In an April 2016 article on Moz by Kristina Kledzik titled “How Long Does it Take for Link Building to Impact Rankings,” the author suggests that new links take about 10 weeks to show an effect. Our research indicates quite the opposite: high-end link building yields immediate and ongoing positive results. I’ll detail our findings and share our data here.
Kledzik’s study focused on a moderately large site with roughly 200K pages and moderately difficult keyword rankings. She rightly observes that with many variables at play, isolating the impact of any particular ranking factor, like a link, is challenging.
Our study was conducted differently and, I believe, provides a clearer picture of why we find that the impact of links is immediate and enduring.
Background on the Study
Firstly, we exclusively work with the legal industry, bringing high-end link building to small business websites. Thus, the impact should be more pronounced. Secondly, to isolate the effect of links, I’ve selected four case studies from the past four years that meet these criteria:
- Extremely successful in generating high-quality links
- For non-retainer clients (i.e., no other SEO work being done)
- Concentrated in a very short time frame, with link-building efforts constrained to just a few days
Fundamental differences in the studies:
- Lower authority: Generally, these small business sites have lower authority, so we’d expect any changes to have a more dramatic impact.
- A massive influx of links: For these clients, we didn’t create just one or two new links but executed a strategic campaign to drive a large volume of high-quality, relevant links quickly, sometimes increasing the volume of quality links by 50% to 300% in under two weeks.
- Focus on traffic rather than rankings: We use traffic as our success metric, not rankings. Traffic captures long-tail queries and site-wide benefits of individual links and translates into actual business. This is especially significant for local businesses like law firms, where local results are heavily influenced by links. Consequently, overall site traffic should grow faster with overall domain authority improvements.
- Fewer variables: Since we deal with small business websites, there are fewer additional variables that could explain traffic fluctuations. Nothing else is happening beyond these link-building campaigns.
Methodology note: Some of these link-building campaigns were undertaken in response to current events. In the graphs below, I’ve filtered out SEO traffic going to that specific content to highlight the difference in traffic to the rest of the site’s content.
Case I: Social Justice
For this case, we ran a link-building program for a law firm focusing on a specific women’s rights issue. All links were generated within a three-day period. Inbound traffic increased by roughly 20% immediately after the campaign’s launch.
Case II: Class Action
We represented a law firm filing a class action suit against a restaurant chain and used social media to reach potential litigants while generating links about the suit. The following graph shows a 17% increase in inbound search traffic (bottom graph) immediately after the traffic surge from the social media campaign (top graph).
Case III: Famous Injury Lawsuit
This was a one-off link-building engagement where our client filed an injury suit against a well-known technology company. The coverage on large nationwide news sites spilled over into secondary news sites, resulting in 114 domains linking back.
The bump in search traffic driven by brand name search was followed by a 46% increase in search traffic across the domain. However, the site’s technical issues meant the increase was underwhelming given the volume of new links.
Case IV: Turkey Day Blowout
This case was most successful and shows a delay between the link-building efforts and the traffic increase. It was a content marketing project launched at Thanksgiving, during which website traffic for law firms typically drops. However, post-holidays, the firm saw a persistent 65% increase in inbound search traffic.
In summary, each case where we’ve significantly improved a site’s authority profile through high-quality links, we’ve observed an immediate and persistent improvement in search traffic performance.
