Building backlinks is one of the most valuable steps in your website’s growth. While many are eager to reap the benefits of this strategy, it’s crucial to get the timing right. So, when should you start building backlinks?
The short answer is: When all your website elements are in place. Think of link building as a way to enhance your website's strength and authority—something that’s most effective when the groundwork is solid. To get a clearer picture, I asked our experts at Page One Power what their opinion was.
Amy, Director of SEO, states:
“Building a home and building a website has a lot in common. Your website is your business's home online. Just as you would make sure your home is structurally completed, including the foundation, roof, interior, electrical, plumbing, etc., before moving on to interior design, furniture, and fixtures, you need to do the same for your website.”
Dylan, Senior Account Executive, says:
“The sooner, the better, as long as they are good, legitimate links, which means you need good information people will want to link to.”
Danica, Content Outreach Manager, recommends:
“People should start building backlinks when their website is set up appropriately for bots to crawl, register, and understand what’s on the website. I think of it like a house. When you build a house (SEO success), you first need a solid foundation (website). After that, you work on the structure (content, KW optimizations, etc.) and support (link building, etc.) of the house.”
In this guide, you’ll learn what you need to have in place before starting a link building campaign and why patience and preparation are essential for a lasting strategy.
What Do I Need to Start Link Building?
Link building isn’t a short-term boost; it’s a long-term investment in your website’s credibility and search visibility. To succeed, you’ll need a strategic approach, the right resources, and a commitment to quality and consistency.
Dylan, our Senior Account Executive, states:
“The first step is ensuring you have good value-driven content that other sites will want (or be willing) to link to. These could be resources, informative blog posts, calculators, and more. The second is a plan of attack (The who, what, where, when, and why). The third is the outreach itself. It takes a long time to build the relationships and skills necessary for a decent conversion rate for link building.”
High-quality backlinks are greatly considered when Google determines rankings (as seen from the 2024 Google Document Leak). In fact, nearly all (92.3%) of the domains ranking in the top 100 in Semrush’s 13-month-long study had at least one backlink.
Quality backlinks improve your site's authority, boost rankings, and increase traffic—but only when built on a strong foundation. So, before embarking on link building, ensure your website is fully optimized and ready to gain traction.
High-Quality Content
Great content draws people in and keeps them coming back. Links lose much power without high-quality content, as users have little incentive to stay, engage, or convert.
Danica states:
“You need a solid foundation. You need something with value to which you can build links, whether that's a service (your domain), a resource (content), or something else.”
But what defines high-quality content?
- Relevance: High-quality content aligns with the interests and needs of the target audience.
- Usefulness: Quality content provides valuable, actionable information that solves specific problems.
- Thoroughness: It fully addresses questions or problems without leaving gaps in understanding.
- Discussion: Engaging content sparks dialogue and increases visibility through sharing.
- Genuineness: Authentic content is transparent and honest, building trust with the audience by providing real value.
To begin creating high-quality content, you’ll want to develop a consistent publishing schedule. Regular article updates signal to search engines that your site is active — an important characteristic for websites that want to rank.
Additionally, you must understand your audience’s needs before creating content. To do this, perform keyword research to understand searcher intent. This process will help you align your content to your audience’s pain points, making it relevant.
Lastly, you must consider your article performance to understand whether your content resonates. Look at metrics like time on page, bounce rate, and organic traffic. This feedback helps you refine your strategy to ensure that future content continues resonating with your audience.
High-quality content builds your website’s credibility, which makes link building more effective. After all, people are more likely to link to valuable and engaging content.
Sound Technical SEO
No matter how great your link-building strategy is, if your site has technical issues, those links might fail to deliver value. Either link equity would not be distributed to the correct pages, or users could become frustrated with your site due to a poor user experience.
Amy states,
“A website needs to be structurally and technically sound, including developing your full content funnel from the top to mid and bottom funnel pages. Ideally, you want internal links on your domain that link products and prominent keyword pages within your blog and general content, creating a beautiful flowing network of link-based pathways between pages.”
Here’s what you should check off your list for sound technical SEO:
- All pages are indexed: If Google can’t find your pages, links won’t help them rank.
- No broken links: Broken internal links reflect poorly on-site quality and user experience.
- Superior website user experience: Make sure the site loads quickly and is easy to navigate.
- Mobile-friendliness: A mobile-optimized website is crucial in today’s mobile-first indexing era.
- Sound on-page SEO: Ensure that your on-page elements (like title tags, headers, and meta descriptions) are optimized to provide a strong structure for search engines to read.
Technical SEO lays the foundation, allowing link building efforts to yield the best results.
Outreach Strategy
People link to other people. A common misconception in link building is that people can automate outreach and send mass emails to publications. But, if you aren’t personalizing each outreach effort, you could miss out on some big opportunities. Great outreach takes hard work, including:
- Understanding the business you’re representing, including your unique value, branding, and target audience.
- Creating an outreach list that includes detailed contact information.
- Prospecting and vetting target sites until you are left with highly-qualified outreach targets.
- Familiarizing yourself with the people you will reach out to so you can personalize the outreach.
- Crafting your outreach to be personalized, polite, and compliant with guidelines.
- Tracking your results to refine your outreach strategy.
Outreach itself is a lot of work. Dylan states:
“9 times out of 10, it makes sense for businesses to outsource their link building to an agency that they can trust is doing things correctly.”
What Happens If I Build Links Too Soon?
Building links right away can be tempting, especially when you want to see fast results. However, premature link building can cause more harm than good without the correct elements in place.
Amy says:
“If you build links to pages that aren't well optimized at worst you'll potentially see no result. Driving link authority to a page that doesn't rank isn't likely to have a positive impact, especially if that page also doesn't internally link to other pages that do rank on your domain.”
Danica states:
Building links too soon isn't necessarily a bad thing; you just won't see the success you would if your website is set up to funnel link equity across it to the appropriate keywords Google should be ranking you for.
Dylan says:
I wouldn't say there's a "too soon;" I'd focus more on quality. If you can get a legitimate home page link here and there before you have a more in-depth content strategy in place, go for it!
To summarize, here are some of the risks involved:
- Low-Quality Links: Without clear goals and a targeted strategy, you may end up with links from low-authority sites that don’t add value to your website’s SEO.
- Wasted Link Equity: A poorly optimized website won’t fully benefit from the equity links bring, so you miss out on the SEO boost and visibility you aim for.
- Wasted Resources: Link building requires time, money, and effort. If your site isn’t ready, those resources could be spent on building a stronger foundation, ultimately making your link building campaign far more successful.
Starting link building with a solid strategy and a fully optimized website is key to seeing real, sustainable results. Link building is a powerful tool, but only when properly prepared and used at the right time.
