What to Put in a Link Building Report for Clients

A good link building report for a client shows every placement as a named, clickable URL, with the site, the anchor text, the page it points to and the date it went live. Then it shows whether the pages you linked to are moving, using Search Console data rather than domain ratings. Keep it to one page a month. Clients renew when they can check your work in two minutes, not when they receive a long spreadsheet of scores.

Most reports fail in one of two directions. Some are a list of links with no sign of whether they helped. Others are a wall of third-party metrics the client can't verify. Here's what to put in, what to leave out, and a template you can copy.

The five fields every placement needs

These are the facts a client should be able to check themselves, by clicking.

Field	Why it's there
Live URL	The page the link sits on. If the client can't click it, it didn't happen.
Site	The domain, so the client sees where their brand now appears.
Anchor text	The words that are linked. This is how you show you're keeping the anchor mix natural.
Target page	Which page on the client's site it points to. This ties each link back to a goal.
Date live	When it went up. It starts the clock on any replacement guarantee and on the wait for results.

That's also exactly what we record for every placement we deliver, which makes this the easy part if you buy from us. You get the live URL, anchor, target and date for each link, and the report you send carries your agency's name, not ours.

What to show besides the links

A list of links answers "what did we buy". The client is really asking "is it working". Answer that with data they trust and can open themselves.

Target page performance. From the Search Console Performance report, filter by each target page and show impressions, clicks and average position for the last three months against the three before. Seeing the two periods together is what makes movement visible.
Links Google has recorded. The Search Console Links report lists the sites linking to you most and your most linked pages. It's Google's own view of who links to the client, and clients give that more weight than any score you quote.
What's next. One or two lines on which pages you'll target next month and why.

What to leave out

Reports get long because it feels like proof of effort. It rarely reads that way to the client.

Domain rating as a success measure. DR describes the linking site, not your client's results. Include it as a column if clients expect it, but never as the headline.
Total backlink counts from a tool. They move with the tool's crawler as much as with your work, and a client who checks a different tool sees a different number.
Ranking changes you can't connect to a linked page. Claiming credit for every movement on the site invites the obvious question when something drops.

A template you can copy

This is the whole report. One summary, one table, one line on what comes next.

Live URL	Site	Anchor	Target page	Live on	Status
example-publisher.com/article	example-publisher.com	your brand name	/services/	3 Sep	Live
another-site.com/post	another-site.com	descriptive phrase	/guide/	9 Sep	Live

Above the table, three sentences: how many links went live this month, which target pages they supported, and what those pages did in Search Console compared with the previous period. Below it, the plan for next month.

How often to send it

Monthly suits most clients. Weekly reporting on links is usually a mistake, because links take weeks to register and a weekly report mostly shows nothing happening, which reads as nothing working. Our post on how long backlinks take to work has the timeline to share with clients who want updates sooner.

When a link comes down

It will happen eventually. A publisher edits an old post, a site is restructured, a page is deleted. Put it in the report rather than hoping it goes unnoticed, since clients who find a missing link themselves stop trusting the rest of the report.

Mark the row as removed, and note the replacement. Our placements carry a 365-day replacement guarantee: if a link goes down in that window, you tell us within 14 days and we replace it at no cost, so the report can show the problem and the fix together.

Common questions

Should the report be white-labelled?

If you're reselling, yes. The client bought from you, and the report should look like your work. Nothing in the five fields above needs your supplier's name on it.

Should I show the price of each link?

Usually not. The client pays for your service, which includes choosing the sites, the anchors and the pages, not only the placement. Our guide to pricing link building for clients covers how to charge for that work openly.

What if nothing has moved yet?

Say so, and say why: links typically take eight to twelve weeks to register as ranking changes. A report that admits month one is quiet is more believable in month three when things move.

To see the sites before you build a client's shortlist, every publisher and price is on the marketplace, no account needed.