Yes, you heard that right; you can master a backlink audit in just five steps. In the next few minutes, you’ll have what it takes to identify spammy backlinks and position your website as an authority in your field.
Basically, backlink auditing is an integral part of your SEO efforts and significantly affects your overall credibility and rankings. That means you should never stay without performing a backlink audit for extended periods because your traffic can considerably drop.
Now, if you’re still with us, let’s get to the goal of this post!
What is a Backlink Audit?
Are you asking what a backlink audit is? Well, let’s start there!
We can even start by looking at what a backlink is. A backlink is typically a link from another page or website to your site. The primary goal of a backlink is to grow traffic and authority on your site, which only means one thing: You should only allow links from high-domain authority sites because Google loves quality!
Consequently, a backlink audit is ideal for determining whether the links pointing to your site or pages are worth it.
Essentially, this is what you do in a backlink audit:
- Discover which sites you are getting backlinks from
- Check which pages on your website attract the most backlinks
- Banish spam backlinks
- Discover new potential sites to build backlinks
As you can see, the ultimate goal of a backlink audit is to prevent lousy backlinks that can destroy your site rankings and encourage high-quality links.
Especially if you think about all your SEO efforts for your site, it’ll be pointless to see a harmful link neutralizing all that, right?
If you agree, continue a backlink auditing process in these five steps!
1. Select a Backlink Audit Tool
First things first, there are multiple backlink auditing tools, some of which are free and others premium. Similarly, some are effective, and others would take your website some steps back!
As such, you must take time to choose the right tool and avoid hours of headaches and frustrations for working with the wrong tool.
In most cases, a premium tool is often more insightful and provides valuable metrics that free SEO tools may not provide. Some practical backlink audit tools include Majestic SEO, Ahrefs, and Moz. Whichever you use depends on the specific metrics and features you want!
Some of the features you should confirm that a typical backlink audit tool shows are:
- Authority score
- Top anchor texts
- Top target pages
- The ratio of dofollow to nofollow backlinks
- Number of linking domains
2. Scan for Opportunities
Using your selected tool, review all the backlinks to determine the most relevant ones, i.e., you’ve gained the links organically, and you can reuse them on your site. Typical opportunities include partner pages, quotes in blog articles, listings in directories, press coverage, etc.
If you are working with the right tool, it will help you filter your backlink report and categorize the backlinks from your product page or authority sites differently from those of poor authority and quality.
3. Scan for Lost or Broken Backlinks
It’s so easy to lose a potential backlink or even have it break! A broken link often directs you to a 404 page, indicating that the page is not found. But note that you can only know when a link is lost or found after backlink auditing; otherwise, browsing such a typical page won’t get the desired results.
And you know what? You can restore a lost or broken link swiftly, even if it means reaching out to the website linked to your site or page.
4. Identify Toxic Links
In addition to scanning quality backlinks lost or broken, you must identify any toxic or spammy backlinks. Fortunately, most backlink audit tools can help you identify and remove such links from your site.
You might notice a spammy link by looking for spam score, toxicity meter, etc. Subsequently, you can submit these links in a disavow file and ask a search engine like Google to assume them when evaluating your website.
5. Link Building
Congrats on cleaning up the mess! Now, what next? You don’t want all your efforts in backlink audits to be insignificant, right? Then, you must develop a link-building strategy, whether adding new backlinks or developing the current quality ones.
In this step, you want to study your competitors to note the links that work for them that you don’t have. Examine them and point to the relevant ones on your site.
How to Build a Healthy Link Image
A Backlink audit is one of the most effective ways of building and improving your backlink profile. In addition, implement the following practices:
- Update your site map
- Add labels and alt texts on images
- Optimize page speeds and loading times
- Guest posts to high-quality sites
- Use internal links
- Focus on high-quality content
- Follow SEO and Google guidelines
Conclusion
There you have the five steps of performing an SEO-friendly backlink audit. Making it this far indicates your concern about your site’s health and credibility. In practicing high-quality backlink-building strategies and improving your backlink profile, there’s no doubt that you will dominate the SERPs.
