Link building metrics

/ Link building is ONLY one important part of SEO

In my career as an SEO consultant, I've seen countless companies trying to improve their visibility by working exclusively on their domain's authority, while neglecting many other factors like on-page SEO, reputation and brand presence. We shouldn't forget that link building is only one (important) part of SEO as a whole.

Whenever this comes up with other industry professionals, I usually bring up this analogy, which I also mention in my book on ethical link building.

In Formula 1, during a pit stop, a team of up to twenty people works simultaneously on the car to carry out designated tasks quickly and efficiently. Coordination and precision are key to winning a race, and the tyre technicians are essential to that.

And yet, despite their importance, their contribution is rarely highlighted, since winning or losing gets attributed to good or bad teamwork and, of course, the driver's execution.

Link building would be that technician who, while a fundamental part of the overall SEO strategy, sees the final visibility result depend on many other factors too.

So, how can we measure results within our link building strategy?

/ Mathematical authority (DR, DA, TF, AS). Relative value 🙁

For many people, authority indicators like Ahrefs' Domain Rating (DR) or Semrush's Authority Score are essential for evaluating how a link building campaign is performing. Ahrefs' own documentation shows how DR can shift independently of the actions you take, since it also depends on third-party actions.

For that reason, while I think these are very useful indicators for our day-to-day work as link builders, I don't consider them key when it comes to reporting value to our clients. You'll surely be happy to include it in a report when DR goes up, but think about whether you'd add it when it goes down, knowing it doesn't depend exclusively on your actions.

When I start an audit with a client, I include this type of indicator as a reference, but it shouldn't be the main goal or a KPI for evaluating and reporting on campaign results.

SEO has changed a lot in recent years, and we need to understand that link building is no longer about building mathematical, PageRank-based authority, but about building brand notoriety.

It's worth stressing that authority indicators, like Domain Rating (DR), are prone to manipulation and don't accurately reflect the real benefits in terms of search engine rankings. I'd advise being wary of anyone offering services to boost your DR or any other mathematical authority indicator. Whichever one it is.

In many cases, clients come to us asking for improvements in these indicators, and as Alberto Fernández from IngenieroSEO puts it:

"Sometimes clients demand metrics like that laid out in a spreadsheet. Of course, during the link validation stage, we do take into account the website's traffic, outbound and inbound links, as well as semantic affinity with our target." — Alberto Fernández, CEO of IngenieroSEO

On the other hand, expert David Ayala tells us:

"I always tailor the report to the specific goal we're trying to achieve for that client, but I never base it on tool metrics like PA/DA or similar." — David Ayala, CEO of SEO Rosa

/ Referring domains. Not entirely up to me 🙁

A commonly used metric for reporting on link building strategies (at least it used to be) is the referring domain count, in other words, the number of domains linking to your website.

For small-scale campaigns, like doing link building for a local hair salon, the monthly referring domains indicator can reflect changes depending on the techniques you've used, making it easier to attribute the results to your actions.

However, in the context of more sophisticated campaigns running many other actions in parallel, the number of referring domains can fluctuate considerably. In that case, link building actions will only be one part of your SEO actions, which themselves are just a fraction of your overall marketing actions. So it would be biased to use this indicator as the basis for attributing performance results.

In a real-world example, you can see that in the last week, links came in from 397 new domains pointing to Coca-Cola's website, and that's clearly not the work of a link building team. While it's always worth keeping this indicator in mind, it should make you think twice about including it as a KPI in your reports.

If we add to this the fact that link building work sometimes involves disavowing or even removing links that are harming your domain, it makes even less sense.

While I'm at it, I'd also recommend being wary of agencies or professionals who offer you a set number of monthly links as a strategy. And on the flip side, if you're the one selling this type of service, I wouldn't recommend selling your services by the link. Years ago that might not have seemed so far-fetched, but nowadays, one good link is worth far more than 100 irrelevant ones. Sell your clients a concrete strategy around digital PR, ethical link building and brand building, regardless of how many links you end up getting.

/ URL rankings. Not solely down to my work 🙁

Remember the F1 analogy?

You absolutely need to measure the visibility of the URLs you're working on in your campaigns. But you could be doing the best link building in the world and still see no results, because your client has serious on-page SEO issues, duplicate content, speed problems, or anything else.

For a link building strategy to work, the rest of your SEO actions need to be solid too.

While this indicator is important and can serve as a KPI, it can also help us spot problems unrelated to links. If we're working exclusively on link building and see results falling short of expectations, it's worth meeting with the on-page SEO team to check whether something's going on that we're not accounting for.

/ SERP visibility. Depends on SEO as a whole ;(

Every SEO action, link building included, aims to improve your presence in search results, so it wouldn't make sense to ignore these appearances and the number of clicks users make when they find your project in the results for their query. Just like with the other indicators, keep in mind that whether the results are positive or negative, you can't attribute this indicator solely to your link building actions.

