How to Do a Quick SEO Audit of Your Page's Links

Created on 19 September, 2025 • Text Tools • 230 views • 3 minutes read

Worried about SEO? Start with a simple task. Learn how to do a quick SEO audit of your page's links to find broken links and improve your site's health.

The term "SEO audit" can sound overwhelming. It often brings to mind complex dashboards, technical jargon, and expensive software. But not all SEO tasks are that complicated.

One of the simplest and most high-impact audits you can do right now is to check the links on your key pages.

Why? Because the links on your page—both the ones pointing to other pages on your site (internal) and the ones pointing to other websites (external)—tell Google and your users a lot. A page with broken links or links to spammy sites creates a bad user experience and can hurt your rankings.

This guide will show you how to do a "lite" SEO audit on any page, no expensive tools required.

Why Do Your Page's Links Matter?

Before we start, let's quickly cover the two types of links you'll be looking for:

1. Internal Links: These are links that point to other pages on your own website. They are crucial for helping Google understand your site's structure and for passing "link equity" (ranking power) between your pages.
2. External (Outbound) Links: These are links that point to other websites. You use these to cite sources or recommend resources. Linking to high-quality, authoritative sites can be good for your users, but broken external links or links to low-quality sites are a bad signal.

According to SEO authorities like Moz, a smart internal linking strategy is a key factor in how search engines rank your pages. An audit helps you make sure that strategy is working.

How to Do a Quick Link Audit (The Easy Way)

Let's get this done in three simple steps.

Step 1: Choose Your Page

You don't need to audit every page on your site at once. Start with your most important ones. This could be:

1. Your homepage
2. A key service or product page
3. Your most popular blog post

Pick one page to start with. Open it in your browser.

Step 2: Get a Complete List of All Your Links

This is where most people get stuck. How do you find every single link on the page without manually clicking each one?

The Slow Way

You could right-click, select "View Page Source," and then try to scan through thousands of lines of dense HTML, looking for every <a href="..."> tag. This is tedious, time-consuming, and it's incredibly easy to miss links.

The Fast Way

A much faster method is to simply extract every link from the page's code.

1. On the page you want to audit, right-click and select "View Page Source."
2. Select all the text on the source code page (Ctrl+A or Cmd+A).
3. Copy all the text (Ctrl+C or Cmd+C).
4. Paste this entire block of code into a extractor.

This tool will instantly filter out all the code and plain text, giving you a clean, simple list of every single URL on that page. Now you have your audit checklist.

Step 3: Review and Analyze Your Link List

With your clean list, you can now quickly analyze your page's health. You're looking for three main things:

1. Broken Links (404s): This is your top priority. Click on your links (especially the ones that look old) to see if they still work. A link that leads to a "404 Not Found" error is a dead end for both users and search engines. It's a negative signal that makes your page look poorly maintained.
2. Internal Link Opportunities: Look at the internal links. Are you linking to your other important service pages or related blog posts? Is the anchor text (the clickable text) descriptive? Instead of "click here," it should be "check out our content marketing services." This helps Google understand what the linked page is about.
3. Outbound Link Quality: Look at the external websites you're linking to. Are they high-quality, authoritative sources? Or did you accidentally link to a spammy or low-quality site? The sites you associate with can reflect on your own site's quality.

What to Do Next

Once you've reviewed your list, the fixes are usually straightforward:

1. For Broken Links: Update the link to the new, correct URL. If the page no longer exists, remove the link or find a suitable replacement.
2. For Internal Links: If you see opportunities, go back and edit your page to add helpful internal links to your other relevant content.
3. For Bad Outbound Links: If you find you're linking to a spammy or irrelevant site, just remove the link.

That's it. You've just completed a valuable part of an SEO audit. By spending 15 minutes checking your links, you can fix errors, improve your user experience, and send better signals to Google—all without any complex software.