90 Digital CEO Nick Garner gives us an overview on the metrics to use for when prospecting for links in this edition of CalvinAyre.com’s SEO Tip of the Week.
So which domains are the ones worth pitching for a link?
For better or worse, in SEO, links are still a huge ranking signal. As a result you will have to get links if you want to rank, especially in iGaming where only a tiny number of phrases are genuinely money making. So the question is what metrics are good indicators for an SEO’er when looking at domains to pitch for links…
Before I go into all of that, it’s important to talk about the high level overview here. The goal here is to process as many domains as possible in the shortest time possible and have the most accurate hit rate from manual review to conversion.
Relevance is important because you are more likely to get a link from a site relevant to your topic and also I think there has been a shift to topical relevance being more important in deciding the value of a link. It kind of makes sense that a site about casinos should like to a site about casinos…rather than a site about cars linking to a casino site.
Page level metrics because ultimately its the PageRank on a given page that affects the power of a link to my site. As you know a page might be a home page or some interior page on a site, but whatever page it is; I want it to have good metrics!
The other metric I love is Trust Flow. For a while I was a bit neutral on it, but after I asked one of my team to do some data crunching on its correlation between traffic and the trust flow metric, I was really surprised by how effective it is as a predictor of rankings and traffic from Google.
The article going into the number is here
So when there are high trust flow metrics associated with a domain, its a pretty sure bet that that site also ranks well. Of course that isn’t necessarily the case with lower trust flow domains i.e. ones in the zero to 25 range, so I use one other metric to double check if a domain is interesting to me or not…
SEMRUSH will show me the number of keywords, the search volumes associated with the keyword and the value of the organic traffic from those keywords. Of course its only a high level snapshot, but its enough for me to know whether a site is on Google’s rankings.
Output in Excel looks like this:
To recap, By putting these metric together, I can sort through 1000’s of domains really quickly and throw out the junk, allowing me to zero in to the domains that matter for link prospecting.
