The 2016 State of Link Building Survey - Results & Analysis

[Estimated read time: 18 minutes]

SEO futurists have predicted the death of links as a ranking signal for years on end. That hasnthappened yet, and I'm happy to say that link building as a practice has greatly evolved.

But rapid change often creates confusion, and there doesn't yet seem to be a strong consensus onhow link building teams should be constructed, where they fit in the marketing plan, and how muchought to be invested into link acquisition.

To bring more clarity and transparency to a complicated pillar of SEO, I'm proud to present to youthe 2016 State of Link Building Survey results!

Lets be frank: link building has had a volatile history filled with spam, tricks, and get-rich-quickschemes. When Google introduced the first version of Penguin in April of 2012, the practice of linkbuilding received a severe shock to the system.

Google Trends analyzes a percentage of Google web searches to figure out how many searches weredone over a certain period of time. - Trends Help

In the minds of many, content marketing has been the modern replacement to link building. To me,this is a flawed perspective, as content marketing has many goals beyond links; link acquisition is ahighly ancillary product amidst the primary goals of content marketing. Links also serve a differentset of goals than content marketing.

The process was supposed to look something like this, from Rands Search Love deck.

The manual promotion, the deliberate intention of earning all of the links you deserve via manualoutreach, is what seems to have been missing in many marketing strategies of late.

If youre interested in learning about how we promoted this survey, check out the methodologysection below. Otherwise, hit the jump link to get SEO Specialist straight to the questions andresults. You can access this years raw data sheet here. I encourage you to create your owngraphs/analysis with Google Sheets (Insert > Chart...) and share them in the comments! First makesure to create a copy (File > Make a copy).

Take me straight to the survey results!

Methodology

I have immensely enjoyed the fascinating data presented in the 2013 and 2014 annual link buildingsurveys. 2015 passed without a survey, and I felt compelled to gather updated data from theindustry at large. Its interesting to note we had 435 responses to this years survey, as compared to315 total in 2014.

Its also important to mention that this survey doesn't contain the exact same questions presented in2014s survey. Link building has been a constantly evolving landscape, and our survey has attemptedto evolve with it.

Check out Mozs link building category page and skim through the posts of 2015 and 2016. There aresome very smart, very legitimate evergreen digital marketing strategies in there, as opposed to thenext big trick or which tactic is on the chopping block for overuse.

As such, the questions in this years survey were designed to reflect link buildings evolution into amore legitimate and integrated marketing channel.

Im not the David Bowie of the SEO world, so I knew Id need help promoting the survey to gather anacceptable sample size. To that end I reached out to the founder of Credo, John Doherty. Hes afellow who has bestowed plenty of wisdom upon me with his digital writings, and has conductedsimilar research on the average cost of SEO consultation recently. He agreed to co-author this post

with me, and aid in promotion.

Beyond emailing our own newsletter subscribers of Credo and P1P, we spoke with a few people in anattempt to increase our reach with the survey. To each one of these individuals we want to expressour sincere gratitude. Thank you!

Without any further ado, lets jump into the data.

Who took the survey?

As expected, a majority of survey respondents were agencies. Link building is still typically anagency offering, despite predictions of link building moving in-house or to PR teams. In our 2016survey, the percentage of Agency respondents versus In-House has actually increased.

41% responded as Agency in 2016 compared to 37% in 2014.

27% of respondents in 2016 selected In-House SEO compared to 30% in 2014 that responded asSEO Manager or head of SEO.

However, this year we segmented our In-House answer selections to include "In-House ContentMarketer" and "In-House PR." In 2014, the only option potentially relevant to In-House professionalswas SEO Manager, so it isnt quite a direct comparison. That said, we had more available answerselections for In-House than before, and Agency still won out.

Its interesting that In-House PR received so few responses. There have been many blog postsproclaiming the need for migration of link building responsibilities to PR departments, but in myexperience that hasn't been reflected in reality.

In an overwhelming majority of link building campaigns Ive been involved in, link acquisition issimply not at the forefront of the minds of PR agencies. While successful PR does create some of thehighest-quality link opportunities, most of them are left on the table; they still require manualoutreach to convert to links.

Its possible our promotional efforts are the reason we didnt reach many in the in-house PR role.However, in my experience collaborating with in-house PRs, it is very rare to encounter someonewho focuses on building links.

What size of companies are actively involved with link building?

This was a Select as many as apply answer set, but with a majority of respondents selecting 1200employees, link building appears to still reign supreme in the SMB market (although it's worthnoting that 10% of respondents were from large businesses). The common line of thought is thatenterprise businesses naturally earn so many links that active link acquisition isnt as necessary.

