9 Reasons Why Link Building Is Hard
Link building comes with a number of challenges and various difficulties, and knowing them is a must for any site owner willing to rank.
Given the importance of link building, it is not ignorable and must be done carefully for optimal results.
The process expands from creating quality content to keeping it up to date and contacting high authority sites for backlinks.
Unfortunately, many underestimate the obstacles they will face and go at it blindly, only to struggle to reach their desired spot on SERP.
Today’s blog will list all the various reasons why link building is hard and how you can deal with them.
Table of Contents
Short Understanding of Link Building
Link building is creating a good backlink profile for your domain by getting backlinks from other websites to your pages. While it may sound so simple, the process is very tricky, we are afraid.
On the one hand, you must keep your content genuine, informative, and helpful to attract more valuable backlinks.
On the other hand, the backlinks your pages receive must be relevant and from authoritative websites for them to work best.
Of course, your pages must also be updated regularly to keep their value intact and not lose backlinks.
An effective link building process can help you out with the following-
- Attracting more organic traffic to your pages within your community
- Getting more followers on your domain
- Help Google find you more trustworthy and authoritative and rank you higher on the search engine
- Allow more community engagement in your domain
Why Link Building Is Difficult
According to a study by Conductor, 41% of SEO experts consider link building as the most challenging tactic, right above keyword research.
Link building takes time, resources, and effort to work the best. Moreover, we need creativity, persistence, and expertise to perform the necessary steps.
Due to these issues and risks, many often fail at link building. Some of them go to link building services for help.
Let us show you the challenges you may face while building backlinks below to help you better prepare.
1. Creating Quality Content
Before you go to your targeted website to build links, you must have high-quality content in mind.
As you can see, any high-profile website may only link to your page if the content is actually worth it. It must be informative, practical, authentic, up-to-date, and helpful for the audience.
So, building the content first as best as you can will be a must.
Now, it is easier said than done since quality content requires ample knowledge of the community’s queries. It also may require keyword research using various SEO tools.
Your blog or videos must be relevant to your service or industry and easily shareable. It should also be friendly and optimized for smartphones, social media platforms, and Google search engines.
Finally, the writing must be engaging and alluring.
2. Reaching Websites Manually
Unfortunately, you can’t automate the process of reaching high-profile websites to convince them to build links to your domain.
Yes, many attempts to use bots to spam blog comments, but those are not hard for site owners and Google to identify. It will do the opposite of what you planned.
So, you must manually reach the website and add guest posts, blog comments, or join forums to establish your presence. These posts and comments must be as engaging and attractive as your content.
Moreover, finding suitable websites to target for link building takes time. We use SEO tools like Ahrefs or Semrush in this.
Your to-do list here may include-
- Identifying the pages to get links to
- Finding relevant and highly authoritative websites within your industry or niche to get links from
- Deciding how you must approach each specific website, be it a post, comment, forum discussion, or email
- Checking your site’s backlinks profile often to know how many backlinks you have obtained
3. Spending Time on Competitor Analysis
All the processes we have included so far will take much of your time to manage. That is if we guess you are not getting any link building service for help,
But the time spent here won’t just stop at getting the links. It will continue to take your time by requiring you to stay at the top of the competition.
We must warn you here that competition for link building is quite intense. Be careless for a while, and you may see your high-value backlinks being replaced by other websites.
In order to solve this, competitor analysis is mandatory.
4. Spending a Good Sum of Money
Building links costs money and a high sum at that. Of course, if you get links from low-quality and spammy websites, that won’t cost much but also negatively affect your SEO.
In order to get backlinks from high-profile websites, you may have to pay them a certain amount. Moreover, some of them will ask you to subscribe with a monthly payment.
Note that Google does not favor buying links like this. However, they don’t really pay much attention or have any way of knowing about any transaction. So, it is safer than you may think.
You can choose two options here.
- Either getting help from a link building service. Or,
- Getting backlinks yourselves.
Now, both of them cost money. For example, any link building service will come at a cost, which can be subscription-based.
Meanwhile, if you want to get the backlinks yourself, that often costs more. It may involve-
- Hiring freelancers to create quality content, like blogs, videos, infographics, etc., for your page.
