How to assess the link-building efficiency?

Hello all!
From time to time, our PR teams ask us for link building for some articles. We did that, and PR teams asked us what the results were. We said some articles are ranked well for specific keywords. PR teams said, 'That's ok, but we need more.'
They need numbers to show to management. Management approves the budgets, so it is reasonable to ask us about results. But I have no idea which indicators add to our reports. We can't measure referral traffic from the articles or know how many users read the articles.

Santeri_G said:

We can't measure referral traffic from the articles or know how many users read the articles.

Click to expand...

you can measure all types of traffic with some analytics software, what are you talking about?

Umm. you can track the data with Google search console.

Edit: You can use any software i.e Ahref or Semrush

Evaluating the efficiency of link building isn't just about how many links you've acquired, but about their real impact on your business, the most basic metric is referral traffic that is, how many people click on those links and arrive at your site, a link that sends you 100 visits per month but doesn't generate conversions can be less efficient than one that sends you 10 visits, but of those 10, two result in a purchase, so, the first step is to connect your links to your analytics system and see what happens after the click.

The second way to measure efficiency is the impact on your rankings, don't expect every link you build to boost your rankings overnight, the useful metric here is the medium-term trend, take a group of target keywords and see how they perform after you've acquired certain links, if, after acquiring quality links, you notice that those keywords start to climb in the rankings, even if it's just one per week, your efforts are on the right track, if you see that nothing is moving after months, you're doing something wrong, either the links are bad or the content they point to isn't well optimized.

Santeri_G said:

Hello all!
From time to time, our PR teams ask us for link building for some articles. We did that, and PR teams asked us what the results were. We said some articles are ranked well for specific keywords. PR teams said, 'That's ok, but we need more.'
They need numbers to show to management. Management approves the budgets, so it is reasonable to ask us about results. But I have no idea which indicators add to our reports. We can't measure referral traffic from the articles or know how many users read the articles.

Click to expand...

In situations like this it usually comes down to focusing on the SEO signals you can actually track like keyword rankings search visibility and the quality of the links since that tends to give a much clearer picture of performance when direct traffic or readership data is missing

Track Domain Authority of sites you placed links on, number of backlinks built, and keyword ranking improvements over time. Those are solid numbers management understands. Tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush make it easy to pull these into a clean report.

in my experience, rankings alone are usually not enough for management.
i normally look at keyword improvements, organic traffic growth and whether the linked pages gained more visibility over time.
link building is often easier to justify when you can show a positive trend in traffic and rankings but not just the number of links built.

When I worked at a company where management was directly involved, I used to send before-and-after reports. Showing ranking improvements, organic traffic growth, hell even i send impressions improvements from google search console.

Just pull up search console and show them the growth in total ranking keywords for those pages, management loves graphs, so show them the dr or authority score increase too, even if it's mostly a vanity stat, If the ranks are moving up, your links are clearly doing the heavy lifting.

Santeri_G said:

Hello all!
From time to time, our PR teams ask us for link building for some articles. We did that, and PR teams asked us what the results were. We said some articles are ranked well for specific keywords. PR teams said, 'That's ok, but we need more.'
They need numbers to show to management. Management approves the budgets, so it is reasonable to ask us about results. But I have no idea which indicators add to our reports. We can't measure referral traffic from the articles or know how many users read the articles.

Click to expand...

Ahrefs or Semrush can give you indicators and/or measure your traffic.

One way to make link building reports more meaningful is to compare organic traffic and keyword visibility before and after the links were acquired it helps show the broader SEO impact even when direct referral data isn't available..

if you cannot track direct referral traffic you can measure and present these exact indicators to prove the clear value of your link building budgets