To dive a bit deeper, I further segmented the data by respondent type with Google sheets Chartsfunction. It isnt surprising to see agencies and in-house professionals working with a higher numberof larger enterprises compared to consultants, freelancers, and business owners. Still, across everyrespondent type, SMBs were the most popular selection.

How many people are on your link acquisition team?

81% of respondents reported they work alone or in link building teams of 15 members. Its possiblethose building the links are typically wearing many hats, with link buildinghttp://www.mainstreethost.com/ packaged into a larger service or part of many other in-houseresponsibilities.

Ive worked with a few larger businesses in-house teams of full-time link builders, but it's a rarity.The largest in-house link building team Ive worked with had 20 employees on staff. Clearly this is byno means commonplace. Most businesses either don't need or don't believe they need full-time linkbuilders. Its mostly SEOs who are typically members of small teams already that either do the work,or recognize its value and outsource to agencies with small, dedicated teams.

I also broke this out into agencies versus in-house. Although agencies did submit more responseswith larger team selections, the spread is quite similar.

As you can see, there are far fewer lone wolves in an agency setting. In-House folks responded withnearly double the selections of Just me! compared to Agencies. In every other team size category,Agencies responded more than In-House. Keep in mind these are fairly similar sample sizes, with180 respondents identifying as Agency and 163 as In-House.

What is the average clients or businesss budget allocated to link building per month?

On this question, we requested in-house folks calculate the total of all link building employee'smonthly salary. Being a part of a larger package or add-on duties to an in-house team could affectthis spread, with over a third of respondents selecting under $1,000.

In 2016, our audience reported much lower costs for link building compared to the 2014 survey. Thiscould be due to a different audience reached, or less focus on link building itself.

The $10K$50K option was too large of a range in 2014, and with 0% selecting $50K+, we loweredand segmented our ranges further in 2016. This is 2014s distribution of the same question:

This years data becomes more interesting as you break it up by our audiences professions. Twodistinct groupings within our respondent types were exposed. Agency and In-House are similar incost spread, with In-House having slightly more on the higher end. The other similar grouping wasConsultant/Freelancer and Business Owner.

What model do you use to charge for link building services?

This spread is somewhat deceiving, as there was essentially only one answer for In-Houserespondents to select. 154 respondents selected the top voted answer, which would make sense with163 identifying as In-House. Remember though, this isnt indicative of reaching more of an In-Housecrowd as opposed to agencies (180 responded as Agency).

This question was structured this way specifically because there are so many different ways thatAgencies and Consultants/Freelancers sell link building in 2016.

Still, this question confirmed a suspicion raised by the earlier question regarding team size.Packaging link building as part of a larger service is indeed the top-selected option for all otherrespondent types besides In-House, and that probably affects the necessary team size of dedicatedlink builders.

The responses typed in when Other was selected are quite interesting. A couple of other responsesactually fit in other buckets that were options, so they arent included. Ive also segmented theselections by respondent type in the pie charts below.

Agency: Other entries by agency respondents: "We sell digital PR retainers that earn media wedon't sell links.

It's wrapped into our monthly retainer.

We're a public university running on an agency model; this is included in budgets.

Business Owners, Consultants, Freelancers: Other entries by Business Owners, Consultants, andFreelancers: "Link building is just a small part of the packages we sell clients on.

Author note: A comment like this indicates that some survey respondents identifying as BusinessOwner may actually be agency owners, rather than business owners that handle link building ontheir own. Its possible the Business Owner data is somewhat skewed by owners of agencies. Only 9%of survey respondents identified as Business Owner, so the data should not be too far off.

Charge a flat fee for contacting a set number of websites.

I do it for myself.

Fixed plus performance-based rate.

I don't link build, I consult on how to do it the Google-compliant way.

In-House: "We don't build links at all. We create and publicize great content and the best naturallinks come themselves as natural by-products.

Everyone in the SEO/Content Team does link building as part of their jobs.

We have a PR person do our link building."

What percentage of the overall SEO budget is dedicated to link building?

What percentage of your SEO work/campaigns is focused on link acquisition?

These two questions were designed to be complementary and are most interesting assessedtogether, rather than separately. One might assume that the % cost of link building will be equal tothe % time of a campaign spent on it, but that was clearly not the case.

This data seems to suggest that as an industry we aren't charging enough for our link buildingservices. Significantly more votes were towards a lesser percentage of budget, while spending ahigher percentage of time on the service! Although 230 responses fell in the 025% of budget range,only 156 responses were in the 025% range of time spent.

An alternate explanation is that people don't put budget towards link building in a traditional way,but do spend significant time on it. Link building isnt a service that is necessarily expensive in amonetary sense. Low overhead, relatively inexpensive tools, and as a later question in this surveyilluminates, frequently cheap labor.

