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A backlink gap analysis is a crucial part to making sure you’re covering all your basis in your backlink profile. It also gives you an actionable path on how to move forward.
Back in the day we used to do our backlink gap analysis using spreadsheets but nowadays our process involves using SEMRush’s backlink gap analysis tool. It has everything you need and it works in conjunction with our process of doing a backlink profile analysis. If you’ve done the backlink profile analysis and gone through all of the directories for personal injury lawyer SEO, you’re ready to do a backlink gap analysis.
In case it isn’t obvious, a backlink gap analysis is when you take all of your backlinks and compare them to your competitors and then any backlinks that they have but you do not, you make note of them and try to acquire them. As mentioned, we use SEMRush for this process so let’s head over to their backlink gap analysis tool and jump into it.
On this page you want to add your domain in the first spot then add your top competitors in the other ones. You should know your top competitors because you’ve already done a personal injury lawyer competitor analysis.
For this example, I’m using The Fang Law Firm. They’re in Denver, so I Googled denver personal injury lawyers and picked off the other firms that rank for this. Note: I skipped the directories like FindLaw.com, Justia and Expertise.com. We only want to compare ourselves to other law firms, not the directories.
Once I’ve got them loaded up I click the green button on the right hand side that says ‘Find prospects’ and on the following page SEMRush pulls up the first I do is organize the table based on the ‘Matches’ column.
Now, most of the one’s with 4/5 matches are directories that they would have if they were our client because they are in our list of directories to submit to for personal injury lawyers. With that being said I scrolled down looking for something unique and came across this:
This example is colorado-bd.com. It’s apparent that it’s a Colorado based site so that’s why it’s not in our directory submission list. 3 of our competitors have links from it so it’s definitely worth looking into it. Where it says ‘Hide’ if I hadn’t expanded it would say ‘View’. If you click that it shows the actual backlink URL so you don’t have to go looking through the site. In this case, this is definitely a link we want to acquire as it’s a directory.
Select the checkmark beside the domain. You can continue on and go through multiple pages without worrying about losing the ones you’ve selected. Once you have gone through all of the links you can click on “Start Outreach” which is in the top right hand corner of the table.
Once you click ‘Start outreach’ this screen will pop up:
Select the project for the domain you’re working on and then hit the green ‘Send prospects’ button.
Now that you’ve added it to the Link Building tool you can set the status to Directory Submission.
I always make sure I add new backlinks into the Link Building tool rather than just submitting them so I have a record of them and keep them all organized within the tool.
Another important thing to keep in mind is to do backlink analysis using as many tools as possible, don’t just rely on SEMRush. In addition to SEMRush we use Ahrefs.com, Ubersuggest, and SurferSEO.com. It’s often times surprising how many additional link opportunities you can find by using multiple backlink sources.
