Running effective SEO campaigns involves analyzing the performance of multiple SEO metrics regularly. One vital off-page SEO factor to keep an eye on is backlinks to your website. Getting backlinks from authoritative websites is good for a website as it helps increase search visibility, referral traffic, higher domain authority, higher page authority, lower spam score, build brand awareness, etc. External backlinks are critical, as any toxic link or spammy link to the website may hamper the ranking on the SERPs. Conducting a backlink audit helps to know from where you are getting external links to your website and whether they are relevant to your product or service offerings. It helps to ensure that your links are from white-hat SEO websites so that users’ trust in your website increases. In this blog, we will discuss how to conduct an SEO backlink audit and remove the penalty-prone external links to avoid Google penalties. Read our blog on SEO backlinks and how to earn them to know more about the importance of backlinks for a website.
What are backlinks?
The backlinks are links on a website that points to another website. The links can be internal links or external links. Search engines like Google prioritize the backlinks on a page and consider it a crucial vote of confidence. When you have links to your website from another, the domain authority of your website scales. With continuous changes in the Google ranking algorithm, it is vital that the more links your website has, the better the chances of the website ranking higher on the SERPs. Whether it is content marketing, email marketing, etc., when you have referrals or when you have inbound and outbound links, the brand authority of the referred website or user increases. When you concentrate on link building, the essential point that you focus on is that you have links to your website from authoritative websites. Similarly, when you have external links to your website, it would be best if you have links from relevant and authoritative websites. You can avail our white label link building services to increase website traffic, build brand awareness, etc.
Essential steps of performing backlink audit
When working on analyzing the external links to your website, you must monitor the links regularly. With the help of a backlink audit in the search engine optimization process, you get to know the details of the external links to your website. As a data-driven SEO report helps to understand the performance of essential SEO metrics and then take work on a plan & strategy to improve the SEO campaign performance. In the same way, a backlink audit helps to identify whether the links you are receiving to the website are trustworthy. In order to improve link building and increase users' trust, it is important to perform a backlink profile audit. Here are the essential steps to follow.
1. Benchmark your profile against competitors - In the process of backlink profile audit, performing competitor backlink audit provides insights into link building strategies. It helps you to analyze your website better and then work on strategies to increase website backlinks. As in PPC advertising, search engine marketing, email marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, etc., you conduct competitor backlink analysis to know how they are performing. Similarly, in a backlink profile audit, once you get to know from where the competitors are getting links, the better are the chances that you can work on link building strategies. Once the SEO backlink audit work is completed, you will know the external links your competitor has, and you can contact get them to provide links. You can contact them for links through guest posting, blog commenting, etc. In the Semrush tool, go to backlink analytics and enter your own and competitors' domains to see their performance. In the overview tab, you will find all the essential pointers that you need to concentrate upon in your backlink search strategy. The essential pointers that you should look at are mentioned below.
a. Referring domains and number of backlinks - It is essential in backlink analysis as you get to know what number of backlinks your competitors are getting. With the increase in the number of backlinks your competitors are getting, you know how much you need to work on building brand awareness on online platforms.
b. Authority score - It helps to understand how attractive your domain should be so that more prospects are attracted to it. The better the authority score it implies that your link building score is working properly and users' trust in your website is high. c. Backlink types - When you work on a backlink search for your competitors, you must concentrate on the type of backlink. Similarly, you need to see what type of links your competitors are getting and also see which page content is getting more links. As you focus on the point of whether the links to your webpage are dofollow links or nofollow links.
d. Referring domains - It would be best to concentrate on referring domains in your SEO site backlink analysis process. It helps to know whether you are receiving an adequate number of links or need to work on modifying them.
2. Evaluating each backlink - Once you are aware of the point that your backlink portfolio is relevant compared to your competitors, you now need to focus on analyzing each link. In your SEO backlink audit process, you need to evaluate each external link to analyze whether they are relevant to your business. You need to look into the spammy links and work on excluding them from your list so that your ranking on the SERPs is not affected. As in content marketing, you focus on content gap analysis, conduct keyword gap analysis, choose high-traffic relevant keywords, optimize images on the page, etc. In the same way, you need to analyze the links in your link building strategy when performing an SEO backlink audit. The better authoritative links you have on your website, the better you build brand awareness, and it helps increase users' trust in your business.
