If you’ve ever been in the position that your Irvine-based company is expanding, you might need your website to grow with it. Maybe you’ve been handling the basics for it yourself, the design, writing the copy, posting new content a few times a week. But now you’re starting to make some headway in your market, and you need to hire an Irvine SEO company to take the reins. One of the things they’ll likely need to do is look at your collection of backlinks and see which of them are viable.
The Backlink Audit
If you’ve been in charge of your own company in Irvine, you probably have been running around ceaselessly since it got off the ground. As the owner, you have many jobs in one. It’s unlikely that you’ve been able to keep track of all the outgoing links on your site. But spammy backlinks aren’t something that you can ignore if your website and brand are expanding. They can hurt your SEO efforts, and they could cause you to get slapped with a Google penalty. Your SEO company should know how to fix that potential problem.
It’s likely your SEO company will want to use Moz, Majestic, Google Search Console, or Ahrefs for this job. Let’s take Ahrefs as an example of how the process will work. They will use Site Explorer, and then they will put on the “Domain” mode. That will allow a whole site audit. After a few seconds, a report will be generated.
They’ll see the number of backlinks you have, and from where those links are generated. This will give them some excellent data regarding where your site is in relation to your competitors. Are your link numbers close to theirs, or does some work have to be done in that regard?
They’ll next look at your pace of acquisition rate over time. Again, this is an indicator of whether you are making the splash in your industry for which you are hoping. If your links continue rising over time, that is ideal. If the rise is intermittent, then it will tell your SEO company that some refining of your technique will be required.
If they see a significant uptick in referring domains, and then a drop that is of a similar magnitude, that is an indication that they’ve found some “bad” or spammy links that need to be severed. The presence of these links might be malicious, or it might not. The point is that if your site is going to be performing at its highest level, this sort of audit needs to be done periodically to make sure that you’re free of these potentially harmful connections.
When you discover these sorts of links, it might be alarming to you, but if you hired an Irvine SEO company that is familiar with white hat website maintenance, then you should be fine. Just remember that they can’t do this once and be done with it. Just like every other aspect of your site, they need to keep running these checks as you progress onward and upward. Think of your website as a living, breathing organism. Your SEO company is like the doctor, and these are the sorts of checkups to keep your site, and your business, healthy and thriving.