The Most Important Link Building Metrics

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Link building is a crucial activity in SEO. It helps the search engines determine the credibility of web pages, increase your website authority, and gain more traffic. 

Given that it's an important metric, it's crucial to uncover the right metrics to analyze the credibility of a link. You can do this by shortlisting a few metrics while forming the link-building strategy. 

Here are 7 important things to consider.

7 Important Link Building Metrics to Measure

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While analyzing link-building opportunities, these 7 measures will help you form the best strategy.

1. Analyzing Site Domain Authority

When creating a backlink strategy, you cannot overlook the domain authority of your website and that of the backlinking website. 

If you receive a link from a high domain authority website, it will positively impact you. However, you will also have to check if the website linking you is relevant to your niche or not. 

Domain authority analysis gives you an idea about website age, popularity, and content database. You must check website DA before allowing a backlink from it.

Tools to Check Website Domain Authority

• MOZ domain analysis: A free and most trusted tool to check the domain authority of a website that appears as in the below image

• Ahrefs Website Authority checker: Get raw DR score, DA from a point scale of 1 to 100, and more
• SEMrush Domain Overview: Check the complete overview of a domain in seconds

2. Checking the Page Strength

Next comes the page strength. After getting an overview of the Domain and its online visibility, you should check specific page strength. You should review the score of the particular page on a scale of 1 to 10.

According to search engine algorithms, the higher the page rank, the better the page strength. For example, the below image shows the PageRank of Moz. 

There are plenty of online tools to check Page strength and page rank and put them to use.

Tools to check page strength

• MOZ: Check how a page ranks on Google and get its grading 
• Hubspot Website Grader: Get your website and page grades for free with tips for improvement
• Ahrefs Website Authority Checker: Find meaningful insights for a website and a page to understand their strength

3. Choosing the Right Anchor Text

After testing the domain authority and page authority of the intended web pages, anchor text comes next. If you didn't know, anchor text is the text used for hyperlinking a URL. The below screenshot shows various hyperlinks used to add the link shown on top. 

Choosing the correct anchor text will give your link-building strategy a good boost. An anchor text indicates what is there on the linked web page to search engines. It adds to the SEO value of the website.

Tools to check anchor text on a web page

• SmallSEO Anchor Text Distribution: Find anchor text distribution on a page instantly
• MOZ Link Explorer: Check how other websites are linking you with anchor text data, links, and more
• Linkio Anchor Text Checker: Get data for anchor text used on a webpage and suggestions to improve it

4. Analyzing Page Relevance

Once you are through with the first three steps, next comes page relevance. It is one of the crucial qualitative aspects while building backlinks. Even if a domain has a lot of links, how many of them are relevant is the right question to ask.

You should always check if the links you are getting on your website are from a similar niche or not. It will allow actual users to discover your website and increase the value of SEO on your page. 

Use any SEO tool to track the backlinks and their niche to know how relevant are they to your website. 

Tools to check relevant backlinks on the website

• Ahrefs Backlink Checker: Get updated data and see Domain and page-level metrics easily
• MOZ link explorer: Check backlink strength and data from a data of approximately 40 trillion links
• SEMrush backlink analytics: Evaluate and compare backlink profiles and analyze the strengths of web pages

5. Counting the Number of Links Built for the Website

Another essential aspect to consider while building a good backlink portfolio is to check the number of links created. While you are at it, check how many backlinks your competitor has. You will also need data on backlinks built by your website and backlinking website.

This activity will help you track active backlinks on your website. It will quickly allow you to compare yourself with competitor domains, and you will know how many links have been created to date. 

Tools to check the number of backlinks on a website

• MOZ link explorer: Check how many backlinks a website has here
• Ahrefs Backlink Checker: Get data and analyze the number of backlinks obtained by a website; this data is available for free, shown below.

• SEMrush backlink analytics: Evaluate website backlinks and mark out good and bad backlinks

6. Root Domain Linking Status Analysis

If you think building a good backlink portfolio will be a cakewalk, rethink it. Initially, there will be challenges, but it will be much easier once you set up this process. After performing the analysis as given above, check the root domain linking.

Suppose you get 5-6 backlinks from different web pages of a website; the root domain link will be counted just once. Rest will be regarded as raw links. The higher the number of root domain links, the better it is for the website. 

The below screenshot shows the difference between referring root domain links and the total number of backlinks. 

Tools to check root domain links

• Link Check Tool: Verify links and analyze large portfolios in one place
• Niel Patel's Free Backlink Checker: Find link domains to you and your competitors in an instant
• SE Ranking Backlink Checker: Keep an eye on your backlink profile and make a data-driven backlink strategy

7. Exploring the Link Positioning on the Page

Search engines track and analyze where the link is placed on a webpage. The idea is to give users the correct information right before their eyes. 

People don't tend to scroll down towards the end. It is unlikely they will look for important information there if they do.

Sighting these reasons, Google and other search engines prefer that a link must be in the main body of the content. For example, links are provided in the first fold in the below screenshot right after the featured image. 

It is best to place it in a prominent position. Having a footer link has less impact. 

Tools to check link positioning on a page

• Site Checker: Find backlinks and their placement, and analyze in-depth
• Screaming Frog: Improve on-site SEO with a detailed list of issues and potential solutions
• SEMrush: Evaluate link profile, health, and placement all in one place

Link Building Metrics - FAQs

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1. What Are Link Metrics? Why Are They Important?

Ans. Link metrics are the criteria to analyze ranking on search results. They are essential to understanding a website's performance, authority, and relevance.

2. How To Choose Backlinks For A Website?

Ans. To choose a backlinking website, you must analyze DA, page strength, content quality, relevance, and niche, among many other things.

3. Is It Possible To Rank A Website Without Backlinks?

Ans. Yes, it is possible to rank a website without backlinks. However, creating a backlink profile helps you get an additional boost and compete in the market better.

Key Takeaways

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• Check the Domain Authority of your website and linking website to analyze its value.
• Know the page strength beforehand to see if the potential backlink will be helpful or not.
• Always choose the correct anchor text for backlinking
• Explore the web page to understand its relevance to your website.
• Check how many links have been built for a website
• Analyze how many links are root domain links. The higher the number, the better it is.
• Ensure link positioning is within the traceable position for a user