Link Building Report: How We Analyze & Share Your SEO Results (+ Free Template)

When businesses invest in link building, they expect to see some real results. And the best way to keep them updated? Sharing a clear and detailed monthly link building report. 

Different agencies handle reporting differently. In this guide, we’ll walk you through our process. Plus, you can grab a free link building report template and customize it to better fit your needs. 

Let’s start!

What is a Link Building Report?

A link building report is a document that includes all the necessary information about the backlinks you’ve built for a specific period. It includes essential changes in link building metrics (e.g., DR and traffic) and the overall performance of your backlink campaign. 

We use a branded template in a PDF file for link reporting, but you can go with a completely different format, such as a Google Doc, a spreadsheet, or anything that works best for you. The goal is to keep it clear for both your team and clients. 

Why is Link Building Reporting Important?

Creating a link building report isn’t just a good idea but a must, and here’s why:

• Link reporting shows whether our efforts are delivering any results. 
• Thanks to reporting, we can find and fix issues on time and make some tweaks to take our backlink campaign to the next level.  
• It helps us to maintain open and transparent communication with our clients. By getting detailed monthly reports, they can get a clear picture of what’s happening.  

Simple reporting can make a big difference and bring more clarity to your link building project. 

So, take the time to document everything to analyze what works well and what needs to be improved! 

What’s Included in Our Link Building Report?

Our backlink report includes key updates on:

Domain Rating (DR) change: A metric developed by Ahrefs, which shows the strength of a site’s backlink profile. The change shows whether it has increased or decreased during a month. 

Organic traffic change: The organic traffic metric in Ahrefs estimates how many clicks from Google the target website gets every month. Since backlinks play a key role in driving traffic, we closely track changes in organic traffic as well.

Target keyword(s) position change: Our clients want to rank higher on Google for specific keywords they provide us each month and we track how their positions change on search results.

Total number of backlinks provided: This is the number of backlinks built based on our agreement. However, it’s subject to change depending on how the backlink campaign is performing. For instance, if the campaign needs a push, we may suggest building more links to stay ahead of competitors.

Agreed vs provided domain metrics: We set minimum metrics for backlinks, ensuring they come from websites with at least DR 50+ and 1,000+ organic traffic. However, we always go the extra mile. As we’re committed to delivering the best results, we often build backlinks from higher-metric sites, at no extra link building cost. That’s why the average DR and traffic metrics in our reports may be higher than what was initially agreed upon.

Number of backlinks built per anchor text: Sometimes clients want us to target specific anchor texts more than others, which is why we include a breakdown of how many backlinks were built for each one.

Number of backlinks built per URL: Our report also shows how many backlinks were built for each target URL, providing clients with full transparency on link distribution.  

Now that you know what’s inside our link building report, it’s high time to jump into the main steps of how we put it all together. Let’s start!

How to Report Link Building in 3 Steps: Our Simple Approach

Here’s what our link building process report looks like.

Track Key Link Building Metrics with SEO Tools

There are many tools to check Google rankings and track key metrics, but we prefer Ahrefs since it’s easy and convenient to use. Here’s how to use it:

Step 1: Sign in to your Ahrefs account and enter your domain into Site Explorer.
Step 2: Review key metrics like DR, traffic, and more. 

Step 3: Scroll down to find a graph showing how these numbers have changed over the past month․

Step 4: Go to the “Keywords” section and set a filter to compare with the previous month. This way, you can see how the positions of the target keywords have changed.

The best part? Seeing our clients reach the top positions for their target keywords! Still don’t believe us? Check out one of our client’s link building case study. The results speak for themselves.

With these simple steps, you can easily track essential metrics and add them to the link building reports.

Add Key Data to Your Link Building Report Template

After you’ve collected all the necessary data, it’s time to add it to your report. 

Whether you’re using pre-made templates or creating your own, make sure all the information is correct, neat, and organized.

Any typos, grammatical, or factual errors can damage your brand reputation and drive clients away. 

So, always double-check everything before hitting the send button.

Share the Backlink Report & Get Feedback

If your report is complete and everything looks good, feel free to share it with a client.

We send our reports via email at the end of each month, so clients can review all the backlinks we’ve built and the results we’ve achieved.

Why email? It’s professional and more reliable, but you can use whatever method works best for you. There’s no one right way to do it!

After sending the report, expect to receive some client feedback. They might have questions or need clarification on certain points. In such cases, we’re happy to schedule a call and discuss everything in a more detailed way.

Once we get their feedback, we improve our strategy to make sure we’re delivering even better results in the upcoming months.

Note: Backlinks take time. Expect at least three months to see some real good results from the campaign.

Wrapping Up

Link reporting might seem a daunting task, especially when you are dealing with so many numbers. 

However, if you want to achieve the reputation of a trusted and professional link building agency, you should take reporting seriously, as it allows you to showcase what’s been done and achieved. 

The better you do it, the more chances you have to leave a good impression and keep your partnerships going. 

Thanks for reading, and good luck!

FAQ about link building report