- Summary of the 2 sites we’ll be analyzing
- How Did Site #1 Build Up Their Link Profile
- How fast were these links built? (a.k.a. Link velocity)
- How fast did Site #1 start to get organic traffic?
- What keywords does Site #1 rank for?
- How many links does each page have?
- How Did batsfinder.com Build Up Their Link Profile
- How fast were these links built? (a.k.a. Link velocity)
- How fast did Batsfinder start to get organic traffic?
- What keywords does Batsfinder rank for?
- What types of links did each site use?
- Link types of Site #1
- Link types of Batsfinder
- Summary
Running a link building company gives me the opportunity to talk with many entrepreneurs who have brand-new websites and are looking to increase their organic search traffic.
Often, these business owners want to know how long it takes a new website to start ranking well in Google, and exactly how many backlinks they’ll need to achieve those results.
When it comes to increasing your organic search traffic, patience is always required. And exactly how many links you’ll need depends entirely on your market and your website.
But, based on my experience, it is indeed possible to obtain significant organic traffic within a year or two.
To prove what’s possible to achieve, I decided to take a deep dive into the SERPs, and I successfully identified several relatively new websites that are killing it.
For the sake of simplicity, I picked two websites that were created just over a year ago.
I then performed a comprehensive link breakdown to find out exactly what makes them tick.
By the end of this article, you’ll learn what to realistically expect from effective link building on a new website. It should help you plan your link building efforts, your SEO budget, and even provide you with some motivation.
Summary of the 2 sites we’ll be analyzing
The two sites that I identified are Site #1 and BatsFinder.
[Note: Site #1 requested to remove any mention of their name, so ‘Site #1′ will have to do!]Both were created near the middle of 2016, and now have large volumes of valuable organic traffic coming from Google right around 1.5 years later.
All the data in this post was obtained from Ahrefs.
Here’s a general summary of each site before we dig in deep:
| Site #1 | batsfinder.com | |
| Creation Date | 5/26/2016 | 4/13/2016 |
| Search Traffic (month) | 102,000 | 14,000 |
| Traffic Value | $71,900 | $8,800 |
| Domain Rating | 54 | 49 |
| Linking Root Domains (LRDs) | 1,120 | 259 |
| # of Keywords (ranking top 10 with 100+ searches/month) | 2,406 | 364 |
| Number of site pages | 131 | 95 |
While Site #1 is clearly on a different level than Batsfinder, both have significant organic traffic for relatively new sites.
The biggest difference between them is the effort put into link building.
Site #1 has about 5 times as many LRDs, and about 7 times as much traffic, this isn’t a coincidence.
There are a few similarities I’d like to point out:
- They mainly rank for commercial terms – As we’ll examine later, they aren’t ranking for general information terms that are worthless. They rank for specific product-related searches that have commercial intent.
- They clearly both do active link building – It’s pretty obvious that both these sites have spent considerable time or money on building links.
Let’s break down each site now, one at a time.
How Did Site #1 Build Up Their Link Profile
I’m not going to focus on low-quality links. They have very little, if any, effect on rankings and my guess is these links weren’t actively pursued. Most backlink profiles are going to have some lower quality links and according to Google, isn’t something you should be concerned with.
So, I downloaded the links for Site #1 from Ahrefs and removed all the links with a 0 URL rating.
A URL rating is a score from 0-100 that gives a decent idea of how powerful the link is in an SEO context.
These links were “grouped by similar links” if you’re trying to replicate the results yourself. This just gets rid of accidental duplicates in their system.
Here’s what the overall distribution looked like:
| URL Rating Group | # of Backlinks |
| 1-9 | 2,130 |
| 10-19 | 833 |
| 20-39 | 59 |
| 40-59 | 25 |
| 60-79 | 0 |
| 80-100 | 3 |
70% of the links were lower authority (<10 URL rating).
27% were higher authority, but still pretty low. They definitely have an impact on the rankings, but not as much as you might think.
