If you’re anything like us (or other link building agencies), you probably get any variation of the following question a million times:
“What’s the upside in traffic we can expect out of this campaign?”
Your reaction is usually something like…
Is that you? Keep reading.
What Has Already Been Said?
I’ve been looking into the topic and found a few contradictory ideas.
Most people are using Google analytics, and traffic increases as a way to calculate and explain the ROI of link building campaigns.
Here are a few of the articles I found:
Linkody.com: Measuring Your Link Building ROI with Google Analytics
ghostmarketing.co.uk : How To Calculate ROI For Link Building
That is all very nice and cool but, in my opinion, that’s only useful if we’re talking about referral traffic that comes directly from the links you build.
Also in my opinion, that’s is usually only true if you’re doing big PR campaigns.
Those links might (and should) bring you quality, relevant referral traffic.
Others, like the late Eric Ward, agree that it’s a pretty challenging task.
The Underlying Problem
The problem, is that most of my clients when they ask “the ROI question”, are actually asking a different thing.
They basically want to know:
“If I pay you $2000 per month, what increase in traffic can I expect to see from my page instantly moving up the SERPs as a direct effect of your links?”
I personally think asking this question means starting off on the wrong foot.
You see, for the type of links that we build (links to increase your site’s authority and strength), you need to keep in mind 2 things:
- Results are not immediate.
It might take a few months for results of a link building campaign to show. That is mostly because it takes a while for Google to spot the new links and to understand whether it should move your page up or not.
If that’s true and understood, how can you expect me to tell you exactly what increase in traffic you’ll see after month 1?
- Too many other factors are at play here.
What about on page optimization? content quality and relevancy? crawl budget optimization? It’s just too hard for us link builders to give you an answer that’s based on our link building efforts alone without taking into account everything else.
What if I’m building 5 great links to your page this month but your content doesn’t satisfy 100% user intent? No matter how many links it has, that content will probably never rank higher than position X.
In this case, it’s my responsibility as a link builder to let you know that you might want to revisit the content before we build links to it.
But if you don’t have the budget or the time to do that, and you still want the links, I’ll just go ahead and do my job.
Build links (even if it means using some of my pre-approved vendors to make things easier).
When The Questions Keep Coming
At this point I usually send prospects a few sample links we have acquired for a similar (not exactly of course, but in an adjacent market) client.
Which, would bring out the occasional:
“if we are unhappy with the links we get back the difference of that $2000 payment?”
Again, this thinking clearly shows me that the client doesn’t have a good understanding of what quality, manual outreach link building involves in terms of hours of work and people. I also think these kinds of questions come from years and years of bad freelance SEOs experiences, so of course, the client is on the fence…
Also, every one of my prospective clients knows (just from looking at the website) that we can get them 10 links per month in the range DA20 + (usually up to DA60), form real sites that are active and managed by real people.
How could they not be happy with the links if they met those criteria?
Would you ask your doctor if you can get some of the money back if the pain didn’t stop completely but just partially?
Probably not.
A Few Words From The Experts
I asked Ryan Stewart of Webris (FTF and The Blueprint) about this on a webinar and here’s what came out of the discussion:
- Avoid selling a direct increase in traffic from links.
- There’s no direct proof that any kind of links (even links from pages with traffic) will increase traffic and so it would be unethical for us to make promises or give guarantees. (Although I know it would definitely make it easier to sell!)
- That said, there is a correlation between the increase in referring (quality) domains and organic traffic.
This Is great and though I agree with it, I felt compelled to dive deeper (I always try to do what’s best for my clients) and wanted to do more research on the topic.
I found this article by Builtvisible, which sparked my interest.
A few quotes from the article:
“Big shiny campaigns with 300 links are irrelevant unless you know the exact ROI of that campaign.”
“At Builtvisible, we’ve built a model designed to tell us how and where to build links we can forecast the impact of. Our work is completely guided by ROI.“
They also have some very nice slides on the topic:
This sounds all great, but to me it’s still a bit vague and not really actionable for the average joe (like we are).
So my next questions were:
Could we actually build something taking into account things like DR, referring domains, link velocity of top 10 results + how many links we can build per month and their metrics to make a projection on those?
