There was a time when companies chiefly conducted their marketing strategies through traditional means. However, those days are behind us. Today, utilizing digital marketing with SEO practices reigns supreme when it comes to growing and expanding businesses.
You’ve probably heard a lot about search engine optimization and many of its strategies to gain traffic and make websites more visible. These include keyword research, Google My Business options, focusing on UX, and more. However, there is one such practice that most companies forget, and it’s called link building strategy.
It doesn’t need to be said that links are one of the most crucial ranking factors for Google and other search engines. After all, they discover new and high-quality content by assessing it through links. So, how can you ensure your link-building strategy is optimal?
In this blog post, we’re discussing everything about backlink audits and how you can use them for your link-building strategy.
Defining Link-Building Strategies—Why Are They Important?
Link building is an extremely important component of search engine optimization that can either make or break it. It is a practice that entails building backlinks, also known as one-way links, with the goal of boosting a website’s visibility for search engines. This process requires content marketers and SEO experts to acquire hyperlinks for their websites from other websites. In simpler words, it’s about ensuring other sites link pages to yours.
These hyperlinks are a way for users to navigate the pages on the Internet. Good links are like testimonials that prove the higher quality of the content available on a particular site. Search engines think of good-quality links as a good sign, which in turn, increases site visibility. That’s because they are designed to crawl each link between pages as well as read pages on websites.
When these search engines crawl pages, they extract data and content to incorporate them into their indexes. Then they determine if the quality of the page is good enough to be ranked higher for relevant keywords
At this point, you might be wondering why link-building strategies are important for ranking higher.
To answer this, you have to look back into the past. In the pre-Google days, Yahoo! and Alta Vista ranked web pages by assessing the content on them. However, Google changed everything by introducing the PageRank (PR) algorithm. As a result, now search engines don’t just look at the content of a webpage, but also rank pages depending on how many times they were linked to external websites. Of course, this also includes the quality of those websites.
As a result, link-building strategies have evolved into more sophisticated practices over the last two decades. This was a crucial need of the time because search engines, especially Google, have continuously improved their ability to detect and identify unnatural linking patterns. As a result, old linking techniques, such as spamming, forum posting, or using PBN, no longer brought in the numbers. However, that was the case if they worked at all and weren’t penalized.
So, how can you ensure your links help SEO? To boost website visibility and high rankings, ensure links are natural, high-quality, and helpful.
What is Audit Backlinking, and How Does It Improve Link-Building Strategies?
Have you ever experienced the traffic on your website drop suddenly? This event can be highly stressful for companies as they see the numbers dipping without knowing the problem. Your team inspects the matter for possible outdated or low-quality content that probably doesn’t meet the standards set by search engines. However, those reasons are not behind the ranking being hit.
If that’s not the case, what is causing the traffic to take a hit? Unfortunately, the answer is right under the nose, but many miss it; a backlink has become harmful. This can be a major culprit for many websites getting their pages ranked lower.
We already discussed in this blog post that good links are crucial in boosting your website’s SEO. So, it’s safe to say that bad backlinks can seriously damage it. Out of the possibly billions of them, it can be challenging to weed out the bad ones from the good ones.
This is where audit backlinking can be helpful.
Audit backlinking is an important SEO practice that first came into play with the advent of Google Penguin updates. It’s used to assess all the links leading to your website to identify all the toxic ones. Once they are discovered, you have to disavow them (to ask search engines to not count them for ranking) or simply remove toxic links.
Utilizing Data from Audit Backlinking as An Opportunity to Create Valuable Links
A backlinking audit is far more beneficial than just finding or removing/disavowing harmful backlinks. As a matter of fact, it can be a major opportunity for companies to create a better backlinking strategy than improving the old one. You have probably heard of IT security teams spotting gaps in website security to improve them or make new strategies—this is a similar concept.
Good professional SEO experts analyze backlink reports to create opportunities for valuable links. A website’s top do follow backlinks could be leading to a home page, a blog post, a service page, or more. It can be difficult to tell much by just looking at them as a whole. However, you can learn a lot by reviewing the backlinks page by page.
A good way to view them is from high to low. That’s because some experts believe that they are the top links that send the most referral traffic. Then, it’s vital to assess what is common between the best backlinks. If you can identify the reason behind why they’re linking to you, it can help you find new prospects. For example, it can be either listicle posts or a specific service page from your website that’s getting more attraction.
Another great way to use audit backlinking for creating valuable link-building strategies is by identifying spot gaps as well as lost or broken links. For example, what pages are not being backlinked enough? This can help you strategize your backlinking and create better, more valuable ones.
Do you want to increase your website’s visibility and ensure your web pages rank higher? Then consider reaching out to Search Berg. They provide website backlink audit service to help clients improve their rankings.
