Link building is an effective way to promote a young website, but it's important to understand what influences its effectiveness. Generally, a page targeting a competitive keyword will experience ranking increases due to link building within two to six months. For completely new websites with no backlink profile, the results can be seen almost immediately. On average, it takes 10 weeks for link-by-link SEO to work.
However, if multiple backlinks are created at once, the effect will be faster. The speed of a backlink's impact is determined by three attributes: domain authority, keyword competitiveness, and link type. It's also worth considering the overall effect of a good campaign on the entire website, not just the page being targeted. Each major link building strategy has a bottleneck that affects how quickly links can be generated.
To dominate search engine rankings, use tools to spy on competitors and make sure your backlinks have more influence than theirs. Monitor Backlinks can be used to check these metrics for both your own site and those of your competitors. In B2B, for example, link building is popular, so relying solely on this strategy may not be enough. Working with the wrong people - whether an agency or an in-house link builder - will not only drain your budget but also prolong the time before your backlinks start influencing rankings.
Without content or keyword targeting, even many backlinks won't have much of an impact. As an example of the impressive results that creativity can bring in link building, one website had more than 1500 links from 588 domains by mid-May, including high-DR sites such as FoxNews (DR 90), Newsweek (DR 90) and NY Post (DR 90). It outperformed all other websites that had participated in link building schemes, including those with manipulated anchor texts. For some websites, the answer to how long it takes for backlinks to take effect could be close to five weeks or even a few days.
It may take months or years of constantly building up your site's authority through links and content before you can rank for a certain search term. To test this out, I chose keywords with a difficulty score between 0 and 10, as these were easy to rank after creating some backlinks.
