Link building is hard, I get it.

Fussy search engines, spammy savvy marketers selling guest posts, black hat link builders burning bridges — it’s tough. Simply counting links isn’t enough when it comes to performance — you need other measures of success. When you hit it out of the park, your outreach campaign deserves to be celebrated.

But how do you know when your link building work is successful, and, more importantly, how do you prove it?

By using the following KPIs, you can measure and report on the success of your link building efforts. When combined, they present a powerful case for whether your link building campaign was a shining, glorious, singing unicorn, or a damp, tone-deaf chihuahua. Trust me, you’ll have both along the way.

Let’s look at the data before I get metaphorical again, shall we? Here are a handful of KPIs you should monitor as you measure the performance of your link building efforts.

Quantitative KPIs for Link Building

There is security behind hard data, and with link building, you can find performance progress right in the numbers.

Here are the data-driven KPIs that are hard to argue with when progress is made.

#1 Organic Search Traffic

Up and to the right is precisely the kind of movement you want to see for the site that you have been consistently running link building campaigns for. It is important to note that if link building is not the only SEO work you are doing, there are likely other factors playing a role in the movement you see: on-site technical SEO and content improvements will also impact organic search, so make sure to factor that in when measuring the impact of link building.

When reporting this growth, be sure to annotate in Google Analytics when link building campaigns begin, and focus on percentage change of improvement over an extended period of time.

#2 Referral Traffic

Sizeable referral traffic doesn’t always happen with link building. More traffic is a good thing, and qualified traffic that stays on your site is even better. If you want referral traffic, it’s important to mix up your link building strategies.

Guest posting and HARO links rarely generate much referral traffic. HARO links just source a quote, so no one clicks on them. And site editors discourage their readers from leaving the site (I’ve seen a lot of hidden anchor text in posts lately), so guest post links don’t tend to generate much traffic, by design.

If you get 15 referrals in a month from a guest post, you should stand up by your desk and do a little dance. High referral traffic for a guest post is a unicorn—it’s rare. In a survey of over 500 guest post bloggers, more than 35% of reported guest posts only got 10 or fewer referrals.

Content promotion, on the other hand, has the potential to perform well, generating a lot of referral traffic if done right.

Content promotion is driven by highly promotable (read: “newsworthy”) data-driven content in the form of a report, tool, or long-form writing. Promoting that content through Digital PR efforts is much more likely to bring significant referral traffic. This occurs when your content gets picked up and covered by a media outlet of any kind, and they link to your site as the source of this newsworthy content. When reporting content promotion results, be sure to include:

• The media outlets that covered your content
• Domain Authority of each site that covered your content
• Referral traffic for each link
• Traffic behavior (time of page, bounce rate, pages visited)
• Total number of links placed

The graph above shows the potential impact that content promotion and digital PR can have. During the three-year life of this site, the first digital PR campaign we launched was responsible for 33% of the site’s lifetime referral traffic. It’s important to note that in this campaign’s case, a majority of the links earned (177) were no-follow. While not quite as ideal from an SEO perspective, no-follow links shouldn’t be underestimated. If we were keeping score (which, c’mon, you know we are), no-follow links should be considered “half links.” They can be used as part of a more long-term link building strategy since a mixture of do-follow and no-follow links create a healthy backlink profile.

In this example for our client, we received a ton of no-follow brand mentions. Brand mentions have been proven to be a ranking factor, so they should be considered a success. Be sure to report no-follow brand mentions too, even if they don’t link to your site (but be sure to follow up anyway and ask for a link).

Utility and resource link building, along with similar link building strategies might garner referral traffic over time as users find and click on the links, especially if they are helpful and on moderate-to-highly-trafficked sites. The great thing about utility link building is that it can often generate conversions because the links target consumers at the lower end of the conversion funnel and drive them to pages aimed at conversion. While improving organic traffic is the ultimate goal of link building, this qualified referral traffic is a great cherry on top.

#3 Traffic to Target Pages

As mentioned previously, in every campaign, whether it is guest posting, content promotion, or any other form of link building, you should have target pages to which you build all your links. The traffic, visitor engagement, and organic rankings for these pages should be monitored and reported on.

