If your business overwhelmingly depends on your website’s online visibility then hiring an experienced link building specialist should be one of your top priorities. A link building specialist specializes in acquiring high-quality backlinks for a website, which in-turn propels the website’s ranking on Google’s SERP. However, hiring a backlink specialist has its own downsides and shortcomings.
If you are still confused whether or not your business needs a backlink specialist then this latest article from PRchitects will fix that problem.
Who is a Link building Specialist?
As mentioned above, a person specializing in link building focuses on securing high-quality backlinks to increase your website’s visibility in search engine ranking. This person is solely and only dedicated to this task; rarely and probably never investing their energy and time in any other tasks related to SEO and digital marketing.
Leveraging on their rich experience as well in-depth knowledge, he or she is able to craft an effective link-building strategy that propels authoritative websites from your niche or industry to link to your website.
What are the key responsibilities?
Looking & hunting for link opportunities:
A link building specialist always aggressively chases best link opportunities for his client or employer’s website. This chase or pursuit never stops for a professional link builder. It is an integral part of his or her job profile. He or she is always striving to identify websites that are not only authoritative but also relevant to the industry or niche. This entire process is referred as link prospecting.
Competitor analysis, where competitor’s backlinks are spied and analyzed, is also an integral part of this process.
Outreach Management:
Establishing and maintaining positive relationship with webmasters and bloggers for securing quality links. Emails are primarily used for this purpose though other channels like telephonic conversations and instant messages can also be used. Taking regular follow-ups and monitoring email responses is also one of the key responsibilities.
Coordinating with content creation team:
Working and maintaining a constant stream of communication with the content creation team for generating link worthy content in the form of guest posts, blog posts, infographics and other content forms. Ensuring that the content is properly optimized for SEO is also an integral part of the job profile.
Kindly note that many a times link building experts can themselves double up as content creators though it is always recommended to have a separate content creation team.
Link monitoring and performance reporting:
Keeping a tab on the acquired links to make sure that they remain activated and live and have not been deactivated or changed to no-follow link.
Another important responsibility is to monitor and gauge the actual impact of the link building campaign on the website traffic and search rankings. This has to reflected in a detailed report that needs to be regularly prepared and submitted to management or the client.
Advantages & Benefits
Let us look at the bright side of hiring a backlink specialist and how it can benefit your business.
Expertise and practical experience:
Acquiring quality backlinks is no easy task and often requires someone who not only has deep knowledge but practical know-how about link building. No one can offer these values or skills better than link building specialists. They are acquainted with every important step on how to develop an effective strategy and its efficient implementation.
Saves enormous time and resources:
As mentioned above, securing quality links is a challenging task, consuming massive amount of your time and energy. But when you have a specialist at the helm of the affair, you don’t have to allot any personal time or other resources. As a result, You and your team are literally free to focus on other important areas of your business, which increases your company’s productivity and also accelerates its growth.
Improves lead generation, sales and other avenues of growth:
As your website attracts high-quality links, thanks to the efforts of a link building specialist, your website’s search ranking will improve significantly and so will its organic traffic. This can open up the possibilities of different growth avenues for your business including lead generation, sales increase, customer retention and many other growth channels.
Risk mitigation:
Since backlink experts have adequate knowledge about search engine guidelines and latest algorithm changes, they always make sure that your website does not navigate into the risky terrain of black hat techniques; thereby ensuring it does not attract any penalties or search ranking downgrade.
However, the risk of penalties is always imminent and always looms large when your link building campaign is overseen by someone who is naïve and has little experience about link building. His or her lack of knowledge about search engine guidelines can prove to be more than detrimental for your business.
Access to wide network and connection:
People who are expertise in securing high quality links have enormous experience in the SEO industry, bringing with them rich connections with bloggers and webmasters. Thanks to their clout, your website gets an easy access to high-quality links, which otherwise would have proven to be an herculean task for you and your team. Your team’s lack of connection in the SEO industry would make your backlink campaign a non-starter or eventually hit a dead wall.
Higher long-term ROI:
Although link building specialist may not give quick ROI or has long turn-around time, your patience is more than rewarded after your website’s organic traffic witnesses a quantum jump. If your team is able to capitalize on your website’s organic traffic grow then sky is the limit as far as ROI goes.
Disadvantages & Drawbacks
Now let us look at the other side. When and why hiring link building specialist could prove to be a liability or burden for your business.
Incurs cost: Hiring backlink expert is bit expensive especially considering that it takes months before you start seeing a tangible ROI. While companies with stable cash flow could bear this cost, small companies with their shoestring budget may find it too challenging to endure the cost.
No guarantee of success: Even though a specialist or expert might know every trick in the book for securing links, the fact is fetching quality backlinks is still very much a daunting task. Therefore, the risk that your campaign might not yield desirable results is more inevitable than you might think. Although you can choose to be optimistic and you should be, there is always a semblance of chance that your campaign might turn out be a dud.
Lack of control: Overwhelming dependence on a specialist person including a third-party agency could mean that you and your team might lose control over the link building process. In other words, monitoring your link building campaign could prove to be a nightmare, which could have many negative consequences including the risk of attracting low quality links and violation of search engine guidelines.
Challenge in measuring the ROI: Since increasing organic traffic take several months, calculating ROI for hiring a backlink expert is not really a straight forward affair. Even when you start seeing results, you may still be in dilemma whether hiring a link building specialist is worth it or not.
Important skills of a Link Building specialist
- Proficiency in working with SEO and Backlink analysis tools.
- Good understanding of SEO
- Keyword research
- Link analysis
- Building relationship and negotiation skills
- Strong communication skills
- Coordination skills
- Preparing monthly reports
Conclusion:
Businesses that are too dependent on their websites for their sustenance should have no ambiguity about the importance of backlinks. Their business is more likely to go southwards if authoritative websites don’t link back to their sites. Therefore, hiring a link building specialist, who is proficient in securing links, brings an intrinsic value for your business. It is equally important to bear in mind that organic traffic usually offers a better ROI in the long run than compared to paid ads or search engine marketing. This fact again reinforces the importance of hiring a link building specialist. Although onboarding backlink expert does come with fair degree of shortcomings and risk, the benefits certainly outweigh the drawbacks by significant margin.