Link Building Guide: Understanding Link Velocity

What is Link Velocity, and how it can help your campaign?

Today we’re discussing one of, if not the most, asked questions we get about Link Building.

“How long is it going to take me to rank my site or beat the competition and still seem organic?”

“How many and how fast can I build a certain type of link and still appear as natural website growth?”

If you have this question as well, you need to know that what you’re really asking about is: Link Velocity, and in this article, you’re going to find exactly what you need to consider when planning for effective link velocity in your Link Building strategy.

So, an effective Link Velocity is the speed at which you should add backlinks to your domain or site over a specific time without being seen as unnatural or problematic by Google’s algorithm.

 

The first thing to keep in mind is consistency.

When building links, consistency is key. Even more so than having a ‘high’ or ‘low’ number of links built. So, It’s important to plan early in your link-building campaign for a specific number of links that can be maintained throughout.

Month to month, be sure you can reach your link building goal.

Suppose you’re in a stage of your strategy where you’re lessening the number of links you build. In that case, it’s also important to scale down slowly and consistently.

Now you’re beginning to see that having a well-planned SEO strategy will always be necessary and even crucial to rank higher or outrank your competitors. This allows you have a tangible roadmap of exactly how many links you should build over a specific period and go about it consistently and methodically.

Just know that you will need to consider the budget for your campaign and its duration before you can start deciding how many links to build. Luckily, you can find all the information you need for both your Link Building Budget and How Many Links Will You Need to Rank Higher.

After you have these two aspects of your campaign set up, your competitors’ analysis is done, and you know how many links your site will need, we can get back into the action.

Let’s go with a hypothetical example and say that your site has no links built, and your competitor analysis shows that to rank higher than the closest one, you’ll need approximately 300 links.

Now what?

 

The real questions you should ask.

At this point in your campaign, these are the three biggest questions you should be asking and answering:

1. How fast are you looking to rank or outrank your competitors?
2. How many links your budget allows you to build Month to Month?
3. How should you divide your links over that specific amount of time?

So, let’s start answering them one by one.

Let’s say you expect to outrank your closest competitor in 8 months, which can be a bit unrealistic, but let’s go with that since this is all hypothetical.

You then look at that budget and realise you can build a maximum of 50 links per month.

So, 300 links in 8 months that average approximately 36~38 links per month, and a maximum of 50 links monthly per budget constraints.

For a new site with no backlinks and no ranking, 300 links might seem like a daunting task to achieve. There’s the budget to consider and the risk of Google penalising your site for finding its backlink profile unnatural.

But that’s where consistency and an organic Link Velocity come in to turn this into something feasible and manageable.

Your monthly Link breakdown should look something like this:

• 1st Month: You start low with 37 links to get link building campaign going.
• 2nd Month: Here, we get your campaign’s link peak: 50 links.
• 3rd Month – 5th: Maintain your peak of 50 links per month to maintain an effective link velocity.
• 6th Month: Here, we scale down the momentum by lowering the peak to 37 links.
• 7th Month: We keep reducing the campaign by just going with 20 links this month.
• 8th Month: We finish the campaign with our last 6 links for the final month.

 

And while effective Link Velocity is not a surefire guarantee for rankings or avoiding Google sanctions, its approach to Link Building mimics a far more natural and organic growth for your backlink profile.

For that surefire guarantee for rankings, you need to learn all about how to identify the best links for your profile and why it’s important to increase your domain authority.

Back to our topic, the Link velocity described above follows a similar pattern to a Public Relations campaign or a breaking news story. This is why it plays an essential role in helping you get to where you want to rank.

 

What’s the main takeaway here?

In a word: consistency. You can build all the links you need to outrank a competitor– just make sure that your build quantity for every month has a natural curve where there’s growth, peak and a taper off.

You want to imitate the growth curve of the massive influx of links huge sites or organisations have after a successful PR campaign or news story, the peak that follows it, and then the eventual and natural down curve as fewer people talk about the story.

Now, having a brand-new site getting 300 links in one month and then nothing else happens is not natural and is sure to attract the bad kind of attention from Google. Meaning your site will get flagged, and even if you course-correct after that, you’re still not going to rank as fast as if you weren’t flagged the first time.

So, build your Link Building strategy around solid, real-life research and aim your efforts towards maintaining the link peak you need, and at the end, don’t forget to taper off your incoming links.

Google will think you had a natural period of interest in your site, that it was linked to for valid reasons, and then the noise around it ended naturally. The authority you gain from that campaign will remain, and your site will improve its ranking towards the keywords associated with it.

 

Let’s summarise.

Be sure to remember these key points:

• Analyse the links your site already has and figure out what keywords it needs to rank for.
• Do the same thing with the backlink profile of each competitor you want to outrank.
• Figure out your budget and get an idea for a maximum of how many links you’ll be able to place each month.
• Plan your strategy around an effective and natural Link velocity with consistent link-building and scale down at the end.

Lastly, if you’re still unsure of how to approach Link Velocity, or if you need guidance on any Link Building matter, remember you can always schedule a free 15-minute call with our resident SEO experts.

We’re more than willing to sort out any doubt or question you may have with your Link Building strategy or help you strategise your next order to get the most bang for your buck.