Keyword-Focused Anchor Text Reigns Supreme

Anchor text has been a huge talking point within SEO for many years now. Most of Google’s major algorithm updates focused around weakening the impact of having backlinks with keyword-focused anchor text, but it seems like it’s still a huge factor towards ranking.

This isn’t a big surprise to me. I’ve seen this factor more than any other to create huge upward movements in search engine rankings. I talked a little about this in a study I did of the HubSpot blog, where the 100 top performing blog posts had, on average, over 80% more keyword-focused anchor text than the rest.

The chart shows that results ranking #1 on page had an average of over 5.4% of all their anchor text containing the keyword they were ranking for. In fact, over 1.2% of all the #1 ranking URLs that I analyzed had 100% of their anchor text containing the keyword they were ranking for.

As the chart above clearly illustrates, webpages ranking higher in Google had a much larger proportion of their anchor text containing their target keyword. Ultimately, it seems that keyword-focused anchor text is an important ranking factor, and this was even more evident in the upper quartile of search volume keywords sampled.

Keyword-driven anchor text still reigns supreme for ranking in Google

Action: 

Work on acquiring backlinks that have your keyword present within the anchor text of the link. It’s important not to overdo it here, but it’s also important to not neglect it altogether.