Do you wonder, “How many backlinks do I need to rank?” If you worry you are short on backlinks, link marketing may be the solution for you.
Do you have the following SEO fears?
- Your keywords don’t rank well.
- You don’t get enough visibility in the Search Engine Results Pages.
- Your traffic suffers.
- Your income is decreasing.
Link marketing combined with strong content may provide the answers you need.
By reading this guide, you discover how to use link marketing to boost your rankings in Google’s SERPs. You also discover additional advantages and disadvantages of link marketing.
In addition, you receive empirical evidence in the form of statistics from SEO authorities that the claims made in this article are valid.
Also, you explore the answer to the question, “How many backlinks do I need to rank?”
Let’s dive into an exploration of link marketing to see if this strategy is something you would try to boost your visibility in the Search Engine Results Pages.
What is Link Marketing?
Link marketing is an artificial form of link building. In contrast to organic link building, link marketing is contrived.
Instead of naturally earning links to your site by publishing thorough content that answers users’ queries, you manually create a situation where a link points to your site.
You engage in link marketing when you participate in any of these activities:
- You guest post and link back to your site.
- You conduct outreach and ask people to link to you.
- You purchase a link directly or through a third-party link marketing agency.
You can see that link marketing does not necessarily include spending money. However, all three of these scenarios involve artificial means to get links. This is in contrast to earning links naturally.
Why Should You Participate in Link Marketing?
Do you prefer to watch rather than read? Here is why link marketing is my 2022 New Year’s Resolution.
1. Everyone is Doing Link Marketing
More than 60% of businesses outsource link-building efforts to agencies or contractors (Source).
When Google announced it sees the quality of a blog based on the number of links to the site, Google made buying and selling links a hot commodity. Link marketing has become an industry.
According to Userp.io, “More digital marketers, SEOs, and companies are investing money into link building every single day.”
2. SEO Companies Verify Links are Currency
Both Moz and Ahref support these claims. Moz uses the Domain Authority Ranking to indicate a blog’s worth. This DA rank is based on three types of links:
- Unique links
- The number of links
- High authority links
Ahrefs uses the number of links to the site to determine the DR, Domain Rank.
This screenshot is from Ahrefs.
Do you see the overlapping metric?
Both of the biggest SEO companies on the planet agree you need links pointing to your website.
Is content still king? Is quality content still needed? Of course!
“The majority of SEOs believe content and backlinks work best together as a main priority to increase organic traffic” (Source).
3. Link Marketing Boosts Your SEO
According to Userp.io, “58.1% of SEOs believe that backlinks have a major impact on search engine rankings.”
Link building, a synonym for free link marketing, effectively boosts your rankings in the SERPs.
Since Google translates links to your website as quality posts for their users, you get a boost in visibility in the Search Engine Results Pages.
With millions of Google searches per minute that’s a great deal of traffic for you.
According to Userp.io, “Without links, ranking for competitive keywords in your niche is impossible.”
4. Link Marketing Boosts Your Exposure.
“85% of SEOs and marketers believe that link building has a big impact on brand authority and brand building” (Source).
After you buy a link, more people will discover your brand. They may link to you organically once they know about your content.
5. Link Marketing Boosts Your Traffic
The increase in organic links to your site results in traffic and sales you didn’t have before you purchased the link and engaged in link marketing.
Since more people are seeing your work, your reach grows since your web content get shared more often.
By using link marketing to boost your exposure, you boost your chances that people will share your work.
Billions of people are on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok alone. In fact, TikTok marketing is a new marketing trend.
You don’t need an advertising budget to promote on social media sites.
Make sure you have social share buttons on your site so people who want to share your content can do so.
7. Organic Link Building is Difficult
According to the SEO Tribunal, “65% of digital marketers state that link building is the hardest part of SEO.”
Artificially building links to your content prevents those challenges. You don’t need to patiently hope for people to link to your web content.
How Many Links Do You Need?
According to Userp.io, “The first ranking page on Google has an average of 3.8x more backlinks than positions 2-10.”
How many links do you need to get to Position 1?
