What Metrics Should I Be Tracking When Building Links?

Most of the business owners that hire our SEO agency never ask us what website performance metrics are the most important. It’s usually our team who broaches the subject.

Starting any new endeavor without having a clear goal in mind regarding what you want to accomplish in it is scary business. But it happens all the time in the often crazy world of link building.

Due to this, I thought it would be helpful to share with you the site performance metrics I pay attention to, and those I don’t, when building links.

My Chief Performance Metric - Revenue Generated from Referral Traffic

If the revenue your website produces from referral traffic hitting it IS NOT CONSISTENTLY GROWING, your link building team or SEO Agency is asleep at the wheel.

Which means, more likely than not, they have been focusing their efforts on improving the wrong website performance metrics.

If that’s the case, let them know you’re looking to see monthly growth in the money your site brings in from referral traffic from this point forward.

Don't Focus Your Attention on the Wrong Website Performance Metrics

The reason I believe most link building campaigns fail is simple, too many link builders and SEO agencies concentrate their efforts on improving the wrong metrics.

As a result, they fail.

Instead of judging the success of their efforts by the money they generate, they opt instead, to improve metrics that have nothing to do whatsoever with your revenue goals.

Metrics like:

Page Rank
Domain Authority
Dwell Time
Bounce Rate
Trust Flow
Citation Flow
Domain Age
Site Load Speed
First Byte Score
(and even) SERP Rankings

Improving those website performance metrics is a lot like putting band-aids on a gunshot wound. It might stop the bleeding, but sooner or later the wound needs to be treated by a doctor.

Therefore, the primary goal of your link building campaign should be to increase the revenue generated by your website from referral traffic.

Once you start succeeding at it, those other metrics will improve faster than a speeding rocket.

Simplify Your Link Building Efforts

Focusing on increasing the revenue your website earns from referral traffic will simplify your link building efforts big time. Just you watch.