[Estimated read time: 18 minutes]
SEO futurists have predicted the death of links as a ranking signal for years on end. That hasn’t happened yet, and I'm happy to say that link building as a practice has greatly evolved.
But rapid change often creates confusion, and there doesn't yet seem to be a strong consensus on how link building teams should be constructed, where they fit in the marketing plan, and how much ought to be invested into link acquisition.
To bring more clarity and transparency to a complicated pillar of SEO, I'm proud to present to you the 2016 State of Link Building Survey results!
Let’s be frank: link building has had a volatile history filled with spam, tricks, and get-rich-quick schemes. When Google introduced the first version of Penguin in April of 2012, the practice of link building received a severe shock to the system.
“Google Trends analyzes a percentage of Google web searches to figure out how many searches were done over a certain period of time.” - Trends Help
In the minds of many, content marketing has been the modern replacement to link building. To me, this is a flawed perspective, as content marketing has many goals beyond links; link acquisition is a highly ancillary product amidst the primary goals of content marketing. Links also serve a different set of goals than content marketing.
The process was supposed to look something like this, from Rand’s Search Love deck.
The manual promotion, the deliberate intention of earning all of the links you deserve via manual outreach, is what seems to have been missing in many marketing strategies of late.
If you’re interested in learning about how we promoted this survey, check out the methodology section below. Otherwise, hit the jump link to get straight to the questions and results. You can access this year’s raw data sheet here. I encourage you to create your own graphs/analysis with Google Sheets (Insert > Chart...) and share them in the comments! First make sure to create a copy (File > Make a copy…).
Take me straight to the survey results!
Methodology
I have immensely enjoyed the fascinating data presented in the 2013 and 2014 annual link building surveys. 2015 passed without a survey, and I felt compelled to gather updated data from the industry at large. It’s interesting to note we had 435 responses to this year’s survey, as compared to 315 total in 2014.
It’s also important to mention that this survey doesn't contain the exact same questions presented in 2014’s survey. Link building has been a constantly evolving landscape, and our survey has attempted to evolve with it.
Check out Moz’s link building category page and skim through the posts of 2015 and 2016. There are some very smart, very legitimate evergreen digital marketing strategies in there, as opposed to “the next big trick” or which tactic is on the chopping block for overuse.
As such, the questions in this year’s survey were designed to reflect link building’s evolution into a more legitimate and integrated marketing channel.
I’m not the David Bowie of the SEO world, so I knew I’d need help promoting the survey to gather an acceptable sample size. To that end I reached out to the founder of Credo, John Doherty. He’s a fellow who has bestowed plenty of wisdom upon me with his digital writings, and has conducted similar research on the average cost of SEO consultation recently. He agreed to co-author this post with me, and aid in promotion.
Beyond emailing our own newsletter subscribers of Credo and P1P, we spoke with a few people in an attempt to increase our reach with the survey. To each one of these individuals we want to express our sincere gratitude. Thank you!
- Rand Fishkin tweeted out the survey several times over a couple of weeks
- Dharmesh Shah shared the survey on his twitter feed
- BuzzStream emailed their customer base, thanks to Paul May
- Anneliese Sparks shared the survey out through the SEMrush twitter account
- Brian Dean of Backlinko tweeted the survey
- Mary Green, community manager of Inbound.org, stickied the LB survey
- Online Geniuses shared the survey out in an email newsletter, thanks to Adam Steele
Without any further ado, let’s jump into the data.
Who took the survey?
As expected, a majority of survey respondents were agencies. Link building is still typically an agency offering, despite predictions of link building moving in-house or to PR teams. In our 2016 survey, the percentage of Agency respondents versus In-House has actually increased.
27% of respondents in 2016 selected In-House SEO compared to 30% in 2014 that responded as “SEO Manager or head of SEO”.
However, this year we segmented our In-House answer selections to include "In-House Content Marketer" and "In-House PR." In 2014, the only option potentially relevant to In-House professionals was SEO Manager, so it isn’t quite a direct comparison. That said, we had more available answer selections for In-House than before, and Agency still won out.
It’s interesting that In-House PR received so few responses. There have been many blog posts proclaiming the need for migration of link building responsibilities to PR departments, but in my experience that hasn't been reflected in reality.
In an overwhelming majority of link building campaigns I’ve been involved in, link acquisition is simply not at the forefront of the minds of PR agencies. While successful PR does create some of the highest-quality link opportunities, most of them are left on the table; they still require manual outreach to convert to links.
It’s possible our promotional efforts are the reason we didn’t reach many in the in-house PR role. However, in my experience collaborating with in-house PRs, it is very rare to encounter someone who focuses on building links.
