With the multitude of SEO tools available, it's sometimes hard to see the forest for the trees. Therefore, you should carefully consider the selection of the right tool, paying particular attention to the interesting differences in terms of costs and data quality. In the off-page area, and especially when analyzing the backlink profile, Ahrefs has proven to be the most helpful tool for us.
Not only can we utilize a wide variety of features here, but we also have access to an extensive database of backlinks. Additionally, metrics like the domain rating help us draw valuable conclusions about the quality of incoming links.
Good SEOs know, of course, that even though Ahrefs is a very good all-in-one tool, ivory coast phone number data other tools should be used for data collection and evaluation, as one tool alone usually only has limited informational power and cannot guarantee 100% accuracy.
In this article, however, we would like to focus on Ahrefs, as it is particularly well suited for a backlink audit.
Get an overview: What is the status quo?
Before taking any further steps, you first need to clarify your current status, what you're good at, what you're lacking, and what your goal should be. For a good overview, start by entering your domain in Ahrefs and displaying the analysis. Identifying the relevant numbers and drawing insights from them is a bit more complex, however.
Figure 1: Overview of the most important key figures of claneo.com
Figure 1 shows the most important data that will help you classify your backlink profile. You should pay particular attention to the Ahrefs Rank, the Domain Rating (DR), and the number of referring domains.
The domain rating, which evaluates the quality of the domains linking to you, provides a useful guide. Using our example in Figure 1, you can see that the ratio of the number of referring domains to the domain rating is quite good: Among the currently 293 referring domains, the majority are strong domains that deliver link juice.
But what exactly does this number tell us? Basically, the domain rating evaluates on a scale of 1 to 100, with 100 being the absolute highest. Domains with a domain rating above 90 have a comparatively easy time further increasing the number and quality of their inbound backlinks due to their proven added value. However, all other pages lose DR when these strong pages become even stronger. Since a higher rating also means that further increases are more difficult, it is "easier" to increase the DR from 2 to 10, for example, than from 10 to 20.
In addition to this more general assessment, the "referring domains" data offers more detail: Here, you can see how many unique domains link to you, with only one link counted per domain. Therefore, you need to compare the number of these referring domains with the incoming backlinks. The significantly higher number of backlinks is usually due to some domains linking to you multiple times—for example, on every subpage. However, a detailed look at the referring domains can never hurt, especially with regard to your SEO efforts.