Keyword Science - Finding the Best Anchor Text for Your Link Building
Table of Contents
In this article, we are going to explore the way we perform keyword and anchor analysis for each new DFY SEO campaign that we onboard.
Using a scientific approach to plan a backlink campaign that ensures the target page’s link graph is on parity with the top-ranking page is one of the quickest ways of achieving noticeable ranking improvements.
This analysis follows the initial technical and quality audit and is a great way to make sure that we have a strong foundation in place for the link building that we will be doing throughout our campaign.
Let’s dive into the scientific method of keyword research and analysis.
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Part 1
Determining The Target Page & Head Keyword (+Main Keyword Cluster)
Following our 30 point audit of every new site we take on, we need to determine what our main target page is going to be, and what keywords we will be ranking for that page. And in many cases, this is easier said than done thanks to poor site structures and major cannibalization issues. The first step in determining if weโre facing these issues has already been done, thanks to our technical and quality audit, in particular our keyword cannibalization sheet.
Normally the client will have provided the target page(s) to rank, as well as the top 5 keywords. Otherwise, we want to determine what pages would be most valuable to rank. For most websites, these will be the homepage, service pages, or location pages. We can use Ahrefs to check the traffic and URL rating of any pages we think are of value. I also like to set up a preliminary rank tracker at this time so that I have somewhere to throw my keywords to verify the ranking pages and search volume quickly.
On this note, weโre headed to Ahrefs and GSC to see what terms our site is already ranking for.
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Determining Current Ranking Keywords (Using Ahrefs & GSC)ย
Weโre going to start by opening up the Google Search Console for this site.
- Select Your Main Site Property (Usually HTTPS://)
- Select Performance
- Widen Your Data Range To 16 Months
- Review What Queries Are Pulling Which Pages
- Write Down Relevant Queries & Their Respective Pages
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Now letโs see what Ahrefs has to say for organic keywords.
- Drop Your URL In Ahrefs Site Explorer
- Select Organic Keywords
- Again, Note What High Volume, Relevant Terms Are Ranking For Which Pages
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Now we know what pages of the site are going to be the most valuable and we should have a head keyword – highest volume, the most important term – for each page, if not additional keywords we want to target. So far we have a strong foundation for building our keyword buckets and starting our keyword strategy.
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Using The Head Keyword To Determine Competitor Pages
Having our top-level pages to target and a few keywords to is great, but itโs not really useful if we only know what weโre currently ranking for. The next thing we want to do is determine what our competitors are ranking for so that we can see:
- If there are better head keywords that we should be using
- What other high volume terms can we target on the same page with proper optimization
- Any low volume keywords or longtail keywords that we can easily rank for quickly
We want to start this process by taking our head keyword and putting it through a cloaked search. The location cloaked search isnโt necessary for national businesses but is paramount for local businesses. I useย https://www.isearchfrom.com to do this.
Reviewing the first page of Google results for our keyword, we want to pull the top 3 business competitors. This means weโll be skipping sites like Yelp and Angieโs list, among other niche-specific directories. If we find that the majority of our search results are not viable (eg, not businesses), we may need to re-evaluate our head keyword.
Once we have 3 businesses in our niche, we want to look at more than just the keywords. We want to see the site and URL structure these competitors are using, the type of content they are creating, and the type of backlinks they are getting. We also want to see if the majority of the competing sites are ranking for our head keyword with a homepage or inner page. For now, weโre going to stick to keywords and anchor text.
**Pro Tip**
You can use the Keywords Explorer feature in Ahrefs to find competitors for your main target term. A preliminary Google search is still a good idea and my preferred method for determining head keyword and competitors for local businesses, but for national campaigns, we can almost always go right to the Keywords Explorer.
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Finding Competitor Organic Keywords
Now that we have 3 top ranking sites to look at, weโre going back to Ahrefs. Weโll be using the Site Explorer feature again, the same way we did for our target site. We want to make sure that we filter to just our target URL and then head to organic keywords where we can see all of the terms that this particular page is ranking for. Of course, weโll be sorting these by volume and pulling any high volume, unbranded terms for our own keyword strategy.