What size of companies are actively involved with link building?
This was a “Select as many as apply” answer set, but with a majority of respondents selecting 1–200 employees, link building appears to still reign supreme in the SMB market (although it's worth noting that 10% of respondents were from large businesses). The common line of thought is that enterprise businesses naturally earn so many links that active link acquisition isn’t as necessary.
To dive a bit deeper, I further segmented the data by respondent type with Google sheets’ Charts function. It isn’t surprising to see agencies and in-house professionals working with a higher number of larger enterprises compared to consultants, freelancers, and business owners. Still, across every respondent type, SMBs were the most popular selection.
How many people are on your link acquisition team?
81% of respondents reported they work alone or in link building teams of 1–5 members. It’s possible those building the links are typically wearing many hats, with link building packaged into a larger service or part of many other in-house responsibilities.
I’ve worked with a few larger businesses’ in-house teams of full-time link builders, but it's a rarity. The largest in-house link building team I’ve worked with had 20 employees on staff. Clearly this is by no means commonplace. Most businesses either don't need or don't believe they need full-time link builders. It’s mostly SEOs — who are typically members of small teams already — that either do the work, or recognize its value and outsource to agencies with small, dedicated teams.
I also broke this out into agencies versus in-house. Although agencies did submit more responses with larger team selections, the spread is quite similar.
As you can see, there are far fewer lone wolves in an agency setting. In-House folks responded with nearly double the selections of “Just me!” compared to Agencies. In every other team size category, Agencies responded more than In-House. Keep in mind these are fairly similar sample sizes, with 180 respondents identifying as Agency and 163 as In-House.
What is the average client’s or business’s budget allocated to link building per month?
On this question, we requested in-house folks calculate the total of all link building employee's monthly salary. Being a part of a larger package or add-on duties to an in-house team could affect this spread, with over a third of respondents selecting under $1,000.
In 2016, our audience reported much lower costs for link building compared to the 2014 survey. This could be due to a different audience reached, or less focus on link building itself.
The $10K–$50K option was too large of a range in 2014, and with 0% selecting $50K+, we lowered and segmented our ranges further in 2016. This is 2014’s distribution of the same question:
This year’s data becomes more interesting as you break it up by our audience’s professions. Two distinct groupings within our respondent types were exposed. Agency and In-House are similar in cost spread, with In-House having slightly more on the higher end. The other similar grouping was Consultant/Freelancer and Business Owner.
What model do you use to charge for link building services?
This spread is somewhat deceiving, as there was essentially only one answer for In-House respondents to select. 154 respondents selected the top voted answer, which would make sense with 163 identifying as In-House. Remember though, this isn’t indicative of reaching more of an In-House crowd as opposed to agencies (180 responded as Agency).
This question was structured this way specifically because there are so many different ways that Agencies and Consultants/Freelancers sell link building in 2016.
Still, this question confirmed a suspicion raised by the earlier question regarding team size. Packaging link building as part of a larger service is indeed the top-selected option for all other respondent types besides In-House, and that probably affects the necessary team size of dedicated link builders.
The responses typed in when “Other” was selected are quite interesting. A couple of “other” responses actually fit in other buckets that were options, so they aren’t included. I’ve also segmented the selections by respondent type in the pie charts below.
Agency:
“Other” entries by agency respondents:
“It's wrapped into our monthly retainer.”
“We're a public university running on an agency model; this is included in budgets.”
Business Owners, Consultants, Freelancers:
“Other” entries by Business Owners, Consultants, and Freelancers:
Author note: A comment like this indicates that some survey respondents identifying as “Business Owner” may actually be agency owners, rather than business owners that handle link building on their own. It’s possible the Business Owner data is somewhat skewed by owners of agencies. Only 9% of survey respondents identified as Business Owner, so the data should not be too far off.
“Charge a flat fee for contacting a set number of websites.”
“I do it for myself.”
“Fixed plus performance-based rate.”
“I don't link build, I consult on how to do it the Google-compliant way.”
In-House:
“Everyone in the SEO/Content Team does link building as part of their jobs.”
“We have a PR person do our ‘link building.’"
What percentage of the overall SEO budget is dedicated to link building?
What percentage of your SEO work/campaigns is focused on link acquisition?
These two questions were designed to be complementary and are most interesting assessed together, rather than separately. One might assume that the % cost of link building will be equal to the % time of a campaign spent on it, but that was clearly not the case.
This data seems to suggest that as an industry we aren't charging enough for our link building services. Significantly more votes were towards a lesser percentage of budget, while spending a higher percentage of time on the service! Although 230 responses fell in the 0–25% of budget range, only 156 responses were in the 0–25% range of time spent.
