A strong link-building strategy helps improve your rankings and boosts brand visibility. However, if poorly executed, link building can also damage your brand’s reputation and cause Google, Bing, and other search engines to penalize you in search results.
UpCity recently surveyed 500 marketing professionals and found that while one-third of small businesses spend $25,000 or more on link building each month, less than half are very confident in their ability to make it worth their investment. Thankfully, working with an outside agency has been proven to increase the quality and quantity of links, as long as you’re able to find the right partner.
Key findings
- 58% of marketers report that they see the impact of link-building efforts in less than three months.
- Most marketers are using quantity of links (57%), linking domains (53%), and search visibility (46%) as the indicator of link-building success.
- 33% report spending $25,000 or more each month for link building, but 23% of SMBs feel only minimally or not at all confident in their ability.
- The 39% of companies that leverage outside services for link-building report more, higher quality links.
What is link building?
Link building involves establishing trust with other websites that share a common demographic in their target audience with your own, and convincing those websites to include links back to targeted pages on your own website. This helps to establish your brand authority on targeted topics and improve organic visitor traffic and visibility of your page on Google and other search engines.
Link building is valuable, despite the effort and cost
The current digital landscape requires marketing experts to leverage every tactic they can to increase brand visibility, and some of those strategies—Google Ads, social media campaigns, and other pay-per-click (PPC) channels, for example—can be extremely costly and burn through your budget faster than you can adjust your marketing spend.
Link building has far-reaching results over time
With any SEO and digital marketing strategy, it takes time for traffic to respond to link-building initiatives. But we found that 58% of respondents said that it generally takes less than three months for them to realize the impact of those efforts.
Link-building activities result in a surprising level of far-reaching digital marketing impact. Our survey shows that 64% of content marketing professionals can establish at least 20 links on other websites for a given piece of link-building content, while 43% boast 40 or more links for the same type of content.
Seventy-seven percent of respondents who already leverage link building as a strategy feel at least moderately confident in their team’s ability to successfully build quality links, but are also spending significant money and time to perform these tasks.
Leveraging best link-building practices into goals and results
While our respondents largely agree that link-building campaigns should be a part of their overall strategies, our survey revealed a degree of ambiguity in exactly what small businesses want out of these campaigns. While they agree that quantity and quality are important goals for link builders, there were mixed responses on everything from the number of links that make a successful campaign to the most important attributes of a link placement.
Most marketers need at least 20 links to be successful
The quality of the links secured can greatly impact the profitability of a link-building campaign. Success of a campaign is also linked to how central link building is to a business’s overall marketing strategy.
Exchanges, paid links, and content marketing are most common link-building methods
Leveraging a link exchange (when companies seeking to grow their presence online can exchange linking opportunities) can fast-track the success of a link-building campaign. This is the most common method, in addition to paying for link placements and creating content that will attract links.
Most marketers aren’t using the best tools for the job
There’s no shortage of software and technology tools available to marketing experts looking to grow their business using link building. As a tactic, link building is heavily reliant upon data analytics such as tracking brand mentions across the web and having access to site traffic and conversions, as well as identifying the right brands to partner with.
But our data only shows that about a quarter of marketers (24%), on average, are using some type of dedicated link-building tool. Without these or support from an external service using these tools, most marketers aren’t making the most efficient choices.
Lack of tools and expertise hinder link-building success for SMBs
While link-building strategies open the door to a host of benefits and may seem like a fool-proof revenue building tool, that doesn’t mean that link building doesn’t come with its own set of challenges, especially if not approached carefully and without a well thought out plan. Let’s explore some of the mistakes your team should avoid and what your team should keep in mind when putting together a link-building strategy.
Wanting to understand the types of challenges respondents were struggling with, we discovered four specific things in link building were keeping our respondents from feeling confident in their ability to deliver.
Small-business owners and entrepreneurs have the added challenges of limited resources and staffing. Further, the staff that they do have might not have experience with the most up-to-date tools and methods for link building. In this case, you’ll need to bring additional digital resources on board or fold in the services of a freelancer or agency to support your staff’s efforts in order to gradually build up the additional revenue to fully support a well-balanced marketing strategy.
The benefits and challenges of working with an SEO agency for link building
The benefits of having support for your link-building strategy are indicated by our surveyed marketers: Marketers working with an outside agency report better quality links (37%) as well as more of them (32%). Outside agencies have also helped them keep up or outperform competitors (31%), and as an added bonus, 38% say their link-building success helps drive management buy-in to seek outside support for other marketing initiatives.
But the top challenge for marketers is simply finding the right agency in the first place (34%).
Start by looking for agencies that work with your business type, size, and need
Thirty-four percent of respondents feel that it’s difficult to identify the right agency that meets the needs of their business. Vet multiple digital marketing providers by their size and the type of clients they support, as well as the specialty they offer. Use this as a starting list and connect with them to learn more.
Read real reviews to truly gauge provider’s ability to communicate
Thirty-two percent of respondents who work with agencies feel like there is a lack of communication from the agency throughout the service engagement, making it difficult to have control over the results and ensure that the agency is meeting their needs. It’s frustrating to be ignored as deadlines approach, and actual reviews from real clients that are vocal about their experience will help you assess whether they are up to your standards of communication before entering into a contract.
Go in with a clear budget and goal in mind
Twenty-nine percent of those surveyed point to the costs of working with agencies as being too high, to the point that it eats into their profit margin. This defeats the purpose of getting support altogether, but starting conversations with a defined budget and what your company expects allows you to find providers that align with your needs.
Get the most out of your link-building campaigns through an agency partnership
By partnering with the right SEO-focused service providers and using the appropriate combination of link-building tools and content marketing strategies, small businesses can ensure that they’re taking the right approach to link building and generating high-quality backlinks, resulting in a cost-effective, resource-friendly digital marketing strategy.
Methodology
UpCity’s 2023 Link Building Survey was conducted in December 2023 among 500 U.S. marketers to learn more about their link-building efforts. Respondents were screened to confirm that they are marketers who oversee or contribute to link building for their company.