3 powerful metrics to measure your link building campaign

Let’s face it, bonding isn’t easy.

But without proper measures, it can become even more difficult.

If you want to improve, you need to identify what you are already doing well and where you could use improvements.

Just counting links will not be enough, so you need other measures of success as well.

Not knowing what kind of metric to use to measure the effectiveness of your link building makes it extremely difficult to achieve the results you want.

On top of that, it’s always good to know how you’re going to measure your link building campaign before you start linking.

This will help you set realistic goals while trying to make positive changes to your organic traffic growth trend.

When it comes to organic traffic growth, it’s good to mention early on that link building is only part of the complex SEO process.

While links are extremely important, there are many other factors that can affect your site’s ranking.

There’s no point in making a lot of top quality links if everything else is flawed, right?

This means that your pages should be well optimized, paying attention to some basic elements like titles and meta descriptions, mobile friendliness etc.

Additionally, the pages you plan to grow via links should target keywords with a decent search volume and, more importantly, should be backed by well-written content.

Once you’ve taken care of the SEO basics, you’re ready to take your organic growth to the next level with data-driven link building.

Here are the top three metrics you can use to measure the effectiveness of your link building efforts.

1. Growth trend of new referral domains

Okay, this might sound obvious to the captain, but the first metric you need to track is the number of referral domains acquired month after month.

This helps you determine if your link building machine is moving in the right direction.

Keep in mind that link building and overnight success rarely go hand in hand.

Developing a respectable backlink portfolio is a process that takes a lot of time and effort.

Normally you spend the first few months building relationships and making a connection or two here and there.

It is only after this time that you can expect links to start knocking on your door.

Usually it takes around 2-3 months to start building a solid number of links for niches we’ve never worked with. So yes, link building takes time!

But once there, you will soon double the number of referring domains acquired on a monthly basis. Ideally, you should see a trend like this:

Besides growing your backlink profile, it is good to occasionally check the growth of your competitor’s referral domains.

If you’re seeing spikes in the number of their referral domains, that’s a positive sign that they’re interested in link building as well.

In fact, checking the backlink profile of your competition on a monthly basis can become an endless source of inspiration for your own link building efforts.

Once your link building engine is up and running, you will likely see changes in Google rankings. This brings us to the second important metric.

2. Positive changes in the positions of target pages in Google search

One of the most important goals we try to achieve with link building is to improve the Google ranking of particular pages.

Ideally, we want to see our top posts in one of the top 3 positions, but the least we want to achieve is to rank it on page 1.

That’s why the next metric you want to track should be your target pages’ position in Google search results.

Even though Google Search Console seems like the obvious place to follow it, keep in mind that it doesn’t really show exact numbers but an average position.

So you will need to use a third-party position tracker if you want to get accurate data for this metric.

Personally, I use SEMrush to track exactly how my target pages are becoming more visible in Google’s SERPs.

To make the whole process easier, I use the markup feature to tag the search queries related to a page and easily filter them out from the rest of the keywords.

In the screenshot below, I’ve asked SEMrush to show me the search terms tagged with the tag “email search” and their position changes over the past 30 days:

As you can see, the main keyword “email search” stayed in the same position and that is something that rings a bell.

If you are faced with a similar situation, the next step is to find out more and find out why.

To find the answer, you need to go to the Ahrefs Keyword Explorer tool and research your keyword.

After that, you will see what types of pages are currently ranking on the first page of Google for that particular search query:

The main thing to focus on here is the number of referring domains.

You need to compare the number of referring domains on your page with the number of pages that are currently outperforming you.

Another important factor to consider is the domain rating (DR) of the website. How does your DR compare to the DR of the top ranked pages?

In our case, Digital Olympus has an DR of only 61, while most of the top 10 results pages exceed 70, with some even having an DR of 90+.

This means that Digital Olympus has to link 4-5 times more to a page to outperform those pages and this is why our positions haven’t really grown over the past month.

The higher your DR, the easier it will be for your pages to rank.

More referring domains and better positions in Google search naturally lead to one thing: increased organic traffic to your website.

3. Organic traffic growth

After all, growing organic traffic is the number one reason we promote link building. That is why this should be the third essential step that you should follow.

Organic traffic growth can easily be tracked directly from your Google Analytics or Google Search Console account.

I prefer to use Google Search Console because it also allows me to check if the impression counts and average positions are increasing for a particular page:

However, it’s important to note that Google may take some time to re-evaluate your site and make it more visible in the SERPs.

Depending on how competitive your niche is, it may take 3 to 12 months from the time the links are made to see significant changes.

To better understand how long it takes to start ranking well and receiving a better flow of organic traffic, you can try analyzing the history of high ranking pages belonging to similar sites within your niche.

Here’s a good example to better illustrate what I’m talking about:

As you can see from the graph above, they started linking to this page in January 2019 and have managed to grow 34 referral domains so far.

And here is their organic traffic graph:

By comparing their organic traffic report to the backlink profile above, we can see that it takes around 12 months to start driving traffic.

Let’s take a look at another example of more recent link building data.

The screenshot below shows that Tidio started linking to their chatbot blog post in January 2020.

As you can see above, they were relatively quick to get up to 60 referral domains. But how quickly did it impact their organic traffic?

The SEMrush report below shows they got their first organic visitors in March. So we can conclude that it took about two months for the results of link building to kick in.

Conclusion

As you could see from the examples above, link building takes time.

But once the results start showing, you’ll instantly know it was worth the wait.

The worst thing that can happen, however, is spending months working on link building without tangible results.

To prevent this from happening, it is essential that you track the progress of your link building using the three essential metrics presented in this article.

If you count the number of new referring domains, track changes in the target page’s search results position, and measure overall organic traffic growth, you should have a pretty good picture of your link building effectiveness.

More resources:

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Image credits

Featured Image: Created By Author, May 2020
All screenshots taken by author, May 2020