Performing A Full Backlink Audit: Step-By-Step Instructions

An essential part of search engine optimization is doing an audit of your backlink profile to evaluate the quality of the links going to your site.

In this step, you’ll check to see that your website is free of poisonous backlinks that might hurt its search engine rankings or cause Google to penalize your site manually or automatically.

Knowing the value of conducting a backlink audit before diving in headfirst is essential. The four goals of any link audit are as follows:

  • Find the fake sites that are linking to yours.
  • Repeat the methods that brought success to your past link-building campaigns.
  • Learn helpful information for your subsequent link strategy.
  • Learn to spot link scams.

You may have passed on a new customer because you didn’t realize the agency they came from had established spammy links to their site.

Or a malicious SEO campaign has been launched against your site. Bad apples among your rivals have built spammy links to your site rather than working to strengthen their backlink profile.

Whatever the case may be, discovering whether or not any of your incoming links are spammy is essential. You need to remove them as quickly as possible. Otherwise, a manual penalty from Google might reduce your site’s organic traffic.

An effective backlink audit requires more than simply a negative outlook. You may now focus on doing more of what is successful.

If your link building and link-earning efforts have been successful, you may take your site’s backlink profile to new heights by duplicating your efforts with similar link kinds, link building tactics, and linkable content formats.

A backlink audit may be used to evaluate your website’s link profile in relation to your competitors. That way, you may beat your rivals in search engine rankings and backlinks with a more unified, action-oriented strategy. You can develop a successful strategy for future link building with the information gleaned from a backlink audit.

Instruments designed to assist you in collecting data on your backlinks are essential. You may use any of the following link building tools in your backlink audit (or even mix and match them in a spreadsheet):

  • Majestic 
  • Search Console 
  • Moz
  • Link Assistant 
  • SEMRush 
  • Ahrefs 
  • Screaming Frog

There are five simple steps to doing a backlink audit, and here they are:

  1. The first step, survey the landscape of your rivals’ and your backlink profiles.
  2. The second step is locating low-quality backlinks to your site.
  3. The third step, examine your backlink profile to find openings and approaches.
  4. In the fourth step, see whether there are any links that aren’t working.
  5. In this fifth step, you will create your next strategy for constructing links.

As with any audit, a backlink audit must begin at the top and work its way down. In other words, you should start with a bird’s-eye perspective of your backlink profile before diving into the weeds.

To start, go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and input your site name to receive a high-level summary of your backlinks. At the time of this writing, 39.8K links are pointing back to our sample website from 1.05K unique domains.

Counting your backlinks and referring websites can give you a good idea of how well your link-building effort is doing at the moment.

The greater the sum of these values, the better your website’s domain rating. Your domain authority will rise if you attract more links from authoritative websites.

As such, it is a crucial part of any backlink assessment. Find low-quality backlinks so you may get rid of them (at all costs, if you can).

If you don’t monitor your backlink profile, toxic, irrelevant connections might stifle your SEO’s future development. When looking for poor-quality backlinks, how do you go about doing so? To begin, educate yourself on the distinction between the quality and quantity of backlinks. If you don’t know what kind they are and whether or not they’re terrible, you won’t be able to find them.

Examining your website’s backlinks isn’t just for spotting the bad ones. It’s also about learning about the top options and approaches. Examine your backlink profile as a first step. If you’ve been able to get more people to your site without paying for ads, you’ve achieved organic growth. Furthermore, it consistently receives new links each month. Discovering some content ideas is very recommended.

Determine which of your site’s pages has attracted the newest link-generating domains. You can see what kinds of material, how long of content, and what kinds of themes have been the most successful with your shareable audiences. Using this knowledge, you may produce more material of a similar nature to keep the flow of new backlinks to your site steady.

The first is awareness of what makes for successful content, whether you intend to use human outreach to acquire links. This time, the focus is on learning why your site can get backlinks without email marketing.

You can see if publishers are using the page as a reference by the increase in incoming links (they see it ranking on the first page while looking for references in search).

Links that formerly helped but no longer did so are considered wasted backlinks. So the question becomes, how do you deal with them? Determine whether there are any broken or unnecessary links and try to fix them. Determine which of your website’s pages are missing their inbound links. This is a golden chance in the world of link development.

Use Ahrefs’s “Best by links” function to find these missing pages. Simply use the pull-down menu to look for 404 errors.

Your next step may be to fix the broken links by sending users to relevant internal pages. This can help your new page rank higher in search results for the term you’ve targeted by passing “link juice” from the original page.

A second option is to start a new page dedicated to the subject. After your updated page has been published, you can contact the publications and web admins who previously linked to the outdated version. Get them to update their external links (from the old broken page to a new page).

Conceive A Linking Strategy For Your Upcoming Project

A more refined link-building strategy is the next step after removing harmful inbound links and expanding your view of potential inbound link sources for your website.

As a result, you won’t be fixated on your website’s finer points in isolation, but instead, consider how it stacks up against the competition.

In this final stage of your link-building effort, consider the following advice.

Think about how you best divide your time and energy across several pages.

Only some pages need your time and effort when conducting manual outreach for links. Only linkable assets can be promoted and potentially earn links from readers who find them interesting. Compile a list of these referenceable online resources.

You should also include landing sites that you want to rank highly for. These pages are an integral aspect of your marketing plan for the middle and bottom of the sales funnel. Your list now contains both landing sites and informative pages that may be linked to. If you get more links pointing back to these sites, you can boost their search engine rankings and, in turn, your business’s income. Page one receives much more clicks than page six, on average.

An audit of your backlink profile can help you see where you stand, what you can improve, and where you can make the most of new prospects.

Try to recall. Various websites exist, each with its characteristics. When done correctly, a backlink audit might take several days.

Important Instagram Metrics To Measure Your Success Rate Previous post <strong>5 Important Instagram Metrics To Measure Your Success Rate</strong>
A Quick Guide On How To Pin Comments On Instagram Next post <strong>A Quick Guide On How To Pin Comments On Instagram</strong>