How Link-Building is Crucial to Jump-Starting New Websites

Backlinks are a vital part of how the Google algorithm determines your rankings.
These links send signals that help search engines determine how trustworthy your content is and what keywords are associated with said content. The quality of these links matters getting a large amount of low-quality foreign links is not going to help your site. Because your website is brand new, it has no “Domain Authority.” Domain Authority is how trustworthy Google views your site and is a metric developed by the SEO company Moz.  It is important to note that this is a process and takes time.

How does your site rank?
Moz offers a free tool: https://moz.com/domain-analysis
Below is an example of a link-building campaign to improve Domain Authority.

The Challenge:
A top software company came to Apogee Results five years ago with a brand-new site
that had no referring domains and a domain rank of 0 (due to it being new!). Our goal
was to build high quality links that would set the foundation for future long-term success.

Objective:
Increase Domain Rank year over year and send the right keyword signals to Google.

Strategy:
The SEO team had quite the task- create quality links monthly to increase Domain
Authority over time. To accomplish this goal, the Apogee team used it’s internal process of deep keyword research to build strategy, and writing high quality content that is published around the web on high quality sites. Building intentional links helped assist with Domain Authority leading to increased rankings for keywords, increased traffic, and more conversions. Below you can see the referring domains built over time:

As you can see below, the domain rank with consistent Link-building efforts does take time to go up. It takes time for Google to recognize and value these links, and it can go up and down over a period of time before it takes off:

SEO is notorious for taking a long time (this one year case study is a prime example), but the results are undeniable, long term linkbuilding will increase Domain Authority significantly.

What about traffic? It is great to have Google rank you site higher from a Domain
Authority standpoint, but does that really bring in more traffic & potential customers?

The data says YES! See the traffic numbers over time: