Where Does Link Building stand in SEO 2016

As Nicholas Chimonas published his 2016 State of Link Building Survey via Moz, I have here cut down the 18 minute read (for the sake of SEOs wanting to save time) to less than a 3 minute read, so you can pretty well extract the jist of what Nicholas so well put down in his rather lengthy but informative piece.

Clearly Link Building has been written on and off for months now, and still it remains one of the most engaging activities of SEOs wanting to optimize websites and webpages of clients or for self promotion. The survey shows some not-so-surprising facts about the current state of Link building in 2016. As he clearly states, the 2016 Link Building survey questions are slightly different than its previous years to reflect the evolution of link building into a more “legitimate and integrated” channel of online marketing.

Below are the data extracted from the very SEO survey on Link Building Moz conducted earlier this year.

(The questions did not necessarily appear in order.)

The above questions are for profiling the participants who take part in the survey. The questions below are a direct overview of SEOs opinions and actual link building practice insights.

The above two survey responses clearly state that for link building through content marketing remains one of the most popularly used (and sometimes abused) mode of spreading links.

Talking about SEO tools that are most widely used for digital marketing, the list below is a clear indicator of the powerful tools SEOs rely on to manage their SEO campaigns effectively. Google Analytics clearly tops the chart as the best free SEO tool that ever existed.

This is an interesting questions and the responses are equally so. For those who havent participated in the survey can take a heads up on which subcategory of SEO to charge for your Link building services.

Notice below a large chunk of participants, 33% are single member team SEOs who work n link building, followed by almost 50% of participants who work on a 2 to 5 member team. Thats encouraging!

Monthly link building budget for clients focusing on search engine optimization through links.

And there you go! Phew! 🙁

The survey is a mere indicator of how SEOs (of all categories and strengths) are performing their link building activities on client websites. I would have been more keen to see how the survey reflects the evolution of link building integrating with other marketing channels. The budget allocated per month on link building is substantial, and yet has room to grow. SEOs the world over take the link building channel of search engine optimization pretty seriously. Whats needs to be seen is how SEOs stop relying on tricks and short cuts to inflate ranks through dubious link building tactics, and encourage the growth of natural link building (sounds weird I know!) through the publication of really valuable content.

I would be keen to know if you still work on Link Building as a part of your optimization process, and what are your thoughts on the strategy in the months to come.