Of course this would be an estimation, but maybe it’s better than nothing?
Is this really worth doing?
Or would it just create even more pain in the ass (especially should those projections not come true at the end of the month/campaign)?
Since I always like hearing from as many people as possible before making a decision on something, I decided to ask a few other people, who I respect as SEOs and link builders what they thought about this.
Here’s what they had to say.
Ryan Stewart (Webris, FTF and The Blueprint)
BuiltVisible is an agency i truly respect, they do amazing work, and what they wrote is true – but in my opinion, this helps sell contracts, it’s not a good business decision.
It’s also important to note, Builtvisible works with huge brands and that deck is mostly for PR – they’re not talking about link building the way most small agencies do it.
You’re working with smaller clients who won’t get the same type of results.
if you start pushing them down this path and conditioning them to think links = traffic, It’s going to be a long, difficult working relationship.
anyone who knows anything about SEO knows that links are important – incredibly important. they know that links are positively correlated with higher rankings.
You do NOT have to show that your links are driving higher rankings, especially bc you’re only working on links.
if you have NO control over page titles, content length, accuracy, UX, etc – how can you be responsible for rankings?
You’re not.
People come to you as a link builder because they’ve self diagnosed “our rankings are stuck – we need links”.
it’s your job to provide the best quality links possible. That’s it.
I respect your drive to improve your service, I really do, I’ve been there.
I really don’t think you should go down this road – you’re not selling SEO, you’re selling links. if you only have control over a small aspect of the campaign, you can’t be responsible for the end results.
Ian Howells (Traffic Think Tank)
You can’t ever get the “exact” ROI, because there’s never a situation where nothing in the entire landscape changes except your link building.
Based on reading the Builtvisible info, it sounds like they’re doing forecasting based on looking at the competition and making the assumption:
“If we build A links with B metrics, we can expect to rank in C positions which will mean D traffic and E revenue.” (Assuming our links needed to rank, CTR, and revenue/visit assumptions are all correct.)
A lot of SEO (with link building being no exception) really comes down to…
“I can’t promise if we do X, it’ll get us ranked #1.
But I can guarantee if we don’t *at least* do X, we won’t ever get there.”
If you’re selling link building, you’re selling the inputs (links), not rankings (output). If you’re selling an SEO campaign, you’re selling outputs/results.
Joshua Hardwick (Ahrefs)
Links correlate with rankings and traffic. We all know that.
I believe this is why so many people get bogged down trying to build accurate and automated models to predict the ROI of their link building efforts. But in my opinion, this isn’t really possible to do—at least not with any kind of accuracy.
There are many reasons for that, but let me offer just two:
- Level of effort doesn’t always correlate with the gained number of links. Any link builder will know that certain campaigns, in certain niches, get higher link rates than others. So even if we assume that more links lead to better rankings and more traffic, ROI in terms of links gained from x hours of effort is often very difficult to predict.
- SEO is bigger than links. There are literally hundreds of things that can hold back your rankings that have nothing to do with links. If your only job is building links, you have no control over those things, so it’s impossible for you to say that more links will equal more traffic for your client.
Does that mean you can’t build a model that’s more accurate than guessing? Of course not.
Look at any correlation study and you’ll see that links positively correlate with rankings and traffic.
But knowing the precise number of links you need to rank #1, or what constitutes a high-quality link in the eye’s of Google, or how much effort getting those links are, to be honest, anyone’s best guess.
And that means it’s very difficult to judge the ROI of any link-building campaign.
So, my opinion is this:
If you sell link building, then you shouldn’t be selling rankings or higher traffic.
You need to work with clients that understand the nature of link building, and the fact that they’re not hiring you to increase their organic traffic.
Brie Moreau (SEO Strategist, White Light Digital Marketing)
It needs to be explained to the client that links are an asset that will never leave and appreciate over time.
Buying 1 link will not move the needle though buying 10 links a month over a year will create a strong SEO asset and ulitmately add value to your business.
Make sure to benchmark the DA when you start a campaign and then you can see how it progresses over time. The higher the DA the easier it is to rank for more competitive keywords, it’s that simple.
