Your Step-by-Step Guide to Conducting A Comprehensive Backlink Audit

Just doing on-page and off-page SEO is not enough if you are not tracking the performance of your site. In order to understand how well your site is performing in search engines, it is important to perform an SEO audit of your site on a regular basis. An important subset of the SEO audit is the backlink audit. Backlinks, if coming from high-quality sites, can amazingly improve your site’s SEO performance and visibility. On the other hand, if these links come from low-quality sites, they can have a negative impact as well. To maximize the positive impact of backlinks and reduce their negative impact, conducting a backlink audit is essential.

What is a Backlink Audit?

A backlink audit refers to a thorough analysis of all the links that are pointing to your website. In a backlink audit, you have to look at which web pages are getting linked to and which websites/pages are linking to those pages. This also includes checking the quality of all the websites having links pointing to your site.

The aim of a backlink audit is to analyze the quality and relevance of all the backlinks to ensure that these backlinks have a positive impact on your SEO efforts. Have are a few factors to check when performing a backlink audit:

• Quality and Relevance of Backlinks: You must understand that not all backlinks are good for your site. Backlinks that come from low-quality or spammy sites can negatively affect your SEO efforts. Therefore, you must ensure that your backlinks come from high-quality and authoritative sites that are relevant to your brand.
• Anchor Text: The clickable text (where the link to your site has been added) should look natural and not forced. Content that seems to be keyword-stuffed or over-optimized anchor texts might be considered spammy by search engines and may get penalized.
• Follow and No-Follow Links: There should be a proper balance between do-follow and no-follow links. Otherwise, it may be considered manipulative by search engines.

Why is Backlink Audit Important?

A backlink audit is important to understand the backlink profile of your website. It helps you understand where your backlinks are coming from, i.e. whether they are from high-quality or low-quality websites. Also, you can identify potential and find new backlinking opportunities by conducting a thorough SEO backlink audit. With this, you can build a strong backlink profile and reduce the risk of your site getting penalized due to spammy backlinks.

How To Conduct a Backlink Audit?

Here is the step-by-step process that you can follow to conduct your site’s backlink profile audit:

1. Collect The Entire Backlink Data of Your Site

The first step in conducting a backlink audit is to gather the backlink data of your site. You can easily do it using Google Search Console (GSC). It is one of the free and powerful SEO and link audit tools by Google.

This allows you to monitor your website’s performance on search engines by analyzing different factors. You can also get detailed information about your site’s backlinks on GSC, which makes it a perfect tool for SEO backlink audits.

For this, you can log in to your Google Search Console account and click on the ‘links’ option given in the sidebar to get a detailed report of your site’s backlink data. This report has different sections, including ‘top linked pages,’ ‘top linking sites,’ ‘external links,’ and ‘top linking texts.’

You can analyze each of these sections to see which type of content is getting maximum backlinks and which sites are offering the backlinks. You can also export the data from one or more of these sections by clicking on the ‘export’ option under ‘more.’

2. Analyze The Quality of Backlinks

Now that you have gathered your backlink data and know which sites are linking to your pages, you can move to the next step of SEO backlink audit. Here, you need to check the quality of the backlinks. This includes checking if the backlinks come from high-quality or low-quality sites. Check the authoritativeness of websites that are linking to your web pages.

You need to ensure that the sites linking to your pages are authoritative, non-spammy, and relevant. If there are backlinks that come from low-quality sites, you can flag them as no-follow links. Make sure that there is a good balance between do-follow and no-follow links.

3. Identify Harmful Links

You can use backlink audit tools to check the source of your backlinks and get information about the reputation of the sites linking to your content. Identifying harmful links is extremely important as such links can have a negative impact on your site’s SEO. Sites with low-quality content are often considered spammy and penalized by search engines. If these sites have links pointing to your web pages, search engines may consider your site spammy as well.

4. Fix Broken Links If Any

There may be broken links due to which you may be losing potential traffic opportunities. Make sure that all the backlinks to your site are properly working. If any of these links are broken or show 404 errors, try to fix them at the earliest. For this, all your web pages should be working properly, so that if in the future any page gets linked to by other sites, it is not broken. You can look for 404 errors under the Pages section in your Google Search Console account.

5. Find New Backlink Opportunities

Google Search Console is not only a great tool for backlink audit, but it also helps you understand the overall SEO performance of your site. You can even find new backlink opportunities using GSC. See which pages and what type of content is attracting the most backlinks and try to create similar content. Apart from this, you can conduct competitor analysis to determine which sites are linking to your competitors and how you can make them link to yours as well.

Summing Up

Conducting a backlink audit of your site is important to determine the quality and relevance of backlinks. Not only this, but it also helps you identify new backlink opportunities and reduce the negative impact on your site. If you are looking for an SEO agency to conduct a thorough backlink audit of your website, you can connect with the SEO experts at MadHawks. Our team has years of experience and expertise in managing SEO and conducting SEO audits of websites. Contact us today to take your site’s SEO performance to the next level.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. How often should I perform a backlink audit?

Ans. To ensure that your website’s SEO performance is not impacted negatively, you must conduct a backlink audit on a regular basis, preferably once a month.

2. How can a backlink audit improve my website’s SEO?

Ans. By conducting a backlink audit, you can identify if there are any low-quality or spammy sites linking to your content and flag those backlinks as no-follow links. With this, you can reduce the negative impact of low-quality links on your site.

3. What are the common issues identified in a backlink audit?

Ans. Some common issues identified in a backlink audit include backlinks from low-quality and spammy sites, broken backlinks, and irrelevant anchor texts.

4. What metrics should I look at during a backlink profile audit?

Ans. Some important metrics to look at when conducting backlink audits include:

• Total number of backlinks to your site
• Number of follow and no-follow links
• Domain authority and Page authority of sites
• Spam score of sites

5. Can a backlink profile audit help in identifying toxic links?

Ans. Yes, a backlink profile audit can help you identify toxic links. You can remove these links to improve your site’s performance and visibility in search engines.