With the increase in online platforms and social media marketing, building brand awareness on social media platforms is essential. So, you need to ensure that the links you receive are trustworthy so that users do not hesitate to click on your website. In your SEO backlink search strategy, you can use the Semrush tool to find and analyze backlinks. To do so, you can go to the backlink audit tool and set up a project. The next step is to configure the tool. To configure the tool, you must enter your target countries, categories, and brand names. It helps the tool understand how relevant each external link is to your business. The essential pointers to concentrate upon in backlink analysis are listed below.
a. Overall toxicity score - It shows too many suspicious links pointing to your website. So, you need to check the overall toxicity score and analyze whether they are relevant to your business or not.
b. Too high or too low number of analyzed backlinks - If you have a high number of links but are not focusing on link building, it may be a concern for your business as the chances of spam attack increases. If the number of links is low, others may perceive it as toxic on the web.
c. Small number of referring domains - Having too many links from a single domain may lead to suspicion in Google’s algorithm and can affect the ranking in the search results for the keywords or search terms entered.
3. Check dofollow and nofollow links - Another essential step that you need to follow after analyzing each link is to check the dofollow and nofollow links. The dofollow links are crucial as it helps in providing credit to the website. When you have dofollow links to your website, it allows search engines like Google and Bing to point to your website or blog. The better your website's brand awareness, it helps search engines point out which websites' blogs and posts are linking to your webpage. So, every time you insert a dofollow link, it points back to your website, thus strengthening your brand authority. As in PPC ad campaign, the better the keyword research is done, the better and more engaging the ad copy is written, and the essential PPC metrics are optimized, which helps provide a better quality score. In the same way, you need to focus on analyzing the dofollow links to your website so that the better the credit your page has, the higher the page rank and page authority.
To check the nofollow links to your website, you need to concentrate on the point that your website has less number of such links. These are links with a rel=”nofollow” HTML tag applied to them. The nofollow tag attached to the links tells search engines to ignore that link. It is due to the point that nofollow links do not pass page rank and also do not affect the ranking of the website on the search engine result pages. You need to ensure that the links you receive are from authoritative websites and not from black hat websites so that you do not lose website traffic, spammy links are avoided, the website is not hacked, etc. As in a PPC ad campaign, you focus on the point that negative keywords are added in the ad group so that your ads do not appear to irrelevant users and avoid irrelevant clicks. In the same way, you need to reduce nofollow links so that the performance of SEO campaigns is not affected.
4. Decide whether to disavow or remove harmful backlinks - In the process of backlink analysis and SEO backlink audit, you need to clearly identify which links to disavow and which links are relevant to your business. In the process of a backlink profile audit, you need to identify the external links and then decide whether to keep them or remove them. There may be links to your website that are toxic links and spammy links. In the process of backlink search, you need to identify which links you wish to disavow that may be harmful to your website. As in search engine optimization, you focus on analyzing the SEO errors or SEO mistakes and work on a plan & strategy so that it does not get repeated. Similarly, when performing an SEO site backlink audit, you need to determine which links to disavow, as this helps to increase website health. With multiple SEO myths to keep at bay, you also need to understand that not all external links are relevant to your business and work on avoiding irrelevant ones. It can be done in 2 ways.
a. You can contact the referring website owner and ask them to delete the link.
b. Sending it to the disavow list. You can then export it to the Google Disavow tool. You can also sort the links based on the page URL structure, page title, URL targeting, anchor text, etc. This helps to decide which links to be disavowed.
5. Check your referring pages - Whether small or large, there are multiple pages on any website. The larger websites have a huge number of pages, while the smaller ones have fewer pages. Not all webpages receive the same number of links. So, as you work on SEO pagination to simplify the user navigation on the website. In the same way, you need to work on checking the referring pages that you have received the external links. The pages that have received the links need to be checked to identify whether the links they have got on the page are authentic.
When you have multiple links to your page, there are chances that the same website is providing you the external links. So, you need to check that the website providing you with the link is authentic, reliable, and can be trusted. As you prepare an SEO report, PPC report, etc., after conducting an SEO audit, PPC audit to determine and fix the issues. In the same way with the backlink audit report, you can check the referring pages receiving the links. You can also work on other pages on the website to improve its ranking. The better the landing pages are optimized, the higher the chances the page visibility increases. You can work on updating old content, optimizing images, etc. This would help to improve the page authority, and more websites could provide links to your page.
