We polled more than 500 SEOs about link building, and this is what came out of it ⚡️

The year is already coming to an end, which means it's time to take a retrospective. The Serpstat team surveyed 523 digital professionals to identify the most important features of link building in 2022 and assist in boosting your efforts in this area in the coming year.

Here are some of my takeaways from the research:

1️⃣Link building is still important:
Refrain from perceiving link-building as a dying technique. Most respondents (55.7%) stated that link creation has a beneficial impact on SEO. A relatively small number of respondents (6.5%) gave low ratings to the effectiveness of link building.

"Backlinks will always play a role in SEO — it's why Google became Google in the first place. But my own belief (and prediction) is that brands will dominate the search results in the future. And therefore, backlinks will become less critical.
If you search for Nike.com, it doesn't matter how many backlinks the website has. Google will return Nike.com" — Steven Macdonald, Head of content at INEVO.

2️⃣Use strategy to achieve higher results:
It would seem obvious that systematic work and clear goals will bring more results than chaotic tasks. However, 42.9% of respondents from B2C companies claim that they do not have a link building strategy.

At the same time, the vast majority of those with a strategy rate it highly with 8-10 points.

3️⃣Content-oriented link building brings the best results:
22.9% of SEOs claimed content marketing the most effective link building technique. The second place was guest posting with 15.2%, followed by HARO / expert roundups with 12.4%.

"Content marketing is the obvious winner because it aligns with the reason for links. Why do most links exist? Because a writer or editor felt that some content out there supports the piece they're creating. A lot of these other techniques are spam" — Andy Crestodina, Co-founder / CMO at Orbit Media Studios.

4️⃣Directory link building is not worth your time:
Respondents also shared the most difficult link building techniques to execute. We suggest you compare the efficiency and complexity to determine whether a particular strategy is worth your time.

The directory link building showed the lowest result. In ratio, it will bring you about 3 times fewer results than the time you spend on implementation.

5️⃣Majority of the respondents reported on nofollow links:
62.3% of respondents included nofollow links in their strategy. At the same time, 32.8% do not report nofollow links.

However, experts determine that dofollow links will prevail in the optimal ratio of dofollow and nofollow links.

Read the complete study here: https://bityl.co/GDI6