While weโre here, we can also take a look at the current backlinks for the page and the site. This will help us later on when we begin the link building process, by showing us the anchor text and anchor text ratios of our competitors. And in some cases, you may be able to grab one or two more keywords from here that donโt show up in the organically ranking keywords.
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We will be looking through All Keyword Ideas, but I prefer to start with Phrase Match because these are going to be the closest to our initial search term. Having the Same Terms will also give us a number of keywords that are close to our search term. Also, Rank For is perfect if we want to see what terms we can theoretically rank on the same page, given the right content and optimization. Search Suggestions, on the other hand, is giving us other things that people have searched for in conjunction with our term, the same way that People Also Searched For on Google works. Newly Discovered keeps us abreast of anything trending related to our terms, and Questions are perfect for finding out what questions our target page content needs to answer in order to serve these queries.
Ahrefs Keyword Explorer also features the top competitors for our keyword, so again I will sometimes go through this process earlier on if it isnโt clear what my head keyword should be, or if I am having trouble pulling competitors.
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Longtail Keyword Exploration & Generation
Weโve already completed part of this process thanks to Ahrefsโ Keyword Explorer tool. Things like Phrase Match keywords and Questions are a great way to start finding and thinking up longtail keywords. Additionally, we use a free tool from Linkio that helps us to quickly generate keywords based on our desired page type.
Using Linkio weโre going to submit all variations of our brand name and our top-level or exact match keywords in the respective boxes. Then we just select our page type (you will also need to put in the city, state, and state abbreviation for a location page) and the types of anchors we want to generate. This wonโt give us any new anchors per se, so weโll just be generating Brand + Keyword and Keyword Plus & Just Part Of A Keyword. Personally I do not use this tool for partial keywords because it does not seem to be able to generate those as well.
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Clicking the Generate button is going to give us a whole slew of keywords, neatly organized by type. Weโre going to export this to .csv so that we can work with it a little more easily. I import this right into a spreadsheet and begin cleaning up the anchors, but you can work with it directly in Excel as well.
We want to make sure that our anchors read well, and of course, most tools donโt care about that. This one actually has a fair success rate, but we still want to do a run-through and make sure that our keywords sound decent and that none include things that our site doesnโt offer (in particular this tool uses the word โfreeโ in several longtails). At this point, we have a robust list of longtail keywords, including Brand + Keyword phrases.
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Bringing It All Together
Throughout this guide, I have been making a list of the anchor text Iโve found that relates to my target page. I highly recommend keeping this organized by keyword type. For instance, we use an organized Link Strategy sheet for all new DFY SEO campaigns, which splits our anchors into the following types:
- Exact Match
- Partial & Variations
- Longtails
- Branded & Brand+
- LSI & Discovered
- Page Title
- Naked URL Variations
- GEO/GEO Modified
- Generic
Quickly, weโll talk about what each of these is.
Our Exact Match, Variation, and Longtail terms are generally the ones that we want to rank for most. Exact Match, of course, will be our main terms like โNew England Roofers.โ Variations will be anything from a misspelled keyword to a similar service or topically relevant term. Longtails, as weโve just talked about, are our keywords interspersed with other words, such as โWhen To Hire A New England Roofer.โ And finally, our Partial Keywords are just that – part of a keyword such as โOur Roofersโ.
Branded and Brand+ keywords, as well as generics and Page Titles, should be self-explanatory, so we wonโt waste time on these. Briefly, our GEO Modified terms are going to only apply to local businesses and will be the reverse of our exact match terms. So in the case of โNew England Roofersโ, โRoofers New Englandโ would be our GEO Modified term. These will also include near me terms. In the event that we arenโt working with a local business, this is often changed to buy terms. And finally perhaps the most confusing, LSI terms. Latent Semantic Terms are essentially topically relevant terms. These are terms or phrases related to our main keywords but not using the same wording. My favorite example of this is โCoffee Makerโ. If you are ranking for this term, a good LSI is โEspresso Machineโ.
Getting Back On Trackโฆ
We want to make sure that our keywords are categorized correctly since weโll be using this strategy in the next phase of our campaign to setup our link building for the first quarter. Weโll also want to cross off most terms as we go so that we arenโt just reusing the same variations of our top terms, and so that we push ourselves to recheck our keywords, target pages, and progress a little later in the campaign.
