Table of Contents
This is my review of Inlinks.net, the relatively new Entity SEO developed by Dixon Jones, formerly Global Brand Ambassador for MajesticSEO.
I was provided with a free version, and 6-months of access to try the tool.
In this review, I’ll talk about:
- What is InLinks
- What InLinks does
- What SEO tasks you can accomplish using the software
- What I have liked
- What I have not liked
What is InLinks?
InLinks is an advanced SEO tool to conduct on-page content optimisation, automate schema markup build and improve internal linking. The tool does all of this by analysing your pages and providing actionable data.
With just a small snippet code, you can install InLinks within your website and the tool quickly gives you a ranking position of your pages on search engines, where you can see for which keyword your pages are ranking.
Not only that, but it also solves for a very specific and essential SEO task which is associating your page keyword to referring general topic.
The reason why your pages should be associated with a specific topic is because the tool will be able to then build your internal links to your target page, by simply finding similar pages that mention or talk about that topic that you have selected.
So essentially what the tool does, in my opinion, is the following:
- Help you to build an information network within your website among a variety of pages, creating context rather than just content.
- InLinks forces you to review your approach to content after the core BERT algorithm update, leveraging topics and supporting a better user intent targeting.
- Build the whole context by finding relevant pages to link from and to, always within your website.
- Build and publish J-SON codes for your schema automatically.
Google rolled out the BERT algorithm in 2019 and here is what it revealed on their own blog:
“These improvements are oriented around improving language understanding, particularly for more natural language/conversational queries, as BERT is able to help Search better understand the nuance and context of words in Searches and better match those queries with helpful results.
Particularly for longer, more conversational queries, or searches where prepositions like “for” and “to” matter a lot to the meaning, Search will be able to understand the context of the words in your query. You can search in a way that feels natural for you.”
BERT helps a machine to understand what words in a sentence mean, but with all the nuances of context.
In my opinion, the #1 use case for InLinks is semantic optimisation.
But that’s not the only way to use the tool.
You can also use InLinks to connect your pages internally and provide search engines with better crawling and indexing. Audit content and improve its topic relevance. Build schema automatically. Improve your search engines rankings. And more.
I am still new to the tool. So I am still figuring out how to get the most out of it.
But the bottom line is that InLinks gives you insights into your website topical coverage.
What that background out of the way, it’s time to review InLinks.
What tasks can you accomplish?
As you can see from the few words I have written, the problems InLinks solves are automating internal links, building and publishing schema markup, understanding users’ intents and grading content based on topical relevance.
Time-saving
It takes time to build a Schema for all of your pages on the website, sometimes SEOs are not even sure what schema type they need. InLinks does all of that for you.
Provide Schema codes
Context and topical coverage
Discover new links opportunities
Website Pages
As we have seen above, InLinks can automate and complete several SEO tasks.
Let’s have a closer look at each of the functionalities, starting with the function called “Website Pages” and how you can control what pages InLinks will work on.
When you create an account with InLinks, this is the first dashboard you’ll see. The Website pages section includes reports about top website pages, the pages you manually add, those that you have audited, content briefs and target pages.
The Top Pages report is a list of pages that InLinks selected automatically for you.
But you can change, add or remove them as you please. The report includes information about the target topic for each page, meaning which topic is covered on that page, content audit score, the keyword you rank for, number of words in the article, how many internal links the system built, number of outbound links and whether there is a schema present in the backend.
If you have a content team, you can also assign the page to another person, produce a brief and send it.
If you want to create a brief, click to “Content Briefs” and then “Create a report”.
Do you want to know which page has the biggest potential for traffic, if optimised?
InLinks got you covered.
Go to “Growth Opportunities”. In this section, the tool provides you with a forecast of how much more traffic you can generate if you position your page higher in search engine results.
For example, if I was able to rank my article about Fiverr alternatives about 10 positions above the current position, I would get an estimated 55 more clicks per month or 10 more clicks if the ranking would grow by 5 positions.
This is the best way for you to prioritise your content optimisation efforts.
Do you need to see which topic your pages cover the most?
I decided to test the tool with my own blog because I am extremely familiar with and I know what topics I cover.
And I can tell you that InLinks reports are SUPER accurate.
