Backlink audits are essential to any successful digital marketing strategy. They provide an in-depth look at your website’s backlink profile and help you identify potential issues as well as discover opportunities to build quality backlinks.
But how can you conduct a comprehensive audit in just 45 minutes? In this article, we will walk through how to complete a quick and effective backlink audit in less than an hour.
Step 1: Gather Domain-Level Backlink Data
The first step in a backlink audit is to gather backlink data for the domains you are auditing. This can be done quickly and easily with a tool like Moz’s Link Explorer. With Link Explorer, you can pull a full list of backlinks for a domain, including page level linking details such as anchor text, link status, the date of last crawl, and the type of link pointing to your site.
Step 2: Analyze the Number of External Links
Once you’ve collected the data, it’s time to analyze it. One of the most important things to look at is the quantity of your backlinks. How many do you have? Are there any sites linking to you excessively? Too few links can indicate a lack of SEO efforts, while too many could point to manipulative link building practices.
Step 3: Review Anchor Text
Next, review the anchor texts pointing to your website. Are they targeted with brand-specific anchor text or are some more generic? Do any of them include your target keywords? Anchor text distribution is a key factor in determining the overall quality of a site’s link profile, so it’s important to check this as part of the audit.
Step 4: Analyze Link Quality
In addition to the quantity and type of links you’re receiving, it’s important to check the quality of the sites linking to your domain. If you’ve done some dodgy link building tactics in the past, or if your site has been impacted by negative SEO, you might find low-quality links pointing to your domain. You can use the Moz Link Explorer to check the domain authority and page authority scores of the links included in the data set. This can help you identify potentially toxic links and realize backlink opportunities from sites with a higher domain authority.
Step 5: Monitor SERP Position
Finally, you should monitor the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) position of your website for any new changes that have occurred since the last time you checked. With a quick search for your brand name, you can take an initial look to determine whether there have been any significant changes. If you’re unsure about anything, you can use a tool like SemRush to compare SEO tracking over time and get a better understanding of your search engine performance.
By following the steps outlined above, you can perform a quick backlink audit in 45 minutes or less. This will help you identify any problems and decrease the risk of manual penalties from Google. Having a comprehensive understanding of your backlink profile is also key to optimizing your overall SEO and ensuring maximum visibility in search engine results.