Syed Balkhi / 8 Mins Read
Updated: March 3, 2025
Discover the 10 key link-building metrics to include in your campaign report. Learn how to track performance, measure impact, and improve your SEO strategy.
When looking for a reputable and successful link-building agency, focusing on quality is essential.
No matter how reputable an agency may be, it will not find clients or be successful in the long run if it does not show clients accurate results.
However, there’s an easy fix to this issue.
A link-building agency (or an in-house link-building team) can highlight its performance by showcasing the right link building metrics.
This post will cover key statistics or metrics you should include in a link-building campaign report.
This way, clients can trust the provider and feel confident about their investment.
Let’s dive in and check out the best statistics that go into a link-building campaign report.
About link building for a website
Link building is a technique of getting links from other websites that lead to your own site. In simpler terms, it's a vote for your website.
The more votes you get, the more liked and authoritative your website becomes in Google's eyes.
As we all know, being popular and authoritative on Google is essential for generating more traffic and sales from your website.
Google's algorithm is constantly changing, but one thing has remained constant since the beginning: links are still a critical ranking factor.
According to Google’s search engine experts, website owners and businesses shouldn't worry about building links in an artificial way. The status quo is that if you build good content, that's all that matters.
However, a passive approach will not get you very far. If you want to rank in today's competitive market, you need to be aggressive with your link-building.
Most website owners and businesses struggle with this. They don't know how to build links effectively, and even if they do, it's hard work that takes time away from other important tasks.
Many businesses outsource their link-building work to an agency or service provider.
Link-building agencies have the time, resources, and expertise to build links in a fraction of the time it would take you to do it yourself.
There are many benefits of working with a link-building agency. But in this post, we'll focus on one specific benefit: trust.
As we mentioned, trust is one of the biggest challenges businesses face when outsourcing their link-building.
They are unsure if they can trust the agency to deliver on its promises and whether it is using white-hat methods.
This lack of trust often leads to businesses working with multiple agencies simultaneously, which is a waste of time and money.
Fortunately, some statistics can help build trust between the client and the link-building agency.
These statistics should be included in every link-building campaign report. As the results appear under these metrics, it’ll become clear that the backlink campaign is working. It’ll also become clear that the link-building agency can deliver and is trustworthy.
Now, let’s dive in and take a look at those statistics.
This is the most crucial statistic in a link-building campaign report. It shows the number of links the agency has built for your website.
This number can help you gauge the agency's effectiveness. If it is building many links, it is likely doing a good job.
Another vital statistic is the number of referring domains ( RD), which shows how many different websites are linking to yours.
A large number of referring domains demonstrates the authority and popularity of your website. Various people and brands find your helpful content.
It also shows that the agency is building links from various websites.
The domain rating is a metric created by Ahrefs that demonstrates the authority and popularity of a website.
It's based on the number of links pointing to a website. A website's domain rating ranges from 0 to 100. The higher the domain rating, the better.
The Next Scoop’s DR, according to Ahrefs. You can find the domain rating of any site here.
A high domain rating indicates that the agency builds links from high-quality websites.
However, although it is preferred, getting links from websites with DRs of 70 and above is not essential.
Getting links from websites with 40+ domain ratings is respectable. The DR of the websites you should aim for depends heavily on the client website's DR.
For example, if an agency's client has a new website, its DR will be 0. In this case, getting links from websites with a DR of 20+ is enough for initial link building.
Link diversity is a measure of how diverse the links are that are pointing to your website. That is, whether your links are coming from different types of pages. Think news sources, blogs, online directories, and so on.
A high degree of link diversity indicates that the agency builds links from various websites.
However, this metric needs to be monitored carefully. While diverse links are good, the sources of these links matter.
Getting a backlink from a food blog for a golfing website makes no sense. Google also notes links that come from wildly disparate sources, indicating that a business may be using unnatural means to build backlinks.
For link diversity, a link-building agency should provide links from sources in the same or related industry. It's also important to get links from websites with a range of domain ratings.
Anchor text refers to the text used to link to your website. For example, if a website links to your blog post on marketing tools with the text ‘best marketing platforms’, the anchor text is ‘best marketing platforms.’
Anchor text diversity is important because it shows that other websites link to you naturally. Not every website will link to the same post using the same terms. Some will say ‘top marketing tools,’ ‘marketing platforms to check out,’ and so on.
It is strange to see the exact anchor text from dozens or hundreds of other websites. It indicates that bots could create and propagate the link, and there are little to no quality checks behind such content creation.
Anchor texts help people understand what a link leads to, and descriptive anchor links help people and search engines understand a web page.
Anchor text diversity also creates a context for Google and other search engines. It helps them understand what your link and content topic are about.
