July 16, 2014

The New Link Building Survey 2014 - Results

Link Building | Marketing Industry

The author's views are entirely their own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Many of you may have seen Skyrocket SEO's Link Building Survey results that we published here on Moz around this same time last year. The reception was fantastic, so we decided to push ahead with turning this into an annual series to see how this strand of the industry is developing and evolving over time.

Firstly, "link building"...

Yep, we've not changed the name to a "content marketing survey" or "inbound link acquisition survey;" we still feel link building is a vital part of an SEOs arsenal of tactics, and therefore it deserves its own survey.

As a company we're investing just as much in link building for our clients (granted, we've adapted what we are doing), but the fact remains that if you want to score big with decent organic search visibility then you need links.

Now that that's out of the way, let's get down to the details:

Who took the survey?

A massive thank you to the 315 or so people who took the survey. That number is slightly down from last year, which I feel is partly due to fewer people considering link building to be a part of their day-to-day roles. I'd argue that's a missed opportunity, and this year we had a few duplicate entries and submissions that needed a bit of tidying up, so we trimmed it back to these 315 submissions.

The makeup of the respondents was broadly similar to last year, as expected, although based on user feedback from our inaugural survey, we added a few more categories for respondents to self-classify—so it is hard to make specific comparisons.

How much does your company spend on link building per month?

In the 2013 survey, 10% of respondents said their company spent $50k+ per month on link building, so it appears that the upper limit to link building spend may have decreased slightly across the industry.

That being said, there now appears to be a much larger number of companies in the $10-$50k per month bracket when you compare this year's 37% with last year's 11%.

I would attribute the changes year-on-year to two factors;

Reclassification of the term "link building:" Many companies have shifted budget that they would previously classified as link building budget into content projects that more than likely still have an impact on link building efforts.
Recognition of opportunity: Based on our own experiences we see a number of website owners and businesses pushing harder with their content promotion and link building as they recognise an opportunity to invest when their competitors are running scared.

Warren Buffett once said "Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful." Based on conversations alone that I've had with a wide range of businesses, many are now fearful when it comes to building links. In fact, we gathered some data later in the survey that revealed that one of the biggest challenges people face is not knowing which links will help and which will harm them. Google's widespread action against websites (and dare I say it webmaster propaganda) has had a dramatic impact on some people to the point of paralysis.

There are clear opportunities that, with a sound strategy, can be seized in today's market.

You can build links like it's 1999 for a microsite or second level property, keep it super-clean and identify link opportunities that would be valuable irrespective of Google, or somewhere in between those extremes. The fact is the links still form the backbone of the internet and of Google's algorithm and that isn't going to change for a very long time.

What percentage of your overall SEO budget is allocated toward building links?

Thanks to John-Henry Scherck for this one as he made the suggestion following the 2013 survey that having data on the percentage would be really interesting. Looking back we don't have a point of comparison but not of course moving forward we will have so we should get a clearer picture of whether online marketing budgets are just increasing in general (and therefore link building gets allocated the same percentage but of a bigger pie) or whether folks are seeing the value from building links and therefore allocating a larger percentage of the same sized pie to link building activities.

Would you say you've increased or decreased your spend on link building over the past 12 months?

This aligns with our data on more people entering the $10-$50k per month investment bracket this year:

Why the increase/decrease in spending?

We asked people why they decided to increase or decrease their spending on link building over the past 12 months.

Responses could be categorized into the following areas:

Common reason for increases:

Increased costs related to moving away from older style and often "cheaper" link building
Increased costs related to production/creativity
Good links are just as important as ever; links still move the needle in terms of search engine visibility and performance therefore it makes sense to increase investment in this area.

Common reasons for decreases:

Moving link building budget into content marketing projects (to be fair, this budget will probably indirectly fund link acquisition of some kind even if it is seen as a secondary goal for the content campaign.)
We wanted to scale back and assess the impact that Google's manual actions etc have on our website.

In the next 12 months, will you look to increase or decrease your spend on link building?

Why the planned increase/decrease in spending?

Link building continues to get more expensive
To raise the bar on existing efforts, and to beat competitors with increasingly sophisticated content assets
Unsure where to invest/which links are working so concentrating budget into other activities.

Which link building tactics do you utilise most often?

(Numbers listed are votes rather than percentages)

When we compare with responses from the 2013 survey, there is a clear shift towards content-led initiatives and a reduction in some tactics for example close to 50% said in 2013 that guest blogging was their staple tactic, in 2014 fewer than 15% listed it as one of their staple activities.

Another interesting bit of data is the fact that paid links have seen somewhat of a resurgence in popularity, presumably as companies look for tactics where they can maintain greater control. In 2013, just 5% listed paid links as their staple linking tactic whereas in 2014 over 13% reported paid linking and blog networks as one of their main link building tactics.

What is currently your biggest link building challenge?

Getting links to pages that aren't particularly linkworthy (money pages)
Lack of scalability (time, process, training, spreading time between clients)
Avoiding Google penalties

These are similar challenges to those reported in 2013 in the sense that there is still concern over which links are helping and harming organic search performance as well as difficulties relating to processes and the lack of scalability.

The interesting thing is that SEO is full of challenges so as soon as one is overcome, the next appears. In 2013, 28% of respondents said that "finding link prospects" was a key challenge but this year not a mention of link prospects being an issue. This arguably suggests that we as an industry were adjusting to the "new world" back in 2013 and that now we have advanced our capabilities enough for this to now longer be the primary challenge in our day to day work. Now the main problem doesn't seem to be getting links as such but more about getting links into the pages that we all need to rank to stay in business … the money pages.