Analysing the link profile of your website and comparing it to your competitors is a fundamental part of any link-building strategy. The normal method is to download all of your competitors links and try to replicate them but sometimes you need to take things further and do some data analysis before you start work.
A link profile is the single biggest SEO asset that a site can have and yet not many people stop to think about what their current profile looks like before trying to improve it.
Building links is time consuming and trying to replicate your competitors 10,000 links will probably take years. The key to success is to figure out where they are beating you in terms of authority and fix that first. If a competitor has a few trusted links then you won’t beat them by going after a load of links from low quality sites.
I’m a big fan of Open Site Explorer and we use this (and the other SEOmoz tools) a lot in our link analysis but only as a source of data, the actual analysis part is done in Excel using the power of the pivot table.
One of my favourite ways to visualise a link profile is to create a pivot chart showing the quality distribution of links across whatever metric you choose. The chart above uses Domain Authority from SEOmoz (a scale of 0 to 100 with the most authoritative sites having a domain authority of 100) to compare the link profiles of Blogstorm, SEO Book and SEOmoz.
The same analysis can be performed with metrics such as PageRank, mozRank, mozTrust. One thing to remember is that Domain Authority has a slight flaw (which hopefully will be fixed soon) because it treats .uk.com sites as sub-domains of www.uk.com and also treats blogs on Wordpress.com & Blogspot.com sub-domains the same authority as the root domain.
Comparing your link profile against the top 10 competitors in your industry on metrics such as mozTrust and mozRank shows you where your site is performing badly – perhaps you have loads of trusted links but very few anchor text links from low trust type sites. Perhaps you loads of low trust links but no links from really top domains.
Once you have interpreted the data you can start to put things right.
Instructions
The first step is to download all the links from the domains you want to analyse. Open Site Explorer is good for this but you can use another tool if you prefer as long as you can populate a column with the metric you want to analyse.
Import all the links into the same sheet and add a final column called “Domain” which is the name of your site and your competitors sites so that you can identify the links to each.
Next you need to highlight the entire sheet and create a Pivot Table with the following fields:
Finally highlight the data and click on the Pivot Chart button in the options menu and you’re done.
Update: The chart above is a stacked area chart which is perhaps slightly misleading unless you are used to them, below is a non-stacked area chart which shows that the link distributions are quite similar.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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I like this sort of analysis, it’s very interesting. Can you explain why there are peaks and troughs that are consistent across all three domains, for example the drop to almost zero at around 30 on the X axis? Obviously there will be peaks and troughs but I wouldn’t expect them to line up across multiple sites like they do in the graph, unless the Domain Authority score was weighted towards particular scores for some reason.
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James, this is a stacked area chart so the peaks and troughs in the Blogstorm profile are reflected in the others, perhaps it’s a bit misleading so I added a non-stacked area chart above as well.
More comments from Patrick AltoftI see, yes, I probably should have realised that. All the same, I’m not much of a fan of the stacked graph; I don’t think it shows the data very clearly. Thanks for the clarification.
Good stuff! How do your clients respond to these visualizations usually?
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Steven they are more for our team but they are great for proposals and presentations. SEO isn’t a very visual discipline so any good visualisation strategies are well received.
More comments from Patrick AltoftOh, yes, pivot tables are like the little wonder of Excel. Experienced it so many times…but have to admit it it wasn’t for this purpose. I will try it now for sure!
That´s great data modelling. Thanks a lot for that information.
Hi Patrick, very good article, I love things which help eliminate time and I think using this technique to get a general overview of someone’s link profile. Genius, Cheers Neil
Hi Patrick, Don’t mean to spam your comments out but I really did like this idea above, I made an adjustment where I have added in Percentage of Count, as Open site doesn’t export a full list of links, this way I think you get a general more accurate view of the percentage of your competitors link profile.
Thanks for the heads up, especially the useful links like Open Site Explorer. I find that in most of my campaigns replicating well established competitors’ link profiles is often sufficient, but I note in this case you’ve really given a lot of thought to doing your research when the above method isn’t applicable. Good post!
hey, Its an really good article & instructions provided with chart analysis & pivot table is even more helpful.I will try this out for sure.Thank for the informative post!
I’m confused, though. I just got finished doing what was recommended and running a commercial ecommerce client site against 10 competitors. My client’s site was ahead of them all in almost every metric, but is below them in rankings in the major search engines. So what is my takeaway? Didn’t seem to give me much input on what to work on…
I’m interested if you’ve had this happen and what might cause it? Any comments or advice?
I’m loving this Patrick – many thanks.
Someone has finally got me pivoting!
I’ve found that using a standard line graph gives the clearest view.
More comments from RichardGreat post! This is a great way to visualize your links and competitors.
An overwhelming issue I have with the OSE data is that it doesn't factor in penalisation. I work in a keyword niche that big players buy big paid links. What I find is that often the paid links that have been penalised often lie on high PA pages, so skewers the data. Waiting for those issues you outlined to be resolved too.
Awesome article. I'm going to use this often now!!
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