- Paying money to the linking website within your industry.
- Using paid tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz, etc.
- Paying any specialist to help with the guest posts or comments.
Note that handling all the SEO sectors alone can get overwhelming, so hiring a specialist can be imperative.
You must assess your budget carefully and ensure your link building project takes as little money as possible. After all, you will still need more money for your business, marketing, or service.
5. Staying Persistence and Experiencing Rejection
It goes without saying that you may face lots of rejections when you start your new link building program. There can be different reasons behind this. Let us give some examples-
- Perhaps the website isn’t offering backlinks at the moment.
- Maybe the site already has an excellent linking relationship with one of your competitors and isn’t willing to replace it.
- Your idea, content, or approach may not be to their liking.
- It is possible that your emails have ended up in their spam folders due to the high number of emails high-profile websites receive.
- The website may be getting lots of emails from your competitors, and some of them are offering better content.
- The website may charge a high fee that you don’t want to pay.
Overall, you must be ready to face such failures and keep on going with perseverance. The process may be gradual, but slow and steady wins the race.
6. Finding Relevant and Authoritative Websites
You should put more emphasis on the search for finding specific websites for your backlinking strategy. Remember that the linking site must be relevant to your industry for more link equity.
However, it is way easier said than done. Most websites you find after searching any keyword may not be relevant. Your goal here must be to get websites as close to your niche as possible. It will attract more people to click the links.
Let’s say your domain is on Gardening Tips, and you searched with the keyword- Backyard Decoration Ideas.
While you may find results specific to this keyword, when you check their domain, it can be related to other niches, like weddings, gazebo-building, etc.
It may take so much to find the perfect websites for a single target non-branded keyword, let alone multiple. Some relevant ones you see may not be highly authoritative either.
It can be an ideal practice to find and target your competitor’s backlinks by checking their backlink profiles. You can try Ahrefs’ site explorer for it, as shown in the following picture.
7. Keeping up with Google Updates
As we constantly handle link building tasks, we know how tricky it can be to update everything according to Google updates.
When making content or trying to rank higher, you need to maintain different policies set by Google. Consider it as the Google search engine law, where doing anything outside the policy can penalize your content, leading to a lower search ranking.
There have been various cases in the past where Google suddenly rolled out new policies and penalized a number of websites. For example, the Penguin Update of 2012 was a target towards sites that used spammy measures to rank higher.
Moreover, another update a couple of years back decreased the importance of keywords in SEO and increased the role of content quality.
Let’s say that all your SEO practices and backlinking process are now according to Google’s policies. However, it can very well violate any new policy they add tomorrow.
That is why you must stay ready, track Google updates, and update your content according to it. It is best to keep your content helpful and refrain from resorting to any underhanded means to rank. We suggest not underestimating Google’s crawlers.
This leads us to our next point.
8. Avoiding Black Hat SEO
Remember that we mentioned ‘underhanded means’ in our previous section? Well, these are called black hat SEO by Google.
Black hat SEO usually gives the audience a low-quality experience. It also involves spamming keywords, backlinks, repetitive posts, blog comments, etc.
Buying backlinks is also a type of black hat SEO, but they are not as targeted nowadays. Regardless, you must still be careful Google doesn’t notice it.
9. Following the Trends
Consumer behaviors change all the time. If you are in any business or marketing sector, you will probably change your service according to these changes.
However, the same goes for your content, such as blogs, videos, infographics, listicles, etc. Maybe people were more attracted to your content since it was trendy for a while.
Unfortunately, that can change, and your site’s ranking may drop after some months or years. The crowd hardly sticks to one website unless it can provide them with new, updated, and improved content.
So, your best strategy here is to know the consumer psychology and shift your content keywords according to these. Needless to say, it will take a massive amount of time, resources, and effort, aside from expertise and creativity.
Conclusion
After following so far, you probably think link building is way too tricky for people without experience, which is somewhat true. However, you will need to practice it to build expertise.
But if you can’t spare time or effort, consider spending money on any service that can help you. The good news is that it actually costs less than doing it yourself.