Transcript
Hi guys, and welcome to another edition of Zupo SEO Talk & Tea.
Today's conversation, measuring your competitors' backlink and referring domain velocity. This is really important because I feel like when it comes to measuring your competition and understanding what it's going to take to rank, a lot of people will kind of take the research on a certain day, and then that data will be the same that's used throughout the entire period. But if that data is only one point in time and every website is adding more content and adding more links all the time, so that data might be outdated.
But before we begin and before I dive into that, I want to introduce the tea we have today. Today, we have an oolong tea. I'm pretty sure it's a roast oolong tea. This is a tea that I've bought a little bit more to the show. It's a tea that was gifted to my father when he went back to visit China. My family is not actually like from China. My family emigrated from Malaysia. We were in Malaysia for about six generations. But before that, my ancestors had emigrated from China into Malaysia. So my dad went back to China to kind of reconnect with that line of our family. And when he went back, they gifted him some tea, and this was one of the teas that they gifted him.
But let's go ahead and get brewing and get chatting. So measuring your competitors' link and referring domain velocity. For the basis of this conversation, I'm just going to say referring domains. That's the metric my firm uses, rather than backlinks. So we're going to go talk about referring domains. But the reason why this is important is because, as I said at the beginning of the video, we're doing a research. Even my own firm in the past has been at fault for taking all the data from one period of time and making all of our strategies according to that data. But like I said, a lot of companies are always adding more links, or they're always adding more content.
And therefore, there's two things to kind of note. One, you should always be checking in, like how much have their content improved and how much have their referring domains improved. That's one thing. But you also want to see the link building or referring domain velocity. How much referring domains are they improving by on a month-to-month basis? And if they're improving at a certain clip, therefore your firm knows, "Okay, we can't just add five referring domains a month when our competitor adds 10 referring domains a month." Because even though you may be adding more referring domains, in all actuality, you're falling behind each month, because you are in the negatives. You're essentially negative five in that example, every single month.
So saying that you need to measure your referring domain and backlink velocity of your own website and your competitors. And if you find a gap, it's pretty obvious from there, we need to find ways where we can cover that gap on a month-to-month basis consistently, enough to the point we're not only matching the competitor but we can start catch things up. Because again, like I mentioned, you can be really proud you got one referring domain or another referring domain each month, but if you're getting one or two a month but your average competitor is getting 10 to 15, you're really falling behind.
Now, there is one caveat, and this is always going to make it more complicated. But sometimes what can happen is that your competitors are getting a lot of referring domains each month where they're all really weak. All the referring domains coming from very weak domain authority or domain rating websites. And the referring domains that you're acquiring can be a little bit stronger. In that case, you don't have to always go one-to-one in terms of the number of referring domains. If you're getting high quality referring domains and your competitors are getting really weak ones, then you can have more confidence. You don't necessarily need to catch up with them with the number of referring domains. You're getting in the high quality range. So I would say, when you kind of measuring it, measure it based on the number of referring domains that the velocity, but also the domain rating of those referring domains.
Now, I would say, be mindful. If you're kind of getting into SEO and you're like, "Oh, well, our competitor who gets referring domains from DRs of 20 and 25, we're getting them at 27 so we're higher." That's not enough. It needs to be like way higher to kind of even that out. So for example, if your competitor's getting 20, 25 domain rating referring domains, you really want to be like 50 and up, or 40 at minimum and up. Because if you want the referring domains, if you're going to play the high quality game, to truly be high quality, and if they're only marginally better in terms of the domain rating, it's not really going to move the needle. So ensure that you're measuring link velocity of referring domain, velocity for your competitors, see how much they're getting each month. And then you need to either match that, or be confident that the referring domains that you are acquiring are of higher quality, just to the point where five of their low-level referring domains equals one of your high quality ones.
And that's kind of the way that you want to make sure that you're engaging in link building or referring domains. When it comes to link building or referring domains, you can often get bogged down in your own day to day. But one of the most demoralizing things is to be able to get five referring domains that you're very proud of, but you see your competitor's getting 10 and you worked so hard for the five. In that case, you need to be more creative. You need to bring more resources in to try and overcome that link building gap.
So hopefully that was helpful. Hopefully that was valuable. If you guys liked the video, please like and subscribe. I'm going to go ahead and pour out my tea. And I hope to see you guys again soon.
Thanks everybody.