For example, if you asked me to list a number of topics I frequently write about in my blog, I would say SEO, freelancing, affiliate marketing, blogging and sometimes tools reviews.
There you go. Go to “Topics” and check the report. The website top topics are exactly right.
I believe this is extremely accurate.
Same story with sub topic. Do you know within “Marketing” which sub topics your website cover?
No problem, select the topic on the left and InLinks will tell you.
Again, I believe this is fairly accurate. My blog is mostly about SEO, websites, marketing and I have a few articles covering affiliate marketing and freelancing.
What surprised me was to find out topics I didn’t target intentionally, but InLinks identified nonetheless.
This is because the tool is able to associate sub topics within different industries. For example, SEO, Consultant and website topics belong to “Business”. That makes so much sense.
This is what I have realised: that InLinks opens your perspective to the larger topics, not just those in your industry or those you write about.
What do you do with this information?
Well, if you notice that a topic is not intentionally targeted but it should be, Inlinks provides you the opportunity.
Just click “Target”. I see this as a topic gap analysis.
Then select the URL that should target that topic.
Once selected, the system marks the topic as “Associated”.
I didn’t know what happened once this action was completed, it took me a few minutes to figure it out.
Essentially, InLinks associated the “Website” topic to the page I have selected and then built internal links to target that specific page.
This means the internal links are already live.
Which takes us to the next feature: Internal Links.
Internal Links
Internal links is basically a report of all the pages on your website that receive internal links.
But instead of the traditional keyword metrics such as Domain Rating and Page Authority, InLinks provides topically related metrics: anchor text, target topic of source and source page.
For example, let’s take another look at my “SEO consultant” service page.
According to InLinks, because I have assigned the “Consultant” topic, that page should be linked to every other page on my website that has the word “consultant” or similar variations in the copy.
And I get to see all of the internal links from the source to the target page.
If I feel these internal links are not relevant, I can remove manually them.
These links are probably obvious to someone doing SEO all the time. It makes perfect sense to link to similar words from other pages, however if you are trying to do this manually, it would take you ages!
This tool provides a simple shortcut to your link optimisation time by 90%.
And when I looked at a page about “Fiverr alternatives”, InLinks provided me with 14 internal links from pages that mention “freelancer” and variations of this keyword. This is because I have assigned the Freelancing topic to that page.
I didn’t know I had mentioned “freelancing” 14 times in my blog across my 100+ pages, so some of these internal links were new to me. Which is kind of the point of InLinks.
Schema
This section is designed to help you build and publish schema markups on your website.
For example, I assign the “Consultant” topic to my SEO consultancy page.
This was my way of seeing how InLinks can find not only internal links but also build relevant schema. Which it did, but not without some hiccups.
In my SEO consultancy page I have built some questions and answers in my copy without building the schema for FAQs. To be clear, there is no automatic relationship between the FAQs you build on a page and the FAQ schema, unless you build the schema yourself.
But InLinks is able to do just that!
Along with some nice schema attributes such as “Organisation” and “Thing”.
I decided that some of the FAQs were not relevant and others were not answered in satisfactory way.
InLinks lets you edit and delete your schema.
I highly recommend that you manually check all of the FAQs and schema the system is building, simply because in my case I have noticed lots of errors.
This is one of the things I didn’t like about InLinks. Yes, you get to automate your schema, but you also cannot rely 100% on a system and I recommend a human eye to have a second look.
Bonus Feature: Market Trends
Market Trends is a way to get insights about trending topics or topics that are interesting to your audience.
To put this feature to the test, I have decided to search for Marketing topics.
Yes, this was out of curiosity.
But I also wanted to see how InLinks would present and extract this information about trending topics.
And in general, InLinks did a nice job is presenting the report about trending Marketing topics.
And instead of providing you with hit topics only, it also shows which topics are falling in popularity.
I have decided to get more details about the topic of “Landing Pages” because I can see it’s trending at the moment.
Questions people ask about Landing Pages.
And newsfeed to check SERPs and understand why this topic is trending.
Jump directly into Google to check news about your chosen topic.
And create a new blog post about this topic, or optimise your page if you have already covered it on your website.
