When I started in SEO, link building was one of the main levers for improving rankings and increasing search visibility. I enjoyed the thrill of landing a quality link and experimenting with different ways of finding link-building opportunities, eventually leading me towards Digital PR.

For a long time, I considered link building an important part of SEO and would propose it as part of a wider SEO strategy for most clients. However, I’ve changed my mind recently due to a few factors, and now I don’t think it’s a valuable investment for most sites on low budgets or outside of ultra-competitive niches.

The TL;DR is, if you’re working on a site where the biggest challenge is having enough content to rank for a broad range of topics in that niche, I think it’s better to fix this first by going all-in on content creation, before branching out to link building and digital PR.

Here’s why…

Over saturation by low-quality link builders

I run a travel site and used to accept guest posts. Back in 2016, a decent proportion of enquiries were from actual travel bloggers, many of which submitted quality articles based on personal experiences. Over time my inbox became a total cesspit of poor-quality outreach emails in broken English. On the rare occasion I followed up, the articles themselves were unpublishable.

While guest posting is not a great way to build links any more, I think the fact that the bottom end of the market is still doing it may result in a negative reception for any kind of enquiry, making it harder to cut through even if you have something of value to share.

I used to consider 10% as a good success rate from enquiry to link placement, but with the increased effort needed to stand apart from the crap, more work is required, meaning the effort goes up relative to the outcome.

One of the ways to get around this is to use an inbound or ‘reactive’ method of link building – providing quotes to the press and other publishers through a service like Help A Reporter Out or ResponseSource.

While you’ll still be competing against hundreds of other PRs and link builders, at least it means your approach will be on topic. If you can provide a compelling pitch and insightful quote or useful data, it is possible to win the link. However, as we see below, I don’t think it’s necessary to incorporate this kind of activity into an SEO campaign for every website you work on.

Wide adoption of rel=nofollow

More and more sites seem to make use of the rel=nofollow tag. This may be a reaction to Google’s general messaging against linking out, or seen as a safe option for webmasters sitting on the fence about whether they should be giving ‘credit’ to the pages they refer to in their content.

Rel=nofollow signals that the link is not intended to be counted when evaluating the page being linked to. So in theory these links are worth less and make the SEO benefits fuzzier.

These days, many UK media sites have a blanket rel=nofollow policy. I still think acquiring links from these sites is worthwhile, but when the SEO value is harder to prove, there needs to be a good reason aside from SEO to go after these kinds of media placements. That should be based on reaching a relevant target market, but unless you’re trying to reach a national audience, that might not be the best use of spend.

This brings us to…

Table stakes are higher

Digital PR campaigns are expensive to run and should really be part of a sustained effort over a long period of time to be effective. This is cost-prohibitive for smaller businesses, and may not actually be relevant to how their prospects are likely to find them.

Meanwhile, reactive PR via Help A Reporter Out or ResponseSource can sometimes result in a feast or famine situation for unknown brands. Journalist requests in your niche can be inconsistent, and if you’ve not got enough time and budget to build a relationship with the key writers about your industry, you can be less likely to convert your responses into published brand mentions and links.

Similarly, many “cheaper” link-building methods have questionable value due to the large amount of effort needed to cut through the noise. Over time I have become more targeted with my outreach, but in turn, this has meant more time needed to research a link target and craft a relevant outreach email.

This might only result in 30-50 targets for a given campaign, meaning a campaign could fail purely because a handful of approaches didn’t resonate with some of those recipients.

But one of the biggest drivers of the success of a successful link-building campaign is having quality content in the first place, and then becoming known for it. Unfortunately for clients on low budgets, this can be expensive. The cost of this might eat up the large bulk of an SEO budget, especially when that budget is only around a few thousand pounds per month.

In my experience, at this point in the market, the biggest challenge is not having enough decent content to rank with, so creating quality content has to be the focus initially.

You can see SEO success without deliberately building links

If you’re investing in quality content and are in a relatively low-competitive niche, then chances are you will likely start to see success without needing to build links at all.

Here’s a traffic chart of a brand new site I’ve been working on:

While modest, it’s still seen growth despite not having any links whatsoever.

Several pages are able to rank on page 1 and are even winning featured snippets for several long-tail terms, because the content is good enough, and likely better than some of the competition.

Pages that rank first in turn are more likely to earn links organically and can enter a positive feedback loop, earning links just because of having P1 rankings.

So for me, I have a choice: do I want to crack on with researching and writing quality content, or do I want to use that time to try and build links to the pages I already have in the hope of ranking higher?

As I’m on a budget of zero and value my time, I’d pick creating content, as this is something I have complete control over. While with link building, I have less control and am reliant on other people who may or may not be receptive to my outreach approach.

I’d probably consider it in the same way if I had a budget of £2000 or even £4000 per month and the site does not yet have a ‘full’ content library covering everything there is to know about that niche.

I’d rather use that budget to hire an expert writer to help build my site’s reputation with the chance of earning links organically off the back of that.

That would let me establish the site as a comprehensive resource on that topic first, and potentially carve out a niche early on by capturing long-tail traffic for topics that my competitors are missing. This is already beginning to work for the site in the screenshot above.

Only if my site became a brand with a clear need to attract broad brand awareness, would I consider Digital PR, or if I reached the stage when I had a complete content library that spanned everything there is to know about my niche.

Don’t try to run before you can walk

For most sites, it is perfectly possible to grow traffic without actively building any links at all. If you’ve started working on a site and the biggest challenge is that it doesn’t have a full complement of content to target a broad range of topics within your niche, I would look to solve that problem first.

This provides you with the sort of quality content that will become useful in future, for example, to draw insightful quotes from, or if you use data in your articles, information that can be provided to journalists, giving them a reason to link to you.

As you do this your site may begin to rank naturally thanks to having well-optimised content. You may even start to see other writers link to you organically if your content is relevant to the needs of other writers. Publishing statistics or research data about your niche is a popular method of organic link-building and can be highly successful, as you’re solving a need for an audience that has the capability to link to you.

Only once you have a full library of content on your topic, should you move on to making link-building or digital PR a higher priority. At this point, you may even find success easier to come by, if your website has built up a positive reputation thanks to its quality content.