Also worth noting that 3 x DA20 links aren’t worth one DA 60 (not even close…) So with link building, quality over quantity. We offer tiered pricing as we always want to get our clients the highest DA links we can.
I also think its important to educate the client that backlinks are not everything, as mentioned before other factors such as on-page and intent behind the keyword are also important. We have clients that are backlink heavy and only want backlinks to pages with no good on-page SEO cause they think it’s all about backlinks. Unfortunately sometime even education isn’t enough to take a more holistic approach to SEO.
That being said, backlinks are powerful… we have blasted backlinks at pages and ranked when we really shouldn’t have, go figure….Content will normally get you on page 1 for a easy keyword, though it’s the backlinks that will make you own a top 3 position. Anything past an easy keyword though a high DA website is needed to rank, period…
Which means backlinks.
Jason Malone (Founder and CEO, WeOutreach)
When selling our service, we aim it squarely at folks who are SEO experts with a deep understanding of not only link building but also all of the other factors that are critical to the success of any SEO strategy.
Most of our clients understand link building, but simply don’t have the time or inclination to design and manage a process themselves.
We let them specialise and focus on content, branding, onsite optimisation, CRO, etc, while we slot into the process to handle the link building side of things.
If a potential client asks me what sort of traffic/rankings increases they can expect as a result of our link building, usually I will just explain that links are only one part of a successful SEO strategy, and end the conversation there as they’re likely not a good fit with our service and process.
Filtering out clients like this means not only avoiding disappointing an unsuitable client, but also lets us focus on doing the best job possible for our specific target market, instead of trying to be “all things to all people”.
There’s also a marketing/branding benefit to this – When our target market sees this messaging, it resonates and attracts them to us. They too don’t want a generalist link builder who talks about traffic and rankings… our target market understand SEO and high quality link building, and they don’t need broader SEO assistance.
They need links that are built in a certain way and meet certain quality criteria, and we deliver nothing more or less than this.
Artëm Klimkin (Linkshero)
SEO is an infinite game.
There are no rounds/games/sets/times which are over after a predefined amount of time (e.g. 90 minutes like in soccer).
SEO in general (and LB in particular) is an ongoing never ending process that’s subject to continuous tweaking, testing, trying and…adjusting (hey-hey Core Update!)
Hence trying to contain SEO-based results into a rigid forecast (e.g. X traffic by Y month) is not a good idea in the majority of the cases (as I see it).
Now…back to the original question this article poses…
“Can you even measure link building ROI?”
The short answer is – no.
The long(er) answer…
The only way to measure the effect of something is to completely isolate it from all the other factors.
Welcome to the world of proper science (and SEO is not science by any means) – randomized groups within double-blind studies, statistically significant sample sizes from true populations and peer-reviewed outcomes.
By no means can we isolate link building from any of the numerous factors that are dynamically fluctuating.
Having said this, we can, to a degree, predict a specific outcome with a certain confidence interval.
It would go like this…
“We can predict that X number of links would result in Y increase in traffic with a Z confidence interval” (where “confidence interval” measures the validity of our testing procedure – and not that there is a 95% probability that the true value is within the interval).
But it also raises a bunch of significant questions.
1. Just how confident could we be in our testing procedure? (methodology is essential in a proper scientific experiment)
2. We still can’t measure the “black swans” (read Nassim Taleb).
Here are the good and bad examples of the said black swans.
- We once landed a backlink on a big news website for a client that we had. It generated a good bunch of referral traffic for him and, as it turned out, some sales that immediately paid for the entire link building campaign he paid for (everything was tracked via GA).
- We once had a client who we were building amazing links for and his traffic was growing really nicely…until the medic update came by and destroyed the whole thing (he is now recovered by the way…thanks to the algorithm readjustment).
Could you predict any of these with a specific level of probability? 😉
Final thoughts…
First, to win you only need to do 2 things continuously:
- Build content
- Promote it
Second, anything that has “ROI-based” on it is a marketing trick (just saying…wink-wink).
