Thread by @Nick_zv_

Backlink Audit in 11 Easy Steps

Not ranking?

It's because you lack backlinks.

Here's how to run a backlink audit and steal your competitor's backlinks.

(I've built 300+ backlinks with this technique)

Step #1 . Let's start with the "why?"

Backlink audits allow you to:

- Understand where your website stands
- Find the gap between you and a competitor
- Understand how competitive a niche is
- Steal competitor backlinks

Step #2. Pick your target.

If you're looking to understand where you stand, go with your own website.

If you want to find a gap with a competitor (or steal their backlinks), then go with their site.

Ideally, do both.

Step #3. Run your competitor through Semrush or Ahrefs.

For the sake of the example, we'll be using Sem and a random website for this audit.

Click the number of referring domains to deep-dive into their link profile.

Step #4. Filter the backlinks by "do-follow" and "active" as follows.

This will filter out backlinks that don't have an impact on the website's rankings (and give you a more accurate view of how many backlinks they have).

Step #5. As you can see, their backlinks went down from 451 to 189.

It's still a lot, but we're not done filtering just yet!

In the authority score range, set 5 as the minimum limit.

This will help weed out all the low-quality backlinks.

Step #6. And we're down to 122 backlinks.

This STILL does not reflect their REAL number of backlinks, though.

This list still includes a ton of scraper, directory, or other types of irrelevant backlinks.

From here, we're going manual.

Step #7. Extract the backlinks into an Excel file.

We're going to start going through the list of backlinks one by one and excluding sites that are not relevant.

Step #8. If you open the Quero party site, for example, you'll see that it's basically a scraper site with a bunch of random links.

This has 0 backlink authority and doesn't contribute to the website's rankings.

Other links, squieora or , are 404. aulaiestpdm.edu.pe

Step #9. Manually go through all these sites and basically remove all sites that are:

- 404
- Directories
- Scraper websites
- Tech review websites

And so on.

Once you're done, you're going to see the number of backlinks go down from 122 to something as low as 40 or 50.

Step #10. From here, you have your work cut out for you.

If your competitor has 40 backlinks, and you have 0, you need to:

- Build 5 backlinks a month for 8 months

OR

- Build 10 backlinks a month for 4 months

And you'll likely outrank them!

Step #11. Finally, use a tool like Snov to find the points of contact (SEO lead, content marketing lead, or marketing lead) in the companies linking to your competitors.

Reach out to them asking for a guest post, ABC link swap partnership, or offer some other link incentive.

That's a wrap!

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