How to Track your Link Building Campaign

The importance of backlinks in search engine optimization cannot be overstated. Search engines place more value on pages that are linked to other reputable and trusted websites. They can also boost your website’s organic traffic and domain authority.

You’ve probably spent some time developing a comprehensive link-building plan or campaign, so it’s important to consider how you’ll properly track your campaign to measure its success properly.

In this article, we’ll review some key performance indicators (KPIs) and tools to help you track your link-building campaign.

Start an Audit of Your Backlink Profile

Establishing a benchmark is the first step in evaluating the success of your link-building efforts. If you know your current backlink profile, you can use that information to plan a strategy that fills in any holes and maximizes your campaign’s growth.

The purpose of a backlink audit is to discover any potentially harmful links that are referring to your site. An audit of your backlinks can reveal whether or not any are coming from high-authority sites, which is crucial for expanding your network.

When it comes to auditing, analyzing, and disavowing harmful or questionable links, the Backlink Audit tool makes the process simple. You can use the tool to request backlink deletions manually and monitor your progress in gaining or losing backlinks.

To put the tool to use, you must-

• From the Projects tab, head over to the website you’re working on. (To use the Backlink Audit tool, create a project first.)
• On the main dashboard, select the tool “Backlink Audit.”
• Your audit’s scope, targeted nations, and domain categories can all be modified in the tool’s settings panels. Click the “Start Backlink Audit” button.

After the audit is finished, the program will return your website’s backlink profile, which will include the domain authority, referring domains, backlink count, and toxicity score.

Either click the ‘Go to Review’ button in the widget’s overall toxicity score or go to the Audit tab in the toolbar. On this page, you may view all the links leading to your site and selectively whitelist, delete, or disavow any of them. Choose any number of links or all of them at once.

Analyzing Your Backlink Profile

Pay attention to the metrics that matter most to your organization to learn how backlinks affect your site’s rankings. While not all metrics are crucial to evaluating your backlink profile, they can help you understand it. Those metrics are-

Authority Score

Authority Score is Semrush’s way of measuring a domain’s or web page’s overall quality and SEO performance. The score considers various measures commonly used to reflect credibility and authority in the business, such as a site’s domain authority. This score can measure domain or page quality. This rating appears in Semrush applications like the Backlink Analytics, Audit, and Link Building Tool.

Earning backlinks from sites with scores similar to those of other domains in your website’s category is preferable, but there is no hard and fast rule for a good authority score. The average authority score tends to be higher for highly competitive genres and websites and lower for less prominent ones.

Niche Relevance

Check whether websites that are in your niche or relevant to you are linking back to your site. Sites in your niche can cater to an audience comparable to yours and have similarly focused content.

First, you can utilize these sites to compare your own profile’s strengths and weaknesses to those of others. There is a correlation between the level of competition on a site and the quality of the score it receives. Because of this, you should focus on the most relevant websites to your own.

You have a better chance of getting backlinks from a niche sites or having your site added to a high-traffic page of a niche site. Remember that increasing your domain authority and attracting more visitors requires building backlinks from as many high-quality websites as possible. Gaining backlinks from irrelevant sources might hurt your rankings and potentially get you penalized by search engines like Google and Bing.

Before reaching out to websites in your niche, use the Backlink Analytics tool to examine their backlink profiles. Simply enter the website’s domain and click the Analyze button to start. The program provides the total number of backlinks, referring domains, and authority score for the domain. Select the Backlinks tab in the menu bar to examine each backlink individually.

Referring domain count

An increase in referring domains over referring links is desirable. Ten links from a single harmful domain are less effective than one link each from ten trustworthy domains.

Earning multiple inbound backlinks from a single domain is not uncommon. Just make sure the domain is of good quality if this happens to your site. If the domain has been marked as toxic because of a high toxicity score, you should work to eliminate or disavow every link pointing to it.

Toxicity Score

If a link is being utilized to artificially boost a website’s position in Google’s search results, Google will label it as “toxic.” The link could get you in trouble with Google if it goes against their Webmaster Guidelines. Some examples of potentially harmful backlinks are:

• Backlink-focused websites (sometimes known as “link farms”) are often disapproved of.
• Links coming from invalid, off-topic links or links of zero relevance to your site
• Blog comments with embedded links look contrived.
• Hidden hyperlinks in the footer
• Links forced into blog comments
• Clearly sponsored links

The toxicity of a link can be evaluated using the Toxic Score feature of the Backlink Audit tool. To view the list of harmful markers affecting the score, use the drop-down menu next to the score.

