Whether you are a digital marketer, SEO professional, or someone interested in increasing your brand’s or your personal online visibility, you must have read, heard, or used the word “backlink” because one way to help people find your website is by getting links from other websites. Search engines use backlinks to decide which sites to show first.

Not paying attention to backlinking can be a mega error, as there are more websites and blogs online now than ever before. According to Ahrefs, over 600 million blogs exist today. Every day, marketers and bloggers keep adding more. In the sea of content available online, it is harder for people to find what they need, which is why if you just keep sharing content on the Internet, it is not enough. Your content must be easy to find, and you need to strengthen your backlinking game for that. Therefore, you must have a backlink checker tool, if you do not have one already, to know which websites link to yours, how strong the links you are choosing are, or if any of the links are broken. 

What Is a Backlink Checker Tool?

It is not surprising that people getting into promoting their content online or needing to improve their online visibility are familiar with backlinking but not with a backlink checker tool. It is like knowing about clothing without understanding which brands to wear for maximum quality and return on investment.

A backlink is a link from one website to another. When another site links to your blog, business site, or online profile, that link is called a backlink. These links help search engines understand which websites are useful and trustworthy.

A backlink checker tool is a web-based service on which you can share a web link. In return, it may show you the following insights.

• Websites linking to your site

• Whether a link is active, broken, or deleted

• The anchor text used in each backlink

• What type of link it is (text, image, redirect, etc.)

• If the link is do-follow or no-follow

• Compare your links with competitor websites

• Track changes in your backlink profile over time

Owing to these benefits, such a tool is beneficial for digital marketers, content creators, SEO professionals, website owners, digital PR service providers, and webmasters.

How Does a Backlink Checker Tool Work?

A backlink checker tool scans the Internet for links that point to your website using crawlers to go from page to page. It looks for your website’s URL, and when it finds a link, it gathers important details like the name of the website, the webpage the link is on, the anchor text, the status of the link, etc.

Good backlink checker tools update these details regularly to help you learn about new backlinks or see if you have lost any. Reliable tools also provide quality scores to help you know which backlinks are valuable.

You can get the details via a report or on the dashboard of the checker site.

Reasons Why You Need a Backlink Checker Tool Now!

Contrary to what many people believe, a backlink checker tool is not just useful for digital marketers or SEO professionals. Anyone who posts content on the Internet can benefit from it. One of the biggest reasons to use it is to know how others see your website. If no or few websites link to your content, your chances of ranking high on search pages drop. Besides this, you need a backlink checker tool for the following reasons.

Discover Which Type of Content Attracts the Most Links

Suppose you post blogs, product pages, case studies, and videos; some pages will organically gain more attention than others. A reliable tool can help you know which type of content gets more backlinks. Following this clarity, you can start publishing content that people find interesting or helpful.

What’s more, once you know which content is backlinked more, you can update and promote those pages to maintain or grow traffic. Hence, you strengthen your content strategy and also provide visitors with effective content.

Identify Anchor Texts That Work and People Use

In a body copy, there is a clickable text or phrase that is hyperlinked, and it is called the anchor text. For example, if your site has a blog, video, or user-generated content on the ‘best SEO tips’, and this phrase is mentioned in another website’s content with a link to your page, that phrase is your anchor text.

Using a backlink checker tool, you can identify anchor texts that other websites are using to link to your content. You get a better idea of how people view your site. Anchor texts can include your brand name, blog topics, pages with stats/useful information, etc.

Avoid Spammy or Over-Optimized Links

Besides counting and identifying backlinks, a checker tool can also point out if too many of your backlinks have the same anchor texts or are from poor-quality websites. Your site can get flagged for having these backlinks.

When you spot this pattern early and find many similar links or links from untrustworthy sites, you can remove or disavow them. Thus, a good tool empowers you to maintain a healthy backlink profile and protect your site from possible penalties.

See Link Gaps Between Your Competitors and You

You may already know who your online competitors are. What you may not know is where they are getting their backlinks from. A backlink checker tool can compare your website with theirs and show you the websites that link to them but not to you. 

After knowing about these link gaps, you can access a list of websites that already link to similar content, which means they may be open to linking to your content, too. Closing link gaps can aid in creating a better outreach plan with real data behind it.

Better Your SEO and Content Reports  

If you manage a blog, website, or digital campaign, you may need to show others what’s working. A backlink checker tool gives you clear numbers and real results. You can show which links were gained, which content is performing well, and how your backlink profile has improved.

No matter who you are reporting to, a client, a boss, or yourself, real-time data helps you explain what’s driving growth, and not only what was published.

Conclusion

Whether you are growing a personal blog, running a business website, or managing content for clients, backlinks were relevant yesterday, they are relevant today, and they will remain relevant in the future. A backlink tool, therefore, is a necessity if you want to stay ahead of others. You need all the visibility you can get to improve what’s working and fix what’s not.

Remember: If you are serious about building an online presence that performs well, it’s not enough to just create content.