Link building metrics and their effect on SEO

Link building is a key SEO practice that plays a significant role in strengthening your site’s authority and traffic. It’s a common practice to perform but it is crucial to know some important link building metrics and their effects on SEO so that you can prioritize your strategies accordingly. In this article, we will check out all the pivotal metrics and know how it can help in generic and small business SEO.

Domain Authority

Domain authority or DA of a website matters when you are expecting a link back from that site. DA tells search engines how legitimate and trustworthy the site is. Popularity, age, trust factor, traffic, and many more factors combine together to form the DA of the site.

A good DA website can positively affect your site and improve the ranking as well. On the other side, a low DA score website will do the opposite impact and hurt the site’s SEO rather than giving any benefit. So before you pitch any website for the backlink, test that site’s DA using any free available tool.

Page Authority

Just like domain authority tells you the authority of the entire domain, page authority or PA helps you with the authority of an individual page. When you are planning to get a link pack from a website’s particular page, then this metric becomes important to consider.

If the DA is high but the page authority is lower where you have linked back, then you won’t get the expected backlink benefits from the domain. This is because page rank is also considered when bots crawl the site and calculate the link juice distribution. So in short, if you are not linking to the homepage of the website, it’s better to check PA.

Anchor text

When it comes to both generic and small business SEO, the anchor text can add more advantages to your backlink. If the link is on a specific keyword that has high search volume, the chances are you will get higher benefits from the backlink. It is necessary because anchor text helps to tell the exact topic of a page to search bots. To understand it in simple terms, it serves the purpose as keywords serve for the on-page SEO.

From next time, always discuss with the author where they will put your website link and always insist on getting in on a targeted keyword rather than your company name.

Total number of links

This building metric tells how many links a domain has and it also affects the overall SEO report. But, a higher number doesn’t always mean it’s good. If a website is having thousands of links but from all spam or low-quality domains, the links are of no use.

But on the other side, if a domain has a few hundred links but from high authority sources, it can play wonders for the site and improve small business SEO. Focus on maintaining both the quantity and quality of links that you are building. You can also opt for SEO packages and the expert team will help in generating high-quality links for your site.

Linking root domains

This is another pivotal link building metric that tells how many unique linking domains do your website have. Having backlinks from the unique domain is always better than having hundreds of backlinks from only one or limited sources. This is because, when there are too many links coming from a single domain, the search engine may fall for spam activity.

So, when you are planning Small Business SEO, local SEO, or international SEO, always ensure there are multiple domains.

Linking page relevancy

Relevancy is a much important metric that everyone should take seriously while building links. If you are linking back to a page whose relevancy is low i.e. the page content is thin or simply irrelevant then the backlink will hurt your site.

So before you pitch the site for a backlink, always use an SEO audit tool to know how much traffic that page is getting and how its bounce rate looks like. Only link back when you feel confident about that content. Always keep in mind that quality is very much pivotal than a large number because the main motto is to improve the user experience and add more value.

Position of the link

Most people ignore this metric but this is also a vital one as it tells Google and other search engines how important the link is. It’s a simple and straightforward concept — if a link is important, it must be presented at the beginning or the middle of the page. And, on the other hand,  if the link is placed in the last paragraph or even obscure which readers would ignore, then the SEO benefits will be lower. While building links, always ask the author to add the link in the first paragraphs.

These were the important Link building metrics that you must know before you start building them. If you are planning to work on the backlink profile, it’s always a good option to hire a good company that can perform robust small business SEO for you.