In fact, according to Social Media Today, quality links are among the top-ranking factor of the Google algorithm. Yet, over 94 percent of the content online gets zero links! Why does link building matter? Well, the more links your content has, the more authoritative and credible it is in the eyes of Google. This is why merely getting links is not important. Instead, you must strive to attract quality links so that you can leverage their credibility. When it comes to building links, there is an array of strategies you can implement to best improve your chances of attaining backlinks. To understand the importance of each strategy, studying a relevant case study can be handy.
Case Study #1: David Farkas’s Experimental Adventure
Rather than believing the link building case studies already shared by the various experts, David Farkas set out to gauge the effectiveness of link building via creating a website within the health niche.
The Beginning
After the development of the website, Farkas and the team went ahead to develop 26 pieces of pithy and highly optimized content over the course of six months. However, no promotion or link building efforts were made. You can say that the first six months were the “control” environment of the experiment. After the first six months of content development, the team waited another six months to see whether the website will attract any traffic purely on the basis of quality content. Long story short, it didn’t.
The Next Step
After a year of barely any traffic, the team decided to begin its link building campaign. Each decision made was on the basis of the answers to two questions:
- Why would other websites want to link back to my website?
- What are content pieces within my website worthy of being linked to?
This helped the team in identifying what content is most valuable to its target audience. Since the website operating within the health niche, Farkas decided to leverage its specialty as a content attraction – an educational resource. This allowed the content to be precise, profound and hence helpful.
The Results
As a result of the link building efforts, the site witnessed a jump in organic traffic by a whopping 2000 percent! And the website now ranks on the first page for 2245 keywords. Here is a graph that best illustrates the outstanding result of the campaign.
Actionable Strategies to Learn
To sum it up, here are the link building strategies you can learn from this case study.
- Develop valuable content that is linkable in nature.
- Leverage your specialty and your niche. Doing what you know best will ensure that you sound credible.
- Don’t underestimate the power of outreach. Do your research and email all relevant websites about linking back to your site.
The Beginning
Chris began by conducting a site audit of the website, which surprisingly showed promising results. He used one of the many available SEO tools for the audit, which highlighted that the website had:
- Simple yet clean backlinks, with links like directories, guest posts, and PBN.
- Main keyword ranking of page 6.
- Most backlinks that the website had were linking back to the homepage.
All in all, while the website had a long way to go for effective optimization, it was surely on the right track.
The Next Step
The budget allocated for the link building strategy was approximately $5,000. Since the website already had some basic links, during the first month, the SEO team focused on natural-ness building to make the site look more credible. Content types included guest posts and niche edits. Again, all backlinks were directed to the homepage. This reaped favorable results in the first month. Therefore, the team decided to continue on the tactic to build relevance and authority of the homepage for the next three months. In the fourth month, the team added other lesser authoritative links to the mix to help in diversifying the anchor profile – which at that point was mainly based on branded and URL anchors.
