What is a Backlink Audit: 7 Steps to Conduct It

Last updated September 12, 2024

In this article, I have everything outlined for you on conducting a backlink audit, allowing you to conduct your audit without stress. Follow these easy steps to increase your rankings and enhance your traffic quality. 

What is a Backlink Audit?

It involves thoroughly examining every link that lead to your site from other websites. 
 
During a backlink audit, you will check the sites where your backlinks originate from, identify the page on your website with the highest number of backlinks, recognize damaging backlinks, search for fresh opportunities for building links, and create a strategy to eliminate harmful backlinks. 

Why Should You Conduct a Backlink Audit? 

Conducting a thorough backlink audit remains crucial for the success of your SEO strategies. If not, you would have numerous bad backlinks that can damage your website's reputation.

1. Monitor Your Competitor Closely

You can monitor your competitors by conducting routine backlink audits. When it comes to SEO, staying ahead of the game is crucial to succeed in creating and removing backlinks. 
 
How can you leverage the examination of your competitors' backlink profiles for your benefit? 
 
If you notice your competitor has a fresh page with 100 backlinks, there must be something appealing about the content. 
 
Therefore, take a closer look at the article, generate a superior piece of content about the same subject, and observe as the backlinks start to accumulate. 
 
During your audit, you will also examine the speed at which your competitors are obtaining backlinks. This provides insight into the speed necessary to create backlinks in order to remain competitive. 

2. Keep Track of How You Are Performing 

Observing the outcomes of your backlink audit will enable you to establish a baseline for your advancement, evaluate your campaign’s effectiveness, and keep an eye on the evolution of your backlink profile. 
 
Therefore, if your approach to building links has not been yielding the desired results, conducting an audit will pinpoint areas that can be enhanced in your efforts.
 
While conducting an audit on your backlinks, you will discover chances to generate new pages for backlink building or enhance existing pages to increase their link-worthiness. 
 
Frequently, you will come across some of your website's pages that have organically acquired numerous backlinks. 
 
By reviewing the pages, you will discover tactics or features that can be applied to other pages in order to enhance their chances of getting linked. 
 
Referring back to a past audit will enable you to monitor the number of referring domains and new backlinks acquired and to assess whether your site's backlink profile has improved since the last audit. 

 
Then, if you observe a substantial increase in your number of backlinks, it is important to review them to verify they are not spam. 

3. Discover Fresh Chances for Building Links

Conducting a backlink audit will help enhance your website's SEO results by identifying potential for new link-building strategies. In what way? 
 
By reviewing the number of backlinks for each page on your site, you can pinpoint the pages that need more links. Afterward, you'll be able to pinpoint where you should concentrate your efforts on link building. 

4. Keep Your Backlink Profile Healthy 

Frequently conducting backlink analysis will assist in keeping your backlink profile in good form, allowing you to promptly detect and eliminate any detrimental links. 
 
You may be shocked to find out that you have acquired PBN backlinks without purchasing them. 
 
Google considers link spam to be a significant issue, therefore, in order to avoid facing a manual penalty, it is important to promptly remove those links. 
 
Failing to monitor your website's backlink profile can lead to severe consequences for its search engine rankings.
 
Also, not recognizing a negative SEO attack can result in your website quickly decreasing in the search engine results pages before you know it.

How to Carry Out a Backlink Audit  

Carrying out an audit on your backlinks may seem daunting, but there's no need to fret. I have divided it into 6 easy-to-follow steps. Let's start now. 

1. Select a Backlink Analysis Tool 

Choosing the correct audit tool can save you countless hours of frustration. You can manually retrieve and review your backlinks using Google Search Console, but it will be time-consuming. 
 
On the contrary, an SEO tool can greatly simplify your work by providing you with useful information and data that cannot be found on Search Console. 
 
I prefer making use of the Semrush Backlink Audit tool for conducting my backlink audit, and that's the tool I will be using in this article to demonstrate how to do a backlink audit. 
 
Semrush offers a variety of tools for link-building and we will focus primarily on the Backlink Audit tool in this guide.
 
It provides significantly more features than Google Search Console. Furthermore, everything is displayed on a user-friendly dashboard. 

2. Start the Backlink Audit 

Using Semrush's Backlink Audit tool, initiate a project and select "Start Backlink Audit". In the tool, there are many data points available to determine if your link-building strategy is heading in the correct direction. So, what should you examine?
 
Website's Authority Score: a measure used to assess a site's overall quality. This characteristic is evaluated using a scale ranging from 1 to 100. The greater the number, the higher the quality of the domain. 
 
Referring Domains: Indicates the number of domains that are linking to your website. Several links from one domain will not significantly affect rankings. So, try to get backlinks from a variety of distinct domains. 
 
Also, determine if the referring domains are growing steadily over time or if the growth of your referring domains is not improving and then observe how your progress measures up against your rivals. 
 
Link Attributes: Use this to determine the percentage of your links designated as either follow or nofollow. 
 
