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Which type of links should you be investing in to reach the top of Google’s search results page? This is an evergreen question in the SEO industry.
At Klikko, we set out to clarify this issue by conducting the largest Nordic link building survey ever. Our objective was to determine the best strategy, factoring in both results and resources spent.
Table of Contents
The survey
Most sites receive backlinks from a variety of sources, including collaborating partners, blogs, and news media. Some links are organic while others are paid for.
It can be difficult to gauge which links are actually effective and contributing to gaining more relevant traffic. We hypothesized that we would be able to estimate the value of each link type by:
- Creating four similar sites targeting the same type of keyword
- Use a particular link type for each respective site
- Spend equal amounts of money on each site’s link type – DKK 20.000 in total (approx. € 2700)
This allowed us to have reasonably fair conditions for the survey.
Four brunch sites
We created four identical brunch sites with brand-new domains in June 2022.
- brunchkøbenhavn.dk
- brunchårhus.dk
- brunchodense.dk
- brunchaalborg.dk
Four link strategies
We boosted the sites by solely focusing on paid links of four different types:
- PBN links – Links from our PBN network
- Niche links – Links from our own niche pages, which have been created to be relevant for specific industries.
- Premium links – Links from authoritative external publishers
- International Guest Posts – Guest posts on international sites with a high DR.
The playing field
The final line-up was as follows:
- brunchkøbenhavn.dk – boosted by PBN links
- brunchårhus.dk – boosted by International Guest Posts
- brunchodense.dk – boosted by premium links.
- brunchaalborg.dk – boosted by niche links.
This formed the basis for the study. However, before we started building links we wanted to clarify one issue:
How far can you get without links?
We had the sites go live without building a single link to see if they would get any organic traffic without help.
And actually, they did. They generated a good deal of traffic, but none of them achieved a top position on their critical keywords. To achieve this, we needed to put our planned link strategies into action.
Final results after link building
We spent DDK 20.000 (approx. € 2700) on each respective site and their links. Then we waited.
When the dust had settled after two years, we were able to assess the growth of each site. Two of the sites had crawled up the rankings and begun to dominate the search results page. The snapshot below from Ahrefs shows one of the site’s growth in traffic:
The study provided us with amazing insights on how different types of links actually perform in a controlled situation. You can read further on all of this in our detailed Case Study. Get access to the entire study for free today and start building links which actually work and help you generate traffic.
