How do you track the impact of link building on organic search?

1 Set your goals and KPIs

Before you start tracking the impact of link building, you need to define your goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) for your link building campaign. Ask yourself: what are you trying to achieve with your links, and how will you measure your success? Common goals and KPIs for link building include increasing organic traffic from relevant keywords, improving domain authority and page authority, boosting rankings for target pages and keywords, and generating more leads and conversions from organic visitors. It is essential to align your goals and KPIs with your overall SEO strategy and business objectives, making sure they are SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

2 Use a link analysis tool

To track the impact of link building on organic search, you need a tool to analyze your backlink profile and monitor your progress. Popular link analysis tools like Ahrefs, Moz, SEMrush, and Majestic can help you discover and audit existing backlinks, identify issues or opportunities, find and evaluate potential link opportunities, track and compare performance with competitors, and see how links affect organic traffic, rankings, and conversions. Carefully consider your needs and budget when selecting a link analysis tool and use it regularly to track and optimize your link building campaign.

3 Monitor your organic traffic and rankings

One of the most obvious ways to track the impact of link building on organic search is to monitor your organic traffic and rankings for your target pages and keywords. You can use Google Analytics and Google Search Console to see how much organic traffic you are getting from different sources, devices, locations, and keywords. You can also see how your pages are performing in terms of impressions, clicks, click-through rate (CTR), and average position in the search results.

You should pay attention to the trends and changes in your organic traffic and rankings over time, and correlate them with your link building activities. For example, you can see if your traffic and rankings increase after you acquire a high-quality link from a relevant and authoritative site, or if they decrease after you lose a link or get penalized by Google.

4 Measure your conversions and ROI

The ultimate goal of link building is not just to get more traffic and rankings, but to get more conversions and return on investment (ROI) from your organic visitors. You should track how your links affect your conversion rate, revenue, and profit, and compare them with your link building costs and efforts. You can use Google Analytics and other tools to set up goals and track conversions from different sources and channels. You can also use attribution models to assign value to each touchpoint in your customer journey, and see how your links contribute to your conversions.

You should calculate your ROI from link building by subtracting your link building costs from your link building revenue, and dividing the result by your link building costs. You should aim to achieve a positive and high ROI from your link building campaign, and optimize your link building strategy accordingly.

5 Test and experiment

The last step to track the impact of link building on organic search is to test and experiment with different strategies and tactics, and observe what works best for your website and niche. You can use tools like Google Optimize, Optimizely, or VWO to run A/B tests or multivariate tests on your pages and links, and measure how they affect your organic traffic, rankings, conversions, and ROI. Additionally, you can use tools like Google Tag Manager, Google Data Studio, or Google Sheets to create customized dashboards and reports that show you the impact of link building on your SEO performance. It is important to analyze the number and quality of links you build, the anchor text and context of your links, the relevance and authority of the sites you link to and from, the type and format of the content you use for link building, as well as the timing and frequency of your link building activities. After analyzing the results of your tests and experiments, you should use the insights to improve your link building strategy and tactics in order to maximize its effect on organic search.

6 Here’s what else to consider

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