State of Link
Building | 2024

It’s really important to look at the value of link building (or digital PR) beyond just link numbers. Long gone are the days of just reporting on the number of links. You need to be looking at the quality and relevance of your links. And I don’t just mean the DR of a link, you need to be reporting on things such as the number of links into target pages, the anchor text, the relevancy of a link, and much more.

You also need to ensure that the links you are securing are driving real growth in the SERPs. You should also be reporting on wider metrics such as organic traffic, organic revenue, and keyword rankings.

It’s important to have conversations with your clients about their wider business goals and ensure your digital PR strategy is going to support them in hitting these goals.

I educate clients that the value of link building can accelerate their existing SEO campaigns. Quality isn’t high DR, but relevancy and traffic. Those links build trust with Google. It will WANT to rank you higher. Better relevant rankings mean more traffic… and more leads!

I think the best way to educate stakeholders on the importance of link building is by showing them what their competition is doing.

That could be their commercial competitors or SERP competitors. What is causing the top 3 to rank in the top 3 for their target keywords? Usually link building has a role to play and by demonstrating that you can show people the value of doing it.

Use a tool like Ahrefs to identify SERP competitors for your client's target keywords and analyze the backlink profiles of the top-ranking pages against the client's.

For new clients, I show how many links competitors have: total links, types of links, and how many new links they’re gaining per month.

For current clients, I show the effectiveness of links monthly: how it affected the position, page performance, etc.

Showing the dependence of results on links, clients better understand the processes and feel free to increase link budgets.

We often describe links (and link building) as acquiring online 'votes of confidence.' While many want to cut corners here, a slow, strategic plan always wins. Choose a link-building method that makes sense for your brand. 

We love podcasting because links are relevant, valuable to readers, and typically from authoritative partners — plus, you get extra exposure being on the podcast. Once a client understands the value and ROI of establishing those partnerships, creating content is 10x easier (and more impactful).

We speak to the importance of E-E-A-T and how backlinks work to communicate those Trust and Authority from reputable sources.

Third-party metrics like DR have their place as one of the many metrics to take into consideration when evaluating the success of your link-building efforts, but it certainly shouldn't be the only factor and it also shouldn't be an important factor. You're relying on third-party tools to notice your link-building efforts, which depending on what industry you work in and how high-traffic your site is, might be somewhat correct, or could be totally off. Instead, you want to look at the effects of the link building itself, not just a metric put together by an SEO tool provider.

In terms of one’s own DR, no. There are plenty of better metrics by which to measure link building effectiveness that marketers have more control over: position 1-10 rankings, impressions, and even conversion rates to indicate the new traffic you’re driving is valuable (and therefore you’re building links on the right types of websites).

In terms of your target sites’ DR, then yes, to an extent. I would build links from a relevant domain in spite of low DR, but I wouldn’t build links from a high DR domain in spite of irrelevance. That being said, just because Google doesn’t endorse domain rating doesn’t mean it’s a useless number. I like using DR to prioritize (or disqualify) opportunities if I’ve pre-determined multiple prospects are equally relevant to my business.

The difficulty of building backlinks tends to correlate with the difficulty of ranking in a certain industry. 

For many in local SEO, a few simple links can have a big effect. For example, a link insertion on another local site and some basic citation links can get many local businesses onto page 1 for their target keyword (assuming everything else is optimized accordingly).

The same can't be said for something more competitive like SaaS.

Although there are exceptions. 

For example, marketing and SEO are competitive fields to rank in. However it’s easier to build a personal brand in these fields in respect to other industries. And a strong brand = natural backlinks. 

Of course, it takes a lot of work to build a personal brand, but it’s a big industry with lots of other marketers conscious of E-E-A-T. And so many marketers and writers want to quote other experts in their content. Whereas other industries that are ‘less SEO & content Savvy’ are less likely to do this.

The financial industry proves to be one of the most notoriously difficult to build links for — and for a good reason. Whether you’re launching a new campaign or sending expert commentary, financial journalists are always going to be extremely sceptical about publishing your data, as they go through a very extensive process of verifying it. Especially when writing about stocks, journalists need to be careful to give impartiality and an equal voice to multiple spokespeople whilst also making sure to provide the public with enough information.

