7 Simple Steps to Do Backlink Audit for Your Business!

Are you sure that the backlinks your website has can support your SEO? What if they actually harm your SEO? If you still aren't sure, it's time to do a backlink audit.

In short, an SEO backlink audit is a checking process that is conducted to make sure your backlink performs properly.

So, how do you audit your backlinks effectively? Read the article below to find out!

What Is a Backlink Audit?

Backlink audit is the process of checking the quality, quantity, and relevance of your website backlink to optimise your SEO performance.

External links that point to your website can be the important factor that is responsible for the website's credibility and authority. That's why you need to make sure that your website is only linked with high-quality backlinks.

Sometimes, you might not realize that your websites have some backlinks that are low quality and risky for your overall SEO performance. 

Therefore, you should do regular backlink audits to evaluate the quality, quantity, and also relevance of your website backlinks. 

In addition, doing regular auditing for your backlink and making improvements can help your business attract more traffic, gain online visibility, and build trust from your audiences.

Benefits of Backlink Audit

Backlinks are one of the important factors for supporting website SEO performance. These are the list of benefits you can get if you do regular SEO backlink audits for your business, such as:  

• Ensure you have a high-quality backlink.
• Remove low-quality and spam links.
• Reclaim lost and broken links.
• Increase the website’s credibility and authority.
• Improve SEO performance.
• Attract more traffic.
• Get a higher ranking.

Steps to Do Backlink Audit

After you have an understanding of what a backlink audit is and its benefits, you can now learn the steps needed to make it work for your business, such as:

1. Do Competitor Research

The first step on how to audit backlinks is to conduct competitor research. Comparing your website backlink to your competitor can give you valuable information, and also help you know which competitor's weakness area that you can improve in your website.

For example, if you're running a florist business in Kuala Lumpur, you can do competitor research by listing your competitor websites that have the same niche market and the same area.

Simply by answering this question, you can start to evaluate their backlink source:

• Are the sites listed on local business directories like Yellow Pages Malaysia?
• Is their website being reviewed by local Malaysian bloggers in a related industry?
• Do local community pages link to their business websites?
• Are there any backlinks from social media mentions?

2. Identify Overall Your Website Backlink

The next step you can try is to identify your website backlink. From this result, you can get information to improve your current backlink strategy, fix harmful links, and enhance your SEO performance.

There are some factors you may consider if you want to identify and evaluate backlinks, including:

• Backlink total number, this shows the overall number of backlinks your website has.
• Website authority score, metrics that show all strength and credibility based backlink profile.
• A total domain that refers to your website, a summary of the total number of backlink domains your website has.
• Link acquisition rate, a metric that shows the speed your websites need to acquires new backlink.
• The number of dofollow links, to know how many valuable d0follow backlinks your website has.

3. Find Contents People Linked To

The next step is to find content people are linked to, which means you must know where the pages that people used to link and identify more aspects to gain new insight that is valuable for improvement.

If you want to know what pages or content are most linked, you can use tools like Google Search Console. 

From the result, you can evaluate what aspect makes that content linked by people and implement the evaluation to another page to optimise the backlink.

4. Remove Spam Backlink

After you've identified your total backlinks, it's time to remove spam links from your website. Spam links are low-quality backlinks that come from irrelevant, low-quality, bad-reputation websites.

If you let spam backlinks on your website, this can be a threat that can harm your reputation at times. In the worst case, search engines may penalise your website for being part of a spam scheme. 

Tips: You can remove the link by contacting the linking site directly and asking them to remove the link, or by using Google's disavow tools.

5. Reclaim Lost Backlink

The next step in SEO backlink audit is reclaiming lost backlinks. Building new backlinks takes time and effort, so make sure you do link reclamation if you lose them over time.

Lost backlinks can happen because of:

• The website author removes the link.
• The linking page was changed to another page.
• The author replaced your link.
• The link was accidentally deleted.

6. Identify 404 Errors 

The next aspect that you can consider including on your backlink checklist is identifying 404 errors. You can identify 404 errors by checking them on the Google Search Console or on Google Analytics.

404 errors happen because the link that is pointing to your web pages no longer exists or is broken, this can be bad for the user's experience, so you need to fix it immediately. 

7. Build New Backlink

Through the analysis of your current backlink profile, you can uncover opportunities for the acquisition of fresh, high-quality backlinks. 

As a Malaysian business owner, you can identify local Malaysia directories, industry blogs, and local community partnerships that can provide valuable backlinks. 

Connecting with relevant local websites will increase the authority and visibility of your website, which will help you rank higher in the local search results and attract more customers in your local area.

8. Monitoring Backlink Regularly

Lastly, you need to ensure that your backlink profile is running properly by checking it regularly. You can make a scheduled audit based on your website's needs and performance.

Regular monitoring will keep you up to date and help you adapt your SEO efforts to changing circumstances, ensuring continuous improvement.

Conclusion

Performing an SEO backlink audit will help you to identify and evaluate the backlinks on your website in order to make them the best they can be for SEO support. 

SEO audit guides can help get you started, but when dealing with complex websites and extensive credentials, expert assistance is indispensable. But, don't worry! SEO Services by cmlabs are here to help! 

Our expert team, including skilled developers and SEO experts, can handle the technical details and ensure a smooth and thorough audit process. 

Let our team handle the technical details so you can focus on growing your business. Contact our marketing team today for expert assistance!