How to Create a Backlink Report

Whether you’re a Digital PR working in-house or with an agency, it’s likely that you’re going to need to create backlink reports for your content, either for the rest of your team, or for your clients.

Now, although these might vary depending on how you measure the value of your backlinks, this article will offer simple techniques for putting together a basic report to cover most needs.

Step 1. You’re going to need to choose your software.

If you’re just reporting on numbers, you might be best off with a spreadsheet program, like Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel. This lets you lay your data out in columns, where I recommend putting different metrics, like the link type (as most clients will want to know about follow and nofollow links), and the domain rating or social shares. You can use the rows to show different backlinks.

Alternatively, if you need to present backlinks more visually, like news clippings, you’ll probably be better off with slideshow software, like Google Slides, or Microsoft PowerPoint. These make it easier to go to your backlinking sites, screenshot the page, and paste it in, before finding all the data results.

Step 2. Find the backlinks.

This can be a little tricky, particularly if you don’t have the budget for an upmarket tool. If you’re going to do it manually, the best way is to start doing Google searches for the title of your content, your company or client name, and maybe a few keywords from your press release.

Then you can take a look at the results to see if any of them relate to your campaign. If they do, you can click into the result, and see if there’s a link. You’ll need to scroll up and down the page – and once you’ve found one, if there is one, you’ll need to find out whether it’s a follow or nofollow link.

You can do this by right clicking on it, and clicking “Inspect”. This’ll bring up a toolbar on the right, where you can see the HTML for the page. If the link you’re pointing at doesn’t say “nofollow” on it, congratulations, it’s a follow link! Either way, you can add that to your link report and move onto the next one.

Step 3. Find data on your backlinks.

Depending on the tools you use, you might need to start pasting your link reports into any variety of different tools to get some form of domain rating, social shares, or quality score. Then you can copy and paste these back into your link reports – if it’s a slideshow, this might take a little while.

Step 4. Tidy up, and repeat the process tomorrow!

If everything goes well, you’ll be finding new links every day.

Of course, if all of this seems too time-consuming, there is a quicker way.

Step 1. Go to Klipr.io/free-plan and sign up for free today.

Step 2. Set up a Company folder.

Step 3. Copy in your Campaign URL and any keywords.

Step 4. Let Klipr do everything I mentioned above for you. Except go home at the end of the day.