Rand Fishkin wrote an interesting post on SEOmoz yesterday, illustrating some KPIs he might use for an SEO campaign. Summarizing the data he presents, Rand notes: “we’re winning not only the link numbers battle, but the importance battle as well.”
Hm. Well, if there were marketing value in the inflation of link profiles, I would say that this is a good metric. However, the number of links you point to a Web site doesn’t matter. Why? Because link profiles do not predict performance in the search results.
Web sites with relatively low link counts (and relatively low PageRank, MOZrank, whatever-you-want-to-call-it-rank) consistently perform well in search results against Web sites with inflated link profiles.
If you sell a link-building service, then clearly showing an increase in linking profile performance is an important KPI for your service. You need to show that people who want more links are getting more links.
But that’s a pretty cheap and schlocky kind of business model. I can go out and build links all day long. I can do it in my sleep (literally, if I just write a few scripts and post them in a few places). You want 10 links a day, every Monday through Friday, 50 weeks a year? I can do that for you. It’s easy. And the links are about as meaningless as using a snow machine to make snow while a blizzard rages around you.
A quality link building service needs to provide a better metric than just the number of links it has placed. I hope you’re not paying anyone money to just show you they can get Yahoo!, Linkscape, Majestic SEO, or some other link counting tool to report increases in backlink profiles.
Links CAN help with your search rankings but just because someone is charging you money for those links doesn’t mean they WILL help your search rankings.
And, quite frankly, it’s the search traffic that matters, stupid, not the search rankings.
Links CAN send you traffic but just because someone is charging you money for those links doesn’t mean they WILL help you improve your traffic.
And, quite frankly, it’s the conversions that matter, stupid, not just raw traffic.
A decent link building KPI will show you the VALUE that those links add to your site in terms of helping boost your converting traffic. That’s not so easy to compute, but it CAN be done. You can use landing page tracking techniques that have been around since Danny Sullivan first started writing SEO articles to figure out where the traffic is coming from.
You should be tracking sales, subscriptions, and satisfaction by landing page, campaign, and time frame. If you invest in a link building campaign and don’t see a corresponding increase in sales, subscriptions, and satisfaction then you know what the ROI (return on investment) is for your link building campaign: NOTHING.
A lot of clients may want to rank well for 1-word queries but if they don’t get converting traffic from those queries then you’re just wasting your efforts in achieving those queries. Search marketing and Web marketing do NOT hinge on links. Links are not THAT important.
The marketing strategy has to focus on many other factors that are equally important with links (and in some cases MORE important than links). Link building has gotten way out of hand within the SEO industry, which is why the search engines are bending over backwards to devalue links from as many sources as possible.
If you want to be a successful Web marketer you need to focus on improving the client site’s conversions. Nothing else really matters.
In other words, stop counting links and start counting conversions. There may be some great link counting tools out there, but they really are not telling you anything useful for Web marketing. Knowing how many links a site has and where the links are placed doesn’t tell you anything about the converting traffic the site receives or how it got that traffic.
In every gold rush, the people who make the most money are the guys selling the picks, pans, and shovels to the gold miners. The gold miners who achieve the most success look at the bigger picture and build strategic resources that help them convert their claims into wealth. They’re not sitting out by the river hooping and hollaring over every little nugget they find in the dirt.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Carlos 12.16.08 at 9:12 am
I think that you overstate the point.
The growth of the links to a site is a valid KPI if your intent is to create in roads to your content and secure continued traffic. If you market your site as if the search engines don’t matter you will put in place exactly the things that produce value for your site, people referencing you. Raw link numbers are not useful, but ignoring their effect in a larger marketing strategy is probably more detrimental.
Using your metaphor: there is more gold in the river of people than in the land. If the search engines are drying up one of your rivers by decreasing the value of links it is going to make your referral traffic, and the links that produce it, even more important; not less important.
Michael Martinez 12.16.08 at 11:42 am
Carlos: “The growth of the links to a site is a valid KPI if your intent is to create in roads to your content and secure continued traffic.”
Michael: Carlos, I guarantee you I can point 1,000 links that don’t send traffic at any URL. Since I can do that so easily, I am pretty sure anyone else can, too.
Hence, using mere link counts as a KPI is a waste of time for anyone other than someone who is selling or performing a link-building service (but even then, as I said, it’s a very poor measure of quality of service).
The fact a link exists in no way means it can or will provide traffic, converting traffic, or an increase in sales.
davesnyder 12.16.08 at 1:08 pm
Michael,
This post is awesome. I would hug you if you wouldn’t get creeped out by it.
I argue those two points:
1) Quality over link count
2) Rankings being less important than the overall return of a campaign.
Its nice to hear someone else saying it.
Dave Snyder
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