One of the best things you can do for your SEO reach is to acquire a decent catalogue of backlinks. That is, reputable websites that link back to your own, because your content is relevant to their audience. But how do you keep track of this constantly moving network of sites and links?

Backlinks from Neil Patel

Neil Patel is a SEO guru who has created a whole host of tools for marketers to manage their online presence. His latest, Backlinks, is simple to use but very powerful.

To get started, all you need to do is paste your homepage URL into the search bar:

You will be shown a variety of charts, graphs and statistics about the SEO performance of your website. The one to pay attention to looks like this:

Clicking on any of the bars in the graph will show you where the links have been lost or gained, as well as which exact page on your site they contained a link to:

From here, you can visit the sites in question and investigate why you have lost the link. A decent number of these will be expired domains, and clearly there’s nothing you can do about those. However, if the site is still active, your next move should be to research who the site owner is. Hunter.io is the Spotler team’s favourite tool for this stage, as it works with the majority of websites (sadly it no longer works with LinkedIn, as it did when first launched). Then reach out to them with a personalized message:

 

Hi Simon,

Hope all is well. I noticed that you removed a link to my article on B2B email subject lines.

I don’t know if you have seen it recently, but I just updated the article and included tips on using emojis and statistics to earn attention: https://spotler.co.uk/email-subject-lines-live/

Would love to see you add the link once more.

If you think I need to do anything to make the article more relevant to your audience, please let me know.

Best regards,

Richard Wall

 

We can’t promise that everyone will respond positively, or even at all, but even a 20% success rate will have a significant impact on your SEO performance. The way to get the highest response rate is to check regularly, and target the most recent removals first, while the site owner is likely to still remember your content.