It’s very, very hard to rank well in Google without links from other websites. In order to rank well, the goal is to have trusted, authoritative, on-topic links from other websites pointing to your website. The goal of a link audit is to find all of the links pointing to the website, review them, and make sure that the website has good, trusted links. If the website has unnatural, inorganic, or manipulative links, the website can be penalized or banned in the search engines. These can also lead to small search engine ranking and traffic drops, as well.
During a link audit, Bill Hartzer reviews the links to the website, going back to around 2004. All links are manually reviewed, and they’re pulled from a variety of sources. All link sources don’t give us all of the links—so it’s necessary to pull from a variety of sources, combine those links into one list, and remove the duplicates. Reviewing every link manually takes time—some sites have tens of links, some have hundreds, thousands, or even millions of links. The cost of a link audit typically is determined based on the number of links involved.
During a link audit, Bill Hartzer looks at the topics of the links, the quality of the links, the anchor text (the clickable part of the link) and other factors that make up a good link versus a bad link. Bill Hartzer reviews competitors’ links, as well, to determine if the website has about the same, more, or less links than competitors. After reviewing all of these factors, Bill Hartzer can make recommendations going forward for a link strategy. This could include fixing/deleting/removing links or working on getting certain types of links that the website doesn’t have.
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SEO Deliverables
There are only a few
SEO Deliverables
during a link audit, but the main deliverable is the list of links. A written document is also provided, showing link data and other information relevant to the website. A plan and link strategy is provided, as well.