Do More Links Equal More Traffic?
By Anna Johnson on November 1st, 2010According to search engine optimizer Jeremy Bencken, once you’ve optimized your website in terms of intra-site and onpage optimization, the best thing you can do to generate more traffic is get more backlinks. Based on his analysis, there’s a distinct correlation between backlinks and traffic.
No, Jeremy doesn’t say more backlinks CAUSES more traffic. Nor does he claim that more backlinks leads to higher search engine rankings which, in turn, lead to more traffic.
While there may, indeed, be a causal relationship between links and traffic (which only makes sense) there are likely to be other factors at play which bring about more traffic. For example, more backlinks is also likely to lead to more direct traffic i.e. visitors to your site who come by way of clicking on those links.
In any case, by tracking your own linking activities, changes in rankings and changes in search engine traffic versus direct traffic, you should be able to spot the relationships applicable to your website(s).
Which leads to the question: how much link building is optimal?
If you know, for example, that after a certain point, any more links will only result in marginal increases in traffic… should you actually be devoting your link-building resources (time, money, etc) to other, more beneficial marketing activities?
Or does your analysis suggest you should only focus on getting certain kinds of links (e.g. links from highly authoritative websites) in order to get the biggest bang for your SEO buck?
The main thing is not to build links ‘blindly’. Our experience suggests that getting certain kinds of links delivers a much better ROI than getting other kinds of links, but this differs depending on the site in question.
So don’t be afraid to apply the same kind of rigor to your link-building activities that you apply to split-testing web copy and other measurable activities. Do what yields the best ROI.
Source: Jeremy Bencken, “How to Value Links?” Search Engine Watch, October 26, 2010
