How To Do a Backlink Audit In 15 Minutes and 5 Steps

Being an SEO professional you understand backlink audit benefits and its importance like no one else. Despite the vertical, size and established or new, a backlink audit proves to be necessary and requisite for a business. But contemplating on backlink audit guide and implementing all the instructions on it seem overwhelming. You want to make the whole process of backlink audit a hassle-free and easy procedure. In this blog, you will understand how to do a backlink audit and the best backlink audit tips and steps. 

What is a backlink audit?

Google and other known search engines are after link building because it has so many benefits to a business. It is essentially executed on new websites. It primarily checks the quality of backlinks and looks for harmful links and the quantity of backlinks on your website. If your website has many great backlinks, the higher your search engine rank. 

Why conduct a backlink audit?

• Well-defined and qualified backlinks can increase your online presence and SERP ranking.
• Identification of low-quality or adverse effect links
• It hinders search engine penalties
• Increase organic search ranking
• Identify the gap between content and link-building strategies
• It ensures backlink profile health
• It addresses manual actions
• It helps you understand the relevancy of the page
• It promotes you as an industry thought leader
• It helps you have an eye on your competitors

Backlink audit tools

• Backlink analytics tool – The Backlink analytics tool is a comprehensive tool to fix your backlink profile.
• Linkchecker – With this tool, off-page SEO optimization efforts get a boost.
• Semrush – A full-fledged complete backlink audit tool.
• Google search console – It helps you analyse the backlink profile
• Ahrefs – You will get to know in-depth information about referring domains, anchor text data and domain rating.
• Click Intelligence – You can easily get to know what works for you and what are the causes of low backlinks.
• Moz Link Explorer – It is one of the top SEO backlink audit tools.

Evaluating the quality of backlinks is essential from time to time using top backlink audit tools. A backlink audit tool checks the overall quality as well as the quantity of links to your website.

Backlink audit tips

When you Google backlink audit tips, you may find innumerable tips on how to do backlink audit but they can be summarised into these six link building tips  as follows:

• Identify target audience – Determine your website or platform for analysis.
• Comparison – compare and analyse your websites with other tools.
• Determine the type of content for links – You need to determine and separate content that gets the most backlinks
• Cut down links – You can check if your website has gained low-quality links or harmful links to remove them right away.
• 404 errors – Fix these as soon as possible
• Analyse negative SEO attack – See if the site is facing a negative SEO attack

Once you apply these link-building tips, you will be adept at learning how to conduct a backlink audit.  

How to do backlink audit

1. Select a backlink audit template and a tool

Selecting a backlink audit template from a tool is not an easy thing to do as there are top-class options available. When you Google this and can find a variety of paid and unpaid options to choose from. To select one, you can ask your community or colleagues to get referrals. Or select a paid tool that has got high reviews and ratings so far. You may opt for a tool that offers full-fledged backlink audit services to save you money and time. Besides, along with the paid tool you need Google Search Console to removal of perilous links accumulated on your site. You can choose any of the above SEO audit tools to learn how to conduct a backlink audit. 

What you will get:

• Get to know the relevance of existing links
• Get to know areas of improvement
• Can conduct a comprehensive backlink SEO audit
• Can fix any abnormalities and catastrophes

2. Understand Metrics

What are the top attributes and parameters you need to look into a backlink audit report? Many metrics need to be analysed to better understand and benefit from the audit.  Unearthing your backlink audit with these metrics answers the question “do outbound links help SEO?’ Prominent key metrics of a backlink audit are as follows:

• Keyword rankings – Your keywords in content relevancy matter as they cause either a drop in SERP rank or a hike. These keywords help with specific ranking on search results.
• Core Web Vitals – This list of metrics is a must-have to get to know how well your website is in terms of performance.
• Organic traffic – How much organic traffic your website has gained over a period assessed to see any warning signs or opportunities
• Your CTR rates – Whether you get high CTR with a high CPC or vice versa.
• Online visibility – The magnitude and depth of your website’s content for an end user reveals how discoverable your brand is.
• Social proof – How much and from where does your brand get social proof and the kind of data regarding traffic and engagement?

• High-quality content – The role of content played in getting top-class, quality-driven backlinks to your website.
• Link velocity – What is link velocity you may ponder? The number of backlinks gained or lost over a specific period.

3. Assessment Stage

Assessment stage you analyse your entire backlink profile for certain attributes that we will discuss below to ensure every quality link is garnered in a gregarious way not unethically. Moreover, search engines scrutinize your backlink’s trustworthiness, credibility and relevance: 

• How relevant are earned links to your domain
• How much traffic comes from the referring domain
• Does the referring domain have any authority, and if so the score?
• What is the context of the link?
• How upright is the referring domain?
• Does the link contain anchor text?
• Have you earned any diversified links?

4. Take the initiative

After assessment, take a great sweep of the website away when it comes to low or adverse links and clear your backlink profile to a sound state. 

• Removal of backlinks
• Disavow backlinks
• Removal of harmful backlinks
• Fix broken backlinks

5. Check and maintain

After these 4 steps, you need to use the chosen backlink audit tool to check and maintain the backlink profile for good health. 

This blog altogether acts as a backlink audit guide for you to begin with. To do a thorough and accurate SEO backlink audit, you can hire the best backlink audit services near your business.