The remaining 3% are plotted below. They were all above a 20 URL rating. The 3 that are over 80 are amazing links.
How fast were these links built? (a.k.a. Link velocity)
I get that seeing 1120 LRDs can be overwhelming.
But let me break it down for you, and I think you’ll find it more realistic.
This is Site #1’s all time referring domains graph at this point:
The link building started shortly after the site was built.
We can zoom in on the last year:
The big takeaway is that it’s a slow and steady increase in LRDs, about 63 per month, or 2 per day.
That’s doable, even if you don’t have a huge budget.
You also don’t need to build links at this exact pace if you’re okay with slower results.
How fast did Site #1 start to get organic traffic?
Speaking of results, organic traffic is the only metric that really matters.
Here’s what their organic traffic growth looks like:
Ahrefs shows a bit of a strange plateau at the beginning, I’m guessing it’s a quirk when tracking new sites.
Links started to get picked up in June of 2016, which is right around the middle of the above graph.
It may not be a linear correlation, but the link building and organic traffic growth definitely seem to be related.
The more links built over time, the more search traffic grew.
What keywords does Site #1 rank for?
As I briefly mentioned, traffic needs to lead to revenue to be valuable.
Almost all of the keywords that Site #1 get their traffic from have high commercial intent. They are able to monetize heavily through affiliate links.
Here are the top 10 terms with how much traffic they generate and how much link building was done to the page that ranks:
| Keyword | Position | Traffic (desc) | LRDs | Links to Page |
| gaming desk | 5 | 3,083 | 14 | 29 |
| best walking shoes | 1 | 2,239 | 23 | 47 |
| best fidget spinner | 5 | 1,078 | 49 | 66 |
| best walking shoes for men | 3 | 996 | 23 | 47 |
| leather sewing machine | 3 | 857 | 18 | 24 |
| high quality fidget spinner | 1 | 815 | 49 | 66 |
| gaming desks | 6 | 798 | 14 | 29 |
| best walking shoes | 6 | 780 | 23 | 47 |
| gaming computer desk | 9 | 598 | 14 | 29 |
| dslr stabilizer | 1 | 491 | 33 | 55 |
There are no super hard terms on this list. They’ve simple targeted a lot of keywords.
For your site, you might just be targeting a few main keywords, so you may not have to do much link building to see results.
For the keyword “gaming desk,” there’s only 14 LRDs to the page. Of those, only 4 of the resulting links have URL ratings above 10.
| Link | DR | URL Rating |
| 1 | 54 | 38 |
| 2 | 45 | 26 |
| 3 | 77 | 14 |
| 4 | 58 | 10 |
There’s really only 2 links that I’d consider “good,” but still obtainable for any website.
Obviously, having so many pages in the site with links helps pass authority throughout the entire site, which is hard to quantify.
The real takeaway here is that it doesn’t take that much to rank for reasonable terms, especially if you’re consistent with link building.
[clickToTweet tweet=”Case Study: If you’re *consistent* with link building, it’s not hard to rank for reasonable terms.” quote=”If you’re *consistent* with link building, it’s not hard to rank for reasonable terms.” theme=”style2″]How many links does each page have?
Just to make sure those above results aren’t exceptions, here’s a quick look of how many LRDs go to each page on the website:
The homepage has the most links, which is natural. Besides that, no other article has more than 36 LRDs.
That’s not too many. The impressive part is that they build that many links for about 100 pages.
But you don’t necessarily need to target that many pages and keywords to get results that you’re with it.
If you’d be thrilled with 10,000 visits a month, the second case study will be even more applicable.
How Did batsfinder.com Build Up Their Link Profile
I think Site #1 is interesting if you’re really ambitious, but clearly they have some significant experience and budget for link building.
If you have limited resources or experience, I think Batsfinder will show you what’s possible for you.