One of the easiest industries to build links for is definitely travel. It’s very easy for a PR professional to create a good data set for a journalist who might not have the time to do the same. Especially because there are so many key dates in the year relevant to the travel industry — for example, during peak summer travel times, Christmas, or when people search for ‘hot holidays’ in January, it is easy to find a newsworthy angle to every travel piece we want to write.

On the one hand, B2B sites are particularly difficult to build links for because you’re limited in brand awareness, and therefore leverage, if you’re going after non-paid links. On the other hand, B2C has the challenge of deep customer overlap. You could argue that multi-vertical retailers compete with every online store on the internet. This can deter potential partners who would otherwise have relevant links to offer you.

Ultimately, B2B folks who can find a common audience in many non-competing or ‘complementary’ sites are probably having the best time. But I don’t envy those who build links for sites like Amazon or Temu — assuming active link building is still important to them.

In a SaaS context, typically building links is easiest when your brand is in a well-developed vertical such as Sales tech, Mark tech, HR tech... etc. due to the larger amount of actively involved brands invested in their SEO with who you can build relationships with.

On the flip side, industries that are hard to build links for would be examples such as CBD & Crypto. Even though these niches aren't "illegal" or anything, they are often associated with a "grey" area.

This makes acquiring links much more difficult as often these verticals are on the "ban list" in terms of vetting criteria of internal SEO teams.

Remember why link building impacts SEO in the first place.

Google invented the original PageRank algorithm to measure popularity. If something is popular, why shouldn't it rank better?

As time went on and link brokering became a black market industry, Google had a problem with its own design. SEOs were exploiting the PageRank model.

Fast-forward to today, Google has taken the "popularity" concept and made its algorithms far more complex to obtain more precise signals. They filter out noisy, spammy, non-editorial links.

Links are still a primary ingredient in the soup. Still, Google understands that a local or small company will accrue a lower volume and quality of links than a national company. Google does not look at the same signals across verticals. As a local or small business, you must focus on links that show your importance in your local region or demonstrate your niche expertise.

But what if your company has no specialty? No superior value? No expertise? What if you have nothing that can earn a link on its merit? From an end-user perspective, you shouldn't be ranking anyway.

Smaller brands can beat larger companies by focusing their efforts on specific topics that are most relevant and where they feel they can add the most value. 

All too often brands try and be all things to all people. Go narrow and deep, reinforce your E-E-A-T with consistency via content and links, do that and you can outperform larger companies with relative ease. We've done this countless times over the years.

Anyone with subject matter expertise and first-hand experience can establish thought leadership on social media. It takes time, but it doesn't require big budgets or teams behind it. 

The press and the rest of the niche publishers prefer to feature experts. And big enterprises and corporations are notoriously bad at having senior leaders establish thought leadership (for various reasons). This is only one way in which your small business can benefit. The benefits go beyond just SEO or links — you can attract customers.

There's no reason why small businesses can't compete with larger companies when it comes to great link-building and digital PR tactics — in fact, small businesses often possess an advantage over lots of big businesses. 

Small businesses are much more agile and have the ability to move a lot quicker when it comes to getting sign off on ideas. Generally, smaller businesses have less 'red tape' meaning there are fewer people working in that business who need to sign off an idea or PR comment, allowing smaller companies to jump on trends in the media a lot quicker. 

From reacting to industry changes to jumping on a trend which is circulating in popular media, small businesses are much better equipped to act quickly and beat competitors to a journalist’s inbox. Not only this, but smaller businesses often also have fewer protective guidelines around brand voice, and the types of conversations the brand can be contributing to — allowing small companies to offer more direct advice and opinion on relevant topics, which journalists love, and adds real value to reading audiences too.  

In addition, lots of small businesses also operate in more niche industries, or offer one singular service or product to consumers, versus big companies who offer many different products or services at once. This is beneficial because small businesses can hone in on their specialized expertise, and use these expert insights to participate in industry conversations and help consumers. 

