By knowing how to do a backlink audit, you will be able to identify spammy and low-quality backlinks. With proper backlink audits, you will be able to improve your website’s rankings as well as your link-building strategy. A backlink audit can help you assess which links are helping your website’s SEO and which are actually hurting it. Subsequently, you can also identify the best link-building and website optimization opportunities. A backlink audit can also help you adjust and improve your existing link-building strategy.
What is A Backlink Audit?
You already know that backlinks, also known as inbound links, are links to your site. Backlinks are a crucial part of SEO and help search engines, such as Google, understand how valuable and trustworthy your website is. On that note, a backlink audit is essentially about taking a deep assessment of all backlinks that are pointing to your website’s pages from other sites.
With a backlink audit, you can essentially do the following:
- Get the details of the sites from which your website gets backlinks.
- Identify the pages on your website that have the most numbers of backlinks.
- Identify spammy and hurtful backlinks.
- Identify new opportunities for link-building.
- Create a plan to exclude bad backlinks.
Why Should You Do A Backlink Audit?
A backlink audit is an integral part of off-page SEO. Unbeknownst to you, your website pages have loads of harmful backlinks, which could affect the credibility of your website. So, an SEO backlink audit can help you identify those harmful backlinks that are causing your on-site SEO to go to waste.
Backlink Audit Helps with Establishing a Healthy Backlink Profile
A backlink audit is essentially a backlink profile audit, which is why it can help establish a healthy backlink profile, as you will be removing the bad backlinks. With regular backlink audits, you will efficiently remove hurtful links after proper identification.
Now, you certainly did not buy PBN backlinks, but with a backlink audit, you will be surprised to learn that you gained a bunch of PBN links unintentionally. Now, as a website owner, you already know that Google has strict guidelines for organic link-building and deals with spammy links very seriously.
With backlink audits, you can create a healthy backlink profile and improve your website’s ranking.
Backlink Audit Allows You to Track Your Progress
Ideally, you should do a backlink audit before setting up a link-building campaign. A backlink audit will allow you to gauge your SEO progress and subsequently monitor the success of your link-building campaign. Subsequently, you will also be assessing how your backlink profile has been changing over time.
A backlink audit allows you to identify the areas that aren’t working in your current link-building strategy, and you will be able to assess which areas need improvement. During the audit, you can also identify new link-building opportunities, which can help you boost your website’s page linkability.
You can also track the number of new backlinks and referring domains that you have lost or gained. You will also know whether the backlink profile looks healthy and whether you have made any progress.
Backlink Audit Helps You Understand What You Are Working With
When you start getting a new website, you should know what you are dealing with, which is why you should know how to do a backlink audit. If your backlink profile is awful, all of your SEO attempts to improve your website’s ranking will go in vain, such as if your backlink profile has loads of PBNs. You can leverage the right tools, such as the site audit tool of Semrush, to check any site for spammy links.
Backlink Audit Enables You to Keep Tabs on Your Competitors
More importantly, with a backlink audit, you can keep tabs on your competitors. You already know you want to stay ahead of the SEO game, which is why you need to win at the link-building game and remove toxic backlinks. Using the right audit tool, you can assess the backlink profiles of your competitors and see what your competitors are doing right to earn high quality backlinks.
Subsequently, you can create better content than your competitors, which other websites would like to link to. Using the right tool, you can also check out the velocity of your competitors regarding how fast they are getting backlinks. This piece of information will help you understand how fast you will have to be with link-building to stay ahead in the game.
Important Question: How Often Should You Conduct A Backlink Audit?
At this point, you might be wondering about the frequency with which you should conduct a backlink audit. The simple answer to this question is that it depends on several things, such as the volume of your backlinks. If you frequently acquire backlinks, then you will have to conduct a backlink audit more often. Also, the frequency of backlink audits depends on the layout and size of your website, as well as the frequency with which you publish content.
Also, be mindful about how the number of years the website has been live. The older your website is, the more frequently you will have to perform a backlink audit. If yours is a competitive niche, then frequent audits will prove fruitful in standing out from your competitors.
How to Do A Backlink Audit – Understanding the Crucial Steps
The following steps will serve as the best backlink audit checklist that you can use for your SEO. Let us get started.
Compare Yourself to Your Competitors
We covered this aspect of backlink audits and mentioned why you should do a backlink audit. However, benchmarking your backlink profile and comparing it with your competitor’s backlink profile is a mandatory step that you must do at all costs. This comparison will provide valuable information, including the number of referring domains and backlinks of your competitors. This valuable insight will let you know about your backlink-acquisition rate when compared to that of your competitors.
You will also get to compare your and your competitor’s authority score. And all of this matters for your website backlink audit. The golden rule is that the stronger your site’s backlink profile is, the higher you will rank in SERPs, which is also your eventual goal.