An alternate explanation is that people don't put “budget” towards link building in a traditional way, but do spend significant time on it. Link building isn’t a service that is necessarily expensive in a monetary sense. Low overhead, relatively inexpensive tools, and as a later question in this survey illuminates, frequently cheap labor.
2016 is only the second year the link building survey has asked this question, and there are significant differences in our dataset compared to 2014.
2014 Link Building Survey responses to “What percentage of your overall SEO budget is allocated toward building links?”
The 51–75% budget range has fallen in this year’s survey from 40% to 16%.
Here are a few possible explanations I could think of; let me know your own ideas in the comments!
- We may have reached a different audience than the 2014 survey. With the evenness of sample sizes between agencies and in-house, we received lesser responses of dedicated budget towards link building.
- We had 120 more respondents, comparing 315 in 2014 to 435 in 2016. Perhaps this contributed towards a more even spread.
- People are putting less dedicated budget towards link building. In the past two years, link building has become more integrated into other departments and marketing processes, packaged in as part of a holistic service, and less specialized link builders exist overall.
- A mix of all of the above.
What is the average salary of a link builder?
This was another question where we asked non-agency respondents to deliver a unique answer. If they were the only one responsible for link building, we requested they enter their personal salary. If multiple employees work on link building in-house, we asked for respondents to average their salaries together for a single response. All answers are in USD.
Sadly, I can’t say I’m surprised to see $20,000–$29,999 reign supreme. Here are the breakdowns by respondent type.
In-House clearly has a much more even distribution than agencies. This is probably influenced by agencies that outsource work, which makes me wish I had included a response option for “Do you outsource work?” Alas, hindsight is 20/20. I have a hunch this did affect agency salary ranges.
Another possible contributing factor to the more even spread of In-House into higher salary ranges is the types of businesses that hire in-house SEOs, content marketers, and PRs. From what I’ve observed, most in-house jobs are with larger enterprises that are located in bigger cities. The cost of living is higher, and so are the wages. Agencies, on the other hand, are in all ranges of city size, some with a lower cost of living.
I didn't originally plan to include Consultant/Freelancer or Business Owner segments in this section of analysis, but it's an interesting side note that the distributions were within 1–2% of one another.
It’s also curious that over half of Consultants/Freelancers reported earning less than $40k per year, with 35.3% reporting $50k or more for their annual salary. 11.8% reported $80k+! To me, this speaks to the low barrier of entry to link building. If you can communicate digitally and write well, there are many agencies that will train you on the technical side of link building.
With a low barrier to entry, there's an abundance of entry-level link builders, but not nearly as many with years of experience. Once you learn link building, you can grow into many different avenues — technical SEO, web development, marketing, possibly even PR. The truth is, the best link builders I know have grown branches of their skills in these ways, and naturally become a T-Shaped marketer.
Which types of clients do you work with the most?
This was another “Select all that apply”-type answer. Earlier in the survey there were indicating factors that SMBs were the most popular clientele of link building, and the data supports that. SMB won far and away, but it’s fascinating to see that B2B and B2C were an exact even tie!
This spread has held true for my own experience working at an agency the past few years. I’ve always felt like we’ve serviced an even number of clients in both B2B and B2C, and a majority have been small- to mid-sized businesses. However, enterprise clients have become more frequent. Today a significant share of our revenue is from a smaller set of large enterprises, but they make up the smallest percentage of our actual client base.
With the even spread of B2B versus B2C, John thought it might be interesting to compare average monthly budgets for LB. The distribution is very similar across the two, with exactly the same number of respondents.
It would appear to not be an impacting factor on spend; neither B2B or B2C is necessarily more expensive than the other. To me, this makes sense. The necessary spend for link building is dependent upon the needs of the brand, which is generally dictated by their size and competition.
As such, I also compared the average monthly spend of SMB versus Enterprise responses. Keep in mind that there were 214 responses for SMB and only 90 for Enterprise. I used a line chart to better display the trends, rather than the comparison of total responses per client type.
Although a majority of both enterprise and SMB budgets were in the "Under $1,000" to "$2,500–$5,000" categories, there is a distinct difference. Within the SMB trend, the number of responses went consistently down with each increase in budget tier. In the enterprise responses the opposite is true, as the numbers trended up with each budget tier increase.
It’s also interesting to note that after the first 3 budget tiers, SMBs responded with an even amount of higher tier budget ranges as the enterprise. This was even with over twice the number of total SMB responses compared to enterprise.
Which link building tactics do you use?
This was another question that was in “Choose as many as you like” format. 90% of respondents selected Content Publication/Promotion or Guest Posting as a link building tactic used. Nearly every other tactic received at least 50% of the audience votes.
