We’ve heard quite a lot about link building. In fact, all the content marketers recommend it as a tactic. But, there’s hardly any information on the web that speaks about ROI and the time it takes to return.
This question may not be new to you, but chances are, you’ve never got a convincing answer of it. Truth is, you wouldn’t be able to get immediate ranking boost with new links. So, it’s hard to relate individual link to ranking increases, because you will normally get more links and there will be a few on-page changes in between the time when you got the first link and when you see the fruits of it.
Well, an SEO Agency with intriguing team sets out to find answers to this issue. For this process, we chose more than 70 links that pointed to pages that are almost similar to each other. The content of these pages remained unchanged for 6 months or so. The focus was on rankings for target keywords. The keyword difficulty rating was between 25 and 35 percent. To have more data, we observed the two versions of the target keywords. Here are the results, although they’re not super surprising.
10 Weeks for a 1 Rank Jump
When you have more links, chances of getting immediate boost also increase. A content marketer promoted some content that earned him 20 links to his page. That page was outranked by other pages with 6 more inbound links. That page took 5 to 10 weeks to increase the ranking from 9th spot to the 5th spot.
This example shows that each of the links has some effect, but it needs some time. With lots of links, you’ll get faster and better improvement.
Link Effects Lower Rank More
Observations of pages that appear on the first page of SERPs show that they were pretty slow to move up. In fact, a page on the first page takes about 22 weeks to move up one spot. On the other hand, web pages that ranked on the second page of SERPs took about 9 weeks.
DA (Domain Authority) Moves the Needle Faster
It has been observed that a higher DA has a bigger impact. — in fact, it shows that the average rank change for a page that got a link from a site with a DA below 25 actually dropped after 13 weeks, then recovered to barely two ranks up. As per the observation DA from 0 – 25 and that between 25 – 50 jumped after 10 weeks.
You must have heard that higher DA links have quicker effects. This may be because higher DA sites get crawled more often (so the link will be discovered sooner), but this may be a purposeful delay in the algorithm. Google’s probably taking a bit more time to trust a link from a lower-quality site.
Here’s what your link building strategy should take into account:
- 1–4 months:Find a link building agency and start them at the beginning of a month, OR
- 1 month: Find an in-house link builder
- 1 month:Come up with your top link building strategies
- 1–3 months:Prospect for potential sites to target, and pull together the content that you need to entice those links
- 2 weeks–1 month: Execute! It’ll take a while to write all the emails you need to write, and respond to the feedback you get
- 5–10 weeks:Wait for those links to take effect! Tell your team not to panic for at least 10 weeks (although effects will continue to grow beyond that)
Conclusion
All in all, that means that it may take you 6 months–1 year from beginning to end before you start seeing noticeable effects from your link building efforts.