"Follow" links impact your position in search results by passing on link equity, while nofollow links do not. So, you  should give more importance to creating "follow" links. 
 
Total Toxicity Score: Check if your toxicity score is high, indicating an abundance of poor-quality links directing to your site.

3. Thoroughly Examine the Quality of Your Links

After initiating the backlink audit process, it's time to analyze your backlinks, each of them separately. 
 
This is because certain backlinks have to be sorted out and removed. Having numerous low-quality backlinks will significantly impact your website's performance. 
 
They might prompt Google to impose a manual action penalty, resulting in some or all of your pages being excluded from search results. 
 
If your website was part of any link spam activities, this is particularly important to address. 
 
So, try to assess every single backlink that is associated with your website. Then, you should also consider the placement of your links on these external pages. 
 
Typically, top-tier links are positioned near the top of the referring page rather than being buried at the bottom of the article. 
 
They are also required to utilize an appropriate anchor text enclosed by a significant amount of relevant text. 

4. Compare Your Backlink Profile with That of Your Competitors 

To begin comparing your backlink profile with that of your competitors using the Semrush Backlink Analytics tool, input some of your competitors' domains in the "Overview" tab and click on "Compare”.
 
This step is essential because looking at your competitors can provide valuable insights and answer key questions about your own performance. 
 
Are your backlinks and referring domains outnumbering those of your competitors? How does your rate of acquiring links compare to that of your competitors? 
 
In order to have a strong chance of out-ranking your competitors, you should aim for a comparable quantity of backlinks, though it is not advisable to rush to acquire numerous links. 
 
Having the same quantity of links as your competitors is important, but having low-quality links will not benefit you in any way. 
 
It also applies in reverse. If your competitors possess an additional 1000 backlinks compared to you, but those backlinks are all spammy and low-quality, you will likely have the advantage. 
 
In essence, the key factor is that your backlinks must have higher overall authority than your competitors' backlinks in order to have a strong possibility of surpassing them in rankings. 
 
What is your authority ranking? How does it stack up against your competitors? All of this is significant. 
 
The more robust your backlink profile is, the higher your chances of ranking well in search engine results and increasing your website traffic.

5. Recover Your Missing Backlinks 

This phase involves ensuring you regain any lost links you once had. Creating links requires dedication and hard work, therefore, it is beneficial to retrieve them if lost over time. 
 
But why do some backlinks get lost? 
 
It might be because the link was deleted by the author from the content, the page has been forwarded to a different page, the author substituted your link with a different one, or the page that was supposed to be linked got deleted by mistake. 
 
You can utilize Semrush's link-building tool to regain your valuable links. Initially, set up the tool. 
 
Next, navigate to the "Prospects" section and select "LostBacklinks" from the menu. You will then see the links that were previously in use. 
 
With this tool, you also have the opportunity to view details on the reason your link vanished. 
 
For instance, if a 404 error is showing up, it might be due to the deletion of the page. Next, you could contact the website owner and request them to restore the page. 

6. Delete or Disavow Harmful Links 

The next in the backlink audit process is choosing between disavowing or removing negative backlinks. 
 
According to Google's instructions, you should disavow backlinks if you have a large amount of poor-quality links created using methods that go against Google's rules.
 
If Google had penalized you with a manual action or you intentionally broke Google's rules by creating a large number of links that violate the rules, you put your SEO at risk. 
 
A notification will be sent to you through Google Search Console informing you about a manual action penalty. 
 
To find out about these penalties, you can visit "Security & Manual Actions" in Google Search Console. When your website hasn't received any penalties, a green check mark will be visible. 
 
Now, there are two ways you can address manual action penalties. 

• Delete: Contacting linked websites and requesting them to remove links 
• Reject: Rejecting links by utilizing Google's Disavow tool.

7. Start Building More Valuable Links 

A backlink audit involves more than just reviewing your backlink profile and recovering missing links. It can also assist you in identifying fresh opportunities for creating top-notch links. 
 
Research which types of content draw the highest number of backlinks to your website, analyze your competitors' methods for acquiring links and implement the same tactics for your own website. 
 
Through this way, you can focus on creating more of the same content in order to keep drawing in links.
 
Visit the "IndexedPages" tab in the Semrush Backlink Analytics tool for your website to analyze the types of content that are acquiring the most links to your site. 
 
If you notice that how-to guides are receiving links, produce additional how-to articles. Also, research your competitors' backlinks in order to create fresh link-building tactics. 
 
To do this, access the Backlink Analytics tool, input a competitor's domain, and hit ‘Analyze’.
 
Next, navigate to the tab labeled "Referring Domains". You will be able to view all the websites that link to that competitor or the types of websites that are most linked to by them. 
 
You then have the option to replicate this process on your own website and obtain links in that manner. 

Bottom Line

If your backlink audit shows that you do not have sufficient high-quality links to stay competitive in your industry, your main focus should be on creating more high-quality links. You have the option to utilize Semrush's Link Building Tool for this task. Start building high-quality backlinks now.