2016 is only the second year the link building survey has asked this question, and there aresignificant differences in our dataset compared to 2014.

2014 Link Building Survey responses to What percentage of your overall SEO budget is allocatedtoward building links?

In 2016, the 025% budget range increased from 27% to 53%. There was no change for the 2650%budget range, remaining at 27%.

The 5175% budget range has fallen in this years survey from 40% to 16%.

Here are a few possible explanations I could think of; let me know your own ideas in the comments!

We may have reached a different audience than the 2014 survey. With the evenness of sample sizesbetween agencies and in-house, we received lesser responses of dedicated budget towards linkbuilding. We had 120 more respondents, comparing 315 in 2014 to 435 in 2016. Perhaps thiscontributed towards a more even spread. People are putting less dedicated budget towards linkbuilding. In the past two years, link building has become more integrated into other departmentsand marketing processes, packaged in as part of a holistic service, and less specialized link buildersexist overall. A mix of all of the above. What is the average salary of a link builder?

This was another question where we asked non-agency respondents to deliver a unique answer. If

they were the only one responsible for link building, we requested they enter their personal salary. Ifmultiple employees work on link building in-house, we asked for respondents to average theirsalaries together for a single response. All answers are in USD.

Sadly, I cant say Im surprised to see $20,000$29,999 reign supreme. Here are the breakdowns byrespondent type.

In-House clearly has a much more even distribution than agencies. This is probably influenced byagencies that outsource work, which makes me wish I had included a response option for Do yououtsource work? Alas, hindsight is 20/20. I have a hunch this did affect agency salary ranges.

Another possible contributing factor to the more even spread of In-House into higher salary rangesis the types of businesses that hire in-house SEOs, content marketers, and PRs. From what Iveobserved, most in-house jobs are with larger enterprises that are located in bigger cities. The cost ofliving is higher, and so are the wages. Agencies, on the other hand, are in all ranges of city size,some with a lower cost of living.

I didn't originally plan to include Consultant/Freelancer or Business Owner segments in this sectionof analysis, but it's an interesting side note that the distributions were within 12% of one another.

Its also curious that over half of Consultants/Freelancers reported earning less than $40k per year,with 35.3% reporting $50k or more for their annual salary. 11.8% reported $80k+! To me, thisspeaks to the low barrier of entry to link building. If you can communicate digitally and write well,there are many agencies that will train you on the technical side of link building.

With a low barrier to entry, there's an abundance of entry-level link builders, but not nearly as manywith years of experience. Once you learn link building, you can grow into many different avenuestechnical SEO, web development, marketing, possibly even PR. The truth is, the best link builders Iknow have grown branches of their skills in these ways, and naturally become a T-Shapedmarketer.

Which types of clients do you work with the most?

This was another Select all that apply-type answer. Earlier in the survey there were indicatingfactors that SMBs were the most popular clientele of link building, and the data supports that. SMBwon far and away, but its fascinating to see that B2B and B2C were an exact even tie!

This spread has held true for my own experience working at an agency the past few years. Ivealways felt like weve serviced an even number of clients in both B2B and B2C, and a majority havebeen small- to mid-sized businesses. However, enterprise clients have become more frequent. Todaya significant share of our revenue is from a smaller set of large enterprises, but they make up thesmallest percentage of our actual client base.

With the even spread of B2B versus B2C, John thought it might be interesting to compare averagemonthly budgets for LB. The distribution is very similar across the two, with exactly the samenumber of respondents.

It would appear to not be an impacting factor on spend; neither B2B or B2C is necessarily moreexpensive than the other. To me, this makes sense. The necessary spend for link building isdependent upon the needs of the brand, which is generally dictated by their size and competition.

As such, I also compared the average monthly spend of SMB versus Enterprise responses. Keep inmind that there were 214 responses for SMB and only 90 for Enterprise. I used a line chart to betterdisplay the trends, rather than the comparison of total responses per client type.

Although a majority of both enterprise and SMB budgets were in the "Under $1,000" to"$2,500$5,000" categories, there is a distinct difference. Within the SMB trend, the number ofresponses went consistently down with each increase in budget tier. In the enterprise responses theopposite is true, as the numbers trended up with each budget tier increase.

Its also interesting to note that after the first 3 budget tiers, SMBs responded with an even amountof higher tier budget ranges as the enterprise. This was even with over twice the number of totalSMB responses compared to enterprise.

Which link building tactics do you use?

This was another question that was in Choose as many as you like format. 90% of respondentsselected Content Publication/Promotion or Guest Posting as a link building tactic used. Nearly everyother tactic received at least 50% of the audience votes.

