How Long Does It Take for Link Building to Pay Off?

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Link Building

The short answer is that it doesn’t have any specific timeline. Reaping good results from search engine optimization (SEO) could take time, depending on many factors.

Still, many marketers and SEO experts claim that it can be anywhere between two and five months. Usually, the impact of optimizing your pages becomes visible within six months.

The good news is that some elements help hasten the outcomes you’re looking for. Let’s talk about how these elements affect your SEO results. 

Link Building

Factors That Can Speed Up SEO Outcomes

Whether you handle SEO in-house or as an agency partner, fast results give you a competitive edge. You may feel frustrated by factors that slow you down or seem out of your control.

Understanding how certain factors affect SEO outcomes helps you make adequate adjustments to speed up SEO results. 

1. Domain Authority (DA)

According to Digital Authority Partners (DAP), one of the most essential elements in SEO is domain authority (DA).  

DA is a metric designed by Moz that tells you how likely your site will rank in search engines, especially Google. Using specific calculations, it generates a score between 0 and 100. 

The higher the figure, the better your chances of dominating the search results.

DA uses various factors to come up with a score:

  • Quality and number of your inbound links
  • Age of your domain
  • Quality of website content
  • Overall website performance

DA is a good way to assess the value, credibility, and trustworthiness of a website. If your score is high, then other website owners and marketers will want to link back to you.

2. No-Follow Links 

A no-follow is a code that tells search engine spiders, bots, or crawlers to ignore the link. To better understand this point, let’s touch a bit on crawlability and how it relates to link building.

Crawlability is the ability of search engine bots to reach and index pages on your site. When it visits your website, it scans for keywords, so it knows what queries you should appear for. 

It also checks for links and then follows where they go. All these will then help determine your page rank.

If your link is a no-follow, it doesn’t receive any link juice. The likes of Google will not include it in determining your ranking.

Plenty of no-follows equal potential lower exposure on search engines since you won’t rank well. It might also tell Google that your page may not be as authoritative as you think. 

3. Content Quality

One of the significant factors that can impact your link-building strategy is content quality. There are three reasons why.

  • Others are cautious when linking to sites with poor or thin content. “Attaching” themselves to pages with no valuable information hurts their brand and credibility. Mediocre sites may also have a low DA score.
  • Many Google updates hit bad-quality copies. The latest update covers helpful content. It targets those with rehashed data like what Google Panda did. If you don’t produce compelling landing pages and articles, your traffic and ranking can drop. 
  • Amazing content becomes worth sharing. When you have awesome content, people are more likely to share your links and visit your site longer. Google loves this engagement signal since it improves the user experience.

4. Technical SEO

Technical SEO is an underrated technique that can do wonders for your link-building objectives. It looks into your website’s architecture, including navigation, sitemaps, and indexing. It also analyzes the quality of your backlinks, determining whether they are broken, dead, or ridden with errors.

It affects your ability to build links in two ways:

  • Good technical SEO enhances site crawlability and indexability. Using a sitemap and improving website architecture makes it easier for search engines to visit and index your website. Increased visibility in the search results also boosts your chances of attracting inbound links.
  • It helps repair bad or broken links. Conducting a technical SEO audit reveals issues that prevent you from ranking well and getting more links. With the information, you can decide on your next steps. You can fix them, redirect your 404s, or remove the page entirely.

5. Page Type

Not all pages are worth linking to. Discerning online marketers and webmasters know that. For example, they link less to those that sound too commercial because of the many ads. They also skip your Contact Us and About Us pages unless they believe these contain valuable information.

Meanwhile, Semrush has shared some of the most popular content types, which can bring you some link juice:

  • Video. Content with video ranked first for a good reason: most people are visual learners. We can pick up, and retain, information faster when texts come with images or videos. It also helps break down long content, adds more insights, and contains beautiful graphics or animations worth sharing.
  • Blog post. The US audience seems to read blogs more than e-mails and newsletters. These articles are mostly evergreen, meaning they don’t go out of style or relevancy. You can also quickly update the information you share to stay on top of the trends and changes in your industry.
  • Success stories. Case studies are one of the most effective pieces you can write. It’s a chance for your potential clients to see that you’re credible and have helped other businesses achieve their goals. You can share your latest win on social media or your website with an embeddable widget.

6. Missed Opportunities

Sometimes you can end up with great link bait but fail to get the attention it deserves. That’s because you’re not thinking outside the box enough.

Here are some common missed opportunities for link building:

  • Resource pages. Many websites feature a list of helpful resources in their niche. Get featured on one of these lists by submitting your site or reaching out to the webmaster.
  • Infographics. Who doesn’t love a good infographic? You can collaborate with other bloggers and websites in your industry to create an infographic that includes a link back to your site.
  • Brand mentions. Mentioning your brand in an article without linking to your site is a missed opportunity. Use Google Alerts to track when someone mentions your brand or website, so you can quickly reach out and ask for a link.
  • Broken links. If a website links to a resource that’s no longer available, you can reach out and offer your own content as a replacement.
  • Internal linking. Linking to your website’s content in your blog posts or articles is a great way to increase traffic and pass on link juice to those pages.

Summing Up

Getting the results you want from your link-building strategies demands patience and perseverance. 

Fortunately, if you do them correctly, you have a better chance of ranking for your chosen keywords, generating traffic, raising your conversion rate, and having a digital marketing technique that works long-term.

If you need help, you can also rely on capable SEO agencies that can create a link-building plan that matches your needs, target audience, and marketing objectives.

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