How Data Gathering Can Help With Building a Backlink Profile: 4 Methods to Get Backlinks

Olga Myhajlovska 16 Aug 2021 6 min read

Information has always been the cornerstone of virtually everything in our lives, especially businesses: We need the information to understand what to do and how to do that in the best way possible to achieve our goals. With the birth of the internet, the amount of information in the world started becoming more accessible and has been growing exponentially ever since.

Today, it’s impossible for a business to become successful without the active use of data gathering and processing — especially if this business wants to be active online. One should put quite a lot of effort into promoting a corporate website to get visitors coming to it and raise brand awareness.

One of the methods that help to promote a site is building a backlink profile — and data gathering can greatly help you in this mission. In this article, we'll explore the ins and outs of backlinks and how data can help you acquire them easier.

What does a good backlink profile look like?

Let's start with the definition: As the name suggests, a backlink is a link that Website A points back to Website B with.

There are a few criteria that determine whether a backlink profile is high-quality and search engines will consider a website those backlinks point to a useful source of information for users. That’s why you can’t just place links to your site on any site you find. Those links should be:

• Placed on websites that have already gained the trust of the audience that might be interested in your site.
• Carefully incorporated in content that is valuable to users on its own and is relevant to your target audience.
• Preferably, you must be the first one from your niche to place a link on that website.

If you check at least two of these three boxes, search engines will consider your backlinks useful and, therefore, will think your website is valuable, too. In other words, the links you place on other websites must be interesting and useful enough for a reader to click on them. That’s why it’s so important to find sites where your target audience spends enough time.

Services like Ahrefs and Backlinko gather backlink data to provide thorough reports on websites' backlink profiles. Here's how it looks:

How can data help you to build a good backlink profile?

Data gathering helps businesses to navigate through the complex maze that Big Data is. There is so much information online that a human being is unable to process it — and if one could do that, it would take a tremendous amount of time for them to do so.

That’s why data gathering specialists use tailored robots — web crawling bots — that go through destination websites, gather all the necessary and publicly available information and bring it to the data specialist. The latter then uses a program that processes that mass of gathered data, structures it, and transforms it into a format easily understandable by a human. Data gathering can be a great aid in building a backlink profile, and here is how:

Find mentions of your brand that have no link

You can’t really know all the mentions your brand gets because it’s impossible for us to monitor all the resources all the time and process the content, so a good tactic is to use data gathering to look for unlinked mentions of your brand. Once you find those, you can contact the website owner and ask them to add a link to your website. Most likely, they will agree to do that for a small fee or even for free.

You could set up your data gathering bot to go through relevant websites, for example, once a week, and fetch you any mentions it can find. It is a great and simple tactic to quickly get new backlinks.

Look for your competitors’ activity

It’s always valuable to know what your rivals are up to. Scan the internet for backlinks to your direct or possible competitors and see where they post links to their websites. It will help you to gain a better understanding of their tactic as well as new insights on which platforms you could include in your pool. It’s always necessary to look for new places where you can find your target audience, and scanning the backlinks of your competitors is a good way to do that.

Find a new niche

As we’ve mentioned, it’s important to place your backlinks on sites where your competitors haven't stepped foot yet. A good way to do that would be to think about which adjacent topic you can grab that will be relevant to your target audience. For example, if your brand sells lingerie, you could make “bringing confidence to your clients” your motto, and start exploring the field of psychology. Then, you’ll be able to cover all the websites that talk about this topic. By doing that, you will both become the first among your rivals on these platforms and get access to a new cluster of your target audience.

Also, you could look for user-generated content your target audience creates to see what they look for and what else they’re interested in. This might help you to discover new approaches and ideas that will let your brand win the competition.

Collect SERP data

Search Engine Result Pages or SERPs contain valuable data on the best keywords relevant to a certain topic and the content that was top-rated lately. Keywords will help you improve the search engine optimization of your site as well as find new ideas for content. And the highest ranked content will obviously bring you some insights, too.

Building a sustainable backlink profile is much more than just placing dofollow links everywhere. To do a really good job, one needs to have enough data to study and base their decisions on. That’s where data gathering becomes truly useful. It picks out bits of valuable information from enormous masses of data making them easy for us to use.

And to make sure your data gathering process is smooth and isn’t interrupted by anti-scraping measures, don’t forget to use residential proxies by Infatica: They will let your bot change IP addresses with each request to ensure that the destination website doesn’t suspect anything and will think that it’s just the ordinary user browsing pages. We’ve written a lot of valuable tips on how to streamline the data gathering process — you can read them in our blog.

Frequently Asked Questions