How to Calculate the ROI of Link Building in SEO.

You can calculate the ROI, positive or negative, on a sale from your marketing channels, but calculating the value of building links seems murkier.

Given the extraordinarily low amount most businesses and marketers spend, you can believe their expectations would be for a trackable ROI.

In fact, I believe you actually can measure the ROI of link building pretty specifically. These ROI calculations fall into two categories:

Understanding the short-term calls for already being able to calculate the value of sales or conversion on your website.

If you can’t measure the ROI of your other marketing efforts, then measuring the ROI of just link building will be futile.

A good understanding of your ROI from link-building actually takes some time to develop. This should be measured over the course of months — leading up to a year or more — rather than a few weeks.

However, we all know that marketers can be evaluated on a much more short-term basis. There are some admittedly limited metrics for calculating your short-term ROI.

A good place to start for talking about short-term ROI centres on how you’ve gone about link building. My short-term strategy is to generate one piece of content on the website and then drive links to that.

The expectation is that this piece of content gets traffic right away.

Take a look at the screenshot above. We commenced link building for this client at the beginning of 2018.

We ended up increasing organic traffic over 76% year over year, but noticeable effects didn’t start accruing until 7 months into the year.

While there was a short-term bump in traffic right as we started, the client didn’t start seeing a large ROI until well into the campaign.

Using tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs, you’ll look at organic rankings and search traffic specifically.

Comparing organic rankings and traffic both before and after your content piece’s publication — generally around a 90-day window, if possible — offers a snapshot of the return on your link building effort.

Going from unranked or low-ranked to the third position is a 0-ish to 10% increase.

Going from third to first is a 10% to 30% increase in absolute clickthrough rate.

With the real search volume in hand, ranking increases can be tied to a tangible ROI.

To nail down the actual ROI of traffic in dollar amounts can be trickier, but if you or your client is able to measure this for other channels, then doing so for link building shouldn’t be out of reach.

Then, you can see the breakdown of channels (with organic being the relevant one here) and their revenue potential.

At this point, you can either:

Take a date range of 6 months or more and divide the total organic revenue by the organic sessions. This will give you an actual dollar value for each session.

Ecommerce Sessions (last 6 months)550,000

Ecommerce Revenue (last 6 months)$50,000

Value per Session $0.09

Ecommerce Sessions Increase (next six months)27%

ROI of Link Building$13.50

Here’s an example above for a client we recently undertook a link building campaign. (All traffic figures are organic.)

They started with a baseline of 550,000 sessions and each session was valued around $0.09. We were able to boost their e-commerce sessions 27%, netting a modest immediate ROI.

It’s only when you start considering the lifetime value of your customers and other longterm effects does the true value of link building start to show.

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