Everyone (or nearly everyone) in the SEO industry tells you to build links.
Including us.
Links are good for your domain authority, referral traffic, and brand visibility – or at least, that’s what they say.
On the surface, it would seem that link building is always a great investment. Spend money, make money, right?
But does link building always have a positive return on investment (ROI)?
Let’s find out.
Contents
The Basics of Marketing ROI
If you’re reading this article, you probably already know some of the basics of return on investment (ROI). But in case you don’t, ROI is a measurement of how much value you get for a given investment, compared to what you spend on it. It’s a pretty easy concept to understand in the world of investing; if you invest $100, and you make $150 back, you’ve made a profit of $50, which can be measured as a return on investment of 50 percent or 150 percent, depending on the technicalities you follow.
At least hypothetically, any marketing strategy that yields a positive return on investment is worth following. That’s because it makes more money than it costs. However, digital marketers should be on the lookout for strategies with the highest possible ROI, since those are going to be the most strategically valuable investments.
The Challenges of Calculating ROI for Link Building
So now we can turn our attention to ROI for link building, specifically.
Unfortunately, it’s very hard to calculate link building ROI. There are several reasons for this, including:
- Many benefits. Link building is practiced for many reasons; it isn’t constrained by a single benefit or a single variable. As we’ll see in the next section, there are many ways that link building can be valuable for an organization. Only by factoring in all of these benefits can you approach an accurate calculation of link building ROI.
- Incalculable benefits. To make matters even more complicated, there are some benefits of link building campaigns that are practically incalculable. For example, merely having a link to your website present in an article on a prolific publisher can increase your brand visibility. However, it’s not clear exactly how much of a monetary benefit this confers. Additionally, link building plays an important role in supporting your rankings within search engine results, but it’s hard to isolate link building as a variable, since Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is such a complex amalgamation of different factors.
- Indirect benefits. Link building has indirect benefits, in addition to direct benefits. Direct benefits like referral traffic are relatively easy to measure, but it’s much harder to speculate about the persuasiveness of your writing in a guest post featuring a link.
- Long-term link building efforts. Link building campaign accrues value in ways similar to compound interest. Building a single link isn’t likely to help you much, unless you happen to build a link on a very powerful publisher. But if you are consistently building links over several months and years, you’ll start to see snowballing results. This is partially because each link you build has a positive effect on your domain authority, and the higher your authority grows, the easier it will be for your web page to rank across a variety of keywords and phrases. Higher search engine ranking leads to more organic traffic, which is obviously a good thing, and that search traffic can be sustained even if you step off the gas with your link building efforts later on. In fact, link building continues paying dividends indefinitely, for as long as you continue running your site.
- Forecasting issues. This leads us to the final issue, which is difficulty forecasting. Even the best link building experts and SEO tools in the industry don’t have a magic formula to acquire links that are going to be best or how a link building strategy is going to unfold after initial planning. It’s very difficult to project the link building costs, how much effort it’s going to take, and what the final results will be.
The Potential Value of Link Building
However, there are some reasons to be optimistic and even enthusiastic about the potential value of link building. Link building provides value in many respects, including:
- Link juice and authority. Link building is primarily used as a tool to build website’s domain authority. Each link pointing to your website is going to pass link juice to it, supporting its authoritative development. The more high quality links you have, and the stronger those links are, the more powerful these effects become. With a sufficient number and power of links pointing to your website, you’ll have a much easier time rising inorganic rankings and attracting more organic traffic to your website.
- Referral traffic. Another obvious benefit of link building is referral traffic. People who are sufficiently compelled by your links will click them, visiting your website directly. Depending on the publisher and the strength of your material, some of your quality links could potentially generate thousands of new visitors.
- Brand visibility. Your brand will benefit from the additional visibility associated with your link. Even if people don’t search for you or click your links, they’ll see your brand name and associate you with a given subject.
- Credibility and trust. Similarly, your author profile and the quality of your content can support the credibility and trust of your brand. As your guest posts become more prolific and more respected, people are going to hold your brand in higher esteem. This is a hard benefit to calculate objectively, but suffice it to say, your company should reap the rewards of having more people trust you.
- A platform for future digital marketing efforts. Link building has intricate synergies with other digital marketing strategies. If you have a stronger off-site content presence, you’ll have an easier time developing your own content marketing strategies internally. If you build relationships with more publishers, you’ll be able to expand your network of professional connections and potentially get to reach out to even more prominent, powerful outlets. On top of that, your link building efforts can support your social media marketing endeavors. Accordingly, link building can increase the value of nearly all your other digital marketing strategies in some ways.
Why Does It Take So Long to See Link Building Results?
It’s no secret that it takes a long time to start seeing SEO results – and that’s one of the biggest factors holding people back from pursuing a link building campaign of their own. Even if link building has a positive ROI, it can take many months to actually see it.
There are several reasons for this. For starters, each link passes only a small amount of authority to your website, and it takes many different links working together to raise your domain authority to a higher level. In addition, it takes Google search console or Google Analytics some time to calculate those links and incorporate your website fully into search engines.
One key consideration is how many links you need to achieve your desired results, as well as the importance of having a diverse range of referring domains. While link builders often focus on acquiring high quality backlinks, it’s equally important to pay attention to internal linking and ensuring that you have a solid foundation of link equity.
Also remember that on page SEO is about more than just building links. Even if you’re working very hard to see good link building results, the value from your campaign will be contingent upon your attention to other areas, like optimizing for strategically valuable keywords.
In any case, it does take a while to see link building value. But the flip side of that is that link building continues paying dividends indefinitely, and those dividends keep growing proportionally to how much you invest in your link building efforts. Using cheap links can be tempting, but focusing on acquiring quality linking domains will yield better long-term results.
The Complications of Positive Link Building ROI
A positive ROI of link building strategy isn’t guaranteed.
There are several reasons for this, including:
- Link Quality. Link building is a somewhat delicate art. If you aren’t careful, you could build bad backlinks and end up hurting your own authority. Your results are highly contingent upon your ability to practice high quality, ethical link building.
- Scale. Results are also proportional to scale. If you only build one new link each month, it’s going to take years before you see any meaningful momentum. Conversely, if you scale your link building campaign as aggressively as naturally possible, you’ll start seeing results faster and you’ll end up with a higher ROI overall.
- Strategic relevance. Some link building targets are going to be more strategically relevant to your brand than others. This is a difficult formula to calculate, because there are so many variables. For example, the domain authority, topical relevance, recurring traffic, and trustworthiness of your referring domain source plays a heavy impact in how much value that link can give you. At the same time, some of the best link building opportunities are also some of the most expensive and time consuming. You’ll need to conduct a cost benefit analysis, or something similar, for each opportunity if you want to reap the proportionately greatest rewards.
- Competition. Link building ROI partially depends on your competition as well. You might have an excellent link building strategy, as part of a fantastic broader SEO strategy, but if you have multiple aggressive competitors with bigger budgets than yours, you may not reap as much value as you would like. This is one reason why it pays to avoid or mitigate competition whenever you have the opportunity.
- Budget. And of course, you will be somewhat limited by your budget. Spending too little means you won’t be able to generate peak momentum. Too much link building costs mean your ROI equation might become imbalanced.
Best Practices for Supporting Positive Link Building ROI
So what are the best practices for supporting positive link building ROI and increasing that value to the maximum?
- Do your due diligence. Don’t simply jump into link buildings thinking that you can improvise your way through it. Instead, you need to do your due diligence. You need to thoroughly understand what link building is, why it’s valuable, and how it fits into the context of a broader SEO campaign. It’s also important for you to understand your competition, the context of your SEO campaign, and the important ranking factors that can help you to have a successful website.
- Work with a qualified link building agency. Outsourcing your link building has a number of benefits. It can help you save money, get better results, and scale more efficiently. But you shouldn’t just outsource with anyone, as some link building companies use manipulative link building tactics. Instead, work with a qualified link building agency that you can trust to lead you to better results.
- Remain patient. Remember, it takes months to years to start seeing the full fruits of your link building labor. Try to remain patient during the early days, when you’ll be spending lots of time and money without immediately impressive results.
- Keep a close eye on your results. Pay close attention to your performance metrics so you can determine whether your link building campaigns are working or not. Some link building strategies are going to work better for you than others, and it’s going to take some experimentation to figure out which is which.
- Measure all calculable benefits. Try to incorporate all measurable, objective benefits into your calculations. This can be tricky with so many variables on the table, but the more complete your ROI equation is, the better.
- Estimate incalculable benefits. Similarly, it’s worth the effort to estimate incalculable benefits associated with your link building. You may not know exactly how much value you’re getting from the additional brand visibility you support, but you should be able to at least ballpark it.
- Keep optimizing. Finally, make a continued effort to optimize your approach. Fend off your competitors. Find better link building targets. Refine your keywords and strategic aims. Adapt to new circumstances. If you don’t adopt a mindset of continuous improvement, it’s only a matter of time before you start falling behind your top competitors.
Link building ROI isn’t guaranteed.
But it is likely when you follow all the best practices associated with SEO link building.
We offer link building services that can help.
If you’re ready to start a conversation with us, or if you just want a free analysis of your current link building efforts, contact us today!
Tim has spent more than two decades in organic online marketing, working with some of the most well-recognized online brands in scaling their content marketing campaigns.
Connect with Tim on Linkedin & Twitter.
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