To help you get the best out of your link building strategy, this article will teach you:
- How to find out the number of links you need to outrank your competition.
- How many links you should build per day for your first month
- How fast you should build links for your first 2-5 months to avoid being penalized by Google.
- What are high-quality links and how to build them?
How to find out the number of links you need to outrank your competition.
With SEO, slow and steady always wins the race.
To ensure you’re not building too little or too many links, it’s best to work with a road map.
You can figure out your link building road map by studying what the competition is doing, the number of links they’ve built and the kind of links they’re building. Knowing what your competition is doing to rank so high will help you understand what you need to do to outrank them.
To know the number of links your competition has, you can use Ahrefs’ backlink research tool.
To achieve this, visit https://ahrefs.com/backlink-checker and type in your domain name to see the number of backlinks your website currently has.
The tool will show you the total number of backlinks your site has, its number of referring domains and your domain rating.
You can repeat this step for 2-3 of your competitors to know the average number of links you need to build.
For instance, let’s say my site www.example.com has just one backlink and my competitors site www.competitorssite.com has 300 backlinks, I know I need to build about 100 stronger links to outrank them.
How many links you should build per day for your first month.
Following the previous example, my site has one backlink, and my competitor’s site has 300.
If I decide to get as many links as possible in my first month of link building, Google and other search engines might assume that I’m doing something spammy like buying links and rank my site even lower than I was before.
To avoid this, you’ll need to start slow, and many digital marketers like Neil Patel recommend building one link per day in your first month. That is about 30 links in total for your first month.
How fast should you build links for your first 2-5 months to avoid being penalized by Google?
After building 30 links on your first month, you can double the number of links you build during your second month. So about 60 links would be just right for your second month.
You can increase to about 90 links on your third month and 100-120 on your third month and keep scaling up gradually until you get to the 6th month.
After your sixth month of consistently and steadily increasing the number of backlinks you build, you can start to build as many links as you want every month without fear of being penalized by search engines.
What are high-quality links and how to build them?
According to Google’s quality guidelines, high-quality links are:
- Links that contain quality and popular content
- Links that are editorially controlled by the linking site
You can build high-quality links by:
- Guest posting on high authority sites that are relevant to your niche.
- Making relevant directory submissions.
- Press release distributions.
In conclusion,
After the six months to a year of building relevant backlinks to your site, you may start to see results in your raking immediately, but if you don’t, there’s no need to panic.
It typically takes google about 12-18 months from the time you first started building your links to rank your site higher and ultimately reward you for all your effort.
So, don’t buy links from anyone offering you a thousand links a week or a day in your first few weeks or months because that can get you banned or penalized by search engines.
Take your time to research your competition, create useful content, and start building your links steadily and consistently.