You can see the full spread of keywords that weโve generated for this campaign from the Link Strategy Sheet.
Now we know the following:
- What Our Main Targets Will Be
- Our Keyword Buckets – A Wide Mix Of Keyword Types Related To Our Page
- What Terms Our Competitors Are Ranking For
- How Our Competitors Are Ranking – What Their Sites Look Like, As Well As Backlinks & Anchor Text Ratios
From here, weโre ready to get started with our action items for our campaign at last! Stay tuned to find out how we determine our anchor text ratios and link spread for the most powerful links in our campaigns.
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Part 2: Link Mapping
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Keyword Analysis & Targeting
The first step for any link building campaign that we run – including the DFY SEO, GMB, and Traffic Links packages – is to determine what pages we want to target and what anchor text would be best for those pages. This can lead to a lot of additional exploration, including content optimization, scouring competitor backlinks for link opportunities, and determining if we need to create new pages of the site to serve our desired target keywords.
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Grabbing Competitor Sites
During the keyword analysis, we should have found a list of competitor sites that we want to match our keywords up to. If we are looking at more than 1 primary page, we will need to find competitors for that line up topically with the additional pages that we are targeting. We donโt want to just pull 3 companies in the same niche and compare site by site for most clients, we want to be more specific than that in order to create a more thorough approach to our link building efforts.
To recap from part one:
- Determine your head keyword (based on volume and relevancy)
- Search this term in Google (remember to use a local cloaking search if needed)
- OR head straight to Ahrefs and put your term in the Keyword Explorer tool (here you can see the list of top competitors as well as additional relevant terms to target)
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Determining Our Target Page(s) And Link Spread
Now we need to figure out how many pages we will be targeting and how we want to spread our links. Weโll start by taking a look at the number of links we have to build. For our Local SEO Community campaign, we are on the Elite Level DFY SEO Package, so we have 15 Authority Niche Placement links to use this month. In this case, we want to target 3-4 pages of our site, and we want to make sure that we are mixing up our target pages over a 3-month span. This will allow us to get some nice links to all of our target pages and even some secondary pages, which helps immensely with our link spread and keeps us from making any one page too top-heavy with links.
How do you know if a page is or could become top-heavy?
During the technical and quality audit of a site, and even during the keyword analysis, we are looking at the number of backlinks per page (for our target pages and relevant competitor pages) and the number of backlinks for the site overall (again for our site and the competitor sites weโve pulled). This helps us to know not only how many links have been built to our main target pages, but roughly how many links we need to measure up to a respective competitor page. In many cases, weโll find that our target page already has a viable number of backlinks, if not more than enough, so weโll need to spread the links, even more, putting our main target at a minimum while choosing pages that are internally linked to this page to target instead.
How do you know what pages to target?
This one doesnโt really have one specific answer. We primarily want to target pages that have value. Most of the time we will be using the homepage and other top-level pages of the site like service pages and location pages. However, as mentioned above, there are cases where we need to find other relevant pages to target for an effective link building campaign. You can see this is the case for our main target page, for the most part.
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You can see here that we have some room to build links to our main page, but we want to be careful because 2 of our competitors have a much lower link count for their main page than we have already achieved.
For this one, we already know the spread of our pages, we just need to determine how many links we will be building per page, per month and what anchors we need to be using.
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Determining Anchor Ratios
Next, weโre going to use a few tools to determine the current spread of anchor text for both our page and competitor pages. The first of these is the Anchor Profiler Program. We want to create a new campaign for each client.
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Then we need to enter our main target keyword. Youโll notice that we can only enter one keyword here. Weโll come back to this in a moment.
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And we need to complete the branding section for our site, as well as our 3 competitor sites. We need the target URL, the brand name variations, and we will be pulling the backlinks by clicking the Ahrefs button and then uploading the file. You can pull backlinks from several sources depending on what accounts you may have.
You should also make sure that you have pulled competitors that have at least 1 backlink to the target page that we are using for comparison. The system will not let you add a competitor with no backlinks, so you may end up having to use a less relevant page of the site that does have links or finding another competitor altogether.
