Backlink Audit: 5 Easy Steps to Optimise Backlinks | 2024

In optimising a website for search engines, SEO tactics are important, especially backlinks. Backlinks can help your site to gain more authority. Yet, to make sure that they are quality links, you must regularly perform backlink audits.

Backlink audit helps you see what kind of sites are linking to you, determine which pages obtain the most backlinks, and many more.

This guide will teach you about this audit and how to carry out one. So, read this article until the end!

What Is a Backlink Audit?

Generally, backlinks are the sites linking to your website. Therefore, a backlink audit is the activity to monitor all links from others referring to your site.

When you do the audit, you can see what sites link to yours, figure out more link-building possibilities, fix harmful backlinks, and many more.

By monitoring your site’s backlinks, you can ensure that every link referring to your site has excellent quality; therefore, it can increase your site's credibility. 

With that, search engines like Google can consider your site to be relevant and authoritative, giving you a higher rank on search results. 

Why Must You Do Backlink Audit?

As one of the off-page strategies, a backlink audit is important to maintain the quality of the links. This is because backlinks from spammy websites can harm your sites, giving you poor-quality links. 

As a result, Google can’t perceive it as a credible source of information for users. Moreover, this audit also helps you achieve these:

1. Check on Progress

The first benefit of backlink audit is enabling you to check on progress. You can measure your progress, track the effectiveness of your campaign, and keep an eye on how your backlink profile evolves by noting the audit results before launching a link-building campaign.

This audit will point out areas where your link-building strategy needs to be improved, whether it has been producing the desired results or not.

As a result of your audit, you may find ways to enhance the linkability of your present pages or discover new ones to which you can establish backlinks.

2. Analyse Competitors

Doing regular audits can help you keep an eye on your competitors. You can see how they can gain quality backlinks and implement them on your site. 

During your audit, you will also observe how quickly they're building backlinks. This helps you estimate how soon link-building will become necessary if you want to maintain your lead.

3. Manage the Backlink Profile’s Health

You can keep your backlink profile in good condition by conducting regular backlink analyses, which will enable you to promptly find and eliminate any bad links. 

This is because link spam is taken very seriously by Google. Thus, you must remove those links as soon as possible to prevent the dreaded manual action. The rankings of your website may suffer greatly if you fail to monitor your backlink profile.

How to Audit Backlinks

There are some steps you can adhere to when doing an audit as explained below:

1. Select Audit Tool

As technology develops, the more backlink audit tools you can find, from free to paid ones. You can also opt for a manual audit by using Google Search Console. 

Using audit tools can give you data on links referring to your site and some recommendations to do in the future. Most importantly, the tools will warn you if there are spammy links to your sites so that you are not penalised by Google. 

2. Find Pages with Most Links

The next backlink audit checklist is finding the pages with the most links because links from existing articles are an excellent starting point for outreach programs utilising linked assets. 

Moreover, a tried-and-true method for getting additional links is to create material that is comparable to that which already gets links.

To find the pages, you can use Google Search Console and click “Links” in the sidebar, then “Top Linked Pages”. 

3. Evaluate the Backlinks

Now that you already find the backlinks, let’s evaluate them to determine which one is good for your sites and which one is not. 

Certain backlinks are more helpful than others, and if your site has a large number of low-quality links, it won't benefit from them.

Moreover, excessive poor quality can lead to penalties from Google, making your pages will not appear in search results.

4.  Disavow or Remove Bad Links

If you already found the bad links, you can disavow or remove them. Specifically, this action must be done if a sizable portion of your low-quality links were created utilising methods that violate Google's policies or if Google has penalised you with a manual action. 

In terms of SEO, you run the risk of losing everything if you have knowingly broken Google's rules and created an abundance of links in an unapproved manner.

When there is a manual action penalty, you will be notified through Google Search Console. To see it, you can go to “Security & Manual Actions” > “Manual actions”. You will notice a green tick mark if there are no fines associated with your website.

If you are penalised, you can take removal action by reaching out to the sites linking to you and asking them to delete the links. Or, you can disavow them with Google’s Disavow tool.

5. Analyse Competitor’s Link Velocity

Not only your backlinks but you must also pay attention to your competitors. You should aim to add at least as many new referring domains as your competitors, or more.

But keep in mind that until your site has some authority, you should not be overbearing with your link development technique.

Gaining an excessive number of backlinks soon can make a fresh, low-authority website look suspect to Google and work against it instead of for it. 

Conclusion

Those are some backlink audit templates you can implement on your site. Similar to other SEO strategies, this link audit is important for levitating your rank and authority. 

A backlink audit, however, is a difficult procedure that calls for a lot of expertise and equipment. Due to this, you can consider working with an SEO company like cmlabs that can significantly improve your backlink quality.

Backlink audits are one of the many SEO Services that cmlabs provides. Our SEO experts and development team can assist you in navigating the complexities of backlink research, putting plans into practice, and achieving long-lasting gains in your search engine results.

Get in touch with our marketing team right now to discover your website's full potential and maintain your advantage in the cutthroat digital market!