The source – https://www.aira.net/state-of-link-building
The Aira survey lasted from February 18 to March 31, 2021. During this time, 253 people responded to the survey via TypeForm. The results were visualized automatically. The survey involved 253 people from 36 countries.
The study confirmed that content marketing specifically for link building was the most popular link building method in 2020 (76%). More than half (54%) of respondents said they conducted competitor analysis to build links, while 50% use brand re-mentions as a link building method.
Guest posting dropped slightly in the list: in 2020, it was used by 51% of respondents, and in 2021 - by 42% of respondents.
Authority or link quality is measured using these SEO metrics:
- the most popular domain used by respondents was Ahrefs domain rating (61%);
- in second place is Domain Authority from Moz, which was used by 49% of respondents;
- on the third - Majestic.
On a scale of 1-10 on link building performance, 21% found links to be very effective in driving organic search rankings. Considering the responses rated 8, 9 and 10 out of 10, a total of 62% of respondents rated the importance of links.
89% of respondents said they create content for the purpose of getting links.
More than half of the respondents said they launched campaigns that generated 1-9 links (60%) and 10-19 links (56%), respectively.
Of these, 31% admitted that their campaigns did not provide any links in the past 12 months.
The biggest challenge marketers faced was scaling link building across a large number of products / categories. 69% of respondents ranked it as a priority, and 31% of respondents said getting topically relevant links and creating topically relevant content were next in difficulty.
When asked whether e-commerce marketers actively create links to specific areas of their site, the most popular responses, with 38% of the vote, were category pages and pages in a topic cluster. None of the respondents indicated that they were simply worried about getting links to the domain as a whole, and no one checked this option.
When asked what pricing models agencies and freelancers used when it came to charging link building fees, the most popular answer was royalty (55%), and the least popular form of charging for link building was 9% cost per link.
The full version of the study is available on the company's website.
