If doing a global search to see all backlinks to the domain as a whole, simply type in “example.com” without any specific landing page reference
- Select “Backlinks” from the top panel to see all of the backlinks pointing to this landing page
- Record each of the backlinks that display here making sure to avoid duplicates with links you’ve already pulled from GA (you can also just record all links and remove duplicates at the end if that’s easier)
- In the search field type in the full landing page URL you are searching for backlinks for without the https:// or www.
- Note: Backlinks take a bit of time to display under SEMRush.com (they are crawling the entire internet to find these – smaller or lesser known sites that link to SimpleTire.com will take longer to show in reports) so you’ll want to wait ~1-2 weeks before searching for links using this method. Ideally, you would check back after one month as well to catch any stragglers.
PR Tool #3 - MuckRack
- Set up Alterts with MuckRack to track mentions of your brand. For any new campaign, we’ll want to set up the same type of tracking [i.e., in this case we’d want to track mentions of “[brand name]” and any other spellings or associations people might make to our campaign(s)].
- This will help us to track, capture and also verify any new links coming in.
Google Search Results
Follow the steps below to locate backlinks through a simple search on Google:
- Visit google.com
- Search for the campaign you are looking to track in a few different ways until you think you’re getting the correct search results.
- Always include a search modifier to remove URLs from the results to clear out any noise: -unurl:https://www.exampleurl.com
- This can also be used to clear out sites that might have a lot of pages listed in the results, but are either links you already have recorded, or not links you plan on recording
- Ex: Yahoo News picks up the article and it is referenced on may pages on their site, but you’ve already recorded the post from them that contains the backlink – use the search modifier: -inurl:https://www.yahoo.com to remove these results
- At a minimum: scan the first 3 pages of search results & At a maximum: scan the first 10 pages of search results and eyeball the URLs/descriptions below the URLs within search results to locate links associated with your campaign
- This can also be used to clear out sites that might have a lot of pages listed in the results, but are either links you already have recorded, or not links you plan on recording
- Notes:
- If you’re hitting completely irrelevant sites after page 3, try a slightly different search or use a different set of search terms that will hone in on what the campaign was about and go through the process again.
- Anything you type within quotes on a Google Search will only return results with an exact match to the words within quotes. Search with or without quotes depending on your needs and what returns the best results.
- Always include a search modifier to remove URLs from the results to clear out any noise: -unurl:https://www.exampleurl.com
Additional Tools & Things to Keep in Mind
Tools to download:
In order to verify whether a link is “follow” or “nofollow”, you’ll need to search for backlinks using Google Chrome. Within Chrome, you’ll need to download the NoFollow Google extension. Once the extension is downloaded onto your Chrome browser, you’ll know whether or not a link is a follow or nofollow link based on how it appears within your window.
- Follow links will appear without a red dotted box around them
- NoFollow links will appear with a red dotted box around them
Backlink tracking file:
In order to track and verify the backlinks that you get both globally for your website as well as for specific PR or link building campaigns you may be running, use a backlink tracking file & update it once/month for all new backlinks.
Things to keep in mind:
- Links can take time to be captured by certain tools so you’ll want to wait a bit after a campaign launches to see what backlinks were acquired
- Content can take time to mature & grow in awareness so you’ll want to check for backlinks and new backlinks several times throughout a campaign. Check for new backlinks once a month for 1-3 months (depending on initial popularity) to keep up with new backlink captures.
- If you’re targeting specific websites with a given campaign, make sure to also follow up with any websites and manually check any websites you’ve outreached to in order to track the backlinks received from these campaigns & outreach efforts.
