The success and popularity of any website are directly linked to the steadiness and strength of its online traffic. For new websites that have recently been launched, page visits are often very low and require substantial marketing to boost website ranking and overall SEO (Search Engine Optimization). One of the best strategies to generate organic traffic and gain visibility is the use of link building to promote your website.
Although effective, manual link building can be a very time-consuming and meticulous task, that can prove expensive for a small enterprise or startup. To help streamline this process without compromising on quality, businesses can make use of automated link building as a solution.
But what is link building and what benefits does its automation bring? What are the risks associated with automated link building? In this guide, we will answer these questions as well as many more. Read more to find out all there is to know about automated link building, including its features, benefits risks, and common effective strategies.
What is SEO?
To understand the dynamics of automated link building, we first have to understand SEO. An acronym for search engine optimization, SEO is a strategy used to increase the visibility and ranking of web pages on various search engines. A higher-ranked web page will have a greater likelihood of being clicked by a browsing user, resulting in improved traffic and popularity. Other factors that affect SEO include readability, relevance, and number of inbound and outbound links embedded in its content.
For context, the front page results of any Google search are the highest ranked at that time. Very rarely does anyone navigate to the second page, and so the competition to increase visibility is quite high.
This is where automated link building comes in. It is a keynote strategy used by digital marketers worldwide to improve page ranking and overall SEO of their websites. By incorporating link building and then subsequently automating the process, the SEO ranking of a website can be improved dramatically.
What is Automated Link Building?
Simply put, link building is the procedure in which hyperlinks that point to your webpage are acquired. These hyperlinks, also known as backlinks, play a pivotal role in the overall promotion of any online profile which consequently affects the website’s SEO. Backlinks can occur at any portion of a webpage, but they are commonly embedded into blog and article content. Usually highlighted in a different color, these links prompt the user to click on them for further reading on any topic.
Common link-building strategies include influencer partnerships, content creation, and guest blogging. However, manually identifying pain points and implementing strategies can not only be time-consuming, but also expensive, especially for digital marketing startups or companies that have a low budget. To help expedite this process, automated link building was introduced.
Automated link building is defined as the usage of software or online tools to generate backlinks for you automatically. These tools rely on custom algorithms to recognize key areas where link placement would be ideal for your business. In addition to singling out top websites for linking, automated link building tools also send the link to your website, regulate lists of partnered web pages, as well as display real-time monitoring of the effects of these links.
Why Automated Link Building is Essential for Marketing
With millions of web pages live on the internet, the fight to be recognized is brutal. Although there are exceptions, websites that have no SEO practices in place often struggle with maintaining steady user traffic and overall visibility. This can be detrimental to your business, especially if ad revenue is your site’s main source of income.
With automated link building in place, you can be assured that users from all around the world will have the potential to visit your site. This is incredibly important, as the greater the number of backlinks that point to your webpage, the higher the chance of you receiving organic traffic.
For example, ten pages have linked to a webpage that occurs on your site. This means that you have access to the audience of all ten pages, resulting in an influx of direct traffic from an indirect source. From a marketing perspective, this is very powerful, and with the right efforts can result in drastic improvements.
The software aspect of automated link building also holds many benefits. Many tools monitor the efforts of backlinks in real time and provide statistics related to their usage and success. This can help businesses identify their weak areas and make subsequent changes faster.
Benefits of Automated Link Building
There are many benefits to using automated link building processes as part of your SEO strategy. The following points highlight some of them.
Increased Organic Traffic
With automated link building systems in place, links to your websites will be more widespread across different internet sources. This allows for more potential first-time clicks, which will increase the overall organic traffic to your site.
Time Efficiency
Manual link building can be a time-consuming ordeal, requiring extensive research into the identification of successes and weaknesses. With automated link building, potential opportunities can be easily ranked and identified. Contacting website owners as well as management of links is also easier with automated link building platforms.
Establishment of Domain Authority
The social credibility of any website is often associated with its ranking on popular search engines, with the more visible sites more likely to be assumed trustworthy. With automated link building, the visibility of your website can be greatly enhanced, and this will affect your domain authority as well.
Brand Exposure and Awareness
This point goes in hand with domain authority, but while the former deals more with social credibility, this has to do with loyalty. Once your website has garnered enough traffic to be socially accepted, the next step is to make sure that image stays.
Automated link building is not just limited to the creation of backlinks. It also includes practices like email automation and social media marketing. These strategies can positively influence the perception of your business, which will ultimately lead to a greater number of loyal customers.
