How We Optimize Your Anchor Strategy for Link Building

Ranking high on a SERP can become significantly more manageable when you incorporate high performing keywords and phrases into your strategy. At Searcharoo, we know that your anchor texts must always be relevant to your target content for your Link Building strategy to work.


That’s why today, we want to share some of the magic we bring to your backlinking profile with you.

We will quickly analyze the anchor text that we would suggest for a campaign and show you how we get it done.
Here you can see the website’s position on the SERPS, the number of links ordered, and the keywords we picked up.

  • WEBSITE: https://www.wellpet.org/best-dog-canned-food-review/
  • KEYWORD: “Best wet dog food”, which is a national keyword.

All within the US search engine in Ahrefs, U.S. for western Google, and the US database in Ahrefs.

 

So, we start by checking the competition’s backlinks for WellPet’s website

Let’s check WellPet’s current position for “Best wet dog food” using Ahrefs, as opposed to what we have written down, which, as you can see below, is the 17th in the SERP. 

We initially look at the top three pages, which are essentially WellPet’s top competitors for that specific keyword. So, we want to check the backlinks for Dog Food Advisor, Dog Lovers Digest, and My Pet Needs That.

Then we make sure all links point to the URL, only do-follow links, and that they’re all sorted as first seen. This way, we can check what links have been built to their site recently to see what their trend is.

You can see what type of anchors have been built and that we have an exact match there from This Blog’s About Dogs, a very close link. However, it’s not a super-powerful domain since it is only a Web 2.0 style Blogspot.

We move to the next one, Dog Lovers Digest, and we can see there’s only one link, and it’s just a simple search.

So, on to the last one, My Pet Needs That. Which as you can see below, it has quite a few good options, potentially, to set up a competitive campaign.

But what’s more important here is that we’re looking at their philosophy of link building, and in terms of 2020, it looks like it’s only the first link that’s been built recently. We can dig deeper if we want, but it’s obvious there are not many links built to this page recently that were do-follow.

 

Next, we analyze all backlink profiles thoroughly

Of course, also not many do-follow links on the Dog Lovers Digest website and just a few more on Dog Food Advisor. But even if the last two don’t have many links going on, the main thing to note is that the first one has one exact match: it’s number one, which is a do-follow link built recently.

With all of this in mind, it is evident that Dog Food Advisor has a few more links. Then what we usually do is scroll down to check their type of anchors. Since we take all of our clients’ strategies seriously, we download each of these Backlink profiles and classify them in a spreadsheet. That way, we can know exactly what type of links have been built in a Personalized Anchor Map.

After all the analysis, we can see that one of them has an exact match:

And It’s built relatively recently, but if we scroll down further, we can see that they also have a lot more links in the past being an exact match as well:

This can potentially allow us to be more aggressive with the anchor text and go with the keyword we previously selected for the target site: Best wet dog food.

But how can we know when to be aggressive or not? Well, in Link building, it is a given that variety is indeed the name of the game, and it always pays to mix things up, so it looks organic. Use the exact match or a branded anchor one too many, and Google will definitely mark your content as spam and penalize the target domain, which brings us to our next step.

 

Check our target site’s Backlink profile and suggest our anchors

For this particular site, this step won’t take long. It is plain to see that the target website only has a few links built, and because we’ve got a five links order with them, our suggestion for Anchors would be something like this:

  1. A branded anchor.
  2. A generic anchor, usually a Call to Action.
  3. An exact match of our suggested keyword since they haven’t built an exact match before.
  4. An exact match anchor variant.
  5. A branded anchor.

That’s just off looking at the different anchors and realizing the top page’s position was quite aggressive when it comes to their “Best wet dog food” anchor history. Keeping that in mind, we can capitalize on it and increase the exact match anchor’s aggressiveness a little bit.

A recommendation for sites with similar backlink profiles/keywords would be to follow a similar pattern and then mixing it up for round 2 by going with:

  1. A generic anchor
  2. A generic anchor
  3. A branded anchor
  4. A URL anchor or naked link
  5. An exact match anchor variant.

We recommend going with an exact match anchor variant for the next links instead of an exact match to limit the risk of getting penalized. Although for the specific case of WellPet, we consider there’s not a high risk of penalization from search engines.

 

A Link Building agency with total transparency

Here at Searcharoo, we care enough to take over your Link Building efforts the right way! That’s why we have no problem in sharing our magic with you, adding link transparency to all outreach links and a dedicated Account Manager.

We take over the Link Building, and you rest easy knowing we take our time to plan a thorough anchor strategy and link sourcing for you. The best part? You can see all the links we think are best for you and their suggested anchors before they’re live!

We are your personal pre-built SEO team that makes sure you get exactly what you want! We’re ready to develop quality links that’ll make your agency, e-commerce, or personal branding website earn meaningful organic traffic and scale the SERP in no-time.

We have the Link Building expertise that can provide you with the high-quality links and high-value editorial edits relevant to your niche that you or your customers deserve.

You can take a quick tour of our highly targeted Link Packages and our professional-level Guest Post. Or, if you want, schedule a 15-minute strategy call with our SEO experts, and see how we can help your business achieve its online goals.

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