What can a hyperlink analysis do for your site?
Over 34 billion social media accounts fill the digital space that consumers, businessmen, kids, moms, dads, grandparents, and more scroll through every day, according to a study from BackLinko. Whether you’re using social media as a consumer or as a part of your work, it’s important to understand the gravity that the role of hyperlinks can play in the success of a business or brand.
Hyperlinks are linked references to other websites or social media accounts that relate to the current page you’re viewing. Viewers can access hyperlinks by clicking them and they’re more visually appealing and efficient than placing a long, unspecified link within a body of text. According to Gohar Kahn, the author of “Creating Value with Social Media Analytics…”, analyzing hyperlinks is an important part of evaluating a social media account’s success and failures. Hyperlink analytics have the power to reveal social media traffic patterns and where incoming and outgoing traffic patterns from your account are going (Khan 327). For example, one study analyzed the outlinks used among Korean and U.S. government agencies’ Twitter accounts and found helpful information. The hyperlink analysis found that the Korean government tended to cite domestic portals’ news services, or self-citation, while the U.S. government tended to go directly to news agencies, not secondary sites (Khan 329). This analysis shows a disparity in social media use among different cultures and how that influences the way people interact with it.
This week, I chose to analyze the WTNH News 8 Facebook account. As an avid reader of WTNH, I wanted to see how the account is performing compared to its competitors. Using a hyperlink analysis tool called Moz, I analyzed WTNH Facebook page’s number of linking domains, domain authority, page authority, inbound links, ranking keywords and much more. I also got to compare this data to WTNH’s leading competitor news station, WFSB.
Linking domains are the number of unique websites that have one or more hyperlinks targeting your website. In my analysis, I found that WTNH has 80 linking domains from websites including, patch.com, Constantcontact.com, theepochtimes.com, publico.pt, ask.com, wsbtv.com and plenty more. However, the competitor, WFSB, has 108, and their pattern is continuing to increase. This suggests that WFSB has a greater outreach of sites that interact with them and possibly a stronger social media connection.
Furthermore, domain authority measures how likely a website is to rank in the search engine result pages (SERPs). This search engine ranking score was developed by Moz and is helpful to see how a website compares to its competitors from the consumer point of view. For example, WTNH’s Facebook page has a ranking potential of 96, which is considered “excellent” in the ranking. The Facebook account is tied with WFSB’s Facebook as well, which is interesting considering they’re competitors and one of them will have to show up first in the SERP.
The grid below compares both of these data measurements.
According to the grid, most of the websites that have links to WTNH often rank low on search engines like Google. Therefore, while WTNH’s numbers for domain authority and linking domain are good, the social media account may benefit from bringing on a bigger partner, that ranks higher on SERPs.
One example of a strong partner to bring on would be Yale New Haven Health. This nonprofit healthcare system is located right in the heart of where all the news is happening and more importantly, right in the heart of the account’s audience. With this partnership, news anchors would be able to talk about dire health issues, developments, medications, or warnings that should be shared with the community. Whether it be nationally or locally, there is always an interest and more importantly, a need for health news.
Additionally, Yale New Haven Health has a strong reputation in the community and even shows promising results in the hyperlink analysis. According to Moz, the site has a domain authority of 62, which is considered “excellent” by seo.com. Plus, going back to the grid above, only about 20 websites were ranking above 60 before. With this partnership, most of the linking domains would be above 60, allowing for more people to see the social media account and interact with it.
Overall, there are many avenues you can go down when analyzing hyperlinks of different social media accounts. Although hyperlink analysis tools are helpful, there are shortcomings as well. While these tools show where the web traffic is going, they fail to identify the type or the amount of web traffic that is flowing (Khan 327). This can be counterproductive because without knowing the type of web traffic, it can be difficult to improve.
Nonetheless, by understanding some degree of your web traffic, its an important reminder to continue using hyperlinks that matter.
Citation:
Khan, Gohar F. Creating Value with Social Media Analytics: Managing, Aligning, and Mining Social Media Text, Networks, Actions, Location, Aps, Hyperlinks, Multimedia, and Search Engines Data. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2018.