Content links in the body of the page is what we’re all after. That said, many of the other tactics listed can lead to in-content links; but the creation of content is a value proposition with the strongest chance of leading to an acquired link. Building links by creating content is simply used more than any of the other tactics.
Every other typical white-hat technique listed received a near equal amount of votes. I believe this shows that most of us think a diversified link portfolio is the best path to follow. Many voted for usage of many different tactics, rather than selecting only one option and moving on. It caught my eye to see Digital PR voted so highly, considering the very small number of respondents (6) that identified as an in-house PR.
Only Paid Links and Old School received under a third of the votes — a not insignificant portion. Nearly a quarter of our audience voted for old-school tactics, which is still a higher percentage than I expected.
Which link building tactics do you feel are the most effective?
Again, this question was presented as a “Select all that apply” format, and received far less total selections than the previous question! “Which link building tactics do you use” had 1959 selections. This question only received 1161.
The audience of this survey appears to believe Content Publication/Promotion or Guest Posting is worth pursuing and effective, and that diversification is important… But they’re not quite sure how valuable the rest of the tactics really are.
Every other white-hat link building tactic received half of the respondents’ votes, but only a quarter of the audience feels those other tactics are the most effective. It seems that the third of the audience which responded as using Old School are also diversifying with other tactics they feel are more effective.
Once again, it’s curious to see Digital PR as the second-highest category below content links. It would seem to me that our audience of link builders are adopting the skills and strategies of their PR counterparts, rather than link building moving in-house to the PRs. It’s also possible more agencies are branding their link building as digital PR, a trend I’ve seen rising over the past couple of years.
Which SEO tools do you use in your campaigns?
This question was also “Choose as many as you like,” with the order randomized when presented to the audience. No selection received more votes than the Google suite. I expected a high number of votes for Moz and BuzzStream thanks to Rand Fishkin and Paul May assisting with promotion of the survey, but several other tools held their own!
Tools which received at least 40% of respondents’ votes:
- Google Analytics/Search Console (WMT)
- Moz
- BuzzStream
- Ahrefs
- SEMrush
- BuzzSumo
- Majestic
- Screaming Frog
There were 60 custom entries in the follow up question for “Enter any other tools you use that weren’t listed.” If you would like to view them, they're available in the raw data spreadsheet on this tab. Almost every answer was unique; the diversity of responses speaks to the incredible number of SEO tools available.
Only a few tools were mentioned multiple times in “Other” custom entries:
- Citation Labs’ Link Prospector
- Searchmetrics
- Link Research Tools
- Scrape Box
How integrated is your link building with other marketing processes?
There was a huge spread on this question, and respondents had to choose only one number. More people selected 5–10 (64% of votes) than 0–4 (23% of votes). Over two thirds of the audience believe their link building is more integrated than not, or are at least trying to move that direction.
One of my favorite Whiteboard Fridays of all time was by Cyrus Shepard, called "The Rules of Link Building." In it, he shares a quote that has resonated with me to this day:
While I do believe you need the links for better search rankings, I think Cyrus is completely correct in the statement he made in April of 2014. This kind of sentiment is what has driven more collaboration between link builders and other departments in the digital marketing mix.
Only 15% indicated level 9 or 10 for integration, showing this is still a work in progress. 53% of total responses were in the 5 to 8 range, indicating this is something that we’re working towards but many feel still have distance to go.
What is the best name for link building?
Over the years you may have noticed a few different rebrands or identifiers for what some would simply call "link building." This was our final question and another “Select all that apply” type. Though I prefer “link building” to describe what I do, I’ve actually always liked “link earning”; however, it was the least popular selection.
Much of the link work I’ve been involved in could easily be called content marketing, but it was specifically for the purpose of links and improving search rankings. I think it’s really all a matter of perspective in most scenarios.
Final thoughts
The link building landscape has always been a swiftly shifting environment. This year’s survey results illuminated an evolution towards integration with other marketing channels, and an alignment with more legitimate future-proof thinking. However, it seems that the cost and salary scale of link building has not yet matured as much as the practice itself.
The past few years have seen link building shaken up, in a state of suspension. 2015 and 2016 so far have been the settling-down period. I see the industry calming down, relying less on tricks and schemes, while taking advantage of link building’s intrinsic presence in all the channels of the marketing mix.
Thank you for reading this year’s link building survey results. A very special thanks to everyone that took the survey and helped promote it. I’m a fallible human with my own biases, thoughts, and beliefs. I tried to objectively view the data to pull out insights, but I’d love to hear from everyone else in the comments.
Nicholas,
You have written a really insightful article, and it will certainly act as a great benchmark for agencies and in-house teams alike.
One point that resonated with me was the fact that there appears to be a mismatch between the percentage of budget allocated to link-building and time spent on delivering the work. Personally, this is one of my biggest frustrations, as good link building takes a lot of time and effort (as well as skill and experience), but often it isn't positioned as such from a sales perspective.
One thing that would be interesting to look at in next year's survey is the proportion of agencies who have started to break their team up into different links related roles.
I am responsible for a team of 15 people, and since the beginning of the year, I have changed the structure of the team so that different people are responsible for (and specialise in) different stages of the outreach process.
To illustrate, I have a group of strategists who are the more traditional marketing specialists, and they are responsible for the creation and implementation of a links strategy. Then, prospectors are accountable for finding opportunities based on the methods that the strategist has advocated. Finally, you have the outreachers, who are more traditional PR people. They are responsible for establishing and developing relationships with the opportunities that the outreacher has found, and ultimately, earning the links that a client needs.
Great post, thanks for posting.
Craig
Craig,
Thank you for the kind words, I'm happy you enjoyed the post.
I've also felt the mismatch between time spent and budget spent is one of my biggest frustrations in link building. You bring up a good point about how it is positioned from a sales perspective. Link building has historically been a fairly quick SEO fix, so a lot of potential clients require new education on how modern link building works. And a buy in to the idea that they may invest for several months before seeing a return.
It's actually one of the reasons I do not believe link building is best sold "by the link". A truly effective digital marketing campaign is going to examine all aspects of SEO, not just links. In my experience, great links can do nothing for a site if the technical SEO is a mess. I'd rather be constantly delivering value to the client by working on improving other attributes of their online presence, while the link building flywheel gains momentum.
I think your suggestion of how agencies are breaking up their teams into separate link related roles is an interesting one. If you go to Garrett French's author profile on SEL, you can find a 5 part series he recently did on exactly the topic you describe. He explains his method of segmenting the link building process with specialized roles:
The agency I work for actually started out in a similar format. When I was hired, my main job was to find relevant sites to the topics our writing team wanted to publish guest posts or other content for. On my team, writers would then research a site more in depth, brainstorm strategy with me for getting published there, then outreach and build a relationship, and eventually pitch content. Some sites could be pitched to immediately.
On the other team, there was an opportunity prospector like me, who handed opportunities off to a dedicated outreacher. When publishing opportunities were locked down by the outreacher, they would hand things off to the writers.
Ultimately, we felt that a higher quality link and more real relationship came by consolidating the process. Now writers do their own opportunity research, build relationships in a niche, and grow their names in certain relevancy universes. They lock down recurring columns and get published on sites that don't allow guest posts.
There are so many ways you can go about securing a link. I think every team needs to experiment with different processes until they find what unique approach is the best fit for their unique team.
Nicholas -
Really fantastic work here. It was a pleasure to work with you on this. I'll call myself the David Bowie of SEO from now on :-)
I think this is a really interesting insight - "An alternate explanation is that people don't put “budget” towards link building in a traditional way, but do spend significant time on it. Link building isn’t a service that is necessarily expensive in a monetary sense. Low overhead, relatively inexpensive tools, and as a later question in this survey illuminates, frequently cheap labor."
I think this is definitely true, and while you have a few link building veterans in the industry, many people start there and then branch out as they get more experience in the digital marketing world. Link building is a great way for someone to get started (I started there myself) and to see results and wins, and also learn some of the soft skills of outreach and managing multiple things at a time (clients, guest posts, etc).
Super good work man.
Thanks John. It was really great collaborating with you on this project, and I appreciate the hell out of you for it. You can be my David Bowie any day. Optimize my heart for love.
It does seem to me that there are only a handful of link building veterans in the biz. Maybe only 10-15 individuals immediately come to mind as consistent, real, veteran thought leaders in the link building space for several years running.
Like you said, link building is a great way to get introduced to SEO. There are multiple paths to follow too. As you mentioned, you'll learn the soft skills of outreach and how to manage a project. But you can also focus your energy on how to hone your creativity and how to balance creativity vs productivity. Or you can go a very technical route, further your knowledge of web development basics; you could master SEO tools in ways that will benefit your link building immediately and overall technical growth in the long term for many different applications.
I think many of us that get a start in link building ultimately pursue many avenues of SEO once building a better understanding of the bigger picture. I also think those are some of the smartest SEOs, because they realize how important links are and integrate their acquisition into all of their other digital marketing processes.
I really like this study, but I miss one question: how do you calculate the ROI of a link building campaign, which is not exactly the same as "how do you establish the cost of link building".
The answers would have interesting for understanding how different is link building now (or not) with respect the past.
In fact, if we look at the "link building payment" costs, what I see is something that is telling me that not much as changed. For instance, how can those ones doing Digital PR making themselves paid over the raw number of links earned by the campaign, and not counting also the traffic those links generated, the social media interactions generated by the campaign, et al?
Sincerely I think that the ROI of a campaign cannot be only the links themselves anymore
Hi Gianluca, thank you for leaving a comment.
We debated at length regarding how to structure a question around calculating the ROI of a link building campaign. There are so many factors that contribute to the ROI of links, and too many "what ifs" and unique situations. I agree with you - I do not think the ROI of a campaign can be only the links themselves.
Obviously for some that is still the case though. 16% of respondents indicated they sell links by the link.
In my opinion, the ultimate goals of link building will always be the following things, in this order:
Now, this follows a hairy, old, unresolved debate. If you're trying to influence rankings with your links, then aren't you "artificially manipulating rankings", and breaking Google guidelines? I say no.
When you're doing link building the right way, you are also looking at direct referral traffic from the links you build/earn, the social media interactions generated by the campaign, etc. You're expecting your campaign to impact those things, and generally build the brand online. You're building relationships with real people. But you don't have to also ignore acquiring links along the way.
I believe it's OK to know where you rank, and attempt to influence links throughout your digital marketing campaigns, try to help them point towards pages that stand to gain the most opportunity, because your marketing aligns with your SEO efforts.
Gianluca brings up a potent point, value of linkbuilding, though I think that such an evaluation is
1) beyond the scope of a casual survey
2) difficult for freelancers to assess
3) creates measurement issues as linkbuilding is a continuum and assigning value implies a "before and after" view of analytics.
Google's Andrey Lipattsev confirmed links as one of the top 2 rank factors during a recent WebPromo Experts webinar. The SEO industry would certainly benefit from such a data-based research, that would elevate the discussion beyond "what I THINK IS WORKING" to overall effectiveness evinced via metrics.
Of course, such an analysis is costly (time and money). Any underwriting immediately causes suspicion in the outcomes, but an industry-wide consortium approach could spread the cost and increase credibility.
Who might broker such an undertaking? SEMPO? A cooperative effort among the tools mentioned in this survey? You, Nicholas Chimonas?
Hello,
I am a researcher at eMarketer and am interested in submitting this data to be potentially cited. Can you please confirm when the study was conducted this year and whether the respondents were US or worldwide-based?
Any data cited will carry full and clear attribution to Moz. Thanks!
Great to see that Moz data is being picked up far and wide!
Hello there!
We opened this survey to the public from February 11th through February 25th of 2016. There was no geo-restriction on respondents, though they were asked to input monetary responses in USD.
Let me know if there is anything else I can provide for you :)
Great, thanks so much Nicholas! I'll be sure to let you know if I have any follow up questions.
@Nicholas - Very well written post with clear structure and readability. The data visualization was fantastic. Definitely sharing this internally with my team.
Hi Nicholas,
Thanks for sharing this great study. I have to admit that, this is the most comprehensive piece of information I have come across on this topic so far. Thanks again.
Hi Nicholas,
Some great insights here and really shows what direction linkbuilding is heading. I think PR is only going to play an even greater role in the future, and your next graph might even look at the trends for things like "digital PR" and "Influencer Marketing".
One thing I'd be keen to know more about is how much time is spent on linkbuilding both from an agency and in-house capacity. I know this varies from industry to industry and company to company, but lets take SMEs in a fairly competitive marketplace - what would the minimum recommendation be for linkbuilding (including content creation, online PR, etc)? I always think that a minimum from an agency perspective is 2 days a month per client although this can become 2-3 days per week (and more in some cases) depending on the size of client and industry they operate in. I just wanted to see if anyone has any thoughts on how much time should be spent on linkbuilding to achieve desired results, and if budget, etc, was not mentioned, what would be the ideal time to spend doing linkbuilding activity for a client.
Maybe something to consider for the next survey.
Cheers,
Nial
Hello Nicholas,
Being a Search Marketing Manager myself and having worked in SEO, SEM, Social and Content, I definitely agree that link building needs to be supported by great content and has to be through high DA websites. The whole process of preferring quantity over quality and the "tips and tricks" that you mentioned most agencies indulged in are all dead. The quality of SEO practices are much more in focus than ever before.
Plus, I love the insights here at Moz blog where there are experiments, detailed articles including surveys and more real data collected in most of the blog posts which adds credibility to the data. Keep doing this great work and thanks for highlighting the importance of great data and content. They definitely go hand in hand to link building process.
Thanks, Nicholas Chimonas (and Page One Power for sparing you enough to handle this). Thanks to all community support, that makes it possible to create an industry resource as a public service. Permit me two observations:
You list rank improvement as a goal, but traffic generation is a very welcome byproduct. Raising one's sights above PageRank to practical results helps elevate the discussion to more directly support business goals. Talking traffic can help win budget. Plus, it gets one out of the follow / "nofollow" quagmire and one step closer to talking Conversions. That's a conversation that business owners and C-suite welcomes. Talk that talk and like John Doherty says, your career advances.
Second, since Google Pigeon and Mobilegeddon and "Mobile-only", local link-building both soars in importance and opens huge new markets for agents who can handle it profitably. I am not sure what the questions would be, but some reference could be eye-opening.
Hey Michael, great to see you here. Thank you for your brain stimulating observations.
I really couldn't agree more with you. You share wise advice, something I'm sure you've known for many years but what a smart marketer would pay serious attention to. Links are simply the means to an end, and that end is making a business more money through increased traffic and conversions. When you can guide the conversation to dollar signs and ROI, you gain legitimacy and the attention of decision makers.
It would seem the Local SEO sphere has been a bit of a gold rush over the past 1-2 years. NAP citation building has always been reminiscent to me of old school directory link building. I think the environment will only continue to become more difficult to rank in as time progresses.
Can number of website traffic replace the ranking factor of link building? Link building is tedious.
I feel like I missed a lot of the "Wild West" of link building - I think that's good.
I started in web design and SEO back when it was all about keyword optimization. Left the business for nearly 15 years. Now, back in it for about a year, it's like having left a placid mountain lake and coming back to find out that a raging river has replaced it!
This article is going to take a lot more time to read and digest, but the first thing it tells me is that even the veterans are finding that the ground is shifting.
It also tells me that we (i.e. SEO/link-building providers) need exactly this kind of information so that we can present to our clients with more confidence both in valuing our time and in having reasonable expectations for results.
Thank you very much for all the hard work, Nicholas.
It's appreciated.
Beth Bridges
Hey Nicholas!, Hope you are doing good, An excellent research done by you which is clearly readable in this article. Thanks for sharing this with us. And now I am looking for complete Digital Marketing Strategy Plan of 2016-17. Regards - Pankaj
Pretty nice case study with lots of information and data.
Just like Craig Bradshaw's team, our structure changed in the past few months. We've decided to have different people specialise in different stages of outreach. We have a specialist in research for opportunities and contacts (he is kind of FBI) and outreachers who create connections. It's working just fine for us and our customers.
Thanks for dropping by with your thoughts Viliana. I had a hearty chuckle at "he is kind of FBI" ;)
It can be difficult to not feel a little creepy once you realize how much information is available on the internet when the correct methods of research are employed!
Hi Moz,
Thank you for having me as an author today. My sincere gratitude to Felicia for being so helpful through the whole editing and publishing process.
I hope this survey helps to add transparency to the way some of us are handling link building in 2016. Please share your thoughts with me in the comments; I'm really interested in alternative perspectives and hypotheses on the meaning behind the numbers, or how your organization compares to the survey results. Cheers!
Hi Nicholas,
That was quite a piece you wrote in here! It's really comprehensive and easy to read. Usually it's a little bit hard for me to fully understand this posts. Just loved how you've exposed the link building current state, I'm just beginning with the link building stuff, so it's always good to read about it.
Kind regards,
I'm happy you found the post easy to read :)
If you're just getting started, I recommend checking out Paddy Moogan's Beginner's Guide to Link Building & the link building category page of the Moz blog. We also keep our link building resources page up to date on Linkarati. Cheers.
Thank you very much! So nice from you responding with all that info :D
This was a fun survey to participate in and huge thanks for putting this together, Nicholas!
I'm a bit surprised that guest posting still reigns as the go-to link building tactic despite the all the talk and controversy about its demise.
I strongly believe that if you are still Guest Posting you should make sure the link is legitimate (I wrote a whole article covering that here) and mix in other link types as well.
I chuckle when I look at someone’s backlink profile, and it only contains links from guest posts. It’s funny, because it’s unnatural, and because they’re not putting any real thought into link building.
Such a detailed analysis of the state of link building today. Wow. It's interesting to see how everyone is link building these days and where I fall into the majority or minority. I have to admit though, I'm finding the link building process (without having to resort to terrible quality sources) is becoming a real struggle for some industries. Whereas with others, it's so easy to just acquire them naturally through the production of good content.
