Link building is a form of online marketing, and with any form of marketing, you should start with goals. Knowing the goals of your campaign right at the start helps to ensure that you create a strategy that gives you the best possible chance of success. You also need to ensure that the goals of your link building campaign tie in closely with the overall goals of your business. For example, "build 10 links" is not a good goal to hit if building 10 links doesn’t have any impact on the overall success of the business.
Here, we encounter a slight issue. We learned earlier that links are a strong part of the search engine ranking algorithms. So, wouldn't hitting a goal of more links help with rankings? Helping with rankings helps drive more traffic and this helps bring more customers, right? All of this is true, but the problem is that it can sometimes take time for the links you've built to start having an overall positive effect on rankings. It isn't as simple as build links one day and see improvements the next. This is particularly true in competitive industries.
This poses a problem for SEOs because it can be hard to show that a link building campaign is successful, even if it hits certain goals. This can be even more of a problem if you have other activity in progress such as:
Technical SEO changes and improvements
New content being added to the website
Brand campaigns such as display advertising or TV ads
For this reason, it’s very important to not only set realistic goals, but to make sure that the goals you set are more intelligent than "build X links." The goals need to tie into real organizational goals and ultimately have a positive impact on the bottom line of your business. For example, you may want to increase organic search traffic in order to drive more sales. At the same time, you need to educate those around you that SEO and link building doesn't succeed overnight and that results are not instantaneous. Like any good marketing, the focus should be on long-term gains, not overnight quick-wins.
While it’s hard to show that building X number of links had Y impact on revenue, knowing that increasing revenue is the goal can shape and guide your link building approach.