Again, let’s break down the backlink distribution:
| URL Rating Group | # of Backlinks |
| 1-9 | 397 |
| 10-19 | 171 |
| 20-39 | 22 |
| 40-59 | 2 |
| 60-79 | 0 |
| 80-100 | 0 |
Batsfinder doesn’t have any of those 80+ amazing links.
In fact, their profile looks pretty ordinary.
A few dozen solid links, with a good amount of diversity backing them up.
For a more clear-cut breakdown, here’s a histogram of the data:
The links largely center around the 8 URL rating mark.
The takeaway should be that you don’t need only amazing, hard to get backlinks to rank well.
Even links with a low URL rating can help, especially if they’re relevant.
How fast were these links built? (a.k.a. Link velocity)
These graphs are more interesting than Site #1’s.
Notice that there was a flurry of link building work done in the first 6 months or so that the site existed, and then it completely stopped right around January of 2017.
Then, the referring domains spiked again around July of 2017. Here’s a zoomed in graph that makes it clearer.
That’s 211 LRDs in about a year and a half, or about 12 per month.
Most people can do this level of link building on their own if they’ll invest time consistently, or purchase a service for similar results (or better).
The interesting part is when we compare that activity to organic traffic growth. Let’s do that now…
How fast did Batsfinder start to get organic traffic?
Here’s the organic traffic profile for the site:
Remember that the link building stopped from January to July of 2017.
From the above graph, that’s the exact period where organic traffic really took off.
It really shows you why patience is crucial. The results from all that work in the months before took many months to actually translate into rankings and search traffic.
But then what happened?
As we saw, the owner stopped building new links. We can see above that around June, the search traffic stops going up, and actually declines (during baseball season too!).
As soon as traffic started declining, they started up actively link building again, and traffic started to go up just a month or so after (in about August).
The takeaway? Don’t stop building links just because you’re starting to see results.
[clickToTweet tweet=”Case Study: Don’t stop building links just because you’re starting to see results.” quote=”Don’t stop building links just because you’re starting to see results.” theme=”style2″]What keywords does Batsfinder rank for?
Just to confirm that this traffic is actually valuable, take a look at the top keywords the site is ranking for:
| Keyword | Position | Traffic (desc) | LRDs | Links to Page |
| pitching machine | 3 | 482 | 6 | 36 |
| baseball bats review | 1 | 174 | 153 | 761 |
| baseballbat reviews | 1 | 174 | 153 | 761 |
| softball bat reviews | 1 | 162 | 40 | 215 |
| best softball bats | 1 | 161 | 40 | 215 |
| baseball bat reviews | 1 | 156 | 153 | 761 |
| youth baseball bats | 6 | 150 | 17 | 77 |
| baseball bat review | 1 | 149 | 153 | 761 |
| best youth baseball bats | 3 | 134 | 17 | 77 |
| bats review | 1 | 110 | 153 | 761 |
Only a few pages on the site rank for these terms (that’s why the page stats are the same).
Other than the homepage, with 153 LRDs, no other page that ranks for a top term has more than 40 LRDs.
Ranking #3 for “pitching machine” only took 6 LRDs, and none are particularly great. The highest URL rating for that page is just 14.
Once you get enough links to other pages (like the homepage here), it gets easier and easier to rank for other keywords by leveraging your domain authority.
What types of links did each site use?
There’s no “perfect” type of link, and no single link building strategy that is better than the rest.
The more important thing to focus on is the authority and relevance of your links. That’s why I focused so much on those factors above.
But it is interesting and can be useful to examine the types of links different sites use.
Link types of Site #1
Many of their links were contextual links within blog posts. These are high quality links that were probably obtained through outreach and guest posting.
The rest of the links consisted of a scattering of:
- Links from testimonials they gave (e.g. to a WordPress theme)
- Social media posts
- Blog comments
Nothing too special, the kind of links that everyone has been building for many years.
Link types of Batsfinder
The link profile for this site was very balanced, there wasn’t really a single type that dominated the results.
Overall, I saw 5 particular types that were more frequent than the rest:
- Links in guest posts
- Scholarship links (yes, they still work!)
