What Is Backlink Management? A Quick Guide

If you want your website to play in the big leagues for search rankings, having a backlink management strategy is essential. Over 90% of the top websites for search results have backlinks. How can your business manage backlinks effectively?

What Is Backlink Management?

Your goal is to create a healthy variety of inbound links for SEO. Successful link management involves a few pillars:

• Creating a smart strategy to get new backlinks consistently
• Regularly checking your existing backlinks
• Optimizing the quality of your links
• Fixing backlink issues

These tasks take time, but they’re worth the investment. Backlinks support search rankings, website traffic, leads and sales.

What Is an Example of a Backlink?

Backlinks are hyperlinks that direct traffic from outside websites to your site. Imagine that your website is www.mybusiness.com. Whenever another website shares a link to www.mybusiness.com, you score another backlink.

Backlinks for Helpful Information

Other websites give you backlinks because you have high-quality information they find helpful. See how this can happen.

You Create a High-Quality Guide

You write a 2,000-word blog article, “How To Choose Liability Insurance for Small Businesses.” This in-depth article has expert tips. One recommends extra insurance for high-risk work environments such as machine shops.

Another Website Sees Your Content

A trusted website like Forbes.com also wants to cover liability insurance. The article writer saw your guide and loved the tip about machine shops.

The Website Gives You a Backlink

The Forbes writer included your idea in the company’s new article, “10 Tips for Small Business Liability Insurance.” The article links to your blog. You have your first backlink.

Other Sites Notice You

Forbes.com is a trusted industry resource. When other websites prepare articles about liability insurance, they may see the link to your blog article. They decide to link your page, too, and your backlink management pays off even more.

Backlinks for Statistics

Everyone loves statistics. They’re powerful and attention-grabbing. That makes them a goldmine for backlinks. Check out this example:

• Over 310 million people use smartphones in the United States
• Nine out of every 10 people have a smartphone
• Experts expect smartphone sales to reach over $100 billion in 2023

Those impressive statistics come from a Statista article. Now, we’ve given Statista a backlink. You can also attract backlinks if you include original statistics in your content.

What Are the Three Types of Backlink Management?

Three types of backlinks stand out: editorial, guest blog and business listing backlinks.

1. Editorial Backlinks

An editorial backlink is the same as our example with Forbes.com. It means other websites cite your article as an authoritative source.

This type of link is the golden goose of backlink management. It significantly increases search traffic and offers huge benefits for search ranking. When search engines see that a website they trust has backlinks going to your article, they trust your article more.

2. Guest Blog Backlinks

If your content impresses other websites enough, they may agree to let you write a guest blog for them. This quip-pro-quo strategy is one of the best ways to strengthen your backlink profile. That’s why a whopping 65% of SEO pros (statistics, baby!) use it.

Returning to our Forbes.com example, imagine the site reaches out after your liability insurance piece. The editor wants you to write an article for Forbes about “Top Workplace Hazards in Small Businesses.”

In that guest article, you can share links pointing back to your website. This type of backlink management has the same impact as editorial backlinks but via a guest blogging relationship.

3. Business Listing Backlinks

When you fill out a company profile on well-known business listing sites and share your website address, Google gives weight to the backlinks. Popular listings include:

• Google Business Profile
• Yelp
• LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.
• Better Business Bureau
• Hotfrog
• InsiderPages

This third type of backlink tells search engines that you established your company and it is legitimate.

How Can You Manage Your Backlinks?

Effective backlink management is like taking care of a car. You should provide your vehicle with high-quality parts, be proactive about maintenance and correct issues quickly. Those three principles also apply to backlinks.

Invest In the Best Content

If this point wasn’t clear enough throughout the article, we’ll emphasize it again: Amazing content is the end-all-be-all of backlink building and management. It’s the pumpkin in your pumpkin pie and the pineapple in your pina colada.

Use Backlink Management Software

How many backlinks do you have right now? If you don’t know the answer, backlink monitoring tools can help. They show:

• How many links have pointed to your website
• Which sites have given you backlinks
• Which of your pages have attracted backlinks
• What backlinks have broken

There are plenty of free and paid tools for link management, such as:

• Moz Link Explorer (free)
• Semrush (free trial)
• Ahrefs Site Explorer (paid)

Tracking this data gives you valuable information for a link-building strategy. If a popular website has a backlink to one of your pages, why not ask about a guest blog opportunity?

Repair Backlink Issues Quickly

Imagine going through all the work of acquiring authoritative backlinks only to lose them because of broken pages on your website. Your backlink manager needs to step in immediately.

Knowing how to manage your backlinks helps you avoid this problem in the first place. Always check backlinks before updating your site layout. Don’t delete blogs and guides with a lot of backlinks. Instead, update them.

Eliminate Toxic Backlinks

Not all backlinks are good for your SEO. Some spammy, low-quality sites try to seem legitimate by piggybacking on your success. This can potentially drag your search rankings down.

To shake off these toxic web “parasites,” the Google disavow links tool can help. This is an advanced tool that only your backlink manager should use. It “cuts” your SEO connection with those sites.

Why Choose Our Team for Backlink Management?

At BKA Content, we’re experts in link building and backlink management. Plus, we’re famous for our phenomenal content. We can save you time and money with our white-hat link-building and blog writing services. See the results for yourself right away.