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Backlink audit is just as important as link building campaigns. If you have successfully launched your link building techniques, you also need to consistently follow up to analyze the performance and progress of your backlinks. Backlink audit helps you understand your link profile while it gives insight into your competitors.
There is no business that doesn’t undergo an audit review, likewise in building link. You need to focus your attention on building the right backlink for your brand, storing dofollow links that are vital, and measuring various link data to analyze your profile.
Backlinks are a basic SEO strategy that helps boost traffic and visibility. This link building Guide will help you uncover why this audit is useful and also discover referring domains linking to your own site, and how to resolve issues such as spammy backlinks and broken links.
Table of Contents
What is a Backlink Audit?
This involves a review, analysis, and management of links pointing to your website. Backlink audit tool is used to detect bad links that may pose a danger to your site in the future. It can also be said to be an inbound link on a website page gotten from another website. If you have an existing site and you haven’t audited, this is the best time to consider performing an audit to attract organic search engagement.
You can manage your backlink strategy when you are able to research the source of external backlink pointing to your domain. Effective link audit can be done quarterly or weekly depending on the size of the business. Smaller brands tend to have fewer links pointing to them compared to top e-commerce businesses that have thousands of internal links. Link audit can also help you measure up with your competitor site’s link profile.
Benefits of Backlink Audit
Link audits give your brand the opportunity to scale your link building strategies, It lets you see how you can improve your techniques and build a reputable domain authority. This audit can benefit your search engine optimization as it attracts organic search traffic.
It helps you discover bad links
You can easily detect toxic backlinks using backlink audit tool like Google Search Console, these toxic links can affect how your website rank on search engine. Links generated from external sources such as private blog networks can result in a Google penalty. This black hat backlink strategy has a negative SEO attack on ranking. Low quality links are fetched out and removed permanently to boost organic traffic.
It Creates Opportunities
You can easily discover more techniques for building links, such high quality links may be found in blog post or through a referring domain. You need to focus on backlinks analysis to know which drives more traffic and generates leads.
It helps you gain an understanding of your competitor
It gives you clear details on how your competitors are performing on Google search pages, this will help you gather valuable links that will elevate your brand to rank. You can receive backlinks from all the domains on your competitor’s website that have a higher ranking score. For instance, you can create similar content on your competitor’s websites while utilizing the receiving backlinks present in the content.
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Tools used to Run Audits for Backlinks
Before you can run an audit on your backlink profile, you need to identify the type of tools you can use to run this link building campaign. There are several tools online that you can use to embark on an audit, both free and paid tools you can then decide which options fit your brand. A list of three major SEO backlink audit tool, includes:
it shows you backlink data from your profile, it also shows you the number of referring domain link on a website. You can also determine how many backlinks pointing to your site, also showing you anchor text present in other websites when linking to your page. Links pointing to your page are also revealed together with any manual link penalties present on your page.
Note Google Search Console is a free link audit tool, and can be assessed by newbies in the SEO niche. But, it has its disadvantage which is the difficulty encountered in identifying the details of a link.
This is a popular SEO link audit tool used by link builders or agencies. It provides detailed information regarding backlink profile, the number of referring domains, and also your domain rating score that determines your ranking rate.
The pages that have more backlinks are also revealed with anchor text data on other websites that link to yours. Not only does Ahrefs provide context around every link detected, but the DR also helps to assess your profile and that of other sites. The limitation is that it is not free and has a higher pricing rate.
It provides so much beneficial data from backlinks. Using Moz you can assess the total referring domains on a website, also inbound links present, with the domain authority of the page. Interestingly, unlike other analytic tools it searches Spammy backlink and scores them. That way you tell how spammy links look on a website. Also, it has a high pricing, but there are free checkout options for visitors.
There are other SEO tools used in auditing backlinks in any link building tactics. You just need to identify which option best suits the size of your website.
Step-by-Step Link Building Guide to Run Backlink Audits
If you have gotten the right tool to start up your audit, then you are ready to kick start your audit. Subsequently, you need to follow a series of guidelines to achieve this result seamlessly. Here are simple steps to get you started.
Identify Links to your site
The first thing to do when auditing is to assess a list of links present on the website. You can as well import links from other sources if you have doubts about any missing links on the tool. You can assess backlinks such as Dofollow links, nofollow links, broken links, lost links, and toxic links. All you need is to follow the right metrics to provide an overview of the website’s current backlink profile.
For Example, if you want to use a free tool such as Google Search Console, you just have to simply follow these steps:
- Log into the search console and select search traffic.
- Select “links to your site”
- Then you can review the report of your backlink profile.
- Then you can check all the backlinks or external links available
- Click on the export external link and save it on the spreadsheet.
Futhermore, if you want more details on your backlink profile, you can use paid methods of auditing like Ahrefs SEO.
Evaluate your Profile Backlink
You can easily review these links provided for you, to know which benefits your website or identify harmful links present on the website. You can easily evaluate the links there as unified content, showing you the strength and weaknesses of the whole link. Before can evaluate links on a website, you must:
- Know the website authority and profile links. This is done by searching referring domains and links analyzed
- You must measure SEO DR rank and scale them from (0-100). This will help you see the quality of each link provided; the higher the score the higher the quality of links.
- The quantity of referring domains present on the web page
- The number of linked pages the website has.
- You can check the organic growth of your profile by reviewing link velocity. The link velocity chart will let you know when there is a drop in links and referring domains and also shows you when the spot spikes. You can achieve this by simply going to the overview page on your website to see features such as DR, toxicity score, backlinks, referring pages, organic keywords, etc. The referring domain will show you the number of websites linking to your domain while referring pages will spot the unique number of web pages directed back to your website.
Disavow or Remove Harmful links
After you must have reviewed the profile details, you can now decide if you want to remove any toxicity from your own website. You need to identify negative SEO attacks before you can remove them, to do this involves:
- Sending messages to referring domains and requesting to delete links.
- Or quickly sent it to disavow list and export it to Google disavow tool
In case you don’t have much time to contact website owners, you can as well divide your toxic links and whitelist all the toxic links with a score below 45. Then filter the list and group based on the issue detected.
Find Opportunities to build broken links
Some pages may return a 404 error i.e. page not found due to some linking errors.
This can limit your website ranking equity that comes with internal linking. So these broken links need to be fixed. To find these links simply:
- Enter your domain name using the Ahrefs tool and select “broken” in the section
- Select the link report best pages and filter for the errors
- Then go to the list of error links and fix
In situations where they are linking errors, also reach out to webmasters through and ask for a fix. Also if you have changed your URLs redirect the link to a new address, create high quality content and replace it on the page.
Improve Your Link Building Strategy
You can finally improve your backlink strategy to grow your business. You can focus on creating blog posts, paid links, attract links from authoritative websites, and monitor your profile consistently. This can have a great impact on your website ranking and increase your engagement metrics.
Conclusion
Embarking on backlink audit is an effective means of building links for search engines ranking. Make sure to audit regularly or get an expert who can help you channel your resources on the right track. You can actually rank higher with just a few quality backlinks and boost your website presence.
With these step-by-step link building guides you are able to analyze and manage your backlink profile.