Content links in the body of the page is what were all after. That said, many of the other tacticslisted can lead to in-content links; but the creation of content is a value proposition with thestrongest chance of leading to an acquired link. Building links by creating content is simply usedmore than any of the other tactics.

Every other typical white-hat technique listed received a near equal amount of votes. I believe thisshows that most of us think a diversified link portfolio is the best path to follow. Many voted forusage of many different tactics, rather than selecting only one option and moving on. It caught myeye to see Digital PR voted so highly, considering the very small number of respondents (6) thatidentified as an in-house PR.

Only Paid Links and Old School received under a third of the votes a not insignificant portion. Nearlya quarter of our audience voted for old-school tactics, which is still a higher percentage than Iexpected.

Which link building tactics do you feel are the most effective?

Again, this question was presented as a Select all that apply format, and received far less totalselections than the previous question! Which link building tactics do you use had 1959 selections.This question only received 1161.

The audience of this survey appears to believe Content Publication/Promotion or Guest Posting isworth pursuing and effective, and that diversification is important But theyre not quite sure howvaluable the rest of the tactics really are.

Every other white-hat link building tactic received half of the respondents votes, but only a quarterof the audience feels those other tactics are the most effective. It seems that the third of theaudience which responded as using Old School are also diversifying with other tactics they feel aremore effective.

Once again, its curious to see Digital PR as the second-highest category below content links. Itwould seem to me that our audience of link builders are adopting the skills and strategies of their PRcounterparts, rather than link building moving in-house to the PRs. Its also possible more agenciesare branding their link building as digital PR, a trend Ive seen rising over the past couple of years.

Which SEO tools do you use in your campaigns?

This question was also Choose as many as you like, with the order randomized when presented tothe audience. No selection received more votes than the Google suite. I expected a high number ofvotes for Moz and BuzzStream thanks to Rand Fishkin and Paul May assisting with promotion of thesurvey, but several other tools held their own!

Tools which received at least 40% of respondents votes: Google Analytics/Search Console(WMT) Moz BuzzStream Ahrefs SEMrush BuzzSumo Majestic Screaming Frog

There were 60 custom entries in the follow up question for Enter any other tools you use that werentlisted. If you would like to view them, they're available in the raw data spreadsheet on this tab.Almost every answer was unique; the diversity of responses speaks to the incredible number of SEOtools available.

Only a few tools were mentioned multiple times in Other custom entries:

Citation Labs Link Prospector Searchmetrics Link Research Tools Scrape Box How integrated isyour link building with other marketing processes?

There was a huge spread on this question, and respondents had to choose only one number. Morepeople selected 510 (64% of votes) than 04 (23% of votes). Over two thirds of the audience believetheir link building is more integrated than not, or are at least trying to move that direction.

One of my favorite Whiteboard Fridays of all time was by Cyrus Shepard, called "The Rules of LinkBuilding." In it, he shares a quote that has resonated with me to this day:

At its best, good link building is indistinguishable from good marketing. When you're doing linkbuilding right, you don't even need the links because you're doing good marketing. You're pushingyour content out there, you're talking to those influencers, you're getting traffic to your site, andthose just happen to be the signals that Google wants to reward.

While I do believe you need the links for better search rankings, I think Cyrus is completely correctin the statement he made in April of 2014. This kind of sentiment is what has driven morecollaboration between link builders and other departments in the digital marketing mix.

Only 15% indicated level 9 or 10 for integration, showing this is still a work in progress. 53% of totalresponses were in the 5 to 8 range, indicating this is something that were working towards but manyfeel still have distance to go.

What is the best name for link building?

Over the years you may have noticed a few different rebrands or identifiers for what some wouldsimply call "link building." This was our final question and another Select all that apply type. ThoughI prefer link building to describe what I do, Ive actually always liked link earning; however, it wasthe least popular selection.

Much of the link work Ive been involved in could easily be called content marketing, but it wasspecifically for the purpose of links and improving search rankings. I think its really all a matter ofperspective in most scenarios.

Final thoughts

The link building landscape has always been a swiftly shifting environment. This years survey resultsilluminated an evolution towards integration with other marketing channels, and an alignment withmore legitimate future-proof thinking. However, it seems that the cost and salary scale of linkbuilding has not yet matured as much as the practice itself.

The past few years have seen link building shaken up, in a state of suspension. 2015 and 2016 so farhave been the settling-down period. I see the industry calming down, relying less on tricks andschemes, while taking advantage of link buildings intrinsic presence in all the channels of themarketing mix.

Thank you for reading this years link building survey results. A very special thanks to everyone thattook the survey and helped promote it. Im a fallible human with my own biases, thoughts, andbeliefs. I tried to objectively view the data to pull out insights, but Id love to hear from everyone elsein the comments.

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