How to Perform a Website Backlink Audit?

What is a Backlink & Backlink Audit?

A backlink is a link on other websites pointing to your website. It is a strong ranking factor for almost all search engines. A web page that has a large number of high-quality backlinks will be ranked higher in the SERP but the quality matters while building the backlinks.

A backlink audit is a process to filter the good and bad backlinks and as well as analyzing the opportunities to build new backlinks.  Why is a backlink audit important? Because if a good backlink can support your website to rank high & make the credibility of your website vice versa a bad (spammy) backlink can impact your website's ranking badly. Analyze your website backlinks on a weekly basis to keep the good backlinks and remove the spammy ones. It can be possible by a deep backlink audit. 

In this blog post, we have covered all the crucial steps to perform a strong backlink audit to help your website grow without any hurdles.

• Compare Your Backlink Profile with The Competitors.
• Analyze each Backlink on Your Website.
• Remove the Spammy Backlinks.
• Find New opportunities for building new backlinks.

Let's move toward how to perform each step to do a backlink audit.

Step 1: Compare Your Backlink Profile with The Competitors: 

This step is not a part of the backlink audit but it helps to build the strategy for the new backlinks and analyzing the competitor's backlinks strategies i.e. the type of backlinks they are creating and their top pages with the highest number of backlinks. This will help to ensure that we are in the right direction.

Elements You Should Analyze

No of Backlinks / Referring Domains:

It tells how many backlinks your competitors have made and helps to estimate the number of backlinks we need to build to run in the competition.

Domain Authority / Authority Score: 

This score tells about the power of a domain. The Authority score depends on multiple factors (Domain age, backlinks & overall SEO). By analyzing the authority of a domain we can estimate whether we can beat the competitor or not.

Types of Backlinks: 

Which type of backlinks your competitors have built? There are several backlinks types (guest post, profile linking, Business directories)

Link Attribute: 

It helps to detect the weaknesses of your competitors or you can say it's an opportunity for you to fill the gap your rivals are missing. 

Top Referring Domains: 

To find out the top domains from where your rivals are getting backlinks.

Step 2: Analyze each Backlink on Your Website

After analyzing the competitor's backlinks profile you come to know whether you are in the right direction or not. Now it's time to analyze each backlink to find the issues in your link profile that is the reason why you can not rank high as compared to your competitor. 

Some of the common issues are spammy backlinks, but there are many other factors that we need to focus on. Eg: lost links, link gaps, etc.

Method: 

Open the semrush 

Go to the backlink audit tool 

Setup a project 

Configure the tool by entering the keywords, category & Competitors

Elements You Should Analyze in This Process

High Toxic Overall Score:

It means there are a large number of spammy backlinks pointing toward your website.

Total Number of Backlinks:

If the total number of backlinks is very high compared to the backlinks you made then it means it is a spam attack. 

Small Number of Referring Domains:

If you are getting too many backlinks from the same domains then Google considers it spammy. 

High Toxic Referring Domains:

Detect the highly toxic domains that are most harmful to your website and collect them to remove later on.

High Number of Dofollow Backlinks:

Analyze if your website should not have the same type of backlinks. A Good backlinks profile is a mixture of different types of backlinks (Image links, Textual links, Dofollow, and Nofollow backlinks)

Existence Of Spammy Anchors:

Check that your backlinks should not have money, anchors or exact match domain anchors.

Gained/lost backlinks in a certain period: 

Analyze your lost backlinks and find if you have lost valuable backlinks.

Step 3: Remove the Spammy Backlinks

The most crucial step in a backlink audit is finding & removing spammy backlinks. It can be done in two steps

1) Approaching the owners/managers of the referring website and ask them to remove the backlinks

2) Collect the spammy backlinks and submit them to Google disavow tool.

Method: 

Go to the audit tab of the Backlink Audit tool

Filter the toxic links and try to group them according to the elements explain in step 2

Eg: Filtering the website having the high toxic score

      Filter the links with spammy anchors

      Filter the links by link attribute

Another way is to filter the toxic link by the source of the problem (URL, Title, Anchor). 

Added the spammy links into two categories: links you can remove to the remove list and links you can not remove to the disavow list.

Finally the links you want to disavow collect in a text file and submit that file to the Google Search Console disavow tool. 

Make sure don’t replace the new file of disavowed links with the already disavowed links. Instead of adding the new links to the existing file and submitting it.

Step 4: Find New Opportunities for Building New backlinks 

A backlinks audit is not just finding the issues in your backlink profile and fixing them, it is much more than that. It can help you to find new opportunities to improve your overall link-building strategy.

Here are a few tips to find backlinks opportunities 

Step 1: Connect your Google Analytics & Google Search Console to the Semrush so that it can analyze all the backlinks data. Click on target pages to check which page of your website provides an opportunity to get more links. 

Step 2: Add the popular domain that is already linked to competitors' websites to the outreach list. 

Step 3: Don't miss the lost link because it's easy to revive them. Use the link-building tool to approach the owners of the website for restoring the links.

We have discussed all the crucial steps to perform a successful backlinks audit for a website. You can do this analysis from time to time to keep your backlinks profile clean and updated as well as to add high-quality backlinks to your backlink profile. 

If you find it difficult to manage the backlinks no worries as an off-page SEO expert we will handle it just fill up the form or contact us for further discussion.

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