How to Do a Backlink Audit (5 Simple Steps)

What Is a Backlink Audit?

A backlink audit is the process of analyzing the quality, quantity, and relevance of links pointing to your website.

A comprehensive link audit can give you a gold mine of information that can greatly impact your SEO and backlink strategy.

So you can build better links and beat your competitors by outranking them in search results.

In this article, we’ll run through a simple backlink audit process you can replicate for your own site.

Note: We’ll be using Semrush’s Backlink Audit, Backlink Analytics, and Link Building Tool for this entire process. Semrush tools have the biggest backlink database on the market.

Let’s get started.

Step 1: Benchmark Your Backlink Profile Against Competitors

This step is a must. Comparing yourself to your competitors can give you a lot of valuable insights and answer important questions like:

• Do you have more backlinks and referring domains than your competitors?
• What does your link acquisition rate look like compared to your competitors?
• What’s your Authority Score? How does it compare to your competition?

All of this matters.

Because the stronger your backlink profile is, the better you’ll end up ranking in search results. Which can translate to more traffic to your site.

To start your analysis, go to the Backlink Analytics tool. Enter your domain name and click “Analyze.”

Then, in the “Overview” tab, enter some of your competitors’ domains and click “Compare.”

You’ll find lots of data points to see whether you...