Martijn Scheijbeler

Measuring SEO Progress: From Start to Finish – Part 2: From Creation to Getting Links

How to measure (and over time forecast) the impact of features that you’re building for SEO and how to measure this from start to finish. In this series I already provided some more information on how to measure progress: from creation to traffic (part 1). This blog post (part 2) will go deeper into another aspect of SEO: getting more links and how you can measure the impact of that. We’ll go a bit more into depth on how you can easily (through 4 steps, 1 bonus step) get insights into the links that you’ve acquired and how to measure their impact.

1. Launch

You’ve spent a lot of time writing a new article or working on a new feature/product with your team, so the last thing you want is not to receive search traffic for it and not start ranking. For most keywords you’ll need to do some additional authority building to make sure you’ll get the love that you might be needing. But it’s going to be important to keep track of what’s happening around that to measure the impact of your links on your organic search traffic.

2. Monitor

So the first thing you’d like to know if your new page is getting any links, there are multiple ways to track this. For this you can use the regular link research tools, that we’ll talk about more in depth later in this piece. But one of the easiest ways for a link to show real impact is to figure out if you’re receiving traffic from it and when that time was. Just simple and easy to figure out in Google Analytics. Head to the traffic sources report and see for that specific page if you’re getting any referral traffic. Is that the case? Then try to figure out when the first visit was, you’ll be able to monitor more closely then since when you’ll have this link or look at the obvious thing, the published date if you can find it.

How to measure success?

Google Alerts, Mention, Just-Discovered Links (Moz) and as described Google Analytics. They’re are all tools that can be used to identify links that are coming in and might be relatively new. As they’re mentions in the news media or just the newest being picked up by a crawler. It’s important to know more about that as you don’t’ want to be dependent on a link index that is updating on an irregular basis.

3. Analyze

Over a longer period of time you want to know how your authority through links is increasing. While I’m not a huge fan of the ‘core metrics’ like Domain Authority, Page Authority, etc. as they can change without providing any context I rather look at the graphs and new and incoming root domains to see how fast that is growing. In the end it is a numbers game (usually more quality + quantity) so that’s the best way to see it. One of my favorite reports in Majestic is the cumulated links + domains so I can get an easy grasp of what’s happening. Are you rapidly growing up and to the right or is progress slow?

How to measure success?

One suggestion that I would have is to look at the cached pages for your links: So by now you’ve figured out what kind of links are sending traffic, so that’s a good first sign. But are they also providing any value for your SEO? Put the actual link into Google and see if the page is being indexed + cached. It is? Good for you, that means the page is of good enough quality and being cached for Google’s sake. It’s not, hmm then there is work to do for no and your actual page might need some authority boosting on its own.

4. Impact

Are you links really impacting what’s happening to the authority and ranking of the page. You would probably want to know. It’s one of the harder tasks to figure out as you have a lot of variables that can be playing a role in this. It’s basically a combination of the value of these links, which you could use one of the link research tools’ metrics for or just looking at the actual changes for search traffic for your landing page. Do you see any changes there?

5. Collect all the Links

In addition to getting insights into what kind of links might be impacting your rankings for a page you’ll likely want to know where all of your links can be find. That’s relatively simple, it’s just a matter of connecting all the tools together and using them in the most efficient way.

So sign up for at least the first three tools, as Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are free, you can use them to download your link profiles. When you sign up for Majestic you’re able to verify your account with your GSC account and get access to your own data when you connect your properties. So you just unlocked three ways of getting more data.

That’s still not enough? Think about getting a (paid) account at three other services so you can download their data and combine it with the previous data sets, you’re not going to be able to retrieve much more data and get a better overview as you’re now leveraging 6 different indexes.

(P.S. Take notice that all of them grow their indexes over time, a growing link profile might not always mean that you’re getting more links, it might be that they’re just getting better at finding them.)

How to measure success?

Download all the data on a regular basis (weekly, monthly, quarterly) and combine the data sets, as they’re all providing links and root domains you can easily add the sheets together and remove the duplicate values. You won’t have all the metrics per domain + link that way but still can get a pretty good insight into what your most popular linking root domains + links are.
In the previous part I talked more about measuring the impact from creation to getting traffic. Hopefully the next part will provide more information on how to measure business impact & potentially use the data for forecasting. In the end when you merge all these different areas you should be able to measure impact in any stage independently. What steps did I miss in this analysis and could use some more clarification?

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