The Ultimate Guide to Backlink Audits in 2024
Backlink still matters in the modern SEO era, and prioritizing your backlink profile is of utmost importance!
Aside from learning how to acquire backlinks through email outreach, guest posting, or social media marketing, it’s also important to conduct backlink audits. A backlink audit is a thorough analysis of your link profile that checks the quality, quantity, relevance, and link health status of your links.
As you regularly do backlink audits, you can improve your SEO rankings and achieve your business goals in the long run. So, if you want to improve your SEO, continue reading our article to learn more about backlink auditing.
The Complete Backlink Audit Process
To make your backlink audit successful, you must complete the auditing process to see positive results. Remember, a knowledgeable SEO specialist can change the SEO statistics with more organic search and traffic and even boost your sales!
Without further ado, let’s begin your journey in learning how to do the backlink audit process in 2024 by understanding the nature of backlinks.
What Are Backlinks?
Google is continuously evolving the digital landscape, and now, search engines emphasize the quality of your backlinks. The backlink’s role is to give your website a “vote of confidence” or recommendations pointing to your website.
With this role in SEO, it is evident that you need to do regular backlink audits to keep your links healthy and reliable to search engine standards. As you do so, your website will be more authoritative in your industry.
Why Backlinks Matter in 2024
Backlinks still matter in 2024 because they are still one of the pillars of SEO rankings, aside from your content and technical aspects. Backlinks can still make your website authoritative and credible, helping you with search engine rankings.
As you do so, you can keep your website at the top of the Search Engine Result pages or SERP. Also, remember that in 2024, link quality is also an essential factor to consider in your site’s health and SEO performance.
For this reason, you need to do a thorough SEO audit by following the steps below.
Step 1: Preparing for a Backlink Audit
👉 Setting Goals and Objectives
Like every plan, you must start with a goal and objective for your backlink audit. Defining your goal can help you streamline the process you need to do and identify the key metrics you need to improve or track, like domain authority (how your website will rank), spam score (likelihood of being penalized), and referring domains (total count of unique domains linking to your site).
Your goals might include improving your search engine rankings, reducing the spam score, enhancing domain authority, and removing toxic links. As you establish your goals, you’ll know the tools and resources you need.
👉 Gathering Tools and Resources
Sirlinksalot shared that you need to find an effective tool to help achieve backlink goals before you start your backlink audit journey. There are some recommended tools for banking analysis, such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, MOZ, Google Search Console, and Google Disavowal tool.
Here’s how they can help your backlink audit process:
✅ Ahrefs – It is a tool known for its comprehensive backlink analysis feature. It can help you learn more about your website’s backlink profile and determine which areas to improve.
✅ SEMrush – SEMrush can offer detailed backlink health and is suitable for competitor analysis. So, if you want to improve your rankings, SEMrush will help you know which areas to improve.
✅ MOZ – It can provide metrics for your spam score and domain authority. If you need to improve these, MOZ is an applicable tool for your backlink audit.
✅ Google Search Console—This tool allows you to get data about your site’s external and internal links and domains.
✅ Google Disavowal Tool—This tool is applicable if you need to remove toxic links. It will allow you to submit links that you want Google to ignore because they are harmful to your website.
After choosing the tools you need for your backlink audit, you can set up the accounts and prepare your work process.
Step 2: Conducting the Backlink Audit
SEMrush shared that conducting a thorough backlink audit can help you get ahead of your competitors and even increase your organic search for more sales. For this reason, you must know how to properly utilize the tools you have to achieve your backlink goals.
👉 Collect Your Backlink Data
This section will teach you how to extract backlink data from tools such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz, and Google Search Console.
- Ahrefs – Navigate the backlink profile and explore the data you need for your audit.
- SEMrush – Use the “Backlink Analytics” tool to gather your backlinks and export the list.
- Moz – Go to “Link Explorer” and export your backlink data.
- Google Search Console – Under “Links,” you can find your external links and export them.
After getting all the data you need, consolidate it in an Excel file to get an overview of the statistics you need to improve. It is also better to use a Google Excel sheet that can be autosaved.
👉 Analyze the Quality of Your Backlinks
When analyzing your backlinks, you need to know key metrics to follow, such as relevance, authority, and traffic. Here’s why they are important to analyze:
✅ Relevance – Use tools to Check the link source to determine if the link is relevant to your niche. You need to ensure that the link is related to your business or services so Google can see the site’s relevance with the interlink to your webpage.
✅ Authority – This statistic determines whether a website can rank in the SERPs. Check the domain authority of your links to determine whether they are worthy of your overall SEO performance.
✅ Traffic – Most importantly, you can check the website’s traffic to see how many online users it attracts. This tells you that most online users can click on your website.
Finally, remember to evaluate the link quality, whether it’s high or low quality. After categorizing the link quality, you’ll know the next step in your backlink audit process.
How to Identify Toxic Backlinks ?
Indeed, toxic backlinks can harm your overall SEO performance. You are responsible for looking after these toxic links to keep a healthy website and see positive results for your business! It is essential to know the common signs of toxic backlinks so you can remove or disavow them:
- Links from spammy or low-authority sites
- Links from unrelated or irrelevant content
- Excessive anchor text manipulation
Final Tip: It is also better to use SEO tools so you can find and assess toxic links that can harm your website’s performance. In doing so, you
Step 3: Cleaning Up Your Backlink Profile
Toxic backlinks are indeed toxic to your website. You must immediately take action if you see a toxic link harming your website. There are two ways to remove toxic links: Use Google Disavowal Tool and Contact the webmasters.
✅ Use Google Disavowal Tool :- If you find a toxic link and can’t contact the webmasters to remove it, you can use the Google Disavowal Tool to submit the link so Google can ignore it.
✅ Contact the Website Owner :- You can also contact the webmasters to remove the toxic link. Just make sure to craft a professional email when you request that they fix the toxic link linking to your site.
Step 4: Maintaining a Healthy Backlink Profile
Aside from removing the toxic links, it’s also important to maintain a healthy backlink profile to keep a well-performing SEO strategy for your business. Here’s how you can do it:
✅ Regularly produce high-quality content :- If you want to maintain a healthy backlink profile, you need to produce high-quality content such as your blog articles, infographics, and guest post submissions. With this, you’ll encourage credible websites to use your contents as an interlink.
✅ Engage within your community :- To have relevant links for your website, it’s better to engage within your community to get high-quality links. It can increase your credibility and make your website look more expert that can encourage people to trust your website.
✅ Monitor and Conduct Regular Backlink Audit :- Of course, it’s also important that you monitor and conduct your backlink performance. With the tools mentioned above, you can use them to ensure that your backlink profile is healthy and effective.
Step 5: Post-Audit Actions
👉 Monitoring and Maintenance
Once you’re done with auditing your backlink profile, it’s also important to do monitoring and maintenance to keep your backlink profile healthy. What you can do is to use SEO tools to check the backlink status and know which areas you need to improve.
Perhaps you can have a routine check weekly or even monthly to see whether your backlink profile is still effective or if it needs another backlink audit.
👉 Reporting and Benchmarking
If you’re an SEO specialist, it’s better to create a detailed report of your findings so you can manage the backlink performance more easily.
You can also compare the results from your previous audits to measure progress and see where you need to improve. Remember to include the key metrics and use visual aids to present the data easily.
Start Your Backlink Audit Now…
Backlink audit is part of the SEO strategy to keep your website effective and well-functioning. For this reason, you need to streamline your backlink audit process that can lead to a healthier backlink profile. Now, you can use this guide to start your backlink audit and transform your business with higher organic search and better website authority.
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