You need to analyze your website's backlinks. What tools should you use?

1 Why analyze your backlinks?

Analyzing your backlinks can help you understand your website's strengths and weaknesses, as well as your competitors' strategies. By doing so, you can identify and remove toxic or low-quality backlinks that may damage your reputation and rankings, find and fix broken or lost backlinks that could reduce your traffic and conversions, discover and replicate high-quality backlinks that can increase your authority and visibility, monitor and track your backlink growth and performance over time, and compare and benchmark your backlink profile against competitors' and industry standards.

2 What tools to use?

When analyzing your website's backlinks, there are numerous tools to choose from. Google Search Console is a free tool from Google that allows you to monitor and manage your website's presence on Google Search. It also provides a report on your website's backlinks, displaying the domains and pages that link to you, along with the anchor texts and attributes used. If needed, you can use it to disavow unwanted backlinks that cannot be removed manually. Ahrefs is a paid tool that offers an extensive and detailed analysis of your website's backlinks, as well as your competitors'. It reveals the number and quality of your backlinks, along with their distribution by type, country, language, industry, and more. It can also be used to find new backlink opportunities, track your backlink progress, and conduct a backlink audit. Moz is another paid tool that provides a thorough and insightful analysis of your website's backlinks, as well as your competitors'. It shows the number and quality of your backlinks, as well as their distribution by domain authority, page authority, spam score, and more. With it you can find and fix backlink issues, monitor your backlink changes, and compare your backlink profile with others.

4 What to avoid?

When analyzing your website's backlinks, you should be mindful of the potential pitfalls. Focusing solely on quantity rather than quality can be detrimental, as having more backlinks does not necessarily equate to having better backlinks. You should pay attention to the relevance, authority, diversity, and trustworthiness of your backlinks, as well as their impact on your SEO metrics. Additionally, your backlink profile is ever-changing due to algorithm updates, website changes, link removals, and link additions. Therefore, it is important to monitor and update your backlink profile regularly and respond to any changes accordingly. Lastly, attempting to get or pay for backlinks from irrelevant, low-quality, or spammy websites can have negative effects on your SEO. Instead, focus on earning or building backlinks from relevant, high-quality, and trustworthy websites that can add value to both your website and audience.

5 What to remember?

Analyzing your website's backlinks is an essential part of your SEO strategy. It can help you improve your website's performance, reputation, and rankings on search engines. To analyze your website's backlinks effectively, you need to use the right tools, follow the best practices, avoid the common mistakes, and take action based on your findings. By doing so, you can optimize your website's backlink profile and achieve your SEO goals.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?