Anchor Profiler only allows us to enter one head keyword at a time. However, we are able to enter more than one keyword per project. Unfortunately, this means a bit more work in the long run. Below, weโll talk about another process we use primarily for inner pages and secondary targets that makes this process faster.
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Now we can see a nice visual of the ratio of anchor text types for our target page, as well as a nice pie chart showing what our average ratios should be for our page based on what competitors have going on. We also need to note that many of our anchors are currently categorized as โUnknownโ so Anchor Profiler is not going to let us proceed to the next step until we do this.
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Categorizing Anchors
The next step, and perhaps one of the most time consuming for what it amounts to, is categorizing the types of anchors that our sites have already. Remember how I mentioned that this platform only takes into account a single main keyword for analysis? That means that we need to not only categorize all of the Unknown anchors, but we also need to make sure that any additional exact match or variation terms that are not our main term are properly categorized before we proceed.
Now just rinse and repeat for the other two competitors and our own site.
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Now we have a real idea of what anchor ratio we need and we can add the total number of links to build in the box at the top right.
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Another Way To Determine Ratios
Iโve mentioned a few times, thereโs more than one way to skin this buck. Letโs take a look at how Ahrefs can help make finding our ratios a little quicker, although with a little more mental work. We use this process primarily for inner pages because these page types have far fewer backlinks (in most cases) so it is easier to absorb this data at a glance for multiple sites. We still run into one of the biggest drawbacks from Anchor Profiler here: sometimes competitors just donโt have backlinks. In these cases, we can say that backlinks are definitely not the primary reason that these pages are ranking so highly, but we still want to build links to our own site regardless.
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Starting with the analysis of our target page for Google SEO Training, you can see that we have a higher ratio of Longtail anchors, typical for an inner page of this type.
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And for a competitor for the term GMB SEO Course, you can see that the site we pulled is a homepage, so weโre seeing more branded than an inner page might have. Our second competitor had no backlinks.
We always keep in mind that a good mix for an inner page is: Generic, Longtail, and Branded. We normally stay away from an exact match on blogs and long-form content pages, but we do use them on occasion for the service and location pages.
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Deep Links
Part of a strong anchor strategy is making sure that we arenโt just throwing all the links at one page. But we also donโt want to water down our link building efforts by just targeting random pages of the site. Instead, we need to go deep. Check out this video overview of how we find blogs and other relevant internal pages to target that either already link back to our main page or can do so easily.
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Building Our Link Plan
Weโre finally ready to start tallying up our links for the quarter! We have a total of 45 links to build, and weโll be splitting these across our five main target pages, as well as some of our blog posts. Generally, we donโt spread the links across this many pages for the first quarter, but we are working with a well-established site plenty of nicely built and optimized target pages that we can drive traffic to. So from here, weโre going to be spreading our links pretty evenly across 3 pages per month, mixing those pages each month for the first quarter.
We can now head back over to Anchor Profiler to see what anchor text it suggests we use for our main target page.
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We want to do no more than 15 links to this page this quarter, and this platform is telling us all of those should be branded. We do not have an exact match brand name, so this is generally fine. However, we know that this is an established site and much of our anchor text is branded already. So for this one, weโll do primarily branded but sprinkle in some safe longtail or partial anchors in month 2 or 3. Weโll now repeat this process using either Anchor Profiler or Ahrefs for all additional pages that we want to target.
At the beginning of quarter two, weโll take another look at our pages to determine which are doing well and can have the same or even fewer links for quarter two, and which might need more links to see the right level of improvement.
You can find the full monthly link building strategy for this campaign here.
Wrap Up
We run our link building campaign monthly. The early months focuses on establishing a branded and generic backlink profile from blogs and content that are niche-specific.ย
We then boost those links using more aggressive anchor text.
All of this link building and link “boosting” is designed to do one thing. Build the authority of our targeted pages. It increases their PageRank.ย
This leads to an increase in keywords our page will be shown for, and also an increase in our search engine ranking position for those keywords.ย
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It is still early on in the campaign, but the pages are gaining keyword market share very quickly.
And we expect, using our link building strategy based on the anchor text and link mapping that we laid out above, to see these gains continue over the months to come and we will update this post periodically.
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