Sometimes success really is about who you know, and in the SEO world, we mean who you secure backlinks from. Backlinks are integral to helping you climb higher on search engine results pages (SERPs), and Google pays close attention to what domains are referring to you.
Because of this, backlinks are an important component of any SEO strategy. But how do you know when someone links to your content? As we’ll cover, there are a couple of ways you can check the backlinks of a website. In this post, we’ll cover how to check backlinks on Google Search Console and with a third-party tool.
Why should you check backlinks in Google?
Simply put, a backlink—at times called an inbound or incoming link—is when one website links to another. They’re typically there to point the reader to a relevant source for further reading and more. It’s kind of like a referral being given to another’s content. Backlinks are critical for building your website authority with Google, which helps you with SERP rankings.
Backlinks come with a lot of considerations, like who is backlinking your content, where they’ve placed your link, and how relevant your content is. For example, if you wrote a blog post on the best treat dispensers for cats and have a backlink from a pet store website, that’s probably a win!
Let’s cover some of the many benefits that backlinks offer.
Checking backlinks will help you establish authority
No content marketer wants to remain buried in millions of search results, but the only way to rank as high as possible on SERPs is to establish your authority. Whenever a credible domain backlinks you, that’s a nod to Google on your own content’s credibility.
When your content is featured on another website, your pages will get crawled and indexed faster. The more relevant backlinks you accumulate, the more you’ll establish yourself as an authoritative domain. You may even start getting first-page SERP results or a featured snippet if you’re being referred to a lot.
While domain authority isn’t exactly a ranking metric in Google’s algorithm, it’s a great indicator of your performance compared to your competitors. Especially if you’re new to the scene, building authority should be a priority.
Source and check your backlinks to increase your brand exposure
One of the biggest benefits of backlinks is the visibility they offer. Being featured on someone else’s page puts your business in front of its readers.
You want your content and web pages to create a buzz. Even if you’re not quite hitting the first page of search results, being featured on a website with a lot of traffic will still give you the exposure you’ll need. This can even aid your rankings once your content starts gaining traction.
Backlinks promote referral traffic
Related to exposure, you’re also likely to get more traffic from the linking website. When a high-traffic web page backlinks you, you’ll be able to sample some of their traffic. How does this work?
There’s an SEO term referred to as link juice (a bit of a weird name, we know). Basically, every backlink passes on some of the linking page’s SEO value to the linked page. Among this value is the traffic you’ll be getting from that website. They’re essentially bringing visitors to your front door.
Plus, they’re referring to you directly, meaning they’re giving you a degree of credibility with the reader. This, paired with some good standing with Google, can mean wonders for the backlinks page’s ranking.
How to check backlinks of a website
There are a couple of ways you can check backlinks for a website.
Find backlinks in Google Search Console
The first method of checking backlinks is using Google Search Console. GSC is a free tool that allows you to check many things about your site, including organic web traffic, keywords used, and, important for us, backlinks to your site!
It’s pretty easy to check your backlinks with GSC. All you have to do is select your property, open up your links, and click “External Links.” There will be multiple reports, but you’ll want to look at “Top-Linked Pages.” This will show you a list of URLs that have linked to those pages. From there, you can start checking out your backlinks.
While this method is free, there are some downsides. First, it only shows the top 1,000 linking websites, meaning you might not get all the information you need. Also, it doesn’t provide the anchor text or context of where the link was included. Last, there are no insights into the quality of those pages, only the aggregate number of links.
View backlinks through third-party monitoring tool
Given some of Google Search Console’s limitations, we recommend you opt for a free third-party backlink monitoring tool like Semrush, Ahrefs, or Screaming Frog SEO Spider to check backlinks of your website. With these tools, you can check any website and backlink, not just your own.
With most of these tools, when you check a backlink, you’ll learn more about some or all of the following factors:
- The domain authority of the linking site
- The organic search traffic of the site
- The anchor text used to backlink
- The domain referral/pointing page
- An alert of when a backlink has been disavowed/deleted
- The ability to assess the quality of a backlink
As you can see, there’s a ton more data that you evaluate about your backlinks.
Find backlinks with advice from SEO consultants
If you’re an SEO novice, all of this probably has you pretty confused. Rather than trying to navigate and analyze the data from these tools, you may want to ask for the advice of SEO experts like the ones at Ranq.
Here’s how it works at Ranq—our SEO experts use Ahrefs and other tools to assess the health of your website and content assets, domain authority, and more. We’ll then analyze our findings before creating a strategy that meets the goals you’ve set out. Once approved, we’ll dig deep to get your SEO health alive and kickin’ all the way to the top of SERPs!
Checking backlinks using Google too much of a hassle? Have Ranq take care of it for you
We’d like to say, “Birds of a feather backlink together!” Sadly, this isn’t always the case. Spammy sites or others with low domain authority will backlink you anyway. By monitoring your backlinks, you’ll get a better idea of your brand authority as well as who’s backlinking you and who shouldn’t be so you can take action.
Whether you check backlinks yourself or decide to hire Ranq’s team of SEO experts to monitor them for you, you need the most transparent insights into the quality of your backlinks and your domain authority.
Contact Ranq today, and let us show you how we can level up your off-page and on-page SEO strategy so you can sail to the top of SERPs!