For example, creating an expert-led report that contains specialized insights and internal data is a great way to gain links from consumer and trade publications alike. Or for a more reactive approach, small businesses could pass comment on recent industry or wider economic changes and explain exactly how this relates to and impacts their industry and customers. 

Journalists are always looking for different kinds of specialist experts, and by leaning into your business' niche you can land high authority links on relevant publications, place your challenger brand name in publications larger company competitors are usually seen in, and garner both major brand awareness as well as mega SEO impact.

Small businesses can compete with larger companies by creating linkable resources and investing in original research. Think of assets like infographics, small-scale niche-specific industry reports, and user research. Another successful tactic is building web-hosted tools, that are task-specific, product/service/brand-relevant, and highly useful to users. Such tools, when hosted on their websites, can be great for link acquisition and are often easier for small companies to execute without the long and hefty approval procedures, which typically burden larger organizations from publishing innovative solutions on their sites.

Small businesses may not be able to compete with the total number of links large businesses can generate, but they can compete on relevance. Focusing on building links at the local level through local affiliate news and community sites, in addition to relevant topical websites, can help smaller sites rank for the most relevant searches especially when there's overlap with the searcher's location.

I’ve got a few tips for those who are new to SEO and link building:

For low cost and high ROI, prioritize unique linkable assets like infographics and surveys.

Create free tools to help your ICP: Tax calculators, crypto converters, etc.

Create partnerships and long-term relationships with key players in your niche to help with content distribution.

Avoid wasting your budget on cheap guest posts that will probably damage your rankings.

Focus your budget on quality over quantity, one great digital PR campaign every 3 months is way better than buying mediocre guest posts every month.

Link building itself isn't a strategy, it's an outcome of many bespoke workstreams working together to drive relevant coverage and natural links to a website. Large companies can sometimes just rely on their market authority to drive natural links to their content, but for a small brand, this may not be feasible unless you're incredibly niche.

Keep up with your link hygiene and broken link reclamation, yes. But also make sure you're creating new, fresh, and interesting content to outreach to the media. Ensure you have a hook — for instance, a unique view on relevant data or new self-sourced data even, so that journalists and content creators will have much more reason to feature you in their content. 

The main things are: keep trying new techniques, learn from what doesn't work, and continuously improve your process. Link building and digital PR is a long-term workstream, but your results will pay dividends down the line!

Small businesses need to focus on relevancy and expertise. Every business will have experts within the company who have unique insights that will enhance their audience's experience and add value to their decision-making process. Utilize this expertise and share it in relevant press and online publications.

The great thing about this approach is that it can be done on any level and many big businesses overlook their own expertise in favor of more 'attractive' prospects like buying links. Champion your own expertise and you'll be onto a winner!

I think you need to use the layers of approval that larger businesses often have as a tool for reactive digital PR link building. If you as a small business owner have a response to provide to a journalist quickly, then do it!

Larger businesses often don't have the luxury of being able to provide a quick reaction without layers of sign-off, so you can use a rapid turnaround approach to your benefit for both journalist requests and reactive digital PR link building.

Small businesses can move at faster speeds than larger companies, so they should experiment with different methods to see what works best and what gives them the best ROI.

Let's cut to the chase. Yes, link building is the most thankless, arduous task in the SEO game, and I'll give you 3 reasons why:

1. Time sink with a gambling twist. You’ll pour endless hours into crafting emails and churning out quality content, for what? The hope that someone bites and gives you that backlink. It’s a colossal time investment, and the ROI is a roll of the dice. You’re at the mercy of Google’s whims. One day your backlink is the golden ticket; the next, it’s as if it never existed. The unpredictability of Google’s affection for your link-building efforts turns it into a high-stakes gamble with your time and sanity.

2. Quality over quantity is almost a fantasy. Google’s preaching about quality backlinks. So, you’re expected to play detective, hunting down these reputable sites willing to link back to you. You need to court and woo these sites, hoping they deem you worthy. It’s a mad dash for digital approval that’s sometimes exhausting.