Higher Search Engine Ranking
The core benefit of automated link building is higher search engine ranking, which opens up the possibility of many more positive outcomes. The rise in organic traffic, bounce rate, and clicks brought by automated link building is bound to affect SEO. This will result in your website’s content being among the most visible pages on the internet, which will only add more organic traffic.
Data Analysis
Automated link building tools can quickly and easily identify the different trends and patterns in your current online portfolio. This can streamline the process of resolving weaknesses, which may require much more effort to do manually. Many data collection automated link building tools prioritize using data to target effective marketing strategies
Scale
With automated link building tools, you don’t have to worry about the management of higher-scaled campaigns across multiple websites. They are equipped with features that can easily handle such simultaneous loads.
Risks Associated with Automatic Link Building
Although there are many benefits to automatic link building, there are also some drawbacks to its usage. The following summarizes the risks associated with link building.
Quality Concerns
Automated link building software is trained to be more quantity-focused, with emphasis given to acquiring the most number of links possible. This is in contrast to a human approach where quality and relevance are gauged. Although this may be an effective tactic to increase traffic, it can result in irrelevant linking that results in popularity that is not sustainable long term.
Penalty Risk
Popular search engines like Google have certain rules and regulations in place to manage link-building that are of a malicious or manipulative nature. This is because many businesses view link building as a way to ‘beat the system’ with the sole aim being to garner attention and traffic.
This is unethical and dishonest to other businesses that hold more honorable intentions. If not used carefully, businesses that use automated link building may find themselves subjected to fines and penalties or banning of content, resulting in plummeted visibility.
No Creativity
One of the core ideals of business is customer relationship building. In this new age of the Internet, the value of interactions has decreased significantly in favor of programmed sentiments. Automated link building is not immune to this, and may struggle to introduce personalization that is in line with human nature. The result may be a fake-looking outlook that can affect a business’s relationship with its customers as well as each other.
Changing Software
The software world is prone to a myriad of constant updates and launches. Automated link building also relies on algorithms to achieve its goals, and what works now may not be as effective in the future. Backlinks may be the ticket to a higher search ranking regarding today’s algorithms, but there is no guarantee that a new update will not reject them.
Being completely reliant on these automated tools and having no industry knowledge is something businesses should avoid, even if there seem to be no current issues.
Effective Automated Link-Building Strategies
Backlink Analysis
The core use case of automated link building tools is backlink analysis. This is an in-depth, full-scale examination of your website’s link profile where link audits are done to identify the key areas of improvement.
Common features that are a part of the backlink analysis process are website pointers, anchor text identification, geolocation, and establishment of referral site authority. Common backlink analysis tools include Semrush, Linkody, and Ahrefs.
Email Automation
Email automation is another function of automated link building that can help add a personalized touch to any business’ link building campaign. Although it may sound trivial, this is more than just the sending of emails but is rather an easy way to connect with your audience. Manual email sending can be extremely time-consuming as well as repetitive, which is why automation tools are a better choice.
Key functions of email automation tools include the organization of contact information, smart prompt generation, automatic follow-ups, and progress tracking. Examples of common email automation tools include FindThatLead, MailChimp, and MailShake.
Data Collection
Data collection is a core part of any automated link building tool, providing important information on the link building opportunities that are best suited for your business. These tools scour the web for backlink data that corresponds to your search, identifying the key web pages where a potential backlink can be set. In addition, these tools can also track competitor links, organize profiles in lists, and generate lead reports.
Examples of common data collection tools include ScrapeBox, Majestic, and Dux-Soup.
FAQs
What should you avoid in automated link building?
Not focusing on quality links, ignoring link relevancy, spamming or buying links, not monitoring backlink profiles, neglecting internal linking, and not focusing on social media presence are all link building mistakes that can hurt your business. Although you may see short-term success, you should avoid these practices for a more sustainable business with a loyal customer base.
How many links should you build per month?
There is no right answer to the question of how many links should be built in a month. This is a process that takes time and everyone has their journey. However, what is important is that you remain consistent. If you choose to build 20 links in one month, make sure to do it consecutively for months, if not years. Overcompensating and then completely stopping links can be harmful to your business, so consistency is key.
What is broken link building?
Broken link building is a very unethical practice of link building. Also known as dead link building, this entails building backlinks but not linking them to any substantial website, instead directing pages to 404 pages that have working links.
