Most of the people nowadays know how powerful link building is. However, one of the most important parts of SEO is tracking your results. Tracking results is impossible if you don't know what your goal is. Whether your want more traffic, conversions or better rankings, you need to set your goals before even starting to do link building so you can measure your progress properly.
Some of the most common goals when doing link building are:
Better Rankings
Improving rankings can be easy or difficult depending on what makes you happy. Appearing in the top 100 on page 5 for example is easy. However, it will be way more difficult to move from sixth to third place on the first page of the results unless your desired keyword is highly uncompetitive.
You should also consider personalized search when setting your goals and checking the results. You might see your website on first place when it actually is on seventh. To prevent this you can use a gread Mozilla Firefox extension called TrackMeNot.
An important thing to know is that you shouldn't worry if your website has been number 5 for a couple of months and one day you see it on the sixth place. This does not mean everything you have done is about to go down in flames.
More Traffic
A lot of people think that improving their rankings will also drive more traffic to their website. This is true most of the times, but if your website is not appealing to people, they are likely to not click on your link at all.
It is important to place your links on relevant to your niche websites that get a fair amount of traffic and have very good rankings. Link exchange is one of the ways you can get a link from such websites.
However, placing your link on a website with hundreds of other links that is also not relevant to your business at all is a waste of time because people are not likely to even see your link, let alone click it.
A great way to get traffic is to place a link on a new blog post that is getting a lot of social media attention and shares. That way you will not only get more visitors, but you will get visitors that are actually interested in your content.
More Conversions
The most important thing when your goal is to increase your conversions is relevancy. Getting a lot of traffic and great rankings without any conversions is a probable scenario when your traffic is not relevant at all. Most link builders focus on the previous two goals, leaving conversions in the background. However, if you set it as your goal, you can achieve amazing results by making sure your visitors are interested in your website and it is relevant to what they need.
Tips & Advices
Whatever you do when it comes to SEO and link building – keep doing it if it's working. If you stop, your results and efforts will eventually go down the drain. However, bad things tend to happen from time to time so here are some advices which can prevent you losing what you have achieved:
- Don't focus only on paid links. Try to get as much free backlinks as possible because if you run out of money for these links, they will disappear and so will your results.
- If you have an SEO company, make sure more than one link builders are working on a client. That way if one of the employees quit, the other one will be able to continue.
- Consider social medias and keep in mind that they can be pretty powerful when your slow down your link building tempo.
Make sure you know what your goal is and never stop tracking your results. Remember that tracking is as important as link building itself and these two things should not be separated.
Atanas Valchev currently works for one of the leading SEO companies in Bulgaria - SEO PAL. The company also offers PPC campaign management and SEO consulting.