3. Penalty roulette. Step out of line just a tad, and BAM, Google’s ready with a penalty, knocking your site down a peg or twenty. It’s like walking through a minefield blindfolded. One wrong step, one link deemed “unnatural,” and your site's visibility is obliterated. You’re constantly playing it safe, but even then, there are no guarantees. The rules of the game are changing with the wind, and it’s your job to keep up or face the consequences.

So, there you have it. Link building is the most difficult part of SEO because it’s a relentless, often futile, endeavor that can drive you mad. It’s a necessary evil in this line of work, one we all love to hate.

Building bad links, no. Building high-quality, authoritative, and relevant backlinks, yes. It boils down to the quality of backlinks you're working to acquire. I only aim for ones coming from legitimate websites, that are relevant to my business, and where my ideal customer would be reading. Those are difficult backlinks to land and they take relationship building, intensive research, and consistent efforts. Once you build enough of them though, it gets easier and you can start to see how a specific process can work.

I don't believe so. It's clear that link building has evolved over the last few years and has become more complicated. It's no longer a simple 2+2 with a checklist from a manual. But, what SEO practice isn't complex these days? It's true that it might be more difficult to identify and achieve quick wins, and there is generally more uncertainty, but there is also a methodology that we can follow.

However, I think that link building has certain unique characteristics that set it apart from other disciplines within SEO. For example, I believe it requires a combination of analytical and creative skills to develop a truly effective strategy. That can be more challenging to achieve. Additionally, it might be an area with more uncertainty, less information, and fewer tools that provide quantifiable data. This complicates matters. Finally, I believe the negative aura that always seems to follow it doesn't help, making it a more closed field than other areas.

I'm not sure! I've never been a tech-savvy SEO, so I can't say if those tasks are harder or easier.

BUT, I do hear from many on-site SEOs that mastering the basics makes a huge difference. In link building, though, basic methods get copied, scaled, and eventually die off.

Following that idea, link building might be tougher because you often need to find creative tweaks or change your approach completely.

Plus, you're dealing with real humans like editors and journalists, which adds another layer of complexity.

Link building is definitely one of the most difficult parts of SEO, especially for new websites or one without a well-established brand. Quality links can be hard to find when the "easy" opportunities are often just link farms in disguise and smaller publishers, which can be more likely to provide links to their content, have often shut down or are bought up by massive media companies where links can be harder to come by. 

It can also be hard to prove the impact on ROI for link building which can make it difficult to get buy-in and investment in it.

I'd recommend trading or swapping links, assuming you have a moderate-to-high domain authority. Link building can be done organically, and sometimes you can build links from folks who don't know the value you're getting. But typically it's a transaction for both parties. So don't be shy about giving a link of value in return for your own link. And if you find a great partner, work with them repeatedly.

I recommend pitching guest posts for relevant websites in your niche. It's still one of the most popular link-building techniques where you place trustworthiness and brand exposure in the first place. Prioritize quality over quantity of backlinks, do keyword research for every topic pitch, analyze the brand's blog, and suggest value-added content.

I guess that outreach would be the #1 strategy in general for getting good links (unlike buying bad links). Like creating some high-quality/sharable content and reaching out to relevant sites individually with your content, or targeting websites and approaching them with content suggestions that will add value to their readers.

I'll acknowledge my bias here because I'm a content-led SEO expert, but creating the best, most well-researched content in your industry or niche is the best way to organically earn links in a sustainable, lasting manner. Do research, create new data and insights, and the links will come. 

Does this take more time? Yes. But I've worked for sites that have done incredibly well without a backlink strategy at all if their content-led SEO is superb. Good content, and sharing it through multiple channels, earns high-quality links in its own right. Through this method, I've had high-authority sites in competing spaces approach me for organic link swaps. 

A secondary approach to creating good content is healthy, quality digital PR in your industry niche, along with manual outreach to other site owners for link swaps in your topic. Concentrate on earning quality links with sites related to your site's area of topical authority, rather than focusing on quantity.

