5 Easy Steps for a Free Backlink Audit and a Winning Link Building Strategy

Over the past decade, we have conducted extensive research on backlink building for our business website, Appkodes.com.

AppKodes is a ‘business-to-business’ (B2B) website, and acquiring quality backlinks for a B2B site is never easy.

So, we have conducted deeper research, investing a lot of time to identify the smart way for backlink opportunities. This is always challenging, which is why we follow an optimized process during backlink audits.

We compare Appkodes with its competitors to identify gaps and opportunities for improvement using simple, free tools. I’m sure this backlink audit process only requires your time.

All you need is patience, as some processes may take a month to analyze how your competitors are improving their backlinks. Okay, let’s not waste any more time — let’s dive into the strategy!

What is Backlink Audit?

Before diving into the strategy, it’s important to understand what a backlink audit is. Link building strategies don’t work the same way they did a decade ago — they’ve evolved.

You may have noticed the word ‘Source’ in some of your ChatGPT results. So, how do we build backlinks to support Google’s organic search traffic and AEO (Ask Engine Optimization) as well?

A backlink audit is the starting point for it all.

A backlink audit involves identifying all the external links pointing to your website and categorizing them based on quality and types. The next step is to audit them by evaluating the quantity of referring domains and the relevance of these external backlinks.

A complete backlink audit also involves identifying harmful links and reducing their impact. But do you really need to do that? What impact would these harmful links have on your domain’s organic performance? We’ll explore all of this in the upcoming sections.

Let’s see how to find your domain’s backlinks using the free tool, Google Search Console.

5 Easy Steps to Perform a Backlink Audit Using Free Tools

The following simple steps have worked for us, and we’ve used them for initial startups to invest only in manpower, instead of spending a lot of money on advanced tools.

Step 1: Backlink Audit Using GSC

Google Search Console (GSC) is one of the most powerful tools to get all your backlink details for free. If you haven’t set up a GSC account yet, follow these steps to start integrating GSC with your website.

Register in GSC Account

Register your new account on GSC using this link. Once you’ve completed the registration, you will be directed to the following page.

Simply enter your domain details and click ‘Continue.’ You will then be taken to the ownership verification page.

This verification is a mandatory, and you can choose the options based on your website’s firewall configurations. For my domain, we are using Cloudflare, so we will need to log into Cloudflare to grant access and verify the domain. In other cases, you can choose the ‘DNS Provider’ method.

Once your domain is successfully verified, you will see the following page.

The next step is submitting the sitemap link to Google Search Console.

Download Backlink Data

GSC will take some time to crawl your website after submitting the sitemap. It will also take time to find all your backlinks from external websites. Once the website data is fully updated, you can navigate to the ‘Links’ section in GSC.

Here, you’ll see the total number of backlinks pointing to your site at the top. This number includes all backlinks, not just the referring domains linked to your website.

Export all the backlinks pointing to your website by clicking the ‘Export’ option in the top right corner.

I’ve always thought that the backlink count provided by Google Search Console is much lower than the actual number. To conduct a successful backlink audit and develop a new link-building strategy, we need to estimate the approximate number of backlinks your domain has.

Deriving the Average Metrics

The backlinks list you get from GSC will help you identify the high-quality links pointing to your site. To estimate the approximate number of referring domains to my website, I have to explore different tools to reach a conclusion.

I created an Excel sheet to draw a conclusion about my website’s backlink profile. This sheet collects all the information I gathered from free tools and helps find the average number of backlinks and other details.

The important metrics that needed for backlink audit is total number of backlinks and number of referring domains or unique domains pointing to your website. As you can see from the collage, its not matching and its different from each sources.

The main reason these numbers don’t match is that the data is pulled from different sources. Each source may use different algorithms to continuously track backlinks across the internet.

However, there is no significant difference in the numbers, as you can see by closely examining the data in the following Excel sheet screenshot.

So, the best way to conclude my backlink audit using these two primary metrics is by finding the average of all the data provided by the free tools.

I’m pretty sure that even paid tools cannot give you the exact backlink count and referring domains. It’s all based on the different algorithms they use.

Finally, for my website Appkodes, these are the approximate numbers I’ll consider for my next link-building efforts.

Other Metrics

There are other metrics that need to be considered when conducting a backlink audit.