Gisele Navarro (Operations Director, NeoMam Studios)
Any business owner who is right now wondering how long till they see real-world value generated by their link building agency needs to hire a technical SEO.
As an agency, we stopped getting ROI questions they day we decided to only service in-house SEO teams with a solid strategy in place. Link building is only half the story so we can’t foresee the effects on rankings and organic traffic without being involved in everything else.
If a potential client gets in touch but they don’t have anyone on their team who owns the technical side of SEO, then we’re not a good fit for what they need and we refuse to sell them on the promise of links = rankings = traffic = $$$.
The reality is that all the high-authority, relevant, contextual, follow links in the world won’t save a site that doesn’t satisfy user intent.
It comes as no surprise that behind the most powerful sites on the Web there’s a savvy in-house SEO team with a plan – they are the ones who define the ROI of what we do and not the other way around.
BuiltVisible wrote those articles and presentations from the point of view of an SEO agency who offers link building as one of their many services. When I read their call for agencies to “stop talking about links and start talking about ROI”, I assumed that they we were speaking to other full service agencies who have the power to set the direction of both on-site and off-site efforts.
As a team specialised in producing content that attracts links, it is not our place to define the ROI of our work in the same way an SEO agency would.
We work with our clients to set clear expectations in regards to what success and failure will look like. Our team’s goal is to meet (and ideally exceed) those expectations so that the client’s team can achieve their own goal. We then measure the return on investment based on those expectations: either we delivered what we promised (editorial links) or we didn’t.
And if it comes to a point where the client is unhappy because they expected more than what we promised, then we will give them their money back. In a situation like this, we’ve either worked with the wrong client (our fault), didn’t set clear expectations (our fault) or failed to deliver our best work (our fault). Whichever way you look at it, it was our responsibility so the client shouldn’t have to pay for it.
Adam Steele (Loganix)
If you’re doing SEO, you need links. There is seldom a way around that.
The other thing I am sure of is you can’t measure link building ROI, when doing SEO.
You have 3 choices:
- Buy links
- Earn links
- Ask for links
Link builders are selling the difference between what it would cost a typical company to earn or ask for them (+ the time/investment it will require to get to our level) vs hiring a link building company. The difference can be enormous. It gets even bigger when your company is unsexy or hard to link to (lawyers, loans, etc.)
Many companies come to us having tried to build a team in house, and most have only moderate success, at a ‘ROI’ or scale that doesn’t jive with expectations nor needs.
Not everyone can be a good link builder. It often requires being moderately good at many different things. What we want to do is catch companies before they waste all the time and effort proving to themselves they aren’t suited for the task. Show them what lies ahead of them, the opportunity cost and why they needn’t go through hell.
Nick Eubanks’ 7FA course taught me to measure my tasks in terms of likely reward, in increments of $5, $50, $500 and $5000. For example, if I do sales for one hour, what value will my sales prowess likely have for the company? If non link building companies were to apply this system to the time of their own team members tasks, what value would they create for their time spent? Calculate hours per link earned, and compare the cost of those hours (or link) vs the going rate for an equal link.
David Farkas (Owner & CEO, The Upper Ranks)
In my experience when someone is asking about ROI they are always almost coming from a ‘paid ad’ mentality in which they want to see, black and white, how spending X will earn Y, which of course is impossible in the realm of SEO and link building.
I mean, even when there is an increase in traffic they can always play devils advocate and argue that the organic traffic would have improved anyway because of all the other ranking factors, right? 😉
So I just tell them that they are 100% correct and there is absolutely NO WAY in the world to calculate ROI. And anyone who is providing them with an ROI is lying thru their teeth to try and close the deal for a quick buck.
But, BUT, if they do a little bit of research they will find countless case studies that prove the correlation between links and rankings and how links are one of the most powerful ranking factors.
And then I’ll illustrate the unlimited potential organic traffic can open for their business 24/7, and how it can open a consistent floodgate of traffic on autopilot; something unfathomable with the ROI/PPC route.
At which point I’ll tell them, in a subtle manner, that they have to ask themselves if they want to stick with their ROI principles and be stuck to the limitations of PPC the rest of their lives, while their competitors are smacking themselves silly to the bank.