My biggest recommendation for newcomers isn't about tools or tactics, it's about people! As SEOs and marketers, we can get so caught up in the technical stuff that we forget to consider the human behind the computer. Make it a point to connect and network with content writers, who are often the unsung heroes of getting meaningful backlinks. Engage with them in a way that shows you're trying to help them AND that you know what you're talking about.

Content writers are hit with many AI-generated pitches from fake subject matter experts. When you engage with writers and actually provide what they are looking for, you'll stand out and they will appreciate you. Not only will they be more likely to include your backlink, but they may continue to reach out to you in the future.

In short, connect with content writers, be a nice person, and make their job easier by providing the information they want to include!

It's not necessarily a link-building technique, but my advice for newcomers is this: before prioritizing anything else, put effort into creating content that people would naturally want to reference and link to. Creating high-quality, unique content lays a foundation for attracting links organically over time.

At Databox, we've found that original research we conduct and publish on our blog works wonders. People find our content valuable because of data and insights they can’t find anywhere else, and link to our reports naturally, without the need for constant outreach.

We're aware of industry players using AI and getting a better output (more opportunities identified, more comms sent) but worse results. LLMs are 80% there, but outreach is one of those things where the human touch and the remaining 20% is the difference between getting a link in one of every 10 attempts and getting a link in one of every 500.

We're leveraging AI in other ways, but definitely not in the actual outreach, and despite what other people might be saying to investors, clients and the industry, when looking at what other players are really doing (through talent interviews and industry gossip), we don't see AI being used for actual outreach successfully. Just as with content creation, it might have made some things faster, but the actual output is not anywhere near where it should be.

AI will revolutionize the industry by the end of this year. Fractl's product, LedeTime, exemplifies how a decade's worth of industry expertise can be distilled into an AI system that streamlines list building, pitch strategy, and outreach, rivaling the capabilities of a Digital PR Executive in minutes. This technological advancement allows professionals to allocate more time to critical human-centric tasks such as journalist relationship building and strategic campaign planning, while simultaneously scaling their number of effective targeted pitches and placements. Early adopters of such AI tools are set to outperform their competition by leveraging these efficiencies to gain a pronounced advantage in the market.

We don’t focus a lot on that. Unless nofollow links are from very high authority websites and might bring not only SEO link juice but also brand awareness and traffic.

In my experience, the volume of links matters much less than the quality of links. "Quality," in this case describes the referring domain's traffic, domain authority, topical authority (this one is often missed, but has a huge impact), and the anchor text you use.

For example, we had a page skyrocket in traffic based on four links. I also want to point out that the page itself was set up for success: optimized for SEO and helpful content, strong foundation of interlinking, etc.

I guess that outreach would be the #1 strategy in general for getting good links (unlike buying bad links). Like creating some high-quality/sharable content and reaching out to relevant sites individually with your content, or targeting websites and approaching them with content suggestions that will add value to their readers.

For businesses, whether you are agency-side or in-house, the focus shouldn’t be about the number of links but rather the quality of links.

If you gain 1,000 backlinks but all of them are PBNs or come from spammy websites (which Google has started penalizing heavily with the last 3 HCU updates), none of them will make an impact on your SEO efforts.

Whereas if you were only able to gain one high-quality backlink through digital PR or even HARO link building, and the article is niche-relevant, has good traffic coming towards it, and is dofollow — that has a much greater impact than buying 1,000s of links.

Additionally, link building shouldn’t be a siloed, individual practice — it NEEDS to tie in with your technical, on-page/onsite SEO strategies, too.

Link building should supplement everything you’re doing on your website, NOT be an individual strategy or the sole strategy.

So to evaluate whether the links acquired were successful in achieving your goals, think of the following:

1. Is it niche relevant? (E.g. the context of the link — if you’re a healthcare website getting a link writing about cars and automotive, there’s no correlation)

2. Is the website credible?

3. Does the website have good-quality content? NOT purely AI-generated, NOT keyword stuffed?

4. Does the website you’re linking from have good traffic?

5. What is the anchor text used? Does it match with your campaign goals? Does it read naturally?

6. Is the link dofollow? If not, is there an option to change it to a dofollow?

Most people talk about DR/DA, but these are just vanity metrics. They’re good at reviewing websites at a glance but as SEOs, you need to dig deeper and analyze the questions above to see if a backlink you’re gaining is truly valuable to achieve your goals.

