I’m going to make an argument against companies investing their resources in building links before investing in content and title tag optimization in 2023.
Alternatively, I’m going to make an argument for building content that fully satisfies user signals via RankBrain.
Now, SEO people, don’t throw a temper tantrum and eject your computer out the window just yet.
Just bear with me as I make a case.
In order to make this case, we need to discuss a little more about what link building is, the time investment, and the results you might expect.
What is link building?
Link building involves a number of techniques to convince other websites to link to your website. We are not talking about natural “wait and pray” techniques.
The overall objective is to send links to your critical pages that need keyword ranking improvements.
External website links to you → rankings go up → more traffic to the page → more revenue.
If you look up link building techniques, you will find the encyclopedia of techniques. Some of them include:
- Broken link replacement.
- Guest blogging.
- HARO outreach.
- Cold outreach.
- Reverse image search.
- Paying for links (let’s not pretend this isn’t a thing).
What is the success rate?
The tough part of link building is that in order to do it right, you need to invest a TON of resources to see success.
Authority Hacker did an awesome job with a study in which they sent 600,000 emails asking for links, which resulted in 4,300 root domains earned. They used the cold outreach technique.
Based on their math, that’s 140 emails for each root domain earned. Their investment was a success:
But the question is: Do you have the resources to send 600,000 emails?
What’s the time investment needed to earn a link?
Let’s talk about the time needed to generate a single link, then scale up to a level where it will actually make an impact.
In order to generate a single link, a person would need to:
- Identify a target website, using a tool or their brain.
- Find an appropriate page to link from the target website to their website.
- Find a good person to contact.
- Write an email (likely a template).
- Follow up a few times.
- Get the link placed or move on.
After writing this I went through steps 1-4 and got the whole process done in five minutes and thirty seconds.
Assuming I follow up with a brief message two more times per website, it will take me an additional two minutes.
That’s seven minutes and thirty seconds per website outreach.
According to the Authority Hacker study, they earn one root domain for every 140 emails.
If it takes me 7.5 minutes for every three-email sequence to generate a link, then it would take about 350 minutes to generate one root domain (about 6 hours).
So if I hire someone to do nothing but build links 40 hours a week, they should be able to generate about seven quality links per week.
So should you do link building?
Maybe.
It depends on the pages the links are going to, the quality of the sites your link builder is acquiring, the monetary return on the pages being impacted, and whether or not you have enough money to invest in the resources needed.
What we can say for certain is that you need a LOT of time to get it right.
What you might want to think about instead
Link profiles were REALLY, really important years ago. Google was much more mechanical (and understandably a bit more clunky) than it is now.
(And links are a super easy way to quantify stuff.)
X links at Y quality equals Z domain/page value.
Pretty simple stuff.
But at this point, Google isn’t ranking pages based solely on link metrics.
It’s trying to find the very best content that satisfies the reason the person searched for it. In order to do that, it’s measuring:
- Topic coverage: How well the content covers the subtopics for the keyword.
- Dwell time: How long someone spends on the content before returning to search.
- Pogo sticking: How often people visit content, then go back to search results and click on something else.
- Click-through rate: How often searchers click on your content when it shows up in search results.
So in order to do a good job satisfying these new “searcher indicators”, you need to know exactly what people are looking for, and create that content.
And, it might be much faster and more effective to do than building links.
Title tag modification example
We were bouncing around position one and two for “eczema over the counter treatment” and were sporting a fairly low CTR.
We used the RankBrain Auditor Tool to modify the title tag from “Eczema & Over-the-Counter Treatment” to “Top 5 Eczema Over-the Counter Treatments.”
The result was a nearly doubled CTR and clicks.
Total time commitment: 10 minutes
Result: Nearly double the clicks
Content optimization example
Another easy way to send non-link signals is by writing more in-depth, thorough content than your competitors.
This one is a double-whammy: it sends signals that the content has more topic coverage than previously, and when searchers land on the page they will likely “dwell” longer, sending another positive RankBrain signal.
Here is an example of a piece of content we re-optimized:
Oh, and we took position one with only 56 root domains, compared to position two’s 217, and lower UR rating than all.
Total time commitment: 2 hours
Result: 25 clicks per day to 250
Content and title tag optimization example
In this example, we modified both the content and title tag using the RankBrain Auditor Tool.
Here were the results:
And here are the root domains for the top ten pages:
We are in position one with a lower DR, UR, and root domains than any of the top pages, by far.
Would building links have been as/more effective than taking a content optimization approach?
How much time would it have taken to even match my competitors’ link profiles? Months? Years?
Total time commitment: 2 hours
Result: 3 clicks per day to 100
Conclusion
Yes, link building certainly can be effective.
It’s a strong ranking signal, and people can and do effectively build links all the time.
But the question is whether or not it’s right for your particular situation.
The two questions you need to ask are:
- Are you already re-optimizing your content, title tags, and on-page experience?
- Do you have enough resources to justify the time it will take to build links correctly?
It seems to me that searcher signals and content depth are becoming increasingly important.
And I’m not saying that everyone should stop building links.
But I am saying that you should probably optimize your content and title tags first, because it’s faster, cheaper, and potentially more effective.