Or, are they willing to forgo an ROI and take the ‘risk’ with link building and SEO to take their business to unimaginable places.
Robbie Richards (https://www.robbierichards.com/)
I don’t ever promise rankings or traffic increases to clients off the back of a link building campaign. There are too many variables at play – intent, quality, UX etc – to give any type of guarantee.
We always set very clear expectations with our clients. We don’t sell a certain number of links a month. Clients buy a chunk of our time to execute a specific campaign designed to drive links to a specific asset on the site. Most of the clients we run link building campaigns for come to us because they realize how much of a grind it is, and want someone else to shoulder those activities. Therefore, little education is needed.
At a high level this is how we’ll approach it:
- Content inventory – which content does the client want to rank higher? The content type will dictate the strategy.
- SERP signals – does the client have strong enough content/on-page to compete outside of links? If not, we’ll highlight that so we are not setting ourselves up for “failure”. We’ll then look at the domain rating, and then the average number of referring domains (existing and acquired monthly) to make a projection on the number of links that will need to be built in the short term, as well as ongoing to remain competitive in the SERPs.
- Outline strategy – based on the assets at hand and the level of SERP competition, we’ll outline the strategies (and time) we think are needed to compete in the SERPs (provide other SEO efforts are in check).
It’s a data-driven approach that helps us set realistic goals and ensure the client does not base the success of their entire SEO campaign on the shoulders of their link building team. While link building is critical to ranking in the SERPs, it is just one piece of the pie.
Brendan Hufford (SEO Director, cliquestudios.com – brendanhufford.com)
I find the article by BuiltVisible (and the associated deck) to be completely confusing.
They claim to have ROI nailed down and then proceed to vastly oversimplify the process of full SEO campaigns translating into quantifiable revenue for a client.
They claim to have a 2,190% ROI for a client and then link to a case study based on traffic and zero mention of revenue. It appears to me that “revenue-focused approach,” simply means that you need to make sure your client can monetize the traffic you bring in. But again, no visibility on how that’s done anywhere.
It also assumes the client has a highly successful and completely trackable sales process.
I’ve never found that to be the case with any client.
Ever.
It’s with that said that I agree with focusing more on ROI than links (or any other specific part of an SEO campaign).
It’s why I re-read Ryan Stewart’s manifesto on why he stopped selling SEO services as often as I can.
It’s why I re-read and implement one of the smartest public approaches I’ve seen: From The Future’s Nick Eubanks approach to conducting an assessment on the Total Addressable Online Market.
Answering the question about the ROI of Link Building is part data (which I find the TAM model to work very well for) and part relationship. If you want clients to stop asking the wrong questions, you need to improve when and how you communicate with one another. Ross Hudgens summed it up extremely well here and we’ve put his advice into action with:
- Smart goals and baselines upon project kickoff
- Setting up our work as a full SEO campaign versus ad-hoc services
- Monthly reporting & review calls
- Bi-weekly SEO education newsletters for our SEO clients
- Training and SOP documents for our clients and their teams
I think we still have a long way to go, but I want our clients to lean on our SEO campaign expertise just as we lean on them for their industry expertise. I think education and communication gets us both closer to that goal.
Closing Thoughts
I believe the most important takeaway here is:
As outreach link building agencies, we need to educate our prospects, show people the effort and time that are involved in the kind of work we do, which is different from other platforms that leverage existing relationships with websites (we call these link “vendors”).
This in turn, gets clients well-placed, quality backlinks that they can be proud to have, which help improve their domain authority, as well getting them more traffic.
This might not be what most (uneducated) clients expect to hear, but for me it ultimately comes down to:
Say how things really are, tell the truth.
With this principle in mind, the only ethical things we can do as link builders are:
- Sell the output of the hours it takes to prospect, qualify, manage outreach and acquire the links.
- Sell our processes, systems (how we do things, could be differently or better than others)
- Sell links according to the market value and quality of the links we acquire (based on popular third party metrics).
It might look “bad”, it might even make the sale harder, and we might risk being seen as a commodity, but at least it’s honest.
What’s your opinion? Let me know in the comments 🙂