Chapter 5 - External Link Profile benchmarking and Reputation Management

Hopefully, you won’t have disgruntled customers denigrating your company on any of the platforms in Stage 1 or worse still creating dedicated [yourwebsite]sucks.com types of sites to try and spite you. If you have, then you need some professional help beyond the scope of this guide.

However, many of the sites mentioned in Stage 1 are important in helping create a positive image of your business. So manage your reputation on these sites.

Get your customer support people to ask happy clients for a review on one of these sites and rotate this until you get good coverage and a solid rating and reputation across all of them.

If you are not sure which sites are the most important for your niche, then you can research them for free in the Authoritas SEO Visibility Tool. Discover which sites are ranking well in the SERPs for your related keywords and target them.

Here’s an example of software review sites that we analysed for our own internal marketing.

This shows us that G2.com is the most visible website in the UK for software reviews in general.

You can then filter this view to only look at their Visibility for relevant keywords and in our example we found that leading review sites like Capterra and G2 ranked in the top few places for very relevant keywords.

It then becomes essential to manage (and even consider advertising) on these software comparison review sites as they may help your overall SEO visibility but more importantly they can bring you relevant buyers.

Can we help?

If you are looking for an easy way to automate much of the advice given in this guide, then please book a call with one of our platform experts to explore whether we have what you need.

Many tools such as Authoritas allow you to analyse your backlink profile at a domain level.

However, this can be far more useful and informative if you look at your individual key landing pages and compare the relevance and Authority of your landing pages to your competition.

At Authoritas we have always recommended Majestic link data – but whichever link data you use, try and assess topical relevance as well as domain or page authority metrics (whether you prefer Majestic or Moz or your own in-house metris).

Figure 1 – Quality and Relevancy Matrix

With the Authoritas platform you can define a list of relevant terms and when we re-crawl the backlinks we get from Majestic to your site we add an additional layer of value helping you to see whether the links are from relevant or influential sites.

If you also add competing pages to the link analysis section then you should be able to download the data and produce a simple scatter graph in a platform of your choice (Excel, Google Data Studio, Tableau, PowerBI, etc) which will give you a good indication of how you fare against the competition.

Figure 2 – Comparative Link Velocity

It’s also important to monitor the rate at which you are comparing links to your competitors.

You can do this automatically in the Authoritas dashboard.

Now that you have identified the gaps between you and your competitors and the velocity at which your competitors are gaining or losing links, all you need to do is build more quality links than your competitors.

How to do exactly this will be the subject of another complete ultimate guide in the series.