6. Find new opportunities for valuable links - A backlink audit tells you which of the links on the website are relevant to your business and which links need to be disavowed. A backlink audit is more than finding and removing toxic or spammy links. It also provides opportunities to get high-quality links and improve overall link building strategy. When performing a backlink audit for your website, some of the essential points that you can focus on to find new opportunities for valuable links are listed below.
a. Connect your Google Analytics and Google Search Console to backlink audit so that the Semrush tool knows about your backlinks. As you connect Google Merchant Centre with Google Analytics so that you get to know about the performance of shopping ads. In the same way, when you connect these accounts, you get to see the new opportunities where you can find valuable links.
b. You can switch to the target pages tab to find which pages you can optimize on your website for more backlinks and referral traffic.
c. You can keep an eye on the ‘Lost and Found’ tab in the Semrush tool so that you have information about important changes to your backlink profile. It would also help you reach out to website owners to fix lost or broken links
How to get more backlinks?
There are multiple ways to generate quality backlinks to your website. Some of the vital tactics are discussed below.
1. Guest blogging - To generate quality backlinks for your website, one of the most effective ways to get links to your website is to focus on guest blogging. You need to concentrate on white hat SEO backlinks so that search engines like Google do not penalize the website. With the help of guest blogging, you allow your business to build your backlink profile by inserting links to various pages, blogs, where applicable and relevant. As in PPC ad campaigns, you focus on choosing the relevant target audience, ad relevance, etc. Similarly, in guest blogging, you need to choose relevant websites and also with higher domain authority. When you have a website with higher domain authority, the chances of higher ranking on SERPs increase, leading to better page engagement, higher website visibility, traffic on the page, etc. With the help of Moz's free Link Explorer tool can be used to check a website's domain authority.
2. Engaging content - The more engaging the content on the page, the more users are interested in making a click. The engaging content on page helps create a sense of urgency among the target audience to convert into customers. When you have great content on the page, the users feel that the product or services offered by the business are also worth availing of. It helps in increasing brand awareness and, ultimately, conversion rate. With a wide range of users on social media platforms, marketers also target social media platforms to run SEO campaigns, and engaging content helps build brand awareness on these platforms. It helps in peer-to-peer marketing and also makes the visitor move down the marketing funnel. When you have engaging content on the page, the referring website owners can be contacted to provide links.
3. Unlinked mentions - Another way to generate links is using unlinked mentions. It can be used to increase trust with the website owners already providing the links. It means that the target source is already providing your website, article, or blog name but are not mentioning the links to your website. So, with the help of links to your page, you get to have better page visibility and more users engage with your business, which ultimately helps drive traffic to the page, etc.
Tools to perform backlink audit
1. Semrush - With the increase in the number of online platforms, there can be links to your webpage from social media platforms, blog pages, etc. Apart from keyword research, competitive research, marketing insights, etc., you also get to perform backlink search that helps in the link building process. To conduct an SEO backlink audit, you can consider using the Semrush tool.
2. Ahref - Another SEO tool that you can use in your backlink audit process is ahref. It provides an in-depth backlink analysis that helps to know how the link-building strategy works. With the help ahref tool in digital marketing, you can gain insights into essential SEO metrics and know the backlinks to your page.
Round off
With multiple SEO ranking factors in the digital marketing world, to rank higher on the SERPs, both on-page and off-page SEO needs to be continuously monitored. While the on-page SEO factors can be analyzed by preparing an SEO report and conducting an outsource SEO audit. The essential point to concentrate upon is the off-page SEO factor. It needs to be done as if the off-page SEO factors are not optimized; they may impact your SEO negatively. It may have a negative impact on your brand awareness, and you may lose website traffic. As discussed in the blog above, you can focus on an SEO backlink audit that helps to analyze where you are getting links from and helps increase website health. If a backlink audit seems cumbersome, you can get in touch with a digital marketing agency and outsource backlink analysis services. The backlink services help in analyzing the external links and disavow the spammy links. The SEO professionals have expertise in market market research, link building, SEO analytics, video SEO, local SEO, small business SEO, etc., and scale your business ROI.
References:
● How to audit your site’s backlink profile
● How to Conduct a Backlink Audit in 45 Minutes