Link building is a long-term process that builds the authority of a website over time. Taking the time to build an effective link building strategy can be extremely fruitful. However, when a lot of time and effort goes into something, you want to be able to track the ROI, to ensure that your strategy is working effectively.
Link building for SEO needs to be tracked using the right metrics, this can reveal a lot about the success of your link building, i.e. where needs more attention and which strategies aren’t working. The importance of link building cannot be overstated enough, which is why we need to know how to track its ROI.
Traffic
Tracking the growth of your traffic is an effective way to see whether the links you’ve gained are driving more people to your website. Traffic can be easily tracked using an SEO tool such as Google Analytics. You can track metrics such as visits, unique visitors, page views, visit duration and bounce rate.
Take it a step further by tracking the conversions from your website visits. This will show you just how effective your link building is and whether you’re targeting the right audience. For example, if you gain a link in a major publication which results in thousands of visitors but no conversions, it can be frustrating. However, if you gain a link from a more niche website which results in more visitors and conversions, this might tell you which websites to target in your link building strategy.
Increase in ranking
One of the main aims of a link building strategy is to improve your ranking on SERPs (search engine results pages). Therefore, tracking your ranking is so important. If your ranking for your keywords is increasing, it’s clear that link building is effective. However, it’s important to track relevancy too. If you’re on the first page of Google for an unrelated search term, this won’t produce any conversions and you might be building links with the wrong websites.
You can track your ranking for certain keywords using an SEO tool. Or, if you’re a smaller business, you can simply create a spreadsheet of your keywords and regularly track your position for them in Google search.
Compare before and after the publication on Google Analytics
You can directly track the performance of your link building using Google Analytics. If you’ve obtained a high-quality link from a publication, you can compare your analytics before and after the article. Here are some of the things to compare using Analytics:
- Referrals report — under traffic sources you can view your referrals report which shows all the sites sending traffic your way; you’ll quickly be able to identify the ones from your link building campaign. You can then view how many conversions these links have generated.
- Organic traffic — view reports on organic traffic before and after the publication of content with links to your site.
- Determine your most fruitful links — comparing analytics before and after certain links are obtained allows you to see which links made the biggest impact. This gives you the opportunity to chase more links from similar sites and see what worked.
Domain authority
Your domain authority (DA) predicts how likely you are to rank highly in SERPs. The higher your domain authority, the more likely you are to rank highly on Google. The number of high-quality, external links pointing to your website has a significant impact on your DA. You can check your score with most SEO tools.
Comparing your DA from before your link building strategy to after will enable you to see the impact first-hand. Focus on building high-quality links from authoritative websites to boost your overall DA.
With link building being such an important part of your SEO strategy, it’s vital that you track the success and ROI to ensure that you’re on the right track. At Distinctly, we offer link building services and track the performance, so you can see the positive impact for yourself.
