Are you also worried about your SEO efforts for your website going to waste? Are you wondering why hasn’t your website SERP ranking improved regardless of your Off-page optimization?
Well, worry no more because you have come to the right place to learn how to check your efforts’ effectiveness!
Contents
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to your website’s adjustment and its content according to the search engines. It is mainly of two types of website optimization, namely On-page and Off-page SEO. The On-page optimization includes any adjustment directly made to your website, like content optimization. Whereas, Off-page activities include anything that contributes to your website’s worth without being directly related to it. Such unrelated yet significant contributors to your website ranking involve building quality backlinks, guest-posts, Web 2.0s, and more. Hence, you must maintain a healthy mixture of On and Off-page practices to ensure a good SERP ranking.
What is a Backlink, and What is its purpose?
A backlink is an essential element of the whole structure of search engine optimization and its consequent rankings. A backlink helps to link to your website that gets placed from a different website through various methods. These methods include direct link placement, anchor texts, or through ads and images.
Apart from the apparent reason for redirecting traffic to your website, Backlinks serve a far superior purpose to just redirecting traffic and contributing to your website’s worth. Considering a search engine ranks your website based on various features. One of the main features includes backlinks that act as votes to prove your website’s worth. The search engines count these votes and check their validity based on their parent rank to determine your website’s ranking.
Since backlinks mainly add to your website’s credibility, every vote should count in your favor, right? Wrong!
The fact is that every vote has credibility associated with it. If a website with previously malicious or spam SEO activities or a low domain authority links to your website. It might prove to be harmful to your website, as the search engine might flag your site as dangerous too. Similarly, there might be links that you might not have facilitated called the unnatural links damaging your website’s SERP rankings. That is why you need to stay aware of the backlinks of your website and strategize accordingly. Hence, to use the full potential of positive backlinks to your website and avoid backlinks damages. Here are six tips on how you can perform a backlink audit for your website by yourself.
6 Tips to Perform a Backlink Audit:
Assess all the existing backlinks:
The most straightforward and crucial step of any audit is to know what you are working with first. Similarly, to carry out such a comprehensive assessment of your website’s backlinks, you need to know all about them. Only then can you be sure about the number and quality of backlinks that your website possesses. Consequently, helping you to determine the credibility of your existing backlinks and strategize for better results. You can either use one of the popular SEO helping tools or the Google Search Console to extract your backlink profile. Simultaneously, allowing you to use that list of search engine votes, keeping your website’s boat afloat in the sea of search engines.
Compare backlink portfolio with competitors:
One of the crucial and most common practices in the Off-page SEO world is to analyze your competitor’s back-linking profile. It is a common and effective strategy to determine the competitors appearing above your website in the SERP results. After which, you can extract the backlink profiles of these respective competitors. Helping you to understand which links to create to achieve a similar off-page score to your counterpart. Through this method, you can quickly analyze your website’s comparative backlink footprint in your respective industry. It also facilitates you to imitate your competitors’ corresponding search engine visibility and success and improve.
Evaluate links and strategize:
The next step is to evaluate all such backlinks to your website deeply. Such an evaluation refers to the measurement of a variety of performance metrics. Such metrics include recognizing the domain authorities, traffic, search volumes, and more. You also need to assess; which links are harmful to your website as their domains might be blacklisted. You could even analyze the authority of your inbound links, as well as their distribution between the no-follow and do-follow link types. Furthermore, you can utilize all such information to form a proper strategy on how and which backlinks to pursue for future purposes.
Remove harmful backlinks:
Any business can suffer from harmful, unwanted, and unnatural backlinks. These links are artificial as they won’t produce the result of your SEO efforts. Instead, often your competitors might place your website’s link at such spam websites to hamper your website score. To recover from such situations, you must opt for a proactive approach to deal with such harmful links. You must use your backlink tool to mark such negative links and disavow them to break-off connection with such a site. You must then send that file to Google to confirm the removal of these links from your backlink portfolio.
Assess penalty risks and situations:
There often exist cases in the SEO world where you could do everything right and still suffer from a lack of results. A reason for such a situation could be that the search engines might penalize your website for such links. These penalties include search engines not allowing your website to get into the search index, which is a big drawback. Such is the reason why you need to keep a keen eye on the unnatural links to your website. Consequently, removing such connections as soon as possible to avoid getting penalized.
Create new and reliable links:
Last but not least, you need to make amends and improve. You can enhance your back-linking strategy with the assistance of all such information from the backlink tools. It would help if you devised a technique that utilizes the potential of back-linking in your relevant industry. As well as improve your overall SERP rankings, benefitting you in monetary means and means of traffic. You must maintain a keen eye for new opportunities and make unique and reliable links to help your website.
Conclusion:
Consequently, it can be well-said that the world of SEO, especially Off-page optimization, can be pretty tricky for many people. That is why you must recognize the importance of backlinks in your SEO strategy. Furthermore, you need to know how to audit your website’s backlinks to tackle these SEO problems dynamically. Simultaneously, helping you alter your SEO strategy and benefit accordingly. These six tips above are crucial for you to carry out a backlink audit yourself. Hopefully, it can help you achieve the desired results.