- Contextual links from other baseball niche sites and resource pages
- Standard social media and web 2.0 sites
- Forum posts
Summary
If you’ve read this far, my sincere hope is that you have a clearer idea of what you need to do to achieve your traffic goals on a new site.
Hopefully, you now believe it’s possible, even for fairly new websites, to rank well in Google.
It’s not going to happen overnight, but if you’re consistent and patient with your link building, your traffic can grow to a significant level even within a year or so.
We looked at two real examples of new websites substantially growing their traffic within a relatively short amount of time.
There’s nothing special about these websites, and there’s no reason that you can’t achieve similar results, even if your own site is brand new. If you have the patience and follow best practices, you can succeed.
Comments
Really interesting study David, I’ll look forward to reading back through your posts. I noticed a competitor this week ranking well and they’d merely spammed a huge volume of low value links through Fiverr type gigs (do follow blog comments etc) so I’m curious how long they rank. It was clearly working, but like bat finder they might be flying too close to the sun!
Thanks for the comment, Chris!
Hard to believe spammy links would move the needle in any meaningful way. And if they do, it’ll be short-lived. Definitely not something I’d spend any amount of time or money pursuing. Hopefully, that’s not what you’re walking away with from this post 🙂
It’s possible your competitor has some better quality links you’re just not seeing yet.
Although BF has some lower-quality links they also have links on niche baseball sites + the Scholarship links, both of which are probably what’s driving their rankings.
Thanks again and keep me posted on your progress!
Hi David,
Very interesting to see these two link profiles.
I’ve recently started a site from scratch and need to start getting more search traffic to it.
I think my initial approach will be more like Batsfinder
Then as it starts paying off, I might try to get to that next level of links!
Sounds like a great plan, Dennis! Slow and steady wins the race 🙂
Really great study on link building. However, some niche like gaming particularly card game industry websites, I have experienced that link building is not so open and easy to gain. Lot of publishing sites, article publishing platforms will totally ignore you, just for the reason of the industry it belong.
Any ideas for specially this sort of websites. Will appreciate any feedback or information sharing.
Hey Vaibhav,
In general, the gaming industry is one of the hardest to build links. There’s an incredible amount of spam and webmasters are wary of linking to such sites.
Your best bet is to create a really good linkable asset such as ‘the history of game X’ or you can try a totally different angle with something like ‘X healthy ways to spend your free time’. This would open up new opportunities to reach out to sites related to health and wellness. If the content is really up to par you could probably snatch a few edu’s along the way.
Best of luck!
Great study! Do you have any conclusions about anchor text with these sites?
Thanks, David! Just had a look and both sites played it safe with anchor text usage and besides for their brand name, didn’t use any one anchor text more than a couple of times.
Interesting insights about new websites. Thank you very much for the content. I would have a question: isn’t unnatural (therefore dangerous) to build links as Batsfinder did? More specifically: a brand new website that pushes hard, than a plateau, than hard again.
Thanks for stopping in and I agree consistency is important.
But I don’t see how it would be ‘dangerous’ at all for a website that isn’t building links on a regular basis. As long as when they are building links they are focused on legitimate, relevant links
Hi David, thanks for the great article. I didn’t pay much attention to link building with my first project which must be the main reason on why I’m not seeing much natural traffic there.
Glad you enjoyed, Andy and best of luck on future campaigns!
Thanks for the great article and insights on ranking new websites. I’ll look forward to reading back through your other posts.
You’re welcome, Brenda 🙂
Hi David,
Found your article on Twitter and glad I visited your site!
The article is detailed and has great informative! I was focusing too much on getting high-quality links from the beginning only as a result of which my website’s backlink profile is growing very slowly but your article has definitely helped me clear my doubts.
Thanks!
Hey Rahul,
Thanks for stopping in and glad you liked! Everyone wants quick results but I would never recommend comprising on quality. Best of luck!
