Ahrefs Launches Internal Backlink Audit Feature
Having the right tool is vital for your SEO strategies and efforts to dominate your niche. As much as you try to gain traffic and climb up the ranks in search results without the aid of a tool, this would just be a waste of time. Ahrefs has proven its name in the industry, evidenced by its visibility in most Webmasters’ vocabulary. The crowd-favorite is continuously evolving and you can see it through its recent update on the Internal Backlink Audit.
Internal linking is one of the tasks that most webmasters neglect to check, which can very well hurt your position in the SERPs. Google has mentioned time and again that links are one of the most important ingredients you should take advantage of in order for you to rank. This is why the right linking strategy includes the Internal Backlink Audit.
How to Audit Backlinks Using Ahrefs
The thing with having an efficient tool such as Ahrefs is that you are at your most convenient while using them. With the knowledge that Google crawls websites through links – both internal and external – this should be a reason enough for you to organize your internal linking. If you don’t know this by now, providing a road map for your content by internally linking to it provides a hierarchy to it.
Ultimately, you lead the users into your most important content, all while providing them with the best set of information. You will also see broken or bad links that return a 404 error. By using this tool, you can identify internal links that are not helping the parent pages gain velocity in ranking and traffic.
An overview of the external backlink profile has always been a part of the Ahrefs skeleton. Now, you will see that Internal Backlinks can also be checked using this tool. Under the Site Explorer tab in the Ahrefs toolbar, start by inserting your url and then checking the Internal Backlinks option found at the sidebar.
As you can see, your anchor link and all your internal backlinks are grouped accordingly. Once you see that you fail to include a link that is related to your anchor, then start internally linking through it.
Another important feature of Ahrefs Internal Backlinking Option is its ability to let you categorize your link data according to the link type. This will further enhance your efforts to do a linking audit since you can decide where to focus. Additionally, you would not find difficulty in doing on-site optimization regarding links since you can check if you are properly redirecting to a page or if you are using the dofollow/nofollow tags correctly.
Aside from URL Ranking, Referring Domains, External Links, Total Search Traffic, and the Keywords that page is ranking for, you can also see how your content is grouped according to the message you want the user to receive. The new Ahrefs feature lets you do just that by using the text snippets surrounding your content, you will see how it points back to your anchor link. This will help you understand how you should group your content accordingly.
Importance of Internal Backlink Audit for SEO
Internal Linking should follow a structure. Using the Ahrefs tool will help you do this in order for your site to bring smoother user experience and a solid SEO profile. Organizing your web pages in accordance with the keywords or its purpose for the site is one of the best things you can do to dominate the SEO industry. Let’s face it, you can come up with thousands of strategies but if you fail to do the simplest act of Internal Link Audit, all your efforts will be for nothing.
Additionally, you will not reap the benefits that Backlink Audit brings to your SEO. These advantages include but are not limited to:
- Utilizing anchor links to better aid user intent.
- User navigation becomes smoother because users would not run the risk of encountering a dead link or page.
- Content is displayed in a series, giving the signal that your site has a well-optimized structure.
- Highlights new links that point to relevant content.
- Link juice is passed between your web pages.
Internal linking will pass on your site’s true value. In addition to running a site crawl to collect the links that are not beneficial to pages anymore, it is important that you see them relating to one another. By doing this, content is better delivered and utilized according to its purpose.
Using Internal Links for Your Content Marketing Strategy
Knowing all this, how are you going to use the Ahrefs tool to your advantage? Linking deep into your site can help will be the best way to build your link architecture, so why not make a content marketing strategy out of it? You may have heard about topic clusters and this is where Internal Backlink Audit comes into play.
Whether you plan on re-purposing content or making new ones, you can use this Ahref tool to do so. As you may well know, using tons of links in your internal pages will hurt your SEO score. To avoid this, just segment those content on your blog page or preferred content navigation page.
This common model found below will give you a clear idea of what to do by using internal linking as a content strategy. It may seem obvious to do this but many tend to neglect this part of their sites.
Think about this: If your content is woven together to form a large chunk of information from your site, users will have something to look forward to. More traffic and a larger opportunity to rank in the SERPs for you.
Once you see that internal linking makes sense, you will have more cause to debunk the common misconception in SEO that internal links carry little weight as opposed to external backlinks. Using Internal Linking will help you improve your link flow to individual pages which means that you will help them rank better. And since “Content is King”, target this part of your site and see the improved results.
Key Takeaway
Every website has internal links but not all webmasters know how to use it. Internal links are silent players when it comes to boosting organic traffic, but once you start being mindful enough to audit them, the results will be beneficial. Keep in mind that the link audit is an important part of your regular on-site optimization efforts and step up your game by using it to build a great content structure. What are your best techniques in link auditing? Comment down below!
