How to do a backlink audit

Boost your position in SERPs with five techniques for link building and disavowing reports

In this Quick Win we review 5 techniques for link building and disavowing reports. You can also create a report for analyzing your competitors’ websites to help you gain more insight on the links that improve their ranking. You can then build strategies to outrank them.

Why are links important?

Search engines crawl the page and then they add the content into their indexes. This way they can decide whether a page contains enough quality content to be ranked high in search results for relevant keywords. However, it doesn’t end here. When they crawl the content of a web page, they also look at the number of links pointing to the page and the domain as a whole from external web pages.

How is this Quick Win structured?

• Step 1. What is a backlink audit and why should I do one?
• Step 2. Backlink discovery
• Step 3. Define link quality metrics
• Step 4. Find poor quality links to disavow
• Step 5. Find new link opportunities

About the authors

Amelia Mayes

Amelia Mayes is Head of Content at Smart Insights. She is responsible for managing the paid member content library and e-learning resources, as well as strategic planning to ensure customers get the most from their memberships. She is a University of Southampton and the Chartered Institute of Marketing graduate with over 7 years’ experience in digital marketing, specializing in content marketing.

Luca Tagliaferro

Luca Tagliaferro is a Senior Web Analyst at the Portsmouth City Council. Formally qualified with MA in Digital Marketing from a leading UK University, he regularly writes for leading publications and manages his two blogs: www.lucatag.com and www.travelshouse.com