Be sure to report changes in traffic and behavior over time to these pages. Below is a snapshot of traffic to Portent’s SERP Preview Tool. You can see where traffic over time has increased to this page by 48% YoY which would make any stakeholder happy, especially if a page is designed to convert users.

Qualitative KPIs for Link Building

While the quantitative KPIs mentioned above do a nice job of putting hard numbers to performance, there are a couple of qualitative factors to monitor when tracking the performance of your link building efforts.

#4 Relevance

Although it is not nearly as measurable as other KPIs, the relevance of the links you build should be an important focus for any link building campaign. The domains on which you build links on should be relevant to your website’s brand and industry. Landing a link on a competitor’s blog is the sparkly, magic kingdom every link building team should aim for, but it’s hard to get there. Linking on pages within your direct industry is a close second on the list of coveted link placements.

The text surrounding your backlink should be natural, highly relevant, and full of naturally-occurring keywords (relevance). The anchor text that directs the reader to the content on your target page should inform the reader of exactly what information they’re going to get when they click on your link. Guest post content should be informative and well-written (and hopefully your target page is too).

#5 Domain Authority, Domain Rank, Trust Flow

We all learned a big lesson recently about how tenuous it is to rely on Domain Authority (DA) as a primary metric. With Moz’s DA algorithm change on March 5th of this year, marketers in the SEO world got a big wake-up call. While DA still gauges the authority of a site in a very reliable way, it is important to take into account the relevance of the page when evaluating whether a link you place is valuable. To a small HVAC company, for instance, a link on Inc. Magazine with a DA of 92 (on a scale of one to 100) is not nearly as valuable as a link on their biggest competitor’s blog in the HVAC industry with a DA of only 32.

Domain Rank (DR) on Ahrefs and the Trust Flow on Majestic are both similar gauges of your referring domain’s authority, as well as your ability to rank as compared to their competitors.

Use DA/DR/Trust Flow to point out the authority of the sites you’re placing backlinks on, and to point out that you’re building a natural backlink profile. Make sure you always take this information with a grain of salt, realizing that they are relative, proprietary metrics. You should work to build links on sites from 10-100 DA and DR, and relevance should always be your primary KPI here.

Relevance and authority are what I would call soft KPIs. Your DA will rise very slowly (it’s like watching water come to a boil if you do it right), and it shouldn’t be a primary (or even a secondary) indicator of success. Monitor how your DA tracks in comparison to your competitors to get the most out of any DA numbers.

Go forth, armed with cold, hard data

It isn’t hard to prove the success of a good link building campaign. Link building is a long-term digital marketing strategy and should complement the on-site technical SEO and content efforts you put forth. So don’t get discouraged if your efforts are slow to reveal themselves. Resilience is the most important character trait of a good link builder and patience is a must. Use carefully-selected link targets, mark your progress, and prove your hard-won success with a handful of the KPIs outlined here. And always remember to celebrate those unicorns—whether or not they can sing Queen.

The post 5 KPIs for Measuring Outreach and Link Building Efforts appeared first on Portent.

How efficient is your website? If you were to access your site from any mobile device, would you be satisfied with the experience?

For some years, there has been a lot of talk about mobile-responsiveness, yet a good number of website are yet to adapt. The mobile craze is not without good reason. In 2015, Google’s search chief Amit Singal announced that for the first time, more searches were conducted on mobile than on desktops.

It’s no secret that while the search giant dominates the search industry on desktop, it still competes fiercely with companies like Facebook and Apple for mobile search browsers. It’s not surprising to note that it has since taken measure to correct that situation.

In 2015, Google decided to wage war on websites that were not mobile friendly by giving site owners an ultimatum to become responsive or drop in search rankings. The decision paid off because many website owners soon switched to a responsive interface.

At the time, Google started putting labels on sites for “mobile friendly” and giving them a better ranking position on its search engine result pages (SERPs).

According to Brendan, digital marketing analyst at Domain 4 Less “Mobile compatibility does not only improve your SEO, it creates an enhanced user experience for visitors. It helps you get more visitors and then convert a larger proportion of them. It is one of the most practical steps you can take to increase the ROI you make in your business.”

