Have you heard of backlink analysis? It’s the simple act of analyzing the number and quality of links leading to your website. This allows you to comprehend the impact the backlinks have on your rankings in search results. Since marketers are usually overwhelmed with strategies and ideas, they easily forget to do an audit every now and then. Continue reading to understand how to do the analysis.
Go Through Every Backlink
How many good or bad backlinks do you have on the website? You can’t be sure whether the backlinks are doing you any good if you don’t evaluate them correctly. That’s why the most effective approach is to analyze every single one of them. This will prevent your pages from not being visible in the search results.
Like with most marketing audits, you can use a specialized tool to save time and get more conclusive results. Although every tool is different, the metrics marketers analyze in this case are more or less the same. For example, you should pay special attention to toxicity scores and referring domains. When it comes to a single backlink, check the URL and anchor text and make sure they’re legit and relevant.
Keep or Remove Backlinks
Now that you’ve evaluated the backlinks, you should make a tough decision. Based on the analysis, should you keep or remove bad links? The decision should be based on the search engine’s guidelines. This way you’ll make sure to comply with its rules and make the website more visible.
If your target search engine is Google, then the rules are clear. It doesn’t tolerate low-quality links. In other words, if Google removed webpages from search results because of link spam, then such backlinks should be removed or disavowed. To remove links, you should first reach out to websites so they can delete them. If that doesn’t work out, then try Google’s tool and disavow them.
Return Lost Backlinks
Link building is a long and dreadful job. It takes a considerable amount of time and continuous effort to make even the slightest progress in online visibility. For this reason, losing backlinks that used to make a difference over time is discouraging. Although it’s none of your fault, you might face a setback and have to start all over again.
To get a clear overview of all the lost backlinks, open the tool you decide to use for the audit. You should have an option to check every link individually. This will tell you the reason why you lost the link. The reasons can vary. The author removed or replaced the link. The linking page got deleted or redirected. Either way, you can reach out to the website owner and ask for the link to be visible again.
Explore New Opportunities
Once you finish the audit and have a clear picture of the quality of your backlinks, you can figure out the next steps. Whatever the audit results show, you should explore new opportunities for backlinks. Especially, if you lack good links to stay competitive on the market. Some audit tools offer to find new prospects as a feature too. If that’s the case with your tool, then you should definitely take advantage of it. However, if that isn’t the case, then finding strong websites and reaching their owners can bring the same results.
Conclusion
Backlink analysis is a familiar process among marketers. The evaluation of backlinks allows them to improve their quality and overall ranking in search engine results. This article is your reminder to analyze the backlinks, make necessary improvements, and start this year strong.
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