FINDING THE "OPTIMUM" ANCHOR TEXT RATIO

1. FINDING THE "OPTIMUM" ANCHOR TEXT RATIO
NOTE: This works for me most of the times. However, it's not 100% "reliable" for every single scenario. A lot of the bigger niches are quite complicated and require more research, digging and analysis. This strategy is perfect for low/medium competition terms that aren't already spammed with sites using strong PBN's. This strategy is designed to give you a rough idea only on what I call the "optimum" anchor text ratio. It might not work for everyone, but it works for me, hence why I'm sharing this today.

INTRODUCTION

This is something I've seen a lot of people stress out about over the last few months. Picking the right anchor text ratios'. There are a lot of sites and tutorials online where they claim to have found the "perfect/ideal" anchor text ratio. For example, over here. Ahrefs did a fantastic job with their research/case study and they claim the ideal ratio is 1.5% for exact match and 33% for partial match. Whilst I have no doubt this is probably the "safest" ratio to use.. I'm not entirely convinced it's the "best". Not everyone has a long term site. For example, a lot of my sites just now are churn/burn (sites that are designed to make money for as long as possible, but in the quickest time possible). Therefore, even though I could "play it safe" by sticking to a specific set of anchor ratio percentages, I'd rather jump into the deep end and get slightly more involved. 

The strategy I explain here is straight forward. It works extremely well in my niche (I have 30+ sites in a single niche which I'm having a lot of success with and this method works perfectly for me for this specific niche). As I mentioned above, this strategy is not going to work in every single scenario.. but this gives me a rough outline of what I need to do. I can then compare the data I gather using this strategy + take into consideration the data gathered by Ahrefs and other case studies to form a final conclusion on the "optimum" anchor ratios' before I go ahead and start the link building.

To summarise my point - let me give you an example. "Niche 1" might be heavily spammed and therefore the only way to rank here is to go hard and aggressive with your ratios and link building. Sticking to the 1.5% for exact match anchors isn't going to help in this niche simply because every other site is dominating by going above a certain % for their exact match anchors. And I don't have time to "play it safe" and wait several months to see results. Like I said, I'm going after tough/slightly aggressive niches with churn/burn sites so I don't care if a site gets hit in the end.

To test this out, I picked a fairly aggressive niche that should of been moderately fair to rank. The objective of the test was to see what would be the quickest way to rank. To do this, I created 2 identical sites with similar lengths of content, approach, etc. I then carried out a quick varied SEO "package" to each of them myself. Note - there are no "authority" sites on Page 1 in this niche I picked, hence why my strategy worked better. 

For the first site, I used the following anchor ratio breakdown:

• Naked URL's (domain.com) - 15%
• Branded Anchors (brand name) - 75%
• Generic Anchors (any generic word) - 5%
• Partial Match/LSI Anchors (different variations of my main keywords - KeywordShitter is a great tool for this) - 3%
• Exact Anchors (main money keywords) - approx 2%

For the second site, I used the "optimum" anchor ratio breakdown I gathered from using my strategy.

Results after approx 45 days? Here you go..

These were the rankings using the "safe/ideal" anchor ratios:

Managed to get 6 keywords ranking fairly decent although nothing great. The site is currently still ranking.

These were the rankings using the "optimum" anchor ratios using the strategy I'll explain below:

Got all the keywords ranking in better positions. Made $XX on the site so far in conversions. Nothing great, but this was just a quick test so I wasn't expecting much anyway. 

Now the results from the quick test were not surprising. In fact, I knew what the verdict would be anyway. It's common sense. Building more links with your exact anchor is going to increase your chances of ranking for that keyword - although you have a higher chance of getting hit later down the line. 

For those who have long term sites and want to rank for as long as possible, your best bet is probably sticking to the known and tested "safe" anchor ratios. However, for those who are in slightly aggressive/short term niches, the following strategy might end up working a lot better in getting you results. 

Like I mentioned at the top of this post, this strategy is not going to work for every niche and the success rate for you might be lower than what I achieved. For example, if Page 1/2/3 for your keyword is full of authority sites, that isn't going to change - no matter what you do. Most of these authority sites probably only have a few backlinks, so using the strategy explained below isn't going to help. However, this strategy has been working for me for quite some time now for most of my churn/burn sites and if it works for me, then it must surely work for a few of you.

"OPTIMUM" ANCHOR RATIO
So, we can now finally talk about the strategy. Some niches just require you to build out link after link targeting the exact anchor. The "safe" anchor ratio breakdown doesn't help with these niches.. and therefore you need to think outside the box. For example - let's just say my main keyword was "sell my mobile" for the .co.uk market. Here is the anchor profile for the top result:

This is just an example anyway.. but as you can see their exact anchor ratio is 34%. I've seen niches with a lot higher percentages and it took me several months of building links specifically targeting the exact/target anchors before I cracked Page 1. Anyways, so back to my point - providing that the Page 1 results for your main keyword isn't full of authority sites - it means the sites ranking on that page are doing something correct, right? Surely their anchor ratio percentages are working for them.. so why won't it work for you? Let's copy them.

This strategy revolves around analysing the anchor text ratio of your competition on Page 1. I usually have my VA do this as it can sometimes be a tiresome task - but to save time you can just analyse the Top 3 instead - although the less sites you analyse, the less reliable your final data/results are going to be. For this, you can use Ahrefs or Majestic but I've always preferred Majestic.

I'll go through the steps very briefly as it should be quite self explanatory. Enter in the first URL of your competition and export their "Anchor Text" data. Now remove all the columns and leave just the "Referring Domains" stats. 

Should look something like:

You could filter it by "Domains" instead but there's no way to prevent duplicate anchors (such as site-wide links), hence why I usually choose "Referring Domains".

Do this for as many sites as you can for your keyword. I always do Page 1 in full and sometimes Page 2 and further if I really need more data or if the numbers from what I have isn't convincing/"juicy" enough.

Once you have all your data, either yourself (or your VA) now needs to note down the "type" of anchor each one is. For example: exact/partial-LSI/naked URL/generic/brand/other/etc.. you get the idea. And then calculate the % that type of anchor accounts for each site you've gathered data on. Again, this strategy isn't necessarily "quick" but this is often the first job I give my VA when once I've created my churn/burn sites.

Of course you could probably just stick to the "tried and tested anchor ratios" and hope that you'll rank or you could possibly just build a bunch of links with various anchors using trial and error.. but personally, I've found this strategy to work the best for the niches I go after. A huge majority of the sites I make that follow this strategy always end up on Page 1 fairly quick and so far, they're all steady. So I'll continue using this strategy for as long as my sites continue to rank.

Anyways, so for example - this is what it should look like after you've concluded the data from 1 site:

Once you have all your data, you need to find the "average" from all the sites you've used. This will be your "optimum" anchor text ratio.

After finding the average from all the different sites you analysed, you will now have your final "optimum" ratios for your keyword/niche.

Now that you know the average ratios for your keyword/niche, go out and begin your link building.

For example, the above average ratio says 30% for exact. That is a lot higher than the "industry recommended" amount. I would never build exact anchors that take up 30% of the profile for my longer term sites. However, with my churn/burn sites, I don't care. I simply start doing my link building using the "optimum" ratios Ive attained with my analysis'. This is the exact method I've used on a large majority of my churn/burn sites.. and it works just fine. 

CONSIDERATIONS
However, there are 2 big things to consider:

As I said right at the start, this strategy is not "100% accurate/reliable". For example, a lot of the sites targeting the bigger/more rewarding niches are most likely using/building PBN links. And there's a high chance most of them are hiding the links from tools like Ahrefs/Majestic. There are 2 options for this:

• You can dig deeper and try to find their PBN links. Just because it's blocked by Ahrefs/Majestic, doesn't mean it's blocked by every single crawler/bot. A method I use involves using newer/fresh backlink checker sites such as this. These are probably not going to be blocked by some PBN sites. I've found quite a lot of PBN sites that I wouldn't have seen on Ahrefs/Majestic by using this tool. I then used the sites I found on this tool to find further footprints. There are many other tools like this - just search for "backlink checkers" and then try each one out. You'll eventually start finding several PBN links which you wouldn't have found with the more popular backlink checking tools. After you find the PBN links, you can alter/edit your "optimum" anchor ratios.

• The above method is quite tedious and not everyone is going to be fan of it. The alternative solution is the easiest. Just guess/take a calculated risk. First, have a look at your niche. Is it a niche that is going to require a lot of PBN links to rank? Based on that, increase your exact and partial anchor % ratio's slightly higher. The majority of these PBN links will probably contain OBL's with the exact/partial anchor so that's the only ratio you'll need to adjust.

The second thing to consider is that finding the "optimum" anchor ratio doesn't mean you're going to beat your competition. It simply means you now know the average anchor ratios your competition is using. You still need to build strong and powerful links to beat them. So what do you do after getting your "optimum" ratios? You start building links - and you do it better than your competition. And if you do this all correctly, you WILL rank.

FINDING COMPETITORS' BACKLINK SOURCES IN SECONDS
Here's a small tip which you can use to get the same links your competition have. Credit to Ahrefs. For this, you'll need an Ahrefs account. If you don't want to pay for one, you can get it for $5 (1 month use) on Fiverr.

Now as we all probably know already - the "traditional" way of finding the links your competition is using is by doing a manual reverse engineering campaign. t0mmy does a good job explaining the process in detail over here.

With this technique, everything/majority of the process takes place inside Ahrefs. Once you're logged in, you can use the "Link Intersect Tool" directly to find out all your competitors' links. For example:

You'll then see something like this:

If you click on the "arrow" icon underneath each site, you'll be given more information on the site, backlinks, anchor text used, etc.

Go through all the different sites/backlinks you see and try to figure out ways where you can also do the same thing (but do it better!). I'd recommend reading Ahref's full post to get a better understanding on this. They explain everything perfectly and it's probably better if you read it on their blog rather than me just copying and rewriting what they've already said.

CONCLUSION
The main key is to build better links than your current competition. With my above "optimum" anchor ratio strategy + quality link building = surprisingly easy rankings - if you do it all correctly. 

Let me know if you have any questions and I hope some of you found this section interesting/useful/worth the read.

If you made it to the end of this post, thank you for sticking through it!