10 Difficult Things About Link Building

Link building can be a long process, and there are many different ways to go about it. Other times, it’s as easy as contacting a writer. Local citation builders are good for some situations, but what about the more difficult link building tasks. This blog post is all about ten of the most difficult things about link building. For every topic, it lists an advantage and a disadvantage. The process can also be difficult for a lot of other reasons, such as the time it takes to establish and maintain positive relationships. 

These are 10 things that make link building difficult :

1. Clicking on links

I’ll assume that you’re well-versed in how to get good quality links for your articles. If you are, and assuming that your website has a strong base of inbound links, you’re going to have a difficult time getting people to click on any links you post. The absolute worst kind of non-targeted links are from self-made websites. They can provide no value to a site, yet they’re nonetheless hard to overcome.

2. Link choices

Now that you have an in-depth understanding of what link building is all about, you can begin to make decisions on where you want to get links. But with so many options, it can be difficult to decide where you should spend your time and energy. Fortunately, there are a few things you can do to change this. You can start by analyzing your keyword and link profile as described above. As you do this, keep a running list of sites that have related keywords, but aren’t yet linking to your content. 

3. Backlinks

Let’s say you’ve created something wonderful and you want people to see it. There’s a natural tendency to start looking at potential backlink opportunities. This can be easy to do, but not always easy to get right. A few easy ways of getting links are to find sites that publish related content on similar topics, and then link your article to these sites. Another great way is to find relevant authority sites that might be interested in linking your content in the future. 

4. Relationships

The best links aren’t going to come from one-off emails. It takes a lot of effort to be able to build relationships over time. However, as you foster your relationships with others, you’ll find that it becomes easier for them to link back to your site and for others to link out to yours. Entering into the relationship-building process can be the most difficult part of link building because it requires time and energy upfront in order for it to have a future payoff in terms of links (and other social signals). As you’re doing this, keep in mind that it’s a long-term strategy and the payoff comes from your actions more than from their actions (incidentally, you can use Ahrefs Site Explorer to learn how many links each domain has).

5. Relevance

As you’re gathering links and curating content, you have to be careful that your links are always relevant to the topic at hand. If they’re not, it can hurt your ability to rank in search engines. If you can’t consistently provide relevant content, it will be difficult for people to link to you or for Google and other search engines to determine the relevance of your website’s content. In addition, linking out is another example of how being relevant is important in building relationships with others.

6. Competition

With the entire Internet out there for you to link and curate, why would you limit yourself to a local area? If you do, though, remember that your competition is much closer than it may seem. If other businesses in your area have already built up their link profiles with similar keywords, it can be difficult to have any sort of positive effect on local search results or rankings. You may find that there are different topics in your industry that need to be covered that aren’t getting the attention they deserve.

7. Structure

When it comes to link building, the best content doesn’t always get the most links. Sites with a more comprehensive structure are more likely to be linked to by others as well as ranked higher in search engines. Some sites may have pages that only link out, for example, and these pages tend to rank lower than those that offer a wide-range of content and information. This can be especially true of informational websites such as blogs and knowledge bases which are often better able to rank on traditional keywords because they’re so detailed and provide everything a user might need on the subject matter.

8. Subsequent content

If you’re looking for more links and even more points of difference, take a look at your website’s subsequent content – meaning, the other content related to your topic that has already been created. If there hasn’t been subsequent content, it’s likely that no one will link out to your site. If there has been subsequent content, then it’s time to look at ways to get others to link out to yours. 

9. Content management systems

Content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress and Drupal make it much easier for site owners and website developers when working on a website because they provide a lot of functionality that would take a lot more time otherwise. They also allow you to add a link to your content and can automatically list out the latest posts, thereby increasing visibility and attracting more links.

10. Proximity

Being close to other sites and businesses can be another great way of creating opportunities for more links as well as getting some backlinks in return. This can be done through physical location, but can also be done by grouping together with others in Google My Business or Moz Local. It’s important to note that it’s not always a good thing to put your various businesses in the same physical location because your SEO efforts will be diluted (this is true for non-local searches too).