23% of SEOs claim content marketing as the most effective link building technique. New survey by Serpstat
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    23% of SEOs claim content marketing as the most effective link building technique. New survey by Serpstat

    07 December 2022

    The Serpstat team surveyed 523 digital professionals to analyze the best link building practices in 2022

    Google algorithms are constantly updated, and 2022 is no exception. Along with it, approaches to SEO are changing, and those techniques that worked well 3 years ago may no longer produce a result now. In the state of link building report, SEOs were enquired about their favorite link building tactic in the passing year. The clear winner was content marketing with 23%. 

    The Serpstat team polled 523 digital professionals via Typeform, using a specific set of questions. 36.5% of respondents are from North America, 34.2% from Europe, and 29.3% from Asia.
    Here are five takeaways about link building in 2022 and the near future.
    Link building is still important: The majority of respondents (55.7%) said that link building produces high results for SEO. A relatively small number of respondents (6.5%) gave low ratings to the effectiveness of link building.

    Backlinks will always play a role in SEO — it's why Google became Google in the first place. But my own belief (and prediction) is that brands will dominate the search results in the future. And therefore, backlinks will become less critical. If you search for Nike.com, it doesn't matter how many backlinks the website has. Google will return Nike.com.

    Steven Macdonald, Head of content at INEVO.

    55.4% respondents do link building manually: Respondents were asked about using automation for link building tasks (outreach automation, media tools, etc.). Most respondents (55.4%) indicated that they do the work manually, and another 6.7% did not know whether their teams use such techniques.
    Techniques for link building automation.png
    Content-oriented link building brings the best results: 22.9% of SEOs claimed content marketing the most effective link building technique. The second place was guest posting with 15.2%, followed by HARO / expert roundups with 12.4%.

    Content marketing is the obvious winner because it aligns with the reason for links. Why do most links exist? Because a writer or editor felt that some content out there supports the piece they're creating. A lot of these other techniques are spam.

    Andy Crestodina, Co-founder / CMO at Orbit Media Studios 

    Directory link building is not worth your time: Respondents also shared the most difficult link building techniques to execute. We suggest you compare the efficiency and complexity to determine whether a particular strategy is worth your time. The directory link building showed the lowest result. In ratio, it will bring you about 3 times less results than the time you spend on implementation.
    Link building tactics (2).png
    Majority of the respondents reported on nofollow links: 62.3% of respondents included nofollow links in their strategy. At the same time, 32.8% do not report nofollow links.
    Complete study results: https://serpstat.com/blog/link-building-statistics-you-should-know/

    Company information

    Serpstat is the go-to search marketing platform. Customers use Serpstat to reduce the time on common search marketing tasks, cut down on repetitive, manual work and get more clients from search. Serpstat has more than 50 tools such as tools for full site analysis, semantics collection, link analysis, audit, clustering, daily position monitoring and content creation with AI.