In any industry, there’s one major component that over arches as a key component to success. All the marketing, sales, and company picnics aside, none of them mean a thing without assessment. Though most businesses recognize the importance of assessing their tactics, the proportion choosing to assess the success of their online marketing is unnecessarily small. After all, in today’s market, online marketing is one of the most critical ways to generate leads.

So much of online marketing comes down to search engine results and the backlinks that boost them. Though generally, the more links that are out there to your site, the better your ranking, the process is not really all that simple. Search engines don’t just count backlinks. They also assess their quality. That’s why it doesn’t really work to buy unrelated backlinks. Search engines penalize sites that do it, and they give preference to good natural links. Assessing not only the number of backlinks you have, but the quality of those links is critical to an understanding of how you can improve your online marketing. Backlink reporting tools are available to not only let you know how many backlinks your site has, but what anchor words are used to describe your page, and any red flags as to the quality of the link. Backlink tracking through backlink reporting tools can be used as often as you want, but a good rule of thumb is to run a full link audit once a year to determine which link building areas are working the best. Maybe most of your traffic is coming from blog comments or from social bookmarking. Assessing where your best links come from informs your future online advertising decision and can help bring more traffic to your site, once new strategies are implemented.

While backlink reporting tools on their own are particularly useful, some SEO companies and independent offsite companies also offer website graders. Essentially, web graders take all that information about your backlinks and keywords and show you how your results compare with others in your industry, helping you to put that backlink reporting into perspective. It’s all well and good to know that you have 1,000 backlinks, but it’s much more helpful to know that information if you also know that your competitor has 5,000. Called website benchmarking, this comparison lets you know where your attention needs to go in order for you to boost your online presence and which keywords are generating the most success for others in your industry.

As marketing has become more advanced, it only stands to reason that assessment tools have become more advanced. Companies who know how to assess their success and what to do with the information they gain are in a better position to improve their visibility, their customer experience, and ultimately their profit. Continue reading here.