Link Building Statistics for 2024

A recent study of more than 800 SEO strategists found that more than 58% believe Backlinks play an important part in SERP rankings. (1)

It costs businesses, on average, $360 to secure a backlink from a reputable website. (4)

40.7% of marketers find content marketing the best strategy for passively building organic links. (1)

Posts that answer the Why and What question, along with infographics posts, get 25.8% more backlinks than videos and “How-to” posts. (7)

43.7% of the top-ranking pages on SERPs have reciprocal links, also known as link exchanges. (17)

Long-form content between 3,000 and 10,000 words acquires 77.2% more links compared to shorter articles, ranging from 0 – 1,000 words. (7)

According to Ahrefs, the average cost of publishing a paid guest post is $77.80. (13)

Digital marketing has become ever more important as technology changes. Businesses are run online, information is shared on digital platforms, and money is exchanged virtually through e-commerce checkout carts.

And while an SEO-optimized website might give site visitors a pleasurable browsing experience, the links to those pages tell Google you deserve to be near the top of the SERP rankings.

So, are you gearing up for your next link-building campaign and looking for some much-needed inspiration?

We know that in times past, link building has been an essential part of successful SEO strategies, and this hasn’t changed.

Here are some up-to-date link-building stats that help you craft a super successful SEO strategy and get your site noticed in 2022.

What is link building?

As the name suggests, link building involves building links or connections from other web pages to your own website.

Once you’ve built a link from a site to your own, the link will often be highlighted and visible to readers, making it easy to follow.

Here’s what I mean:

The article then allows the user to navigate from one website to another relevant page by clicking on the blue text.

This is super important as there’s a direct correlation between the number of good links to your page and achieving a high SERP ranking.

Surprisingly, 95% of all pages online have zero external links pointing to their website. (1)

What the experts say regarding Link Building

A recent study of more than 800 SEO strategists found that more than 58% believe Backlinks play an important part in SERP rankings. (1)

In contrast, only 4% believed that backlinks added little value to their SEO strategies. (1)

In the same study, 56.3% believe that link quality and quantity impact rankings. (1)

Not all links are beneficial or healthy. You must ensure that the links you pursue and build to your domain will indicate a healthy website to Google, not a terminally ill site.

Broken links on your site are a sign of an unmaintained web URL, and Google doesn’t like that. Here’s a screenshot taken from the Google Analytics SEO starter guide, stating the importance of avoiding “letting your navigational page become out of date with broken links.”

Screenshot of Google SEO Starter guide

Google themselves have confirmed that Internal links are a ranking factor in their Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. (2)

There it states:

“Make it as easy as possible for users to go from general content to the more specific content they want on your site. Add navigation pages when it makes sense and effectively work these into your internal link structure. Make sure all of the pages on your site are reachable through links, and that they don’t require an internal search functionality to be found. Link to related pages, where appropriate, to allow users to discover similar content.”

DataBox recently surveyed that almost half (42%) of the SEO specialists who participated spend as much time on internal and external links. (3)

34% of them think that backlinks have more SEO value, while 24% focus on improving internal linking. (3)

Then, the expert SEO strategists and Google all seem to agree that building links to your website is an important part of an effective SEO strategy.

But how much does link building cost?

Link Building Pricing and Cost Stats

Building links can be quite pricey. Although one should never pay for a link to be added to your website, there are SEO specialists whose bread and butter it is to build links on behalf of other websites.

Here are a few important stats regarding the price of link building in 2022.

According to ahrefs, it costs businesses, on average, $360 to secure a backlink from a reputable website. (4)

This amount goes up when the link is from a high-ranking website.

Siege media recently ran a study and found that high-quality backlinks could set you back $1500. (5)

This doesn’t seem to deter larger companies who know the value of good backlinks.

Some companies reportedly pay up to $20,000 per month for link-building campaigns. (5)

Link building isn’t always outsourced. It can also be done in-house but at a cost.

According to one study, marketing teams that have chosen to shoulder the responsibility of link building have spent up to 10% of their marketing budget on link building. (6)

And the same study found that experts agree on one thing. The price of link building will only increase.

40% of its participant believed that the cost of link building will increase due to the competitive rise in building links to relevant sites. (6)

Even though the experts agree that the cost of link building will only rise in the future, it hasn’t held companies back from doing things themselves.

It turns out that 63% of companies would rather create in-house link-building teams than outsource the process. (6)

Are links really effective?

Yes, they are.

And while there’s an ongoing discussion about the effectiveness of paid links vs. organic traffic resulting from links built, many businesses have shown their willingness to pay for links.

Aria found that around 63% of marketers believe buying links will have a positive effect on SERP rankings. (6)

And the results don’t end there. The same study found that 44% of marketers believe that link building will have a positive impact on their overall marketing strategy. (6)

No wonder they’re willing to dedicate funds to this marketing funnel.

And it’s not just SERP rankings that marketers are going after. Many companies now understand the importance of brand authority. They know that the more links are built to and from their pages, the more they get their brand name out there.