Hi Ria, I totally understand you! I'm currently working in a real estate agency and it's harder for us to get those links because we have to focus on really specific pages. Instead, society magazines, for example, have that really easy since they talk about everything... Sometimes it is a little bit exhausting, but in the end, worth it :D
Interesting research, I am surprised that majority of link builders have a salary around $30K. For the effort and ROI, I think it is way too little.
It is huge information about Link building! Thanks a lot.
Thanks for the insights. I also believe the survey in itself has proven for sure a good example in terms of link building and sights pointing at it due to its quality.
Great! I will take this great post as a reference for link building strategies in the future, sure I reread many this post looking for more and more information lol
Interesting Post !
All of the seo agencies should have look here.
Amazing article Nicholas, the Graphs, charts and images you used to describe Link building , Analysis and result are fantastic and very helpful to understand.
Thank you for the lovely graphs and images. the survey does support the fact that link building is live and kicking.
Many people increase their invest in this channel, and probably will benefit from this.
Very very interesting this post.
I like to put into practice.
Hi Nicholas!!
Very interesting post to learn how to watch insights. Thank you very much for sharing
As anything dealing with significant amount of data, I think it all depends on how you slice and dice the numbers. It's all interesting, but sometimes, we are all prone to over analysis and looking too deeply into what the numbers mean. Sure, some of them are just plain and you definitely get some great insights when you dig in.
But in the end, isn't the SEO game more or less the same as it always has been? Good content in whatever form, human interaction, and backlinks? The details have certainly changed, anyone would agree. But I think the trend is that the SEs are getting closer to emulating human judgment and as that happens, the SERPs will reflect more and more of what humans will find useful.
So the days of gaming SEs are coming to an end sooner than later and real content will pull through.
Just my two cents.
Thanks for the in-depth article!
Wicked article, thanks for sharing!
Very Good statics you have put inside this article. Its really informative about real time SEO company structure. Today many of companies are facing lack of seo projects demanding. Many of the SEO profession those are involved in this work they are going frustrate.
hmmm cool strategy.
Wonderful article, I love the way you described everything in form of charts. Thanks for sharing the insights. Greetings!
Very full review , complete with pictures and info graphics really extraordinary. thank you already share this info . I fit in this feast apply to blog Jual Rumah Pontianak
Great article and survey, ! Thanks Nicholas!!!
Great insights thanks for sharing
Great job on this and insight to our industry. I think that some may think that link building has fallen by the waist side but really it all depends on the project or client you are working with. One of the survey results that I really enjoyed was the small to medium business being one of the top ranking canidates for link building in general. I find that when you are just trying to make a company relevant that is when you will have to do the most work, but with a more enterprise client you may find that the brand and overall market exposure is there so the strategy will need to be a bit different.
I also enjoyed the breakdown of tools used from the results as it can help us all see some items we are missing in terms of tools of the market. Once again thank you for your contribution to the community and hard work on this topic.
Thanks, good insight!
Have you thought about splitting by industry, or perhaps by online only vs mixed? Businesses with just online presence versus businesses with stores and locations likely have at least to some extent different link building requirements.
Very interesting post, congratulations!
Many agencies should take as a reference work like this post to make their correct Link building strategies.
Thanks for posting!
Nicholas, Thanks for sharing this Great research and Analysis
Link Building is soul of SEO along with content. Rankings will and has always been impacted by link building.
I would support this analysis with the help My personal experience on Link Buidling - I have read everywhere that directory submissions doesn't make impact on ranking's but i have live example for one of my website where i purchased directly link and in 2-3 days my keyword jumped to top of the page, thou keyword was easy but still it came on top as impact of directory backlink.
Regards
Pulkit Thakur
Mr. Nicholas, this is a good article. Thank you for sharing.
Hi Nicholas!!!
Large study that tells us how they have changed the way to generate links in recent months
Congratulations for the post !!!
thanks for the post, was helpful
This is mammoth! I agree with the fact that despite a solid content marketing campaign in place, one still needs to invest handsomely in creating the buzz around it so others can link to it. Thanks for sharing the comprehensive research!
Very interesting Nicholas.
I find it curious the graph size by employees of companies active in the construction of a link. It is quite real and is good stop to analyze this and that encourages me to keep working alone and try to match me my seo large multinational or at least give a good bite.
Wonderful case study with lots of great insights. Thanks for sharing thisNicholas!
Thanks for this article, very insightful! Cheers!
great posting !
Thanks for sharing you valuable research. We all know the majority of the link building is done by the SEO agencies and the freelancers. Actually the business owners do not have the appropriate knowledge and time to build the quality links. The agencies only rely on creating blog to build the blog.
Thanks @Nicholas sharing an informative article about SEO in 2016.
Great Sharing!!!