• Number of Dofollow and Nofollow links
• Average Domain Authority score
• Overall relevancy of your entire backlinks
• Number of Anchor text found in all the backlinks.

But let’s not worry about these metrics for now, as you need premium tools to find them. Also, the impact of optimizing these metrics for organic improvement is still up for debate.

On the other hand, continuously increasing the number of relevant backlinks is always helpful for boosting your organic traffic.

So, let’s focus on the total number of backlinks and total unique referring domains.

Step 2: Analyse Competitors Backlinks Using Free Tools

Now, it’s time to perform the competitor backlink audit using the same free tools. I’ve listed the top 5 tools we use for backlink audits, and you can use the same ones to identify the backlink gap between you and your competitors.

After finding the backlink numbers, you need to prioritize your link-building campaign based on the lowest competition. Increasing the number of unique referring domains will also yield results.

This campaign can be scheduled based on the product or service pages that you and your competitor are competing for. This approach will help narrow things down and show progress stage by stage.

Let’s see how to get the competitors’ backlink numbers. The first one I always prefer is Ahref free tool.

Ahrefs Free Backlink Checker: https://ahrefs.com/traffic-checker

This tool is the one I trust the most, as it provides the right number of total backlinks and unique domains. I selected two competitors and started finding their total backlinks and referring domains.

Competitor #1:

This is the result for competitor 1.

Competitor #2:

This is the result for competitor 2.

These numbers shows competitor #2 is close to my numbers. Now, I have to make sure these numbers are helpful insights for my backlink campaigns. So, I will start collecting the same metrics from the other free tools.

The other tools you can use to collect the approximate backlink counts:

SEOReviewTools – Free tool and no signup required.

Linkody – Free tool and no signup required.

SEOptimer – Free tool and no signup required.

SERanking – Free tool and no signup required.

Finally, I gathered all the average numbers of my competitors and recorded them in the Excel sheet, as shown below.

Backlink analysis using free tools for competitor 2

The final numbers show that competitor #2 is closer to me compared to competitor #1. The number of backlinks between Appkodes and competitor #2 is nearly the same, but the referring domains are not equal, with a significant difference—almost a 3x gap.

So, my backlink campaign plan will focus on exactly what needs to be improved in order to surpass the traffic of competitor #2.

It’s time to determine the run rate required for my monthly link-building campaign. This can also be done with the help of a free tool. Let’s explore how.

Step 3: Find the Run Rate Required

Finding how many backlinks I need to build each month doesn’t depend solely on this number. My competitors will also be working hardly to get more backlinks, so to stay competitive, I need to figure out how many backlinks I should build each month.

Here is my simple calculation:

This simple formula requires one more metric, which needs a bit of patience to determine: the average number of backlinks your competitors build every month.

I suggest two free backlink audit tools to get this number. The first tool is Ubersuggest. This backlink analytics tool requires a free signup to access the average backlinks your competitors build monthly. I’m not sure how accurate these numbers are, so to verify this, I have another tool suggestion.

Diib is another free backlink audit tool that helps you get more details about your competitors. However, the downside is that this tool only sends you these details once a month to your inbox.

It takes a considerable amount of time to track your competitor’s backlink changes and other important metric updates.

Since I’ve already added these two competitors to the tool, I’m receiving monthly updates about their backlink changes. I believe these numbers should be very close to the actual ones.

But this takes more time. Based on the number of new links gained and the number of links lost in one month from the Ubersuggest report, I can estimate that they are likely adding around 50 to 150 backlinks every month.

Now that I have all the numbers needed for my simple calculation, I’ve worked out the number of backlinks I need to build in order to compete with my competitors, one by one.

Since my team is lean, I’ve planned my backlink campaign to last 12 months. Here’s my monthly backlink-building target.

Step 4: Start Scheduling the Plan

These total monthly targets can’t be achieved through a single campaign. They need to be properly distributed based on the frequency of links you can acquire while spending minimal time.

In the meantime, the campaign should be strictly monitored to avoid low-quality links.

We may need excellent backlink management software to monitor these links, identify spammy backlinks, and keep our campaign clean while regularly tracking progress.

Do spammy backlinks or harmful links impact your SEO performance?

In my opinion, I don’t believe finding spammy backlinks and asking Google to ignore them is a waste of time. If they really had a significant impact, I could simply add more harmful backlinks to my competitors. Still, building quality backlinks remains the most important factor.