Therefore, a link-building agency should use a wide range of anchor text when linking to your website.
In SEO lingo, 'follow' or 'do-follow' links is often used to describe links without the 'no-follow' attribute.
The 'no-follow' attribute is a value that can be added to a link's HTML code to tell search engines not to notice it.
You can also use the ‘Inspect’ to check if a hyperlink has a ‘nofollow’ attribute.
Follow links are those that search engine bots can follow. No-follow links are those that search engine bots can't follow.
A do-follow link passes what's called “link juice.” This means that the link helps improve the ranking of the linked-to website in search engine results.
A follow link is more valuable than a no-follow link because it indicates that your link is trustworthy and helps users obtain helpful information.
However, both follow and no-follow links are essential. People who read a blog post or article don't know (or care) if a link on the page has a 'no-follow' attribute.
People will click on a link if it is helpful. So, even no-follow links can drive traffic to your website.
It’s important to create a report on the number of do-follow Vs. no-follow links because it helps track whether your backlink strategy is increasing your domain rating. Using a backlink cost calculator can also provide insights into the budget needed to acquire high-quality backlinks and assess their overall value.
When evaluating link-building metrics, it is essential to track the rate at which a website acquires new backlinks over time. This metric reveals how quickly a website's backlink profile grows or declines, providing valuable insights into the effectiveness and sustainability of its link-building efforts.
For example, a sudden surge in backlink acquisition, commonly called link velocity, can be a warning sign. If a website gains an unusually high number of backlinks quickly, it may suggest using aggressive or manipulative link-building strategies. Conversely, a steady and gradual increase in link velocity reflects organic growth and the natural accumulation of backlinks.
Regularly monitoring the pace of backlink acquisition helps you identify anomalies, such as unexpected spikes or drops. This proactive approach enables you to address potential issues early and reduce the risk of penalties from search engines.
SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page. This is the page that a user sees after searching on a search engine like Google, Yahoo, or Bing.
Ideally, your website will rank as high up on SERP as possible. The higher your website ranks, the more traffic it's likely to get.
'Shift in SERP positions' is a metric that shows how much your website's position has changed in SERP over time.
If your website was in position 50 for a specific key term when starting out and moved upwards to position 30, that's a shift of 20 positions. Utilize rank-tracking tools such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz, or Google Search Console to track keyword positions in SERPs and analyze changes over time. These SEO tools provide regular updates and insights into your search engine performance.
A good link-building agency should help you see an upward shift in SERP positions. If there's no such shift, it could be because the agency uses poor-quality or insufficient links. Or your article simply isn't relevant for the topic you've based it on.
Today, Google Analytics and Google Search Console focus on Clicks as an essential metric to track the success of your website's SEO.
A click is registered when a user clicks on your link in SERP and arrives on your website.
The number of clicks your website gets from SERP is a good indicator of your SEO efforts' success.
It's essential to track the number of clicks you get from SERP because it reveals how many people visit your website through search engines.
Organic traffic comes to your website from search engines like Google.
It's called 'organic' because it's natural. You haven't paid for it (like you would for PPC traffic, for example).
The amount of organic traffic your website attracts is a good way to measure your SEO campaign's success.
A quality link-building service will help you gradually increase organic traffic. If there's no such increase, it might be because the links are of poor quality or because not enough links have been built.
With these metrics, you can evaluate your link-building strategy and make the right decisions to grow your website.
Good link-building is all about relationships. It's not just about placing your links on as many websites as possible. It's about finding high-quality websites that are relevant to your business or website and building a relationship with the webmaster.
When you have a good relationship with a webmaster, they will likely want to help you by linking to your site. They may also be willing to feature your link on their homepage or in a prominent position on their website. This can give your website a significant boost in visibility and traffic.
In contrast, if you approach link building with the sole goal of getting links, you are likely to be seen as just another self-serving marketer.
To build impactful and ethical link-building campaigns, focus on building relationships. How do you do that? Here are some ideas:
Building relationships is essential for link building. It’s an effective long-term strategy to ensure you get do-follow links that stay live for a long time.
Link building can be time-consuming and difficult, but it's worth it.
However, you are better off letting expert agency professionals build links for you. They have networks, and the expertise you’d take months to build just earns a single backlink.
However, it’s important to measure the success of a link-building campaign so that you can adjust your strategy as needed.
I've shared several metrics you can use to measure the success of your link-building campaigns. Do you have any other metrics you track? Share them in the comments below.
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Syed Balkhi is the founder of WPBeginner, the largest free WordPress resource site. With over 10 years of experience, he’s the leading WordPress expert in the industry. You can learn more about Syed and his portfolio of companies by following him on his social media networks.
