Have you just taken on a new SEO client? Or perhaps been put in charge of SEO for your company’s website? You need to perform a backlink audit.
The reason for this is simple: It allows you to check that the site is in good shape before you begin working on it. That means making sure that there are no spammy backlinks which could hinder future SEO efforts or worse, trigger a Google penalty.
spammy backlink
Spammy backlink example
Think of this like buying a home. You plan to decorate and renovate said home once purchased, but that doesn’t mean you want to buy a house on the verge of crumbling to the ground, right? So you scrutinize it, checking for damp and other potentially costly issues before you part with even a single penny (cent) of your cash.
Performing a backlink audit is the SEO equivalent of this process.
It’s your insurance policy against working with clients who’ve had the misfortune of working with scummy SEOs in the past, and now want to push all their problems onto you.
But, importantly, this isn’t all about finding the “bad” things. Auditing your backlink profile will lead to insights that will aid your future link building efforts, and make life easier.
In this post, I’ll show you how to perform a simple, insightful backlink audit that should take roughly 30 minutes (for most sites).
SIDENOTE. 30 minutes is an approximation. If you go deeper and investigate specific issues, it will take longer. Likewise, it will take an experienced SEO less time than an inexperienced SEO. Either way, it’s still well worth the relatively small time investment.
What you need
You can do this entire thing with nothing but an Ahrefs account.
However, should you have the budget available to do so, it’s always preferable to download data from all available link sources—Ahrefs, Google Search Console, Majestic, Moz, etc.
Please be advised, however, that merging data from multiple sources can be a complicated process that requires spreadsheet or coding skills. So if you don’t feel comfortable using APIs and working with large amounts of data, your best bet is to stick to an online tool with a convenient UI.
For that reason, we’ll keep things simple in this guide and use only Ahrefs which is known to have the best link data in the industry. The coverage we provide should be enough to perform a sufficient link audit without the hassle of merging multiple datasets.
For consistency, I’ll be auditing the Ahrefs blog (ahrefs.com/blog) throughout this guide. (Fingers crossed we don’t come across anything too nauseating!)
Step 1. Get a high-level view of your backlink profile
First things first, let’s plug the site into Site Explorer and do some basic analysis.
Site Explorer > enter domain > choose the “prefix” mode
ahrefs site explorer prefix
Please note that in this instance, we’re choosing telemarketing list the “prefix” mode because we want to restrict things to the Ahrefs blog, rather than site the as a whole. If you’re auditing your entire website, choose the “*.domain/*” option instead.
Site Explorer > enter domain > choose the “*.domain/*” mode
site explorer domain search
Everything in this section requires nothing telemarketing list but the Overview report (i.e., the one you see after entering a site into Site Explorer).
1. See how your backlink profile compares to the competition
Let’s start with the absolute basics and answer a simple question: how many backlinks and referring domains do you have pointing to your site?
You’ll find the answer to that question here:
ahrefs blog links
It looks like we have 40.2K backlinks from ~5K referring domains.
These numbers seem quite large at first glance and, if you see similar ones for your site, might be enough to provide a small ego boost. However, unless you compare these numbers with your competitors, they don’t tell you much.
So let’s do that. Here are the same stats for the Moz blog: