Improving your ranking in search results is a constant struggle for most businesses. Allow this Phoenix SEO agency to show you how to overcome that struggle with the help of link analysis tools.

There are a lot of different tools that allow you to run an effective analysis of your keywords to improve your ranking – Majestic SEO, SEMRush, Moz, etc. No tool is better than other; it totally depends on you whichever link analysis tool you want to choose. Once you have decided which tools to go with, here’s what you have to do:

Determine the important keywords

Pretty obvious right? The first step is to find the right keywords for you – keywords that will be most beneficial to your brand and help you convert. Regardless of what people may have led you to believe, this is not tough at all.

All you have to do is put yourself in the shoes of your customers; think about their INTENT. What are your customers trying to accomplish when they search for a particular keyword?

Keep in mind that there are a lot of businesses – well-established, big-budget, Fortune 500 even – that are trying to rank for some of the same keywords you’ve got your eyes on. Be smart. If you are a new business or a startup, there is no way you’re going to beat a business like, say, The Entrepreneur.

Instead, use a tool like Mozbar to measure the difficulty of keywords on your list. There are options in Moz that let you see all the websites that are already ranking for the said keywords; see how many links and domain authority each website has. The higher the number of links and domain authority, the more tough it will be for you to rank for that keyword.

Make a subcategory of your keywords

After you have a number of keywords that you want, divide each keyword into groups based on a certain keyword topic, or category. Since you know how difficult it is to rank for an individual keyword, bundle the relevant keywords together into a pack of ten or more sets, and try to rank for that. Long tail variations are extremely powerful and effective way to rank in search engines.

Know your competition

Once you have your keyword categories, use a tool like SEMRush to access the search results across the world to study your competitor websites. If you want to gauge your competition in the international markets, this is the best tool to do that.

Study their backlinks

Once you have a list of all your competitors, pull their backlink profiles with Open Site Explorer tool by Moz. This helps you understand how the other players in your industry are ranking for the keywords that you want. This task of assessing the SEO strategies of your competitors may seem like overkill to some people, but it’s necessary if you are planning to surpass their SERP ranking.

While using Open Site Explorer, target the link equity, external links and root domain to run your audit. Also include internal links; most people undermine the power of internal linking in SEO strategies.

Once you are done with gathering all the above outlined data (URL, source name, domain authority, website name, author, etc.), compile it all in one document, and have someone (your SEO agency or public relations firm) take a look at it; they will know how to get the maximum SEO juice out of this list.