Making an organized report of your link building efforts and accomplishments is appealing to your clients. It makes you look professional and reputable in what you do. But link building is time-consuming and making a report won’t save your time.
That’s why it is advisable to use outreach templates to speed things up. Link building automation does not mean that you’ll automatically gain new links. You’re basically streamlining the whole process to make building links more efficient.
In most templates, you’ll see different metrics and parameters to measure the efficiency of the link building strategy. So, let’s discuss first the important metrics to measure the linking potential of your campaign.
Metrics to Measure Your Outreach Efforts
Outreach efforts are time and money intensive. It is necessary to have a clear idea of the impact for your outreach efforts so that you can course correct your strategy and ensure that you get the maximum returns as possible.
The following are some of the metrics to track your outreach efforts:
1. Outreach Attempts
The number of your outreach attempts can be directly related to the success of your link building campaign. The more attempts you do, the more chances you will get a link from these websites. You can use a manual outreach tracker in Excel for this one. You can list down the number of outreach attempts you’ve made and arrange it in Excel format.
Once you have the Excel file for your outreach attempts, you can double-check if you’ve already attempted outreach to that website. This will prevent repetitive linking to the same website. You can also update this from time to time and even create new sheets for new campaigns launched.
These outreach attempts require you to keep a meticulous track of all the efforts and give a clear idea about your potential prospects, in that regard, having a pre-defined template will make your process much simpler.
2. Backlink Quality Assessment
The Domain Authority (DA) of the websites you’re reaching out to is also important to measure link building. The value of the incoming links can be estimated through their DA. Although DA does not affect search ranking directly, it affects the backlink profile of your website.
You can check this article to know how to find competitor backlinks using 4 simple methods. If they’re ranking for the same keywords as yours, they must have quality links to back it up. You can make use of a backlink quality assessment template to show clients the quality of the sites linking back to them.
3. New Linking Opportunities
If your campaign makes new linking opportunities, then your client is set for a favorable result. Your campaign should be flexible enough to cater to guest posting, directory links, lost links, and other link types. However, make sure you’re not getting your links from spammy and low-quality domains as this can damage your SEO and link profile.
DISCLAIMER: LinkDoctor™ does not recommend black hat tactics to build links. Use white hat link building techniques to gain SEO value from your backlinks.
You can use a link building campaign analysis tracker to lay all your campaigns and compare them with each other. We’ll talk about these templates in the next section of this article.
Templates to Use for Your Link Building Report
Using outreach templates will make your life easier. You don’t have to start from scratch because these pre-made templates have almost everything you need in there. All you have to do is download the template and fill in the blanks.
Once you reach out to get links from various sites, you need to maintain the data of your backlinks in a presentable way. To do that, you can easily make use of the following templates for your link building report:
1. Excel Templates
There are a lot of things you can do in Microsoft Excel. You can create link building sheets for your clients and present your link building data in a clean and accessible way. Since you can easily share the Excel file, your clients won’t have a hard time viewing and editing the sheets.
Good thing there are a couple of Excel templates to choose from. You can use these templates to show the important metric that your clients want – Domain Authority. Here is a list of Excel templates made specifically for link building reports:
2. Link Building Campaign Analysis Tracker
Using a tracker for your campaign allows you to track the progress of your strategy. You can use the Google query function to make this template and automate the analysis of your entries. Here’s the link to the link analysis dashboard template so you can access it on your Google Docs.
You can also create your template for your campaign tracker. Search Engine Journal shared a step-by-step tutorial on making the same template. You can modify formulas, labels, and other metrics that you can find on the template by making your own.
3. SEO Keyword Template
Keyword research is a crucial part of link building. Thus, you have to give your client a report for the keywords you’re using for their link. You can use a keyword research template to make your report look more presentable and organized.
This is but a sample of the editable Excel sheet of the template. It’s a powerful spreadsheet that you can show to your client to visualize the SEO keywords used for your campaigns.
4. Manual Outreach Tracker
Sending thousands of emails a day can be hard to track, especially if you’re sending each one to different webmasters. Thus, you have to focus on tracking your manual outreach and keeping a tab of every domain to which you send an email.
You can access this manual outreach tracker template and make a copy for reuse. Located at the bottom of the page are different sheets for different categories of new websites to outreach to. It’s also free to use, so don’t forget to thank Workshop Digital for its awesome template.
5. AgencyAnalytics Link Building Report Template
AgencyAnalytics also released a template that link builders can use to report their progress. It’s a professionally-made template of the whole report. You can check the template preview here and decide whether to use the template or not.
You can use the template for free by signing up for their 14-day free trial period. And since it’s a paid one, you can expect that this template can impress your client when you show the report to them. It includes the summary of your campaign and the backlinks produced from your efforts.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What are some metrics to measure your outreach efforts?
The following are some of the metrics to measure your outreach efforts:
- Outreach attempts
- Backlink quality assessment
- New linking opportunities
2. What are outreach attempts?
Outreach attempts refers to the number of time you take a chance at getting a link from the site. The more attempt you take the higher the chance of getting a link from that website.
3. Why do we need link building and outreach templates?
The process of building links for your website requires you to send multiple emails, reach out to various prospects, keep track of the outreach efforts, and measure your results. To do that, it would save you a lot of time with the template to make the process much easier.
Make Your Own Template!
It’s advisable to set these tools as an example and make your own outreach template out of them. This will make your approach more personalized and specific for every client.
These are just some examples of the outreach templates you can use for your link building reports. You can find other sites that offer templates specifically for link building agencies. These tools will help you monitor your campaign and ensure success for your client.