In fact, 85% of marketers feel that link building is important for brand building and will still be important in 5 years. (6)

This leads us to ask which strategies we should follow when trying to build links.

Here are some statistics that should help you pick the best link-building strategy for you.

7 Ways to approach Organic Link building

Creating Quality Content

We know that certain types of content generally have greater success in acquiring links than others.

For instance, Long-form content between 3,000 and 10,000 words acquires 77.2% more links compared to shorter articles, ranging from 0 – 1,000 words. (7)

Case in point, this article on 19 NEW SEO Techniques For 2022 has a word count of over 8,300. (9)

It boasted more than 14,000 social media shares and has acquired 4688 backlinks to date.

Content paired with actionable tips and case studies is valuable and easy to digest, so it’s no surprise why readers don’t hesitate to share these blogs with their peers.

If you don’t have the time to dedicate to creating high-quality content as part of your link-building efforts, why not get in touch with a company that offers this service?

Use Email Outreach Campaigns

Some think old-fashioned when hearing the words Email Outreach. But this method remains effective.

In fact, a recent study shows that 81% of small businesses use email campaigns regularly to improve their SEO efforts significantly. (10)

And numbers prove that this way of communication isn’t a method of the past.

According to Statista, in 2022 alone, 333.2 billion emails are expected to be sent and received daily. That’s a staggering amount of daily emails. (11)

It shows then that outreach campaigns should form part of your SEO Efforts.

Resource Page or Roundup Link Building

Resource pages contain a list of links pointing to highly useful content and reputable sources.

These lists make excellent link-building targets as they primarily link out to other sites.

You can begin by creating your resource page or finding websites or blogs that have one relevant to your blog’s content.

Then, choose the most relevant content that will fit in the list of your prospect’s resource page and reach out with a personalized email.

Broken Link Building

As the internet ages, links become redundant and pages turn up more and more as ‘Not found.’

In fact, one study examined hyperlinks in New York Times articles, starting with the launch of the Times website in 1996 up through mid-2019. (12)

The results they came to were astonishing.

“We found that of the 553,693 articles within the purview of our study – meaning they included URLs on nytimes.com – there were a total of 2,283,445 hyperlinks pointing to content outside of nytimes.com.

Seventy-two percent of those were “deep links” with a path to a specific page, such as example.com/article, which is where we focused our analysis (as opposed to simply example.com, which composed the rest of the data set).”

Now, keep in mind that The NY Times is a website with excellent domain authority, with Ahrefs giving them a ranking of 94. It also has 779,722,453 Backlinks.

So, one would imagine that the links to and from their content are all up to date. But that’s not the case…

“Of these deep links, 25 percent of all links were completely inaccessible. Linkrot became more common over time: 6 percent of links from 2018 had rotted, as compared to 43 percent of links from 2008 and 72 percent of links from 1998. Fifty-three percent of all articles that contained deep links had at least one rotted link.”

Broken links = Opportunity

Most marketers don’t go after this way of building links, citing that the links gained don’t justify the time and effort one puts in.

We at Batlinks disagree and have had success using this strategy. We offer broken link building as a valuable SEO tactic.

Link Reclamation

Some link-building strategies aren’t just about opportunity, as with Broken Link building.

Link reclamation, for instance, involves searching our articles and posts that might have quoted you or your company without appropriately linking to your site.

Once you have a strong brand and reputable name, you simply have to reach out to these webmasters or marketers and ask them to add an appropriate link.

Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is a tactic that is alive and well under link-building specialists out there, here a just a few stats to prove the point:

According to Ahrefs, the average cost of publishing a paid guest post is $77.80. (13)

50% of bloggers perform outreach for guest posts to 10 or fewer contacts a month, while 7%pitch to 100 or more blogs per month (14)

87% of bloggers come up with guest post ideas themselves, but only 52% of them do the actual writing (14)

93% of editors plan to publish the same amount of guest content or more (15)

Content Syndication

Syndicating content involves taking an existing piece of your content and re-publishing it on a third-party website. This means that your content gets put in front of a whole new audience that you probably wouldn’t have had access to otherwise.

This is a risky method as the content could easily be flagged as duplicate, causing issues with Google for both websites.

Wrapping things up

According to one study, the first five organic results account for 67.6% of all the clicks on the first page of the Search Engine Results. (16)

As a business owner or marketer, you need to employ whatever white hat link-building strategies you possibly can to ensure that you end up at the top or near the top of the search engine rankings.

But understanding how to employ the different tactics can be daunting, so why not let us help you? At Batlinks, we have tried and tested several link-building strategies. We know what we’re doing and have the results to back it up.

With a lot of hard work and a little bit of patience, you’ll be at the top of the search Engine Results Pages before you know it.

Sources:

1 – Usurp Study

2 – Google’s SEO Starter Guide

3 – Databox study

4 – Ahrefs study

5 – Siege Media

6 – Aria Study

7 – Backlinko content study

8 – Spiralytics

9 – Backlinko blog

10 – Oberlo Study