If there’s one SEO function we urge businesses to lay that extra bit of emphasis on, its link-building. Now, we have heard marketers wonder whether link-building still holds relevance in SEO 2020. Simply put, link building will stay relevant as long as the internet functions the way it does. 

Having said that, measuring the success of your backlinks ought to own more mindshare. Your SEO team may have waded through picky search engines, liaised with credible websites and built a strong technical framework. But does it work for you? Counting the number of links or website visits won’t do. Quantifying and measuring the success of link building involves a set of metrics and KPIs you need to put your money in. If your back-linking game is flexing muscle, here are some ways you can quantify its success. 

Domain Strength

No prizes for guessing this metric’s feature in our list! Arguably the most basic and yet the most powerful metric, domain strength measures the complete strength of your website. From your SEO, your web content and your backlinks, everything adds up to show your domain strength. The measure runs from 1-100 – the higher the better. A number of free online tools help you assess the domain strength of your webpage. Just paste your weblink and allow it to break it down for you.

Growth of Referring Domains

Taking it a step further, you ought to measure the domain strength of those websites that carry your backlinks. The better they score, the more beneficial your links on that page are to you. this is nothing but measuring the growth trend of your reference domains or ‘ref’ domains as commonly known in the industry. For the uninitiated, reference domains are those websites from where the backlinks connect to your  webpage. Reputed SEO agencies will stack this KPI as a basic requisite to measure backlink success.

Anchor Texts

This one’s a no brainer! Anchor texts are those words that hold the hyperlink to your home page or deep link. It isn’t the hyperlink itself but the actual words that form part of the other website’s content.

What most businesses often do is ignore the importance of getting anchor texts right. Invest time in identifying those keywords that match your services. For example, if you deal in anti-virus software, anchor texts could include –

• Anti-malware
• Software privacy
• PC protection
• Protection from virus threats

Opt for diverse anchor texts to strengthen your backlinking game. The more businesses use generic anchor texts, the weaker it makes your SEO drive. Ditch the overdone ‘Click Here’ anchor text for good!

Root Domains

A rather tricky metric but one your must certainly reckon with. You would want clicks coming to your website from a diverse pool of domains. Let’s say, you have backlinks planted in 10 domains, but a large chunk of clicks route only from 2-3 of these domains. That a big fail for any backlinking strategy. You would want each and every domain spilling over to your website. This gives search engines like Google (News - Alert) a higher endorsement, so to say, of your page from various webpages, leading to a boost in your SERP listing. Use some leading industry tools such as Majestic SEO site explorer to get hold of this metric.

Deep-linking Ratio

This metric is one that even the big daddy of all search engines Google lays emphasis on. Deep-links are those backlinks that direct browsers specifically to a page on your website and not just the home page or any generic landing page. You want to have a healthy mix of deep-links and landing page links in your SEO kitty to pull more browsers to various pages on your website. If a browser lands on your home page, it most likely may be through a Google crawler throwing up your page as a result to their search. Deep-links on the other hand are mostly likely due to a specific service or information backlinked on another website leading to your webpage. While there isn’t a magic number, a higher deep-link ratio is always preferred.

Use these link metrics to get a stronger hold on your link-building strategy. In addition to these metrics, keep an eye on the all-important ROI of your links. Get working on these valuable tenets of SEO and your have yourself a link-building strategy that’s a total winner.