However, despite the fact that the push for mobile responsiveness is in full swing, there are websites that are suffering the effects of the latest Panda update. We have not heard the last of Mobilegeddon, nor is it going away.

It is a requirement that is here to stay.

Here are a few things to consider in the coming months.

1) Google is coming for websites with intrusive interstitials
Mobile compatibility is still a priority for Google. Although it announced last year that it was dropping the “mobile friendly” tag because 85% of searches for website on its mobile SERP were mobile friendly, it is still coming for websites in other ways.

As part of a mop-up activity following Mobilegeddon, Google has asked websites with intrusive interstitials (pop-up ads) to remove them or face de-ranking. These giant boxes which appear immediately a visitor lands on a mobile site is a major reason for poor user experience. There are however, some exceptions like age restriction boxes or cookie policy information and paywall dialogue boxes.

2) Businesses will still lose search traffic if they are not mobile friendly
On February 7, webmasters experienced an update that seemed to affect many websites. While they were not sure about the details of the update, sites most hit where those yet to convert to mobile-responsive status. It is possible for a website with a high search listing on desktop to drop in mobile search listing, simply because it is not optimised.

It is important to consider that if you run an ecommerce website, you are better off ranking higher on mobile search than on desktop. This is because shoppers are more likely to search on mobile, even though they complete the purchase on the seller’s desktop site.

3) Mobile search rankings differ a lot from desktop search rankings today
If you still think desktop search is the same as mobile search, you are wrong. In 2011, SEO expert Rand Fishkin didn’t think much about mobile SEO. In fact, he predicted that at some point, both search rankings would converge and become one, thus making mobile site redundant.

Today, the reverse is the case with mobile sites being even more relevant. Considering the unique nature of smartphones, search engines have optimised the ways desktop and smartphones receive search results. There is evidence that this started even long before Google effected the mobile-friendly update. As far back as June 2014, it was reported that mobile search results differed from desktop by 62% and variance continues to increase till today.

4) Websites not optimised for multiple screens will have it tough
It’s not just enough to be mobile-friendly, but is your site compatible with the different kinds of mobile browsers available? Mobilegeddon isn’t going to end anytime soon. As long as your site is found wanting in one mobile feature or the other, you could be exposed to a search demotion.

As long as the number of smartphone users continues to grow, and use their phones to search, Google isn’t going to relinquish its efforts to promote mobile-friendly websites. There are multiple devices with different operating systems. From Android to iPhone and Blackberry, Google wants you to ensure your site is optimised for mobile search on these systems.

Keep improving your site to suit the latest mobile search trends so you don’t suffer a hit at Google’s next core update. If you are not yet mobile-friendly, do something about it immediately. In the world of SEO you can’t afford to be lax about your search status (on both desktop and mobile) because you could be left behind in a second.

5) Google Tools: How do you know your mobile-friendly status?
In a bid to make it easy for site owners to migrate their platforms, Google has launched a mobile-friendly test tool. This API (application programming interface) helps site managers determine the mobile-friendly status of their websites.

Although it was first released in 2014, at the time its core function was to help bloggers and business owners know if their website could support certain functions. For example, whether a site could show flash software, display texts that were easily visible on small screen or screen-size compatible for scrolling.

The API has been developed for more sophisticated functions. The earlier tool was a simple way to manually test whether a particular URL is compatible with mobile phones.By introducing an API, Google is helping developers and webmasters incorporate the tool with automated software.

For instance, it could be used as a track specific pages automatically on a website and prevent accidental modifications that reduce a website’s responsiveness to mobile screens.

According to John Mueller, Google’s webmaster trends analyst, the API performs all tests and returns the same information, including the blocked URLs list, just like the manual test.

If you are not sure of your website’s mobile-friendliness, check out the page in the link above. You never know, a simple test can improve your mobile-credibility.

This is a guest post by James who is a business psychologist and serial entrepreneur, with over a decade working in finance, IT, marketing and recruitment sectors. He has authored numerous books in the management space and is Founder and CEO of the Daily Posts Content Writing Agency.

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