Are you a business owner who is confused between performance marketing and search engine optimization? If you have a dedicated marketing team then they would have told you to go for the right mix of both performance marketing and search engine optimization techniques to give you the best results for your marketing efforts. Performance marketing gives you results from day one and you can fulfill your short term goals with it. However, SEO is a long term marketing initiative that provides the best value for your marketing spend. Out of all the SEO initiatives, backlink building is one that will be slow to yield results. In fact it could even make you wonder How to measure link building success? Don’t worry, read this blog to understand the same.
Link Building is Not a Cheap Process
While the process might be time consuming, the importance of Link building cannot be overstated. The process involves finding the right website and reaching out to the right person asking for a link back. Reaching out to the site admin is only the first step in link building. There are umpteen number of steps in between reaching out and getting a successful link to your website. At times, you might have to pay to get inks from a standard website. In such cases, the link building fee will be higher. However, these efforts are worth their time and money as you will get a steady increase in your traffic. Getting mentioned in top websites in your domain itself can boost your ranking by a huge margin. If you are able to get the right kind of link with the right attributes then your rankings could skyrocket and your traffic will hit an exponential growth.
It is Important to Consider Linking Attributes While Building Backlinks
As a business owner or a marketing team leader, if you are confused as to How to measure link building success, then you need to first understand about the various attributes of link building. Even if you get the backlink from an industry leader, you need to have the right attributes to the links to get the best effect for your website.
A “do follow” link is as good as getting many “no follow” links. When a website links back to your content, the link can have two main attributes. One is a “do follow” link which conveys to the search engine that it is right to trust the content and information on the other website. This happens when the industry leader quotes the information as authentic. However, there could also be scenarios in which the website with high domain authority could call you out for misinformation. Or maybe just inform the readers that there is another website with conflicting information. In such cases, the link will be made with a “no follow” attribute.
So, not all links have the same value for ranking and not all links from the same website have the same authority. In the search engine optimization terms, this is called “link juices” and if a website doesn’t want to share the link juice with you, they can simply mark the link as “no follow”.
Importance of Anchor Texts in the Backlinks
Another important aspect of the links is the anchor text. It is the text or keyword to which your website is linked. When these anchor texts are neutral and do not convey anything about your website, these links don’t have that much weightage in ranking your website. For instance, if you are a website that operates in the domain of digital marketing and if the anchor text is something unrelated like “click here” or “check out” then it does not give any topical or domain relevance to you. In case, if the same website links back to yours as “digital marketing agency” or “digital marketing” then your website will be construed as one that operates in the field of digital marketing. In short there are many attributes that an SEO has to consider for building the backlinks for your website. That is why measuring the success of link building is a cumbersome and time consuming process.
The Success of Link Building Shows in Increased Traffic over a Period of Time
Unlike performance marketing the effect of link building efforts take at least 2 to 3 months to show the result. However, once the results are visible with increased traffic and search appearances, you will have a rising traffic which increases with passage of time. In some extreme cases, the results will be visible only after 5 to 6 months of starting the link building efforts. If some SEOs guarantee you otherwise, then you can be assured that they are using any of the black hat SEO techniques that Google and other search engines penalize in the long run.
Return on Investment Takes Time But is Much Higher than Performance Marketing
In spite of the huge amount of effort associated with the link building process and the costs associated with the project, companies all over the world engage in link building as the return on investment is higher in case of SEO.
Performance marketing i.e., running ad campaigns is an easier way to achieve results in the short term but it is an engine that moves only as long as you spend on ads. However, investing in the SEO process is like investing in shares or bonds. You get an endless supply of dividends as long as you hold them. If you are still not sure, How to measure link building success then look at the change in traffic after stopping the SEO for a month and after stopping performance marketing for a month. The effect of stopping performance marketing will be abrupt as your whole funnel will go empty and dry within a day. However, in case of stopping the SEO efforts, you will still get the same results for months together before your competitor takes the top ranking from yours by actively working in optimization.
So which do you think is the better investment with higher returns?