Is Manual Link Building Worth the Effort?

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So, you’re a business owner who wants to increase your SERP (search engine result page) rankings—but you’re just not sure if manual link building is worth the effort? Yes. The answer is absolutely yes. If done correctly, manual link building is an invaluable strategy to draw in web traffic but going this route takes a considerable amount of time and effort, something many business owners don’t really have an excess of.

Today, we’ll discuss how and why manual link building is absolutely worth the effort, and we’ll brainstorm ways to reap the benefits of this tried-and-true strategy, while making sure you don’t end up with more work on your plate.

What is Link Building Outreach?

Link building outreach is the process of getting other websites to add links to their content, directing readers to your website. Simply put, you reach out to other people and ask them to link back to your site.

High quality backlinks help bring in organic traffic through a couple of paths:

1. People click on links to your site on other pages
2. Through increasing your SEO (search engine optimization) rankings

Manual Link Building vs Automatic

There are a couple of ways you can get other people to link back to your site—through manual or automatic avenues.

Manual

As the name implies, manual link building is where you find and acquire homes for your links manually. This strategy involves contacting websites individually and having a conversation. While time consuming, this method has plenty of benefits that we’ll get into here in a minute.

Automatic

Automatic link building is where the process of finding homes for your links has been—you guessed it—automated. This involves submitting your links to websites and databases and then letting their software take the reigns. While saving time is a definite check in the pro column here, automatic link building has several disadvantages. One of these disadvantages is that there’s the potential for automatically generated backlinks to be harmful to your business. Google can detect low-quality backlinks and your reputation and SERP rankings could suffer.