One of the first lessons you learn in a marketing classroom is the need to measure link building performance. That is the only way to gauge whether your campaigns are working or not. So, one of the terms you will come across pretty early is metrics.
Think about it much like key performance indicators (KPIs), but there is a difference. KPIs are targets based on your goals to achieve the best result for your strategic decisions. Take the example of getting new organic traffic to your website using link building every month. The metrics support KPIs by measuring performance or progress. So an example would be how many backlinks you managed to get within a set time frame.
Our article focuses on quality link building and the measures or metrics you need to include in campaign reports. But first, let us explore what link building is.
Understanding Link Building
Link building is the active process of getting hyperlinks or links, as we will refer to them, from other websites to your own. It sounds like a mouthful, so allow us to break it down. Let’s say you write fantastic articles and occasionally get invitations to guest posts on other sites. That is all good because you most likely have a byline in the article.
But it gets better if you can place a hyperlink or link. So every time the readers click on the link, it will redirect them back to your site.
Sounds simple right? Well, the surprising answer is organic link building can be very difficult. Consider it an investment in your brand to get link building services so that the experts take on the job for you.
Some challenges you can experience without link building knowledge include:-
- Breaking the Google Webmaster Guidelines on link building. You can incur serious penalties for what the search engine considers link building schemes. These include buying links, linking to low-authority sites, link exchanges, etc.
- Indulging in grey or black hat link building practices
- Linking to low-quality sites
- Poor internal linking practices
- Poor content that is not link-worthy etc.
Do take time to find out more about quality link building. We reiterate this point. Please work with a link building agency or consultant if you don’t know how to go about link building. It saves you the hassle and frustration of doing it wrong. But you also get the benefits of an effective digital marketing tool.
Quality Link Building Measures to Include in Your Reports
Increase in Organic Traffic to Your Site
What we did not mention as a challenge is determining the link building metrics. It would be easy to think that getting as many links as possible is the way to go. And we are not disputing that you should aim for that. All while sticking to whitehat link building practices, of course. But there is more you need to measure with quality link building.
The traffic coming to your website can either be organic or paid. Anyone who understands marketing knows converting organic traffic is easier for one reason. The visitors come to your site because of genuine interest in what you offer. And that is why many brands fight for top rankings on search engines. More visibility makes the chances of searchers clicking on your site higher.
That is why one of the most important link building measures is organic traffic to your site. That means keeping track of the campaign launch and watching the progress within the specific time frame.
Number of Referring Domains
Remember that the organic traffic may also be due to other campaigns you may be running. So, make sure you indicate when you started the link building campaigns. Identifying whether it contributes to the increase in organic traffic will be easy.
As we already stated, quality link building is tough. You might think getting a hyperlink to your site is so easy. But it is harder than you think—the quality of your content matters. Also, the site owners may not be receptive to your offer. Thus the earlier suggestion was to outsource link building to the experts. You have to establish relationships, show value to the linking site with your content, etc.
In the beginning, you might be lucky to get one or two links back to your site. But, effective implementation of organic link building tactics can start to yield positive results. Thus, it is important to have referring domains as a link building metric.
Time It Takes to Get Links
Now, this point may seem strange. Why should it matter how long it takes to get links as long as you get them right? Well, look at it this way. If you run one kilometer in 10 minutes, two weeks later, you are still running that one kilometer simultaneously. Is there any progress?
Let’s say it takes you two days to negotiate one link. One month later, the same applies. It clearly indicates that you need to change or improve your link building tactics. You may, for instance, need to change how you pitch to other sites. Or incorporate other methods like maximizing on unmentioned brands or broken link building.
Strength of the Linking Domain
Does the strength of the linking website matter? The answer would be the same: does it matter the type of people you associate with? You see, you could get ten backlinks every day. But, the linking sites lack value, authority, or quality. Domain authority looks at the likelihood of a website achieving a 1-100 rank on search engines. Some factors to note are:-
- Number of backlinks
- Relevance of backlinks
- Content quality on the site
- Social signals
- Root domains
- SEO performance and more
As you can imagine, sites like Wikipedia, Forbes, Reddit, LinkedIn, and Google My Business rank highly. There are online tools you can use to check domain authority. Linking to low-authority sites will impact your site domain strength.
Page Strength on the Linking Site
Page strength is pretty similar to domain strength. But the main point here is that it points to specific linking pages on the site. The most popular metric is PageRank, a Google ranking factor. It looks at the quality of the web page and has a big impact on rankings. You should always aim for the highest scale, which is 10.
Many websites’ highest scale or strongest page strength is on the homepage. There will be a significant decline in the following pages. Your aim is to get links from pages with the highest strength. Like in the case of the domain authority, there are tools you can use to check page strength. When looking at metrics, page strength is very important.
Positive Changes in Google Rankings
Before you launch your organic link building campaigns, check how your posts rank on the search engines. Many brands compete for the top positions with good reason. A majority of online users will not go beyond the first results pages.
Indeed, the best place to be is within the top 3 results. Take advantage of tools like Google Search Console or SEMRush to know your position on the SERPs. If over time, you see an improvement in the ranking, it means your link building campaigns are working.