What Factors Impact Link Building Results?

Link building is one of the most effective tools for augmenting your online profile, increasing your rankings within search engine results, and garnering more organic traffic to your site. When this is done right – with high-authority, relevant publishers and excellent content supported by strong keyword research – it offers an indispensable methodology for competing within your market online.

How Long Does it Take to Appear on the First Page of Google?

According to recent analysis from Moz, it takes an average of ten weeks to see one rank jump from a single backlink, with continued improvement in the weeks and months that follow. If you don’t have a background in SEO, it can be surprising to learn about the ‘grace period’ that follows once links have been obtained, but this is par for the course with any site.

As for reaching the first page, there is no definitive answer; your rise through the ranks depends on many factors, and tangible results are reliant upon implementing a strategy tailored to your market, competitors, and objectives.

Your Starting Point

If you are already ranking on the first page of Google’s results, then the final ascent to the top spots will be more gradual than pulling a page up from a lower ranking position on, say, the second or third pages.

Domain Authority

The authority of the sites from which you obtain backlinks holds significant bearing for your results. This is why an effective outreach strategy is so important to your campaign, and why so many sites often resort to PBNs or paid links, despite the significant risks of penalties from Google.

Google indexes the links you create, and understands that high authority resources will, in all likelihood, use other high authority sites for reference; a backlink from Forbes, for instance, will yield much stronger results than a backlink from a site that appears on, say, the third page of results.

Commitment

The fastest way to grow your backlink profile is to knuckle down and create as many as possible in a single month, but the fastest way to create a strong and authoritative online presence is to implement a consistent and strategic methodology for obtaining a reasonable number of backlinks over a longer stretch of time.

A rich backlink profile is not worth your time or money if it has been oversaturated in a matter of days or weeks. Speed runs the risk of compromising quality and alerting Google to your tactics – a fact which could do more damage to your site than good.

Similarly, keyword trends change over time; your strategy needs to be able to evolve with market behaviours. Keyword research is an ongoing process, and if you are unable to continue obtaining links from high DA sites through compelling content backed by up-to-date keywords, your competitors will leave you in the dust.

The Competition

As of 2020, the top three most searched terms on Google are ‘Facebook’, ‘YouTube’, and ‘Amazon’. Of course, no business is going to attempt to outrank these sites for these keywords – not only will they be unable to reach any position on SERPs worth the effort, but it will be incredibly unlikely to converge with user intent.

But the basic principle remains the same for any keyword. Sites in the running for the top positions on any SERPs are all utilising strong keyword research in their link building strategies. Gaining traction with the most popular keywords for your market – and therefore the most lucrative in terms of organic traffic – will take more time.

For faster results, you will need to focus on a less popular version of that keyword, or modify it into a long tail keyword. With this approach, the competition is not so strong, but relevant, high quality traffic can still be found, and results can be faster.