Do you know the real value of your link building efforts? To know this, calculate the return on investment of your link building campaign. Link building is an important SEO (search engine optimization) strategy pillar. High quality backlinks help you boost your website’s authority and get referral traffic.
To measure link building ROI, focus on the profit and the investment. Return refers to the revenue you can generate from ranking your targets for specific keywords. To measure investment, identify the number of links you need to reach your target.
Unlike other marketing efforts, link building might not yield instant value. You should wait for a few months to calculate the ROI (negative or positive effect) on a sale from your digital marketing channels.
Many other factors may impact the link building ROI and your Google rankings on SERPs. You should understand these factors to track the return on investment ROI of your link building efforts.
Effective Ways to Track Link Building ROI
Measuring link building ROI can be tricky. But it is necessary to know whether your link building campaigns are bringing conversions. Here is a formula for ROI calculation:
Link Building ROI = Net Return on Link Building / Cost of High Quality Link Building
The net return refers to the overall benefit or value of link-building efforts. It may include factors like improved search engine rankings, organic traffic, conversions, leads generated, and revenue generated from conversions.
The link building costs include the expenses associated with implementing a backlink strategy. This may include costs related to creating content, hiring external agencies or freelancers and outreach, software or tools used, and any other expenses related to link building.
You can obtain the ROI percentage by dividing the net return on link building by the cost of link building, and then multiplying the result by 100.
It seems easy to apply this formula, but you may find it difficult to find the actual return on link building.
In the first step, set the objectives of your Link Building Campaign. Keep all variables constant and choose a target keyword. For example, our target keyword is “Healthy Recipes.”
- Step 01: Analyze the keyword and identify a direct competitor who is ranking highest for this keyword. For example, https://www.allrecipes.com/recipes/84/healthy-recipes can be a direct competitor.
- Step 02: Use an SEO tool like Ahrefs to collect data of organic traffic from your competitor.
- Step 03: Get links from a high-authority website to pass authority. Moreover, you can see other metrics relevant to your web page, like paid keywords.
- Step 04: Collect similar data for your website.
- Step 05: It will help you measure the gap between your website and your competitor’s website. The difference will indicate efforts to improve your link building campaign.
Basically, you have to close this gap to increase the efficiency of your campaign. By decreasing this gap, you can increase the success rate of your link building campaign. Keep your campaign consistent to get a competitive edge on these metrics.
Short-term Link Building ROI
Check your domain authority, as the increase in DA indicates a positive impact due to new backlinks. Measure the difference between traffic before and after building links. Remember, not all backlinks are same because nofollow links may not pass the authority on the sites they are linking to. It will help you rank higher on the major search engines.
Google Analytics has UTM (Urchin tracking module) for traffic metrics that reveal your SERPs position against target keywords. With these metrics, you can find out the impacts of your efforts. See some examples of short-term ROI calculation methods:
- To measure the impact of the link building campaign, you can track the increase in organic traffic. Make sure to compare before and after traffic after implementing link building efforts.
- Monitor the rankings of your target keywords in search engine result pages. Track the changes in keyword positions to evaluate the effectiveness of your link building to improve website visibility.
- Analyze the referral traffic coming from referral sources like other websites. Measure the engagement metrics and number of visitors to evaluate the quality and relevance of the traffic from affordable backlinks.
- Implement conversion tracking to attribute leads, sign-ups, and sales to specific high quality links. You can determine its impact on your business goals by monitoring the conversions generated from your link building strategies.
Long Term ROI for Link Building
For actual ROI calculations, you should wait for almost one year. You can look at the following aspects to monitor success:
- Backlinks growth during a particular period.
- Impact on domain authority.
- Monitor massive link spikes or backlink fluctuations.
Changes in DA will reflect that you have acquired high quality links for your webpage. To monitor massive link spikes, you need to go into more detail. You will analyze instances to get many affordable backlinks in a limited time. These may be beneficial or risky for your website.
Sometimes, linkable visual assets become toxic due to negative SEO. Remove these toxic backlinks to stop further damage. Here are some important factors to calculate long term link building ROI:
Revenue generation
Calculate the revenue generated from referral sources or specific links over an extended period. Build links pointing to more authority and relevance.
Lifetime Customer Value
Estimate the long-term value of customers acquired through your link building tactics. You can consider customer loyalty, repeated purchases, and referral generated by these customers to evaluate their LTV.
