How to Use SEO SpyGlass

The click path runs about four minutes. Add a project. Type a domain. Wait for the backlinks to load.

Then there is one screen almost every SEO SpyGlass tutorial scrolls past. It arrives before a single link does. Get that screen wrong and every number afterwards compares two things that were never comparable.

The Wizard Asks Where the Links Should Come From

SEO SpyGlass does not open onto one fixed pile of backlinks. It assembles a project out of sources you tick.

Its own backlink index sits there as the default. That index belongs to Link-Assistant.Com, the company behind the software. Then the wizard offers you more. Accounts you can connect to the project.

Source lists shift between releases, so read your own wizard rather than a screenshot from somebody’s blog post. Which sources appear is not really the point. What they have in common is.

Now consider that default index. It is a crawl. Somebody’s robot went out and followed links around the web. Then it wrote down whatever it hit. Anyone can point that robot at any domain on earth. No permission required. Which is exactly why it works on a competitor.

Every Extra Source Has an Owner’s Gate

Look at what connecting one takes. You sign in. Then you approve access for a property you control.

That is the entire gate. And it is not a limit somebody coded into SEO SpyGlass.

Whatever your version lists, Search Console behaves this way too. A verified owner sees the data. Nobody else does, no matter which tool is asking.

You can only ever sign in as yourself. So no project you build for a competitor will have those boxes ticked. Not this month. Never on a bigger licence either. Their verified data belongs to them. It stays there.

So the Two Profiles Were Never Built the Same Way

Now the consequence, which nobody warns you about. Your project pulls from the index plus whatever you connected. Their project pulls from the index. Nothing else.

Picture a Calgary flooring contractor at their desk. Their own SEO SpyGlass project reports one hundred and forty referring domains. The competitor across town comes back at ninety-six.

Forty-four ahead, then. That reading is where the afternoon goes wrong.

One of those counts came out of two collections. The other came out of one. Subtract them and the figure carries no meaning at all.

Part of that forty-four is real. Some portion of it is links the contractor earned. Another portion is just rows the crawler missed on the competitor’s side. Meanwhile an owned account quietly handed over the equivalent rows at home. Which portion is which? The report does not say. Nothing in the interface separates the two.

So the truthful version of that number is a range with unknown edges.

The Number Moves When Nobody Earns a Link

Here is the test. It costs you an afternoon.

Build the project index-only first. Write the referring domain count on paper. Then connect one account you own and rebuild.

The count climbs. Same site. The same links sitting out there in the world. Nothing happened outside your own browser window.

Whatever that increase turns out to be, it is not progress. Coverage moved. That is all.

Run the same test on the competitor project. You cannot. There is no second half of this experiment. That asymmetry is the whole finding. It survives every release. None of it was ever about the software.

Keep Two SEO SpyGlass Projects for the Same Domain

So here is the method, and setting it up takes ten minutes once.

Build your domain twice inside SEO SpyGlass. Name the first project for comparison and leave it index-only. Call the second one audit. Connect everything you own to that one.

Then send different questions to different projects. How far behind am I? That belongs to the index-only project, read against a competitor built the same way. What links do I actually hold? That one belongs to the enriched project.

Never read a number from one against a number from the other. Above all, do not let a screenshot from March meet a screenshot from June. That single habit does more for a backlink program than any filter in the tool.

Somebody Will Say the Enriched Project Is Now Useless

Wrong direction, though the objection is worth answering properly. The enriched project is the better of the two.

Think about what it holds. Links no third-party crawler ever reached. Your index-only project cannot show you those, because reaching them was never something its crawler could do.

So the enriched project answers the question you genuinely own. What do I have? It simply cannot answer a question about somebody else.

Two jobs. One project each. The objection assumed one project had to cover both.

Naming helps more than it should. Put the word compare in one project name. Then audit in the other. The mistake you will actually make is opening the wrong one six weeks from now. A filename catches that faster than memory ever will.

Somebody Will Say to Strip the Extra Rows Instead

Fair as an instinct. Match the sources by hand, then compare. The instinct is right, actually.

Some releases do tag each backlink with the source it arrived from. Yours might. Worth checking before you take my word for it.

Still, look at what stripping costs you. You filter by hand this month. Then you do it again in March. Again in April.

Meanwhile a second project does that work once and never asks you again.

Where the SEO SpyGlass Argument Stops

Matching your sources makes a comparison fair. It says nothing about whether any of those links are worth having. Or whether one of them ever moved a search result. A backlink count is one input to search engine optimization work. Never the scoreboard for it.

No third-party index holds the whole web either. Run one domain through two providers. Two different counts come back, both partial.

Your own site is the one exception worth knowing about. Google Search Console will show a verified owner some of what it recorded. Only a sample, though. Still a sample nobody can pull for a competitor.

Pricing sits outside this as well. Free editions carry limits on saving your work and exporting it. Those terms move between releases. Check the current ones before you build a monthly routine on top of them.

Read the Source Line on Your Oldest Project

Do this today. Open whichever SEO SpyGlass project you have kept longest. Find where it lists what it pulled from.

Then look at the competitor project sitting beside it in the same window. Ask whether the two were built from the same list.

Backlink Work for Calgary Businesses

SEO Company To-The-TOP! has been running backlink programs for Calgary businesses since 2007. Nineteen years of it. Tool output is where that work starts, never where it finishes.

A comparable count is worth more than a flattering one. So the reporting To-The-TOP! sends clients each month names what a number came from. Solo practitioner. No junior handoffs, which is why the person reading your SEO SpyGlass export is the same person who planned the campaign. Our Calgary SEO work has always been White Hat only.

Every backlink on that report points at one page. Which page it landed on decides whether it did anything for you. To-The-TOP! reads the reports that way around.

Backlink numbers matter less on their own than most owners expect. Pair them with a proper website audit and the picture sharpens considerably. Some businesses want traffic before a link program has had time to work. That gap is what Google Ads management covers. The slower work keeps running underneath it. Website promotion carries the outreach side of things.

Then there is the timeline. Three to six months before meaningful movement, depending on your market. That is the plain version, and To-The-TOP! gives it to every client before anyone signs anything.

Common Questions About Using SEO SpyGlass

How do you use SEO SpyGlass?

Create a project for a domain. Then pick which sources the project should pull backlinks from. SEO SpyGlass collects the referring domains it can reach and reports them. The setup choice matters more than any later filter, because it decides what the project could ever contain.

Is SEO SpyGlass free?

A free edition exists. It carries restrictions on saving projects and exporting your data, and those restrictions change from release to release. Check the current terms on the vendor’s own site rather than a review page.

Can SEO SpyGlass read a competitor’s Search Console data?

No. Connecting an owned account means signing in and approving access for a property you control. You cannot do that for somebody else’s site. So a competitor project always comes from third-party crawl data alone, whatever tool you happen to be running.

Does SEO SpyGlass show the same backlinks as Google?

No tool does. Every third-party index reports what its own crawler found. Google’s view of your backlink profile stays inside Google. The two lists will never match exactly. Treat any count as a reading rather than a fact.

How often should you rebuild an SEO SpyGlass project?

Monthly suits most small businesses. Backlink profiles move slowly compared with rankings. Rebuild sooner after a link campaign finishes, since that is when new referring domains would show up.