Your website’s rating may drop if it has toxic backlinks. Your website could be downgraded or removed from Google’s index if the search engine repeatedly gets spam complaints about your domain. When your site’s rating lowers in the search engine results pages (SERPs), you may also see a decline in organic traffic.

Harmful links should be removed immediately upon discovery during an audit to avoid this. The Backlink Audit tool allows you to request that the domain delete the backlink manually. Select the links you want to remove and click the Remove button on the Audit tab.

To remove them, click the Remove button. You’ll be allowed to contact the domain’s owner through email. The status column on the left will keep you updated on eliminating each backlink. To access the tool’s request template, click the Send button.

Select “Sent and proceed to next” once you’re done making changes to the template to make a new template for the following domain. The Disavow option allows you to choose to remove links from your profile. You can then import that text file into Google’s disavow tool.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the text you click on to be taken to a different website. This text aims to set the stage by explaining the destination of a given link. Both search engine bots and readers can benefit from properly using anchor text. Relevance to the user’s query increases If a link is being utilized to artificially boost a website’s position in Google’s search results, it will be given more weight than a backlink whose anchor text specifically mentions your target keywords.

Positive Changes in the Google Search Results Page Positions

Increasing a page’s position in Google search results is a primary objective of our link-building efforts. At the very least, we’d be happy if our top-quality content appeared on page one of the search results. Therefore, ranking your target pages in Google’s search results is the next KPI you should monitor.

Google Search Console may seem like the natural place to keep tabs on this, but remember that it doesn’t offer precise statistics but rather an average position. This measure requires an external location monitoring tool if you want reliable results.

You may monitor your target pages’ rise in Google SERP visibility using tools like SEMrush. Tagging search queries relevant to one page allows you to separate them from the rest of the keywords, simplifying the entire process. Doing so will reveal the types of pages appearing on Google’s first page for that query.

The number of referring domains is of primary importance here. Check out the number of referring domains that your page has compared to the pages currently ranking higher than you. A website’s domain rating (DR) is also a crucial thing to consider. Your page rankings will improve as your DR increases. Organic traffic will increase as your website gains more referring domains and higher search engine rankings.

Track the Organic Growth of Your Site

The success of your link-building strategy is likely measured by looking at the organic growth rate in your website’s traffic. If you’ve been working on building quality backlinks to your site, you may have noticed a rise in organic visitors.

Analyze the Ranking of Keywords

Analyzing keyword rankings is another method for measuring the efficacy of your backlink marketing effort. Your website and its content will get more attention from Google if your domain authority rises as your campaign progresses. Your site’s ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs) will be evaluated based on your specified keywords.

“Position tracking tool” is really useful for monitoring where certain keywords fall in relation to your website. Open the tool landscape by selecting your website’s project, and then choose the ‘Pages’ tab to view the track positions for each term the page has earned.

Track the ROI of Your Links

Like any other SEO campaign, a link-building strategy requires a financial budget. It’s very important to track the time and money spent on acquiring each backlink.

Building relationships is a systematic way to acquire backlinks. Once trust has been formed, it could take more time before you start seeing results. Both the time involved and the money spent per link can be prohibitive. Some link providers and domain owners would ask for payment to include a link to your website on their own.

To the best of your ability, note how much you’ve spent on each link. Does it take you long to compose an email? How many emails did you send before you finally heard back from them?

After a certain period of time has passed, whether it’s one month or three, evaluate whether the links are still useful. How long did it take you to get that backlink? How much revenue has been generated as a result of that connection?

Final Words

Defining your business and marketing goals before beginning a link-building effort is important. Then, compare your present backlink profile to a benchmark using a backlink audit tool. When determining the value of a backlink, it is important to consider indicators such as its authority and toxicity scores. Watch how your site’s organic and referral traffic evolves during the life of your domain.

Tracking the rankings of specific keywords can also reveal whether or not your link-building efforts are paying off. And this way, you can properly track the link-building campaign you have launched for the development of your site or business. You can follow the abovementioned measures one by one to track your campaign and make necessary adjustments based on your performance.