The economics of a business problem should always be a consideration before execution, NOT after. Organic search traffic acquisition is no different.
Just because you need backlinks to increase organic traffic, it doesn’t mean the acquisition of links is economical for where you are at as a business.
So how do you determine if it makes sense for your organization to engage in link building?
Unfortunately, there’s no exact science you can follow that produces the same results every time. If that were true, everyone would be doing it.
However, one of the best ways of increasing your chances of success and reducing risk and uncertainty is by utilizing data to build various models and scenarios that inform your organization’s strategic and tactical decision making. This is called business-intelligence (BI).
If you apply business-intelligence to link building, here are some of the questions you’d want to answer using data:
Tactical: How many links do I need to build? What type of links should I build and of what quality? What anchor text should those links contain?
Resources: How much is link building going to cost? How long is it going to take?
Profitability: Is investing in link building a profitable business decision? How long until I can expect a positive ROI?
This crazy detailed article from Cody West digs into all of the above including sharing his custom-built live link intelligence Tableau report.