To measure this indicator we'll use Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, Yandex Webmaster Tools, or whichever tool the search engine you want to analyse provides. Under the performance section, you can filter and measure performance by URL.

/ So, can we actually value the tyre technician?

All these indicators are great, and we take it for granted that they can be factored in as part of a link building strategy. But what happens when link building is all we offer? How can we report our efforts and results?

Back to the F1 analogy. The question would be:

Can we accurately value the tyre technician regardless of the fact that the final result depends on the whole team? The answer is a resounding YES.

KPIs like how long it took them to fit the tyre depend solely and exclusively on their own efficiency.

So where does this leave us?

When you're only doing link building tasks for a project, you're part of a team, but your efficiency should be measured in isolation.

Either way, it's important to coordinate link building strategies with the rest of your SEO actions. Jose B. Moreno, independent consultant, tells us:

"I don't start link building until the content has been optimised. I usually wait two or three months after optimising before starting link building (this is to make sure the link building effort is built on a solid, necessary foundation... because — sometimes — it isn't always necessary, and I always try to minimise risk and cost)." — Jose B. Moreno

So, how can we measure this efficiency independently?

/ Actions carried out

Even though many clients and agencies still believe link building is all about creating links, and that more is always better, behind a properly executed, effective link building campaign lies real relationship-building with media outlets, brand notoriety, topical-authority optimisation for both the brand and the experts working within it, and other tasks that take time and resources.

It's essential to highlight and give credit to the actions that don't focus purely on directly earning links.

When asked which indicators he factors into his reports, renowned SEO and link building expert Luis M. Villanueva tells us:

"I always report on actions taken. I don't really use those indicators for reporting purposes (though that's a separate matter from having our own internal indicators to assess a site's quality)." — Luis M. Villanueva, CEO of Webpositer

Adrián Vilacoba, SEO manager at ClickAge, tells us:

"We report on both the 'actions' carried out and on metrics, in the same report." — Adrián Vilacoba

There are tools on the market that can help with this. At Link Affinity we place special emphasis on reporting, so agencies offering this type of link building service can properly showcase their work. Through custom reports you can send your clients any type of action you want to highlight. We've built a CRM module for link building and digital PR designed to showcase your efforts — sending press releases, requesting a fix for a broken link, offering a collaboration with your experts on a featured topic, or any other type of action. You can export these reports to .CSV or .PDF.

/ Media impact, or link building clipping

Throughout my career I've worked with pure communications and PR teams whose results were measured by the impact of the coverage they secured. If we apply that same approach to digital PR and link building, we can factor in these indicators too.

• Coverage secured in media outlets.
• Details of the mention or link obtained.
• Organic traffic of the outlets where the coverage was secured.
• Semantic affinity with the outlet.

/ Link profile naturalness

It's important to analyse your link profile at the start of a project and work to improve its quality. There are tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, Sistrix and others that help you detect whether artificial linking strategies have been used, which can put the project's search visibility at risk. This indicator is down to you, since link building services should include monitoring the link profile and taking any necessary action to disavow links and detect linking strategies that go against Google's guidelines. That's why it's worth keeping this indicator in mind.

Whichever tool you use, I'd recommend including this analysis in your reports to track progress and catch potential problems early. We work with the "Naturalness" indicator, an algorithm developed by Link Affinity that detects patterns of artificial linking. Unlike other tools, it doesn't aim to give you higher authority, but rather a natural balance that steers you away from outdated strategies of buying links to gain authority.

/ The perfect report

My advice for building the perfect link building report is to include some of the metrics that, while not 100% attributable to your actions, are still part of the overall result. Also include the tasks you can be held directly accountable for.

Whatever kind of report you hand over to your clients, keep in mind you're part of the overall SEO team. So, on one hand, your actions can affect the project's search visibility, and on the other, whatever gets done on-page will affect the performance of your link building strategies.

I'd recommend including the following indicators in your link building reports:

If you're also responsible for on-page SEO, you can include these indicators in your general SEO report.

• Rankings for the campaign's target URLs.
• SERP impact for these URLs.
• Actions carried out by the team.
• Link building clipping.
• Link profile naturalness.

Whatever kind of report you hand over to your clients, keep in mind you're part of the overall SEO team. So your actions can affect the project's search visibility, and whatever gets done on-page will, one way or another, affect the performance of your link building strategies.

Trying to independently measure the ranking effectiveness of link building tasks alone would be like trying to separately measure the effectiveness of editing a tag or piece of structured data while an entire team is working in parallel on other SEO actions, content, and so on.

Going back to the F1 analogy one last time: as the tyre-change technician, you'll report both the time it took you to fit the wheel and, separately, the overall race data — always noting that the overall results, good or bad, depend on the whole team.

If you want to dig deeper, I'd recommend watching Link Affinity's Caffinity session with special guests:

• Cesar Aparicio of Cráneo Privilegiado
• Marta Arribas of Flat 101
• Jose B. Moreno of JBMORENO
• Nuria Cámaras of SEobide