4 Key Metrics to Focus On During Your Link Building Campaigns

As you embark upon a link building campaign, there are a lot of metrics that you can choose to track the results. A big part of any campaign is collecting data. And sometimes that data can truly overwhelm. Knowing what metrics to focus on will likely yield a better return on the investment while helping you to better understand your audience and what they need and expect from you. Here are some KPIs to keep an eye on in order to get a better read of just how a link building campaign is doing.

1. Domain Authority

Only the best link building companies know that it is vital to know where you stand with your current backlinks in order to draft a strategy and measure where your link building campaign is going. It will be instrumental in setting a benchmark, and identifying any backlinks that are causing your site more harm than good. A site’s domain authority leans heavily on the quality of its backlinks. Likewise, having backlinks from sites in your niche will be more helpful and is key to improving your site’s SEO.

2. Organic Growth

Tracking the organic growth in your site traffic is a pretty good metric that can diagnose the health of your link building projects. In fact, it just may be the best indicator of successful backlinks. An increase in high quality backlinks should correlate to more site traffic. Google Analytics can be instrumental in uncovering the referral traffic that’s coming from each backlink. There is even software that will tell you where your traffic goes after leaving your site. This data can help you further identify other sites to partner with for backlinks.

3. Keyword Position Analysis

Conducting a keyword position analysis is another good metric for tracking link success. As your domain authority climbs, search engine algorithms will typically start to focus on your site’s content. One of the first things picked up on will be the use of keywords. The better the keyword positions earned, the better the rank on the SERPs. This is why when embarking on link building campaigns, it’s imperative to have high quality content that’s optimized and well targeted.

4. Cost

No project goes without cost, even link building campaigns. Think about how many hours it costs you to earn a backlink and how much revenue is being generated from that backlink. There are also link exchange services that charge for backlinks. More often, getting backlinks is more of a time commitment. But as best you can, try to assign a value to the time that is spent sending emails to foster relationships and identifying quality sites to solicit for backlinks.

Link building campaigns are a labor of love. They take time and patience and plenty of research. There’s no shortcut here that is going to yield you the types of results you want. Shortcuts can only get you part of the way there, and using black hat tricks just may send you in the opposite direction.