A link audit is an important part of your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. It allows you to look at how other sites link to your website and determine whether those links are positive or negative. A good link audit can help you identify opportunities for new link building campaigns and prioritize which broken or bad links need to be removed from your website.
In this post, we will go over what a link audit is, why it’s important for SEO, how to conduct one yourself and what tools you should use when conducting an audit.
What is a Link Audit?
A link audit is the process of identifying, analyzing and evaluating the links that point to a website. It’s an important part of SEO because it helps you find out who is linking to your site. If someone has linked to your site, there’s a good chance they will link again in the future – and that can help grow your search engine rankings by boosting your site’s reputation.
The best way to think about link audits is to comprehensively analyze all the backlinks pointing at your website(s). A good link audit will tell you where these backlinks are coming from, how many there are, and which ones should be removed or kept as they could potentially negatively affect search engine ranking positions.
Why Conduct a Link Audit?
Conducting a link audit is one of the most important steps in SEO. A digital marketing agency will usually perform one as part of their monthly SEO audits on your behalf, but you can also conduct your own if you have time and resources. The main reason to conduct a link audit is to determine which links are hurting or helping your website’s ranking in search engines like Google.
For example, if someone has linked to your website from their blog post about the best pizza places in New York City, that’s probably good for your rankings – but if they’ve linked from an article titled “The Worst Pizza Places In New York City (and why),” then it may not be so good for you!
Link audits help you manage your website effectively by ensuring all relevant pages are indexed by search engines and getting more traffic from them. They also help identify opportunities for new content creation or outreach efforts so that you can build up backlinks with relevant websites that already rank well on search engines like Google!
How to Conduct a Link Audit
Link auditing is one of the most important tasks for an SEO. It involves looking at your website’s links from various angles, including:
- Who is linking to you? Why? How much weight should those links carry?
- Which sites have nofollowed a link (and why)?
- Have you ever purchased or otherwise exchanged money for any links?
After you’ve identified all of these factors, it’s time to make changes. Whether that means cleaning up some existing errors and omissions or starting fresh with new outreach efforts, the results will be worth it!
Link Audit Tools and Process
A link audit is a process of checking your website’s backlinks to ensure they are legitimate, relevant, and follow the rules set by Google. You can use many different tools to conduct this audit and get a report on how well (or not) your website is doing.
Tools like Ahrefs or Majestic SEO work well for finding obscure broken links that you may be unaware of, while other tools like Moz crawl your site more thoroughly and provide more insight into what’s going on with each page. Some common questions about link auditing include:
- How often should I do it?
- What kind of results should I expect?
- What does a good result look like?
Link Audit Report and Analysis
Once you’ve collected your link audit data, it’s time to organize it into a report. You should begin by creating a spreadsheet that includes all of the links on your website, organized by page and domain. Next, you’ll want to analyze each link in this spreadsheet so that you can identify any issues with them.
To do this effectively, you’ll need to organize information about each link based on anchor text and site; this will allow you to compare similar links more easily later in the analysis process.
Finally, after completing an initial review of all of your site’s backlinks using these methods described above (and paying particular attention to those sites that contain “unnatural” keyword phrases), start creating lists of “problematic” domains and pages where improvement could be made – this list will serve as a roadmap for future efforts at removing bad links or improving existing ones!
Link Audit Recommendations
After conducting the audit, you should gather all your findings in one place. This collection is known as a link audit report. Here are some things to remember when creating this report:
- Make sure all of your findings are easily accessible and organized. You don’t want to dig through files or folders on another system just to find those notes that others took during the process.
- Include any images of screenshots taken during the audit process and any other relevant files that helped guide you through each step of your analysis (whether it was an Excel spreadsheet or Word document).
A Link Audit is the Health and Hygiene of Your Website
It allows you to manage your website effectively and determine which links are negative, broken or redirecting. A link audit is the health and hygiene of your website. It allows you to manage your website effectively and determine which links are negative, broken or redirecting.
A regular process that should be performed regularly will help keep everything running smoothly and ensure that you’re not being penalized by search engines due to poor site architecture.
A link audit is arguably one of the most important parts of any SEO campaign because it helps identify where there may be issues with the way links are pointing back at your site as well as identifying opportunities for building more natural anchor text links from other quality sources (i.e., sites with relevant content).
Conclusion
Link audits are an important part of any SEO campaign. They’re essential for determining the health and profitability of your website and ensuring that you have no broken links on it. Yoho Digital can help with your link audit and provide a comprehensive report on all your links and which are beneficial and bad for your website.