Brand Awareness and Reputation
Analyze how high authority websites and incoming links impact your brand reputation and visibility. Measure social engagement, brand mentions, and sentiment analysis to determine long term effects on brand awareness and perception.
Organic Search Performance
Analyze the long-term improvement in organic traffic and rankings from affordable link builder search results. Track the progress over time and measure the benefits in terms of organic reach and visibility. If you have invested your efforts in broken link building, keep an eye on these links.
Set up Your Website with Google Analytics
Determine your content marketing and SEO success with Google Analytics. It helps you track new visitors and measure the ROI of your inbound links and linkable assets. With Analytical tools, you can determine the exact value of every organic visitor. And use this information to estimate the value of every new visitor that follows a link.
You can also calculate the lifetime value of a customer and the total search volume of your target keywords. Add up your expected costs and traffic if a search term has over 10,000 monthly queries with an organic 10% click-through rate. Subtract it from the total lifetime value of every new customer or conversion.
Google Analytics enables you to evaluate the usefulness of links for other metrics like bounce rate, pages per visit, page views, etc.
Track Social Media Activity to Calculate the ROI
It can be tricky to track the return on investment using social media because you don’t know how and where followers share your videos, blog posts, or other content. Social media gives freedom to every person to share opinions and links. So you may find it difficult to keep track of everything.
However, social media results help you understand the performance of building backlinks. To calculate ROI on social media activity, here are some easy steps to follow:
- Define goals and objectives for your social media campaigns that align with your link building strategies. Your goals could be to generate links, leads, improve brand awareness, and increase website traffic.
- Identify KPIs that are relevant to your goals. You can track website clicks, follower growth, engagement, reach, conversion, and impressions.
- You can use built-in analytics tools like Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, etc. With these tools, you can get valuable data on reach, audience demographics, and engagement.
- Use UTM parameters in links you share on social media to track the traffic generated from specific posts. With UTM parameters, you can tag the URLs with custom variables that may be tracked in your website’s analytics tool.
This will help you attribute conversions from web pages, visits, and revenue to particular social media posts or campaigns.
You can track the conversion funnel to monitor actions taken by users who come from social media. Track the user journey from initial clicks on a social media post to the final conversion. This will help you understand the ROI of your social media efforts in terms of sales generated or actual leads.
Including link building ROI in your analysis provides a comprehensive view of your strategy’s effectiveness.
Regularly analyze and optimize your social media analytics and ROI metrics. It lets you identify patterns, trends, and weak areas that need improvement. Furthermore, it is a good way to modify your social media strategies and content based on the insights gained to optimize your ROI.
Analyze Strength of Your Backlink Profile
Your backlink profile contains links pointing to a webpage from other authoritative websites.
To analyze your backlink profile, you should examine the following factors:
Quantity
It means the number of high quality and affordable backlinks your website has. These will indicate its visibility and popularity on the web. Of course, quality is more important than quantity.
Quality
High quality backlinks come from relevant and authoritative sites. These links can influence the ranking and credibility of a website in search engines. Low quality, affordable backlinks from irrelevant or spammy sites may have a negative impact.
Authority
Backlinks from authoritative sites carry more influence and weight in search engine rankings. Well-established and reputable sites can provide more value to your backlink profile.
Anchor Text
Analyze the distribution and diversity of anchor text to get insights into how others perceive and link to a website. To increase its importance, you can give natural variations to anchor text with relevant keywords.
Relevance
Search engines evaluate the relevance of backlinks to determine the authority and credibility of a website. For this reason, link opportunities from relevant websites are more valuable.
Linking Domains
To analyze the popularity and reach of your website, analyze the number of unique domains linking to it. Try to get backlinks from a diverse range of domains.
You can analyze backlink profiles using SEO tools like SEMrush, Moz, Ahrefs, and Google Analytics. These tools will give you detailed insights into your website’s backlink profile.
Conclusion
In short, building links is one aspect of your backlink campaigns. You need a holistic approach to measure the ROI of your efforts. Link building ROI has a strong relation with SEO. Measure the net return on affordable backlinks and compare it to the cost of link building activities.
To calculate the net return, you should focus on factors like organic traffic, conversions, leads generated, revenue from conversions, etc.
The cost to build backlinks may include expenses related to quality content creation, outreach, tools, hiring external agencies, etc. You can use short- and long-term methods and key metrics to track link building ROI.