It’s still a controversial topic whether link building is a ranking factor for Google, but in my experience, it will never be optional when working for organic traffic.

We’ve even conducted numerous experiments with internal and external links and found that link juice is always a factor in improving organic traffic.”

So, here’s how I would plan these 410 backlinks using different strategies. I’ll outline the top 5 methods to keep it brief.

Resource Page Link Building

This is a time-consuming task, but it yields results. Identify relevant resource pages close to your target niche, create quality listicles, and provide useful, unique information that those relevant pages are missing.

Contact the website owners by sending them an appealing email, asking them to add a link to your listicles on their resource pages. Explain how this would be beneficial for the website owners.

For example, find relevant keywords related to ‘backlink audit’ using free tools like Google Keyword Planner. You could create an article like ‘Top 5 Free Backlink Auditing Tools’ and search for resource pages in Google by using the query ‘intitle:resources backlink audit’.

This will help you find resource pages that can be perfectly linked to your listicle, and you can then approach the website owner.

I will cover a detailed blog on how to do resource page link building in the upcoming days.

Broken Link Building

This is also a time-consuming task, but when done correctly, the effort will yield good results. When we were doing broken link finding for my product Serpple, we targeted existing listicles.

For product marketing, finding all related topics and narrowing them down into a listicle will help you identify broken links. You can then contact the website owners and approach them with an attention-grabbing email.

For example, the keyword ‘Top 10 Rank Tracker’ was our target. We found around 30 listicles and checked all the links using a Chrome extension called ‘Check My Link.’

We discovered about 3 blogs with broken links, and we offered high-quality link exchanges, even paying a few to have our links placed by replacing the broken ones.

Skyscraper Technique

We tried this with no major success, but I still highly recommend it to anyone reading this blog. It’s all about finding top-performing content in your niche.

Collect all the top-performing content and sort them based on keyword rankings and traffic. Then, perform a backlink analysis for those high-performing pieces.

Next, identify what’s missing in those high-quality contents and create a new one that fills those gaps, making it more unique and fresh. Then, approach all the websites that link to those high-performing contents, explaining how your content is fresher and better.

If the content is really good, you’ll likely get a positive response. Even if you don’t get backlinks, you still have a good chance of having Google boost your content’s presence organically.

Guest Posting

Guest posting is a quick approach, but it’s important to prioritize your tasks properly to streamline the process and achieve consecutive results.

This can be productive when the team schedules their work, such as finding websites that accept guest posts, planning quality content, approaching them, and securing approval. This should be a continuous process.

Finding websites is quite easy. Use the Google search term ‘intitle:write for us + [Your niche].’ For my case, it’s always digital marketing, so the search term would be ‘intitle:write for us + Digital marketing.’

Community Building

Find the top 5 communities where discussions related to your niche are happening, and identify common forums like Reddit and Quora.

Keep following relevant tags to get notifications when new questions pop up in the community. Try to be the first to answer, including a link back to your article or website.

Don’t make the answers vague. Present them in a way that anyone who clicks on the question will also want to read your answer, leave a comment, and give it a like to help it gain more popularity with upvotes.

Step 5: Monitor The Progress

Depending on your team size, the backlink audit and its resulting backlink targets can be distributed to achieve these numbers as quickly as possible.

After a couple of weeks, you can start using the same free tools I suggested and begin following up on the progress regularly.

Key Metrics to Follow

Search Rankings: Use the best rank trackers to automate the process of finding ranking positions for the anchor texts your team is working on. Closely monitor their ranking fluctuations.

Dofollow Backlinks: The team should focus more on dofollow links, as they hold more value, as recommended by most digital marketing experts.

Referring Domains: As the link-building process progresses, you should start seeing a significant improvement in referring domains. Always aim to find unique domains for link building.

For more detailed suggestions on the best backlink monitoring tools, check out my separate blog here: Best Backlink Monitoring Tools.

Final Thoughts

Finding target numbers is always a great motivation to start making progress. While backlink audits have many other purposes, we do them to pinpoint the target numbers we need to focus on.

As GPT models are growing, we’ve explored whether there’s anything specifically for AEO, but there’s no unique method to compete with GPT results through resource links. It’s all about content quality.

Start with simple methods, follow the results from free tools, and as you can see, there’s no major difference in the numbers. So, start small and create a big impact.

All the best !