Links earned rather than bought
Links are still the clearest signal Google has for whether other people take you seriously. They are also the easiest thing to buy badly.
Make the path from a relevant search to a useful answer clear.
- Search intent
- Useful answer
- Clear next step
Visibility is the beginning. The enquiry is what we measure.
Why not just buy links?
Because paid link networks leave patterns, and Google has spent twenty years learning to spot them. The sites that sell links to you sell them to everyone, so you end up in a neighbourhood that is easy to identify and cheap to devalue. Recovering from that costs more than the links saved.
We have cleaned up sites that bought links for years and then lost most of their traffic in a single update. The links themselves were not the problem. The pattern was.
What actually earns links
Three things reliably work: original data nobody else has, genuinely useful tools or resources, and being a credible source journalists can quote. Everything else is outreach volume hoping to get lucky.
- Original data
- Surveys, analysis of your own numbers, industry benchmarks. Journalists and bloggers cite figures, and citations are links.
- Digital PR
- Getting your view into stories being written anyway. Slower than buying links, and the links are worth vastly more.
- Reclamation
- Finding places you are already mentioned without a link, and asking. The easiest wins in link building are usually already sitting there.
The wrong question. Ten links from sites your customers read beat two hundred from directories nobody visits. We work to what the pages currently outranking you have, which is a real target rather than an arbitrary number.