Tips to Analyze Your Competitor’s Backlink Profile
To compare your backlink profile to the backlink profiles of your competitors, you can use Semrush’s backlink analytics tool and enter your respective domain name before choosing the option “analyze.” Proceed to enter the domains of your competitors in the “overview” option before choosing “compare.” Subsequently, you will be able to review the following crucial aspects that are part of the backlink footprint.
- Authority Score
- Referring Domains
- Referring IPs
- Link Attributes
What this will do for you is that you will get to know the strengths of your competitors and the potential aspects that you need to improve. You will also get to know how your backlink profile’s growth stands compared to that of your competitors. You can also find more link-building opportunities and start working on them.
Evaluate Each of Your Site’s Backlinks
Once you have the details regarding how your backlink profile looks compared to the backlink profile of your competitors – the next step is to evaluate all backlinks – one after the other. This is the point where you will be taking a deeper look at each link. Why, you might ask? Well, the thing is that some backlinks are beneficial, whereas others are harmful.
If the low-quality backlinks outnumber the good-quality backlinks, it will be impossible for you to move the needle of your website. Also, if you have spammy backlinks pointing to your website, you are at a high risk of getting penalized by Google. Using a backlink audit, you can analyze the quality of your backlinks, one after the other.
Once you have a detailed list of all backlinks pointing to your website, you can have a look at the following:
URLS: You will see whether or not the URLs are from legitimate websites.
AS of Linking Domains: You can assess the reputability of the linking domains and see how these impact your rankings.
Anchor Text: You will see whether or not the anchor texts are linked to their relevant pages. It will help you differentiate between high-quality and low-quality backlinks.
TS (Toxicity Score) of Linking Pages: You will be able to measure the toxicity scores of the linking pages. The rule of thumb is that the lower the toxicity score of the linking page is, the higher the quality of the links will be.
Decide the Backlinks You Want to Remove
In the next part of the backlink audit, you will be deciding whether you will be removing or renouncing bad backlinks and which ones these will be. After all, you must follow Google’s guidelines for effective link-building to avoid getting penalized by Google. On that note, if you have actually received a manual action penalty, you have two options:
You can use Google’s “Disavow Tool” to disavow bad links.
This Is An Original Picture – You Can Use it As It Is
You can reach out to the relevant sites that the spammy or bad-quality backlinks come from and ask them to delete these links. If the potential website owners don’t remove the backlinks to your site, your ideal option is to disavow them.
Recover Your Lost Backlinks
The next step that is part of these backlink audit tips is to recover your lost backlinks. Link-building takes time and effort, which is why it can make a big difference when you lose backlinks over time. You can lose backlinks for a variety of reasons, including the following:
- The website’s author removed the link from your content.
- The website’s author replaced the link with something else.
- The link is being redirected to another page.
- The backlink was accidentally deleted.
You can leverage the right link-building tool to effectively recover the lost backlinks.
Once you have the list of your lost backlinks, you can then get to work and open each of the lost backlinks one after the other. You will get to see the reason why the backlink disappeared, such as the deleted page or a 404 error. Subsequently, you can reach out to the respective website owner and request them to restore the linked page. You can write them a simple email and wait for their response.
Find New Link-Building Opportunities
By now, you might already know that a backlink audit will help you so much more than simply analyzing your backlink profile. With a backlink audit, you can actually spot new link-building opportunities that can help you boost your website’s ranking. To find new link-building opportunities, you can do the following things:
Assess the types of content that attract high-quality backlinks. Subsequently, you can rewrite your existing content and create better and more valuable content to attract high-quality backlinks.
You can also assess the link-building strategies of your competitors and integrate a similar strategy for your website.
Using the right backlink analytics tool, you can assess your most linked-to content by going to the “indexed pages.” Subsequently, you will see the top link-earning content, such as how-to guides or other posts. The next step will be to create more of the type of content that has successfully attracted high-quality backlinks.
At the time of assessing your competitor’s backlinks, you can determine the types of domains or types of websites that are linking to them the most. For instance, if you detect that your competitors are getting more links from popular media websites, such as BBC, it means that you might want to increase your PR efforts as well so that you can earn high-quality backlinks.
Final Thoughts
When you learn how to do a backlink audit, you get to thoroughly analyze the quality, relevance, and quantity of your backlinks that are linking to your website. A comprehensive backlink audit guide can provide you with the necessary information that can help with your next link-building campaign and SEO strategy. With a backlink audit, you can actually outrank your competitors and build better links.
FAQs
How Can Bad Backlinks Hurt Your Website?
There are good and bad backlinks; however, toxic backlinks come from low-quality and irrelevant sites that can hurt your website’s SEO. A backlink audit can help identify bad backlinks.
What to Focus On During A Backlink Audit?
During a basic backlink audit, you will be focusing on the number of your backlinks and the ratio of no-follow and do-follow links. You will also identify the number of referring domains. More importantly, you will be reviewing your competitor’s backlinks and doing a comparison.
What Are Bad Backlinks?
Bad backlinks are essentially backlinks that are unnatural. These can be links from link farms, PBNs, or from spammy websites.