When I explained in my post, “How Many Backlinks Do I Need to Rank in 2022?” that I had over 500 links to my article “How to Escape From Facebook Jail,” the post ranked in Position 1 in the SERPs.
At the time of this writing, the post remains in Position 1 for the keyword “how to get out of Facebook Jail” and has over 600 links pointing to it. As you can see from the screenshot, the post ranks for over 1,600 keywords.
How many links you need depends on the competition you are up against in the SERPs.
Studies show posts with 3,000 words get linked to more than shorter posts. If a competing post has more links pointing to it and has quality content, the post has a stronger chance of ranking than yours.
Link Marketing Best Practices
Link Marketing Best Practice #1
You need to combine quality content with link building.
If you just use link building, the paid methods of link marketing, or other means of artificially manipulating your rankings, Google will boost your visibility in the SERPs. However, when people see your content is thin and doesn’t answer their search queries, they will hit the back button, Google will demote your content, and you’ll lose search engine rankings.
According to the Authority Hacker, no one has been penalized by Google in five years.
Link Marketing Best Practices #2
Choose reputable link marketing services.
Related Reading: Blogging Best Practices
Reputable link marketing services exist like these:
However, some link-building services hack websites instead of paying them for links.
How Link Marketing Services Work
The screenshot shows the NO-BS dashboard. NO-BS Marketplace is a reputable link marketing service.
As you see from the screenshot, the dashboard shows you important metrics you need to make informed decisions about what websites to buy links from.
For instance, you see the website’s Domain Rating (DR) and Domain Authority Rank (DA).
The publisher and NO-BS both get a portion of the money.
One important note…
I am not an affiliate of NO-BS, but I can recommend the service based on my positive experiences.
What if You Don’t Have the Budget For Link Marketing?
Links are currency.
Consider an A-B-C link swap.
Find link swapping groups here:
- Slack groups
- Discord servers
- Outreach
Outreach could include contact through email or outreach in online groups.
Is Link Marketing Black Hat SEO?
Black Hat SEO can loosely be defined as engaging in practices to manipulate Google to boost your rankings in the Search Engine Results Pages.
In other words, Black Hat SEO is doing anything Google would not approve of.
Is Link Marketing Black Hat SEO?
Not necessarily.
According to Julian Goldie SEO, Google released vague guidelines about what you can and cannot do. In his video, Goldie points out that Google’s guidelines include phrases like “may be considered a violation of Google’s Webmaster guidelines.”
However, Goldie goes on to caution, “If you are buying 10,000 links from some random guy off the internet,” you are engaging in Black Hat SEO.
What NOT To Do When You Are Link Marketing
SEO expert Marie Haynes of SEO News You Can Use explains that many SEOs pay people at Fiverr to build links for them.
According to Haynes, for $35.00, freelancers at Fiverr use an automated system of building spammy links.
Haynes cautions against these attempts at link marketing (Source).
Wrapping Up: Link Marketing in 2022
In closing, this article shared the pros and cons of link marketing. This guide to link marketing shared seven reasons you should consider link marketing and link marketing best practices. In addition, you saw the disadvantage of link marketing: angering Google and risking your site getting penalized.
This article also shared free alternatives to paid link marketing.
By reading this post, you learned the difference between organic link building and artificially manipulated link marketing.
Readers, please share so bloggers who might want to engage in artificial link building find this post and get more information.
If you need more intensive help with link building, consider Mostly Blogging Academy’s Link Building Simplified.
Have you ever engaged in link marketing? Would you recommend other bloggers do the same?
Janice Wald is the founder of MostlyBlogging.com and co-founder of the Mostly Blogging Academy. She is an ebook author, blogger, blogging coach, blogging judge, freelance writer, and speaker. She won the Best Internet Marketer Award and the Best Blogger Award at the 2021 Infinity Blog Awards. Wald was also nominated as 2019 Best Internet Marketer by the Infinity Blog Awards and in 2017 as the Most Informative Blogger by the London Bloggers Bash. She’s been featured on Small Business Trends, the Huffington Post, and Lifehack.
