I had a call last night with a potential new client. I walked her through my proposal which was centered mostly around a full audit plus keyword, audience and competitor analysis. Towards the end, she said that the last agency who helped them with SEO mostly focused on link building. She even said that since their website was in such disarray, it made sense to just focus on link building. I couldn’t help but think “no, it’s just that your last agency didn’t want to face the challenge of fixing technical issues and the margins are good on link building”.
In my experience, it’s quite rare for links to be “all you need” to rank. Typically, it’s quite the opposite. If Google can’t crawl, parse, rate and index your site properly. If users arrive at your site expecting one thing but bounce because they got something completely unexpected. If you don’t even have a clear direction or strategy. Link building is probably just a waste of money.
Good link building is really time consuming and should probably come only after you’ve laid a good technical foundation and defined your long-term strategy. After that, there are definitely some low hanging fruit tactics. For example, using Brand Monitoring in SEMrush or Google Alerts for your brand and then asking for links where you already received mentions. Using BrighLocal or WhiteSpark for directory listing automation. Use SEMrush’s Backlink Gap tool to find where your competitors are getting links. Or creating unique content and then doing outreach via Social to “earn” links the right way.
Here is an intriguing article about “audience first” link building. I’ll add more thoughts soon.