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Links from referring domains. The authority/relevance balance of new links. Indexation rate. Movement on targeted pages. Movement on the category ranking page. Movement on home.

Then connect all that data back to organic traffic and revenue, because outside of link building nobody cares about your total link count.

Backlink index size is the least important metric you can track. Period. And almost every vendor leads with it in their reports.

Our guides to which metrics you should be tracking for SEO and the 8 most useful metrics for link building cover everything else you need.

Domain Authority is Moz’s prediction of how well a page will rank. Domain Rating is Ahrefs’ prediction of how strong a link profile is.

Neither has any grounding in what Google actually does. They use completely different indexes to calculate their scores. They regularly contradict each other in the rankings they produce. And both of them are logarithmic, which means going from 20 to 30 is much easier than going from 60 to 70.

Why do people still use DA as a link building target?

It’s useful for comparing site A to site B. But as a target metric for where you “should” be it’s completely arbitrary and holds no real value.

No.

Google has openly confirmed they don’t use Domain Authority as a ranking factor. Yet vendors price placements based on it. Which means when you buy a “high DA” link what you’re actually doing is overpaying for a metric that Google outright says doesn’t matter to them.

Buying links based on DA is like buying a car on horsepower alone. Sure the engine does 0-60 in 2 seconds. Doesn’t mean the thing is road legal.

Compare domains by organic traffic and topic relevance instead. Both are far harder to manipulate, and honestly should be the only two things you ever care about.

Our guide to actually increasing your site’s DA covers how to improve it the right way.

Attribute organic session revenue from the pages you worked on, subtract total program cost and divide by total program cost. Simple.

There are two pitfalls to avoid.

Unclear attribution window. Links bought in January may not convert until June. For SEO there is always going to be a lag. So decide how long you think that window is and attribute accordingly.

Internal resources. Just because you didn’t invoice your internal team doesn’t mean those hours didn’t cost money. Internal time is always more expensive than your vendor’s invoice.

Our guide to calculating SEO ROI you can actually use covers exactly how we handle attribution windows longer than a single month.

Run your profile through two tools. Spotted a link in one that isn’t in the other? Reach out directly and ask. Indexes aren’t perfect.

Pull the links back segmented by referring domain, not by link. You’re looking for concentration risk on specific sites, anchor distribution, dead links from sites that no longer exist, links from sites that wiped their page cleanly after selling you one.

The output of an audit is a prioritised action list. Not a suspicious link score you feed to an algorithm.

Our SEO tip on backlink management and step-by-step guide to running a backlink audit covers the process start to finish.

Google crawled that page and decided it didn’t deserve to take up storage on a server. On a low traffic blog post? Happens constantly. On cornerstone content that gets updated regularly? Not so much.

And if Google hasn’t indexed your link it doesn’t do anything at all. It literally is not a link.

Indexation rate is the least tracked link building metric. Because no vendor tells you when half their links aren’t being seen by Google. You pay $200 for a placement and ask why it didn’t rank. But if your vendor’s placements are indexing at a 40% rate you’re literally paying full price for links Google isn’t reading.

We check indexation on every link we build. Because a link Google didn’t index doesn’t really exist.

Our post on how to get backlinks indexed faster covers exactly what you can do about it.

1 backlink index. 1 rank tracker. 1 Outreach tool. A spreadsheet.

That’s it. You can do literally 90% of the work required for effective link building right there.

Everything past that is convenience. Which is fine, as long as you’re honest about the fact that you’re buying convenience rather than capability.

Link tools are the easiest budget line to inflate and the hardest to audit for a reason. Almost no one uses what they pay for.

Our individual guides to free backlink checker tools, free backlink monitoring tools and every tool in the link building tool stack cover what you actually get for spending money vs. free.

Monthly for actions. Quarterly for results.

Flip that equation and you’ll spend all day explaining yourself. SEO gets delivered on a monthly cycle. But the effects of what you did last month may not show up til 6 months later.

Monthly reports should always be framed around what you did, why you did it, where those assets live and what you plan to do next.

Rankings and revenue won’t move until enough of the work has had time to land. Report them monthly and every meeting turns into a defence.

Report monthly activities monthly. Ranking updates and revenue generation should be a quarterly conversation.

Frame that expectation with the client in quarter one, when there’s no results to defend.