What a cool case study David!
Thank you, Mathew.
David, this is a great and timely (for me) study.
How did you go about finding these particular sites? Something I’ve wanted to develop is a tool or system to find sites that are doing link-building well. Any thoughts appreciated!
Just poking around!
Thanks for sharing this case study and I learned a lot of new things! Very interesting and useful blog overall!
Glad you enjoyed the study, Mahesh, and hope you see the benefit of links taking YOUR rankings to new hights in the search results!
This is incredible Dave. I’ll definitely apply this strategy to my new blog.
David,
You looked at the URL rating of the URL from which you were getting the link, right?
Till date, I just focused on DR of the domain and never considered looking at the URL Rating.
I am going to study that now.
Thank you,
Boni – there is a LOT more to a great link than just blindly focusing on DR!
I have written a lot of content in the past related to this specific point.
Wow, That’s the Thing I am Looking for, Quality Backlink is the way to make your rank 1st in SERP’s. No matter How many backlinks you have drawn. Matters that How Quality of Your Backlink are. I like Your Deepth Article on the Single Topic i.e. Backlink. I have searched many times to get some key notes on the backlink only to give it to my students. Thank You David Farkas Sir.
Pihu – I’m gonna need time to think and chew over all of the nuances you are touching on.
Great case study David.
We have some ecommerce stores in the early stages at the moment so it really is wonderful to see the figures showing the potential. The short time frame makes it even better!
Cheers!
Links can really do wonders, Mike – best of luck with your new sites!
Awesome article. Really gives hope to the little guy. Easy to execute tips as well. Interesting and surprising data on the quality of links too. I would have thought that most of the links would be of higher authourity. Thanks.
Me too, Eric – but I think Google understands that most ‘relevant’ websites out there don’t have a ton of authority.
Really great article and it is so helpful. Link building is key and you have shown that through 2 very helpful examples. Thank you.
Indeed, Macky – it’s basically impossible to rank without great links.
Link building for a new brand website can be frustrating.
many thanks for your valuable study. it’s exactly what I was looking for.
“Building a constant backlinks”, does it mean one can add more backlinks to an existing page or keyword that has already been linked due to the fact that it hasn’t reach its limit?
I don’t count links, Peter – as long as there is an opportunity for a relevant link, I would not pass it up!
how many links does it take to rank high in search results? Do I need to make backlinks continuously for a 3-year-old domain…
Like is a continuous process for the long term or a time comes where you don’t need to make backlinks and they will come naturally.
I believe links are the long game, Rahul – so yes!
Nice case study. As a beginner trying to rank my site for the first time, this opened my eyes to the importance of backlinks. Thanks for sharing David.
I’m all about opening eyes CHL!
I love your name, btw, it’s a true testament to your dedication and love for your company!
I like this post very much, your website is obviously a resource as I discovered it on page 1 of Bing for the search term: how many links does it take to rank a website.
Go Bing!
Hi David? Found your article really helpful. And now , you’ve got a new reader.
I love how your explanation and English is simple.
I never knew how important backlinking is until l read this article.
Have a question though, what if you post like 3 articles on 3 guest sites that have a high traffic (100,000 + monthly )as well as good DA.
Will this make any difference in terms of traffic on your site?
Thanks.
Welcome aboard, Kevin, and appreciate the feedback!
I believe looking at a websites’ traffic is a MUCH better method of determining – thru the eyes of Google – the quality of the site, since they obviously trust a website that they are willing to send so much traffic to. The ‘DA’ you can probably ignore 😉
Best of luck building links, sounds like things are headed in the right direction!
Thanks so much I just noticed that I need backlink for my seo journey
Have been getting it difficult to rank each of my post in serp
David, thank you for sharing this insightful case study. One aspect that caught my attention is the emphasis on link velocity and the correlation between link building and organic traffic growth. How would you recommend balancing the pace of link building for a new website to ensure sustainable results without risking over-optimization or potential penalties from search engines?