Backlinks are among the most integral players in your website’s SEO ranking. The credibility of your website (and business) depends on the quality of your backlinks. It is vital to keep a close check on the links embedded in your content to avoid any troubles from Google. The quality of your backlinks can directly affect your website’s presence on search engines. Over the years, Google’s algorithm updates have changed the course of ranking factors. Many websites lost their high ranks failing to cope with the changes. Backlinking is one of the crucial elements on the list. Whether you seek SEO services to improve your backlinks profile or not, you may need to stay clean of all the harmful and faulty links.
Auditing your website’s backlinks is essential. It gives you a transparent picture of all the links included on your website. Although you may be careful about the links your website points to, they may be broken over the years without you knowing.
Such links can affect your website’s ranking on search engines. To avoid such a scenario, you may need to audit your website every once in a while.
The Role of SEO Company in Auditing Your Website
SEO audit for your website is undeniably important. If you have a business website, you most likely need on-page and off-page SEO services to be on your customer’s radar. Search engine optimization is a complex process that requires continuous efforts. A crucial part of this process is to make an audit report of your website. By seeking SEO services from a professional company, you can stay clear of all the negative factors affecting your website’s SEO.
SEO experts are well-versed in evaluating your website’s backlinks. They can check for any broken links, point out harmful links, and create a list of important links for your website to keep you relevant on search engines.
Whether you have the knowledge and expertise to look after your website’s SEO or not, you may not be able to put your entire focus on it. Hiring an SEO company can save you from any unprecedented threats to your website.
Auditing Your Website’s Backlinks
Benchmarking
It is essential to benchmark your website against your top competitors. In this process, you can analyze how your competitors are doing in terms of backlinks. By evaluating the number and types of backlinks, you can compare your website’s status to devise an influential backlinking strategy. In this step, you may need to check for a few factors using your web analytics. These include the number of backlinks, authority score, types of backlinks, link attributes, and referring domains. All these factors can help you point out the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors.
Evaluation
Once you have the competitive progress, you can begin to evaluate your website’s status. You may look for the same factors in your website’s analytics to compare with your competitor’s websites. In this step, you may find out the factors preventing your website from improving its rank on Google. For example, you may not have high authority backlinks as compared to your competitors. You may also look for the potential gaps in your backlinking strategy. Creating a list of high-value backlinks can help you redevelop your strategy. While you are at this stage, you may also look for toxic links, a small number of referring domains, a high number of do-follow links, etc.
Removal
Once evaluated, you may need to get rid of all the toxic links from your website. You can either ask the referring domain owner to delete the link(s) or send them to Google’s Disavow tool. However, whatever the decision you make, you may not wait too long to remove the toxic links from your website. As long as they are a part of your domain, you may keep losing your website’s rank and credibility. You can remove the toxic links by placing all the links with a Toxic Score below 45 in the whitelist of the Backlink Audit tool.
Cleanup
The next step is to clean up your backlink portfolio. You may need to link your email account and create a template to request the removal of the whitelisted links. To request the removal of the toxic links, you may need to make sure that your email sounds as natural as it can. You may not want the webmasters to think you are a spambot. The ethical way to go about the removal process is to reach out to the website’s owner first. However, if you can not find the owner despite the effort, you may opt for disavowing.
Rebuilding
In the final step, you can proceed to generate new backlinks for your website. You may need to ask your SEO company to do the job for you. Finding new backlinks can be tricky. It requires a lot of research and planning. In this step, you may revisit all the links you shortlisted while conducting competitor analysis. SEO experts use careful analysis to check the quality and authority of the links to embed in your website’s content. However, it is great to audit the status of your links after a few months to see how your website is doing on search engines.
Improving the backlink structure of your website is vital for retaining your rank. While this may be correct, you may need to seek the services of a professional SEO company in your area to create a growth-driven strategy. You may also need to avoid hiring SEO companies offering services at considerably low rates. Such agencies typically use black hat techniques to boost your website’s rank. Such strategies may end up costing you more in the long run.
ESP Inspire is serving Search Engine Marketing for over two decades. The experts at the agency are well-versed in developing a refined on-page and off-page strategy for your business website. You may also find other internet marketing services to boost your business’s presence online. If you need a company that takes control of your marketing strategy and delivers results, feel free to get in touch with one of the in-house experts.