So you want to conduct a backlink audit for your website? Well done! You have taken the first step towards making your website SEO-friendly and potentially improving your search rankings with this backlink audit guide.
But the main problem you will face is choosing the right tool for the job and making the process easy enough for you to conduct a backlink audit frequently.
That is exactly what you will learn in this post.
Ready to learn a quick and simple four-step process to conduct a backlink audit for your website and improve your SEO?
Let’s get started on your backlink audit.
Table of Contents
First – Why Backlinks?
Backlinks play a crucial role in the success of your blog or website. Think of them as endorsements from other sites.
When another site links to yours, it signals to search engines that your content is trustworthy and valuable. This can boost your site’s credibility and improve its ranking in search results.
More backlinks generally mean more traffic, and with higher traffic, your content reaches a wider audience. Plus, backlinks help search engines discover your pages faster as they crawl through these links.
By building a network of quality backlinks, you enhance your site’s authority, making it a key part of your SEO strategy.
1. Choose A Tool
Conducting regular backlink audits is one of the most crucial best practices for good SEO.
But to conduct a quick and efficient backlink audit for your website, you need a good SEO tool like Semrush, Ahrefs, etc.
Both these tools provide in-depth backlink audit functionality and provide numerous metrics to evaluate your backlink profile.
Let’s discuss each of these tools in brief.
Semrush
Semrushs backlink audit tool is one of the best ones to conduct a backlink audit for your website. It gives you 45+ backlink metrics that you can analyze and also provides a toxicity score for your backlinks.
With this tool, you can quickly find broken links, toxic links, and the actions you need to take to optimize your backlink profile.
You can choose to use their free plan with limited functionality or get a paid plan starting at $119.95 per month. If you go for the paid plan, you will get tons of additional features to improve your SEO, optimize content, and get higher advertising ROI.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is another great tool with advanced audit features. With the Ahrefs Backlink Checker tool, you will get all important backlink metrics, along with a few proprietary ones like Domain Rating (DR), Ahrefs Rank, and URL Rating (UR). You can also use it to find broken links.
There is no free plan, but you can get a trial for $7. The paid plans start from $99 per month.
Other Tools For A Backlink Audit Guide
Other honorable mentions include Moz, Majestic, and Ubersuggest. Both of these also provide in-depth backlink audit capabilities that you can use to optimize your backlink profile.
Many of these tools provide free trials and plans that you can use if you don’t want to increase your SEO cost.
2. Check Your Competitors’ Backlinks
This is more of a pre-audit step where you get an idea about your key competitors’ backlink profiles before you start the inspection of your website.
The idea is to see how many and which kinds of domains are referring to them and how many backlinks they have.
How will this help?
It will help you benchmark your performance against that of your competitors. When you conduct a backlink audit for your website just keep in mind your competitors’ metrics to gain more context and insight.
You can use the same SEO tool for this, as you would for conducting a detailed backlink audit of your website.
3. Analyze Your Backlinks
Once you have picked a tool and analyzed your competitors, you can start the backlink audit for your website.
For this section, let’s use Semrush to understand the process as it does most of the work for you and is one of the easiest tools to conduct a backlink audit.
Simply go to the “Backlink Audit” option under “Link Building” and enter the domain that you want to analyze. With a paid plan, you can analyze multiple domains, while with a free plan, you can analyze only one.
Once you do that, you will get a detailed overview of your website’s backlink profile including metrics like:
- Number of backlinks
- Number of referring domains
- Toxicity score
- Domain authority score
While the overview is informative, you need to dig deeper to properly do an inspection for your website. For that, go to the “Audit” tab and find a list of toxic and potentially toxic backlinks.
Check each of these and move them to the “Remove” or “Disavow” list using the blue buttons on the right.
Proceed to the next step of this process to examine your websites links.
4. Take Necessary Actions from Your Backlink Audit Guide
The final step in this process to conduct a backlink audit for your website is to remove or disavow toxic or potentially harmful links.
If you were to manually conduct an audit you would have to check the anchor texts and authority of referring domains for each backlink. However, with Semrush, you get a complete list of toxic and potentially toxic backlinks.
For every toxic link, you can reach out to the referring domain owner and ask them to remove it. However, that is not always feasible.
So, a better option is to simply disavow those links and inform Google to ignore those links when crawling your website. You can do that from the “Disavow” tab in your Semrush Backlink Audit dashboard.
Simply import your disavow links list and disavow them in one bulk action. This will ensure that you only retain backlinks that build authority for your website.
Simple, right?
It’s these Semrush features that make it really easy to conduct an overview for your site within minutes.
Ready to Conduct a Backlink Audit for Your Website?
Irrespective of which SEO tool you choose, conducting an audit has never been easier. Most of the backlink audit tools provide a ready list of harmful backlinks that you can choose to remove or disavow.
The entire process takes around 30-40 minutes, so you should conduct a backlink audit for your website on a regular basis. This can be bi-weekly or monthly, depending on your website’s requirements.
So, do your analytics hat and conduct a backlink audit for your website right now.
Your Turn
Have you performed a backlink audit guide for your website? We would love to hear from you about which tools you are using for your website audits.
He has scaled an agency from 5-figure to 7-figure income in just two years. He has increased leads by 10X, conversion rate by 2.8X, and traffic to 300K per month using content marketing, SEO, influencer marketing, landing page optimization, sales funnel, and LinkedIn.
He contributes to reputable publications like HubSpot, Adweek, Business 2 Community, HuffPost, TechCrunch, and many more.
He leverages his experience to help SaaS businesses, influencers, local businesses, and ecommerce brands grow their traffic, leads, sales, and authority.
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That’s a great guide on checking the backlink profile of our sites.
Question: which tool have you used to create the featured image?
Hey Erik, happy to know, you liked it!
It’s Adobe Photoshop.
Good job Gaurav. I have doubled down on checking backlinks on my blog over the prior month. After mass deleting posts no longer resonant with my blog and brand I had ample broken backlinks to trash. One service located a few. But manually mass deleting seems the best path because I need to trash not only broken links but links pointing to less than worthy content. Backlinks should point to top shelf posts to make it worth reader’s while. Plus, if you have popular post and related post embeds set up then readers will stick around, click through and enjoy related and popular content.
Ryan
Hi Ryan, yes, I think Gaurav did a great job with this one. I love having a broken link plugin to help me with mine. I do look at the outgoing links when updating old content too. It’s good to get rid of any old or outdated info links on the site. Thanks for your feedback and make it a great new week Ryan!
Hey Ryan, I do manual backlink audits as well as use backlink tracking plugging. A manual backlink audit helps me remove unwanted links and helps me understand the backlink profile as well.
Lisa, thanks for allowing me to publish this content on your website!