8 Link Building Expectations & 8 Harsh Truths You Must Know

It becomes evident from the SEO basics that the most lucrative Top 10 spots on search engines require lots of work. Usually, it takes a combination of different approaches and unhacked methods to enhance your website quality and be ahead of your competitors on SERPs.

Old good link building turns out a great solution when you need to boost your website performance and authoritativeness. 65% of marketers believe that link building is the most difficult SEO tactic. Yet, if done right it can be one of the most effective ones. As soon as you master link building, you’ll get the desired outcome with your website rankings traffic.

So once you step on the winding but promising link building path, get ready to face many challenges ahead. We bet you want to be sure that all your time, money, and efforts won’t be in vain. And at the end (nevertheless link building never ends) you’ll reach the #1 on Google. You expect this or at least have high hopes for your link building campaign (for a good reason, though).

But let’s get it real. There’s a bunch of things that you shouldn’t expect from link building and a heap of things you might do wrong while building links to your site.

Harsh truth #1. Link building is time-consuming.

Google never says how long it will take to outrank your rivals. The only straw we can catch at is the competition in the chosen niche. There’s a direct correlation between your chances to rank on Google’s Top 10 and competition within a given niche.

Let’s say that you run a website in a relatively low competition topic, and looking for ways to lead the SERPs within this exact topic. Usually, it takes 3 months to reach your goals. But when it comes to some high-competitive niches, the time frame can easily reach 6 months and beyond. The reason is that you cannot form up a superb backlink profile overnight. If you hurry over getting a lot of new backlinks at once, be sure to get a hefty slap from Google for your manipulative and unnatural link building tricks.

Bear in mind that link building is a laborious, well-considered, and very, very effective way to outperform your competitors and deserve Google’s trust. And the only way to do it right is to do it consistently, gradually, and rationally. If you have the slightest link-building doubts, we’ll be glad to help you. Just give us a shout.

And while we’re on the subject of the gradual link building campaign, don’t miss a chance to reveal the number of backlinks you lack with our SEO Cost Calculator and launch an effective yet natural link building campaign with SEO Expert Tool.

Harsh truth #2. You can build links wrongly.

One day Peter Ferdinand Drucker said that “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all”. And rightly so: how could you know that all your SEO efforts are correct and put just in place? How could you know that you’re doing what is worth doing? What if you were following the wrong track?

After evaluating our customers’ websites and their SEO strategies, we revealed that 67% of them were barking up the wrong tree. There was something all they were doing wrong: irrational link building speed, irrelevant backlinks purchase, incorrect anchor lists, you name it. If they had gone on with their uneven SEO strategies, they would have ended up with a zero result or worse — Google’s punishment.

In the most neglected cases, it’s way easier to move to a new domain. Especially if it’s a new website with less than a 1-year history.

Anyway, it’s easier to have hindsight than foresight. But we know how you can prevent yourself from such kind of deficiencies — think through a well-rounded SEO strategy. Need help?

On-page optimization and technical SEO issues are the backbone of any authoritative and good-ranking website. However, this is the major bottleneck in link building campaigns of the vast 86% of our customers.

We’ve seen cases when people had excellent link building strategies and even generous budget on backlinks (read about financial hurdles below), but they didn’t see the desired outcome. And the reason was their crappy on-page faults. The worst is that usually, you can spend a great deal of money uselessly just for having those mistakes.

The only solution is checking and fixing on-page issues. This is definitely not the thing that requires a lot of brainwork or any specialized knowledge. You can rely on professionals and order the on-page analysis of your website right now.

Harsh truth #4: You under-investigated your target audience.

User experience is a paramount thing for your website traffic rankings hike. The key to success is easy-to-learn — understand your customers’ needs and satisfy them. Even if you forget this simple formula, be sure to meet Google just around the corner with a broad banner saying: “Put your customers first!”.

So, be sure that you really know the genuine desires of your customers. Because if you don’t, even the best in the world on-page optimization and brilliant content won’t save you from a spiraling bounce rate.

The bounce rate means that your customers do visit your website, but very soon they leave because something goes wrong. Perhaps, it’s your thin content, twisted navigation, or merely old-fashioned site design. To avoid this ugly situation, you’d better scrutinize your customers, analyze rivals, and shape up your website accordingly.

Harsh truth #5. The very top of Google is worth all your efforts.

#1 on Google is the land of milk and honey for every single website owner. In one of our researches, we told why there’s a point to struggle for #1 on Google, and an enormous 36% of the organic traffic it usually receives.

From our 10+ years experience, we can say that there were a lot of people who gave up their SEO campaigns. The reason was almost always identical — there were no tangible results anymore.

But the point is that it’s relatively easy to jump from 100th to 50th or 30th position. There’s a whole other story when it comes to #1 on search engines. Usually, there comes a point when you don’t see a vivid result of your SEO. It doesn’t mean that you are not progressing at all, though. Just keep going, and you’ll achieve some striking results on Google!

Harsh truth #6. Link building does require investments.

If you want to be ahead of the curve on search engines, you have to remember one thing once and for all — link building takes money. There is no point in expecting mind-blowing results from your link building efforts unless you’re ready to pour in some cash in the process.

However, there’s good news for you! The more you invest, the better results you’ll get in the end. Check out the case study about one of our customers who had been in despair and was about to give up all that SEO hassle until we got him to go on. Here’s a minor spoiler — that was a story with a happy 623% ROI from SEO.

Basically, it just goes to show you that it’s essential to increase the SEO budget. There’s a crowd of competitors on the approaches to Google’s #1, and they never stint on the out-of-the-box SEO solutions.

Your competitors — is the very prime reason why you need to inject some funds into your SEO regularly. Of course, if the competition in your niche approaches zero, then you can relax and just become a single leader. But we very much doubt whether such a case is possible nowadays.

One more thing that defines your link building expenses is your business size. The large sites with a wide range of services and goods need way more funds and time than the smaller websites with a few pages. SEO is a rare occasion when the size does matter.

Harsh truth #8. This is the worst thing you can do.

Let’s say that you invested not less than $2,000 on your link building campaign and in less than 3 months you finally saw the long-awaited results — rankings growth, traffic boost, and profit gain. “At last…” — you would breathe blissfully and stop devoting money to link building that very day…

And it would be a blunder! Once you gain the slightest positive results, get ready to keep them and go on in the same vein. There’s no good in cutting your costs once the very first results from SEO are looming over the horizon. Otherwise, the chances are to lose your all.

Don’t forget to carry out your website audits regularly and fix all bugs and issues. Don’t have time to handle SEO by yourself?

Harsh #8. Nothing can replace an SEO expert.

We’re doing our best at educating our customers and helping them with SEO. Perhaps this is the reason why you might wish to scrimp on professional SEO services and get right into the nuts and bolts of SEO on your own.

Unfortunately, such approach rarely results in success. Moreover, we never welcome any self-acting without prior consultation of an SEO expert. Numbers never lie — more than 76% of our customers make a heap of SEO mistakes. Basically, that’s why they turn for our advice or assistance.

Don’t take it unkindly — we make no doubt about your outstanding hard and soft skills. We want to make sure that you nailed even the hardest SEO issues. Redirects setting, website structure changes, redesign, you name it, do need a careful and correct approach.

We hope that this article will make your link building better and help you reach your SEO wishes and goals. And now when you all know the drill, don’t waste another minute and go buy a bunch of new backlinks. Link building must go on!

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