5 good reasons to invest in link building campaigns

Link building is one of the more expensive parts of SEO, and one of the easiest to get wrong. So it's fair to ask whether it's worth the money at all. This post gives five reasons it can be, an honest look at what makes it costly, and the cases where you should spend your budget somewhere else.

First, what links do (and don't do)

Google's guidance says it uses links as a signal when judging the relevance of pages, and to find new pages to crawl. That's the official position. It doesn't say links are the biggest factor, and you may see old articles claiming otherwise.

At PubCon in September 2023, Google's Gary Illyes said links are important but overestimated, that they're not a top-three ranking factor, and that a site can rank without them. (Search Engine Roundtable reported his remarks.) That fits what you see in the results: Backlinko's analysis of 11.8 million Google results found that the page in first position had 3.8 times more backlinks than pages in positions two to ten. That's a correlation, not proof that links caused the ranking, but it shows why competitive markets tend to be link-heavy.

So the honest position is this. Links aren't a switch that makes a page rank. They're one input, and how much they matter depends on how competitive your topic is and what your competitors have.

5 reasons to invest in link building

1. Visibility on the sites your customers read

A link from a relevant publication puts your brand in front of readers who might never have found you through search. The link is only part of the value. The mention is the other part, and that's true for AI tools as well as people: in December 2025, Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and found that how often a brand is mentioned across the web correlates with its visibility in AI Overviews (0.656), ChatGPT (0.664) and AI Mode (0.709). Ahrefs is clear that correlation isn't causation, and no one can promise you'll be cited. But being mentioned on relevant sites is a reasonable place to invest either way.

2. Referral traffic you can measure

Some links send real visitors. If the article is relevant and the link is placed where a reader would want it, people click. In Google Analytics 4 you can see referral traffic by source and check how those visitors behave, so you can put a value on a placement without guessing. Our guide to measuring link building success shows how.

3. Most pages get no organic traffic without help

Ahrefs analyzed close to 14 billion pages in December 2023 and found that 96.55% get no traffic from Google. Reasons include weak content and no links. If a page is good and still invisible, links from relevant sites are one way to help search engines find it and judge it. They aren't the only way: good internal linking helps too, and Google says every page you care about should be linked to from at least one other page.

4. Reputation

A well-placed article on a respected site says something about your business that your own website can't say. A healthcare company that contributes a useful feature to a trade publication shows expertise to the people who'll read it, and readers who click through can check the claims on your own site. That's harder to measure than traffic, and it still counts.

5. Links last, and the benefit builds

An advert stops working when you stop paying. A link on a real page can keep working for as long as the page stays up, though nothing guarantees that: sites change, pages get deleted and links get removed. That's why we give a 365-day placement guarantee, and why we suggest you check your links from time to time. Over time, the benefits of good placements can add up as your brand appears in more places, but that depends on the quality of each one.

Why it costs what it does

Done properly, link building is slow and manual. Where the money goes:

• Outreach. Finding relevant sites, checking them, finding the right contact and writing messages that get answered. Most emails don't get a reply. Backlinko's account of its Skyscraper Technique, for example, reported 160 emails leading to 17 links (about 11%), and that was a well-known page in 2013.
• Content. A publisher wants something worth publishing. That takes research, writing, editing and often design.
• Tools. Backlink data, site checks and email tools usually need paid subscriptions.
• Publisher fees. Some sites charge for placements. If money changes hands for a link, Google's spam policies say buying or selling links for ranking purposes is link spam, and that paid links are acceptable when marked with rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored". Our guide to buying backlinks covers this.

We're not quoting a cost per link here. Prices vary a great deal with the site, the niche and the country, and we couldn't source a reliable range.

When link building isn't the best use of your money

Be honest about this. Spend on content or technical fixes first if:

• Your site has technical problems. If pages can't be crawled or indexed, links won't help.
• The page doesn't match what people are searching for. Links to a weak page bring weak results.
• Your topic isn't competitive. If nearby competitors rank with few links, you may not need many.
• You're new and have little content. See investing in content vs link building for how to decide.

A quick test: look at the pages that rank above you. If they have far more links from relevant sites, links are likely part of the gap. If they don't, look elsewhere first.

How to invest without wasting money

• Choose relevance over scores. A niche site with real readers beats a high-scoring site with nothing to do with you. See link quality metrics.
• Avoid shortcuts. Google names automated link creation, link exchanges at scale and low-quality directories as link spam. A manual action can push pages down or remove them from Google's results.
• Decide how you'll measure it before you start.
• Consider outside help if you don't have the time. See how to outsource link building for what to look for in an agency, and manual link building for what the work involves.

How we work with clients

You choose the sites from a shortlist and approve the content before it's published. You're invoiced after the link is live. See how it works, or ask for blogger outreach.

Sources

Checked on 30 September 2026.

• Google Search Central: Link best practices for Google (updated December 2025)
• Google Search Central: Spam policies for Google web search (updated August 2026)
• Search Engine Roundtable: Google says links are no longer a top three ranking factor (PubCon, September 2023)
• Backlinko: We analyzed 11.8 million Google search results (updated April 2025)
• Ahrefs: 96.55% of content gets no traffic from Google (December 2023)
• Ahrefs: Brand visibility in AI systems (December 2025; 75,000 brands)
• Backlinko: The Skyscraper Technique (18 April 2013)