To gauge the number of links necessary to achieve your objectives, you need to examine your competitors' tactics.

 We analyze competitors' backlinks profiles and identify the gaps between competitors' and our backlinks. Also, we utilize the "Link intersection" tool to see which sites are linking to your competitors but not to you. And voila! We estimated the number of links we should secure to achieve our goals! 

But the most important thing to mention —  while quantity is important, prioritize the quality and relevance of your backlinks. We always concentrate on securing links from authoritative sites within our niche to bolster our rankings and attract valuable traffic.

The number of links you need to rank for a highly competitive keyword depends on the competitive landscape for that keyword, and you should establish a benchmark by looking at the current top competitors. 

You can apply this to your SEO projects by using a tool like the Ahrefs toolbar to analyze the backlink profile for the top-raking results in the SERP for a keyword you want to optimize. 

On top of this, consider that if your site has generally lower authority than your competitors (a “David versus Goliath” optimization), you may require more high-quality referring domains to see results in a more mature competitive landscape.

Of course, links have a positive effect on a site’s search performance, but with a couple of caveats.

First, they need to come from a quality site that’s not a link farm specifically designed to sell links.

Second, that site should also be highly relevant to the topic of your target page and preferably the overall site. These two factors will maximize the beneficial effect of link building.

It’s definitely possible to get on the front page without deliberately building links. I’ve done this myself.

The trick is:

1) target low-competition keywords where you can see sites with low DR/DA already ranking on page one.

2) study the keyword’s search intent in detail so your article gives the searcher exactly what they want and does it quickly. None of those long-winded introductions! Aim to answer the search intent better than any other competitor on the front page.

Links play an important role in building a brand, creating a positive reputation, getting people to talk about your brand and product, and sending positive trust signals towards your website — all key contributors to your website's performance. 

What you say about yourself can help to start the trust narrative, but what other people say about you through content on their site which links back to you or cites your experts, plays a significant role in building those all-important E-E-A-T signals and showcasing positive reputation signals across the board.

I'd always start with on-site SEO: content, technical, and on-page. If you aren't matching search intent with great content of the right type, no number of links will save you. 

But sometimes, you've exhausted everything you can do and all the boxes are checked, and you're still not in the top 3 positions. If this is the case across the board and you don't have 50% of your target keywords in the top 10 positions, you'll need to build links.

 In this case, you'll see rankings move up much faster, and you'll thereby increase CTR, traffic, and hopefully revenue if you've chosen the right topics. We've managed to get to the first page without building links, but it's usually earlier on when we're not yet going for very competitive topics.

As someone who's been in SEO and ranking my own as well as my client's Shopify websites I can say that the links are more of an amplifier than anything else.

Let's say you have great content, on-page SEO, technical SEO, and lots of pages targeting high-converting keywords that match search intent.

Pair that with some GREAT referral traffic from paid media efforts, and you'll see that the need for building links, isn't as high as everyone makes it out to be...

But this mainly applies to low-medium competition niches.

When you enter highly competitive SEO niches, you'll quickly notice that the game is quite a lot different and that it ultimately all comes down to the quality of your backlinks.

In regards to what kind of links you want to build, I'd suggest you should always try and build links that are VERY difficult for others to get/recreate, as that will allow you to have a bulletproof SEO strategy, making it much more difficult for your competitors to replicate.

I believe links are used across the board with other systems. Part of the concept of E-E-A-T I believe has to do with links and I am convinced there is a link-based element to the recent HCU classifier. From my observations, sites with poor branding or too few links seem to have suffered whereas other sites with a stronger link profile and brand have excelled with very similar content.

As to not ranking with links, it's definitely been possible (if not very easy) until recently, with sites using programmatic SEO to target longtail searches, a lot of the time with AI — however, this is exactly the type of site we're seeing Google aggressively go after.