Bonus Feature 2: New Keywords Topics and Research Tool
In June 2022, InLinks released what I judge to be the most comprehensive topics and keywords research tool.
The new tool is not just coming up with a list of keyword and search volumes. It’s really showing keywords context.
Do you want to know which other topic is relevant for your main topic?
InLinks got you covered.
Check this out.
And instead of providing you with just a list of keywords, InLinks provides you with relevant other topics you can talk about in your website.
Then, you choose a topic and InLinks provides you with a list of questions.
Not only that, but it does it with a relevancy score: High, Medium and Low.
If you click on the “+” button, the system adds those questions and topics inside your content brief.
Where all of the topics and questions you decided to include are listed.
The content brief is also showing as an editor, where you can write your article and increase your relevancy score.
The cool thing is that the system is built around what other competitors have already published on Google search results.
And if you are able to increase your score from 1% to 100%, you have written some better content, which gives you a competitive advantage.
Is Inlinks worth it?
Let’s start with the things I don’t like.
Price is one of them, I find it very expensive and even for smaller websites the cost can easily reach hundreds of £ or $ per month. The free plan only analyses 2 pages per month, which means you can learn how the tool works, and not much more.
With the Freelancer Plan you start at $36/month and can analyse and link up to 20 pages.
If you need more you can add them for a price, for example, 41 pages cost $78/month and 63 pages start at $117/month.
If it was for me, I would add more pages with the free plan to make sure users can actually get small results and this would encourage them to pay for a bigger plan.
Also, I have found that schema is not 100% accurate and it requires lots of manual checks, which makes InLinks less interesting if you want to automate schema markups building.
Finally, and this is not a criticism, more like a wish-list.
- Provide a proper wizard to teach how to use InLinks and to show how and why target a page with a topic. This is really not obvious and a massive learning curve is required to figure it out.
For example, as soon as you target a page, all internal links go live instantly and schema is built and published. This might not be the right thing to do because it can have negative impacts, especially if schemas are not correct.
- There isn’t any integration with other tools, for example, it would be good to provide accurate traffic data if the site can be integrated directly with Search Console, instead of using Semrush.
We all know search volumes are not accurate in Semrush, to say the least. Which makes InLinks data and forecasts not accurate either.
Conclusion
Overall, while InLinks automations are super useful, I don’t think you can trust its schema automation just yet. Don’t get me wrong, it’s better to have to fix or delete some Schemas instead of building them from scratch, however, being Schema automation one of the core features of InLinks, and I wouldn’t trust them completely.
I’d recommend you to manually review the schema before publishing them live on your website.
The monthly expenses are probably justified if you feel the system can do a good job on a certain number of key, highly selected pages, rather than all pages. Which means you should carefully select the pages you want optimised in order to save money in the bank.
I also think the topic associations and internal linking work much better than schema automation features. Internal links automation doesn’t require any human check and I found to be often accurate.
The topic association is also 100% accurate and I really like the fact that you can find topic gaps within your website, in order to inform your content production.
In terms of SEO results, it’s too early to say whether the tool is bringing good results yet, as we know things take time in SEO, but the initial hopes are very high.
InLinks FAQs
What is InLinks?
InLinks is a data tool that helps you optimise your website for semantic search. It does it by letting you know what themes you cover in your content; giving you the insights to connect pages internally; and suggesting schema markup for your site.
Can I use InLinks for free?
Normally, InLinks offers a free account and lets you optimise 2 pages of your site for free. Check their pricing for more information.
Do I need to be a professional SEO to use InLinks?
Having a background in SEO definitely helps with getting started with InLinks. The learning curve is steep and I highly recommend you book a demo to understand how the tool works, in order to maximise the impact of your SEO efforts.
How does InLinks compare to SurferSEO?
When it comes to semantic SEO, inLinks is hard to beat. The key differences are that InLinks injects schema and internal links to the site, while SurferSEO is used for on-page optimisations.
The main drawback of InLinks is that the data provided only comes from Wikipedia. It is known that Google uses Wikipedia to build their own semantic optimisations, however, with InLinks you can use only one topic per page, which makes it restrictive.
The other big difference is that SurferSEO optimises for a keyword per page only, while InLinks optimises for entities and topics and it can also connect topics between pages.
