Track and measure your link building results

1. Adapt your tracking and measuring to your audience and correlate link-building efforts to rank changes, organic traffic results, and bottom line metrics.

Make sure you speak your stakeholders’ language. For example, if your stakeholder is a CMO with no prior experience in link building, she might not understand the full depth and value of your work if your report sounds like, “This month we earned 50 product page backlinks, with a DR > 20 and a Trust Flow and Citation Flow > 15.” Instead, you could say something along the lines of: “This month our product pages have been mentioned 50 times in niche-relevant publications like X, Y, Z. The most noteworthy mention came from X – an article that gets 1000 organic visits every month.” Examples of bottom line metrics: Sales Leads Signups

2. Report on only the KPIs that are most relevant to your business or your client's business, such as new referring domains, keywords in top 10, organic traffic, and referral traffic.

3. Write a monthly update on the evolution of each important campaign.

Link building can be difficult to understand for stakeholders who don’t have a background in SEO. That’s why it’s important to regularly document your work and results. Documentation = clarity. Use the Jeff Bezos method to document your progress: “No PowerPoints are used inside of Amazon,” Bezos proudly declares. “Somebody for the meeting has prepared a six-page… narratively structured memo. It has real sentences, and topic sentences, and verbs, and nouns.” (source: Inc.com)

4. If you share your reports via email, write an executive summary in the email body and attach the full report for those who want to dig deeper into the data.

5. Record a short overview video to simplify technical processes like an outreach campaign or the quality of relationships built through link building.

Use a tool like Loom or Vidyard to record a ~3 min video explaining a complicated process or specific result. Add the video to your regular reporting email to make the information more digestible.