20 Link Building Benefits for SEO in 2025
Link building is one of the pillars of search engine optimization, which is why SEO agencies spend so much of their time on this off-site SEO activity. Link building involves the acquisition of links on related third-party websites that point back to the business owner’s website. Doing this properly requires a lot of time and a diversified strategy.
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So, why do SEO professionals dedicate so much time to this digital PR activity? This 20 Link Building Benefits list will show you just how important it is.
1. Builds Brand Awareness & Visibility
Brand awareness and visibility are essential for becoming known online. Backlinks (links leading back to your website) are the online equivalent of “word of mouth” promotion for your business. The more other websites are talking about you, the greater the number of internet users who will become aware of your brand and potentially visit your website.
2. Grows Your Online Footprint
Being mentioned and linked to by other websites makes search engines aware of your brand and starts to build an online footprint. This footprint leads search engines to pay more attention to your business and take your website more seriously.
3. Builds Credibility and Trust
Building links boosts your credibility as a legitimate business. Igor Avidon, SEO expert and founder of SEO agency Avidon Marketing Group explains: “Backlinks to your website from respected publications and related businesses increase credibility and trust because readers will naturally assume that the source website (which they trust) vouches for your brand.”
4. Helps to Establish E-E-A-T
Link-building campaigns help to establish E-E-A-T, which stands for “experience, expertise, authority, and trust.” E-E-A-T is a metric Google uses for its human search quality review process. This indirectly affects rankings.
Backlinks from other websites show Google that others find your content valuable and consider you an authoritative source with experience and expertise in the subject matter. This increases trust as explained in the previous point.
5. Establishes You as an Authority and Thought Leader
An effective link-building campaign will position you as an authority and thought leader in your vertical. Reputable websites linking to you and your content show internet users and search engines that you have something valuable or innovative to say that could benefit your industry as a whole.
Coming to be seen as an authority and thought leader online has a wide range of flow-on benefits including increased traffic and sales, networking, and business opportunities.
6. Increases Brand Equity & Market Share
Brands in the same vertical and with a similar reach constantly compete for brand equity and market share. There are only so many online shoppers who buy the same items online, and to sell to these shoppers, businesses need to convince them to buy from their business rather than another brand.
Link building helps boost brand equity and market share by positioning your brand as legitimate, trustworthy, authoritative, and valuable in the circles in which people talk about the kinds of goods and services you offer. More than 90% of customers consider brand perception when making purchase decisions. The more others are talking about your brand as opposed to similar brands, the more brand equity and the larger the market share you can potentially achieve.
7. Helps Search Engines Find, Crawl, and Index Your Website
Helping search engines discover, crawl, and index your website is one of the technical benefits of link building. Search engine bots crawl popular websites much more often than new websites, so having a link back to your website on one of these sites drastically increases the chances of search engines finding and crawling your site sooner rather than later.
Website crawling and indexing are essential because they are prerequisites to the pages on your website being displayed in search engine results pages (SERPs). Being displayed in SERPs leads to increased traffic and revenue.
8. Helps Search Engines Understand the Relevance of Your Website
Search engines use various cues to place websites into categories. Relevant links pointing back to your site show search engines which category to place your website in and the kinds of search queries for which your website should appear.
For example, links back to a real estate data aggregator from real estate publications show search engines that the target domain should be categorized as a “real estate” website. The aggregator’s website will then start to appear in real estate-related searches.
9. Improves Domain Authority (Moz)/Domain Rating (Ahrefs) and Rankings
Websites with greater perceived authority on any given topic are ranked higher by search engines than low-authority websites. For example, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) will invariably rank much higher than an unknown website for health-related search queries. This is true for websites in every vertical—including news, health, legal, finance, tourism, and the list goes on.
The leading SEO tool providers (Moz and Ahrefs) have developed metrics for measuring the relative authority of each website. Moz assigns websites a “domain authority” (DA) and Ahrefs assigns websites a “domain rating” (DR). Businesses will find that a higher number of backlinks from high authority sites in their vertical lead to a higher DA or DR and higher rankings in SERPs.
10. Helps with Networking & Business Opportunities
The exercise of link building helps your business network with related businesses, organizations, and influencers. This could lead to additional opportunities for your business.
For example, a journalist might come across a link to your website and contact you for an interview. Alternatively, an influencer might come across your brand in a product roundup or guest post and request product samples so they can promote your brand to their followers.
11. Increases Relevant Traffic & Sales
Backlinks to your website from related, high-authority websites bring referral traffic in the form of visitors who are interested in what you offer. This increases conversions and revenue because interested visitors are more likely to make a purchase than visitors who know nothing about your brand.
12. Helps You Build Email & Social Media Followings
An email list and social media following are important for staying in touch with potential and long-term customers, building community, and generating recurring sales. Links on relevant sites are very helpful for helping you grow your email list and social media following because they bring referral traffic as described above.
Make the most of this benefit by adding a pop-up or prominent notice on your home page encouraging site visitors to sign up for your email newsletters and follow you on social media. Businesses often offer something in exchange for signing up, such as a discount on the customer’s first purchase.
13. Improves User Experience (UX)
The activity of link building encourages the creation of valuable content because that’s what readers will find most helpful. Readers will ultimately link to and share valuable content without any additional work on your part. Guides, statistics roundups, resource pages, industry surveys, graphs, and infographics are all great candidates for backlinks.
14. Cost-Effective
Link building (both external and internal links) is more cost-effective than pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaigns because it’s often free or low-cost and the results last long after the link is published. In contrast, the effects of a PPC campaign end the moment you stop paying for clicks.
The best way to maximize the cost benefits of link building is to focus on acquiring backlinks from high-authority websites such as sites ending in .edu or .gov. A single high-authority backlink can have a greater impact on your rankings than a large number of low-quality ones.
15. Fairly Quick Results
The results of link building can generally be seen in one to six months with an average of three months. This is quite fast compared to the results of on-page SEO without link building.
16. Long-Term Impact
Once a link is built, it will potentially stay there and continue to bring traffic (and authority) to your site for years. This is a much longer-term impact than PPC, which stops driving traffic to your site the moment you stop paying for ads.
17. Works for Every Industry
Link building works for every industry and website type. The main thing is to place links on websites that are high-quality and related to your industry.
18. Great for Local SEO
Local link building can have great results for local businesses. Not only are these links likely to help your rankings in local search queries but they will probably bring you more local customers, too.
19. Builds Resilience
Using a range of link-building strategies protects your website against a drop in rankings due to a change in Google’s algorithms. If Google decides to go after guest posts, for example, the other kinds of links you build will help buffer the impact of the change.
20. Can Be Outsourced
Link building is something you can do yourself or you can pay an expert to do it for you. Outsourcing your link-building strategy to an experienced professional who uses above-board, white-hat link-building techniques saves you time and is often more effective because link-building professionals have ready-made networks they can tap into to acquire relevant, high-authority links.
Link Building Works!
Link building is essential for improving site authority and rankings, and for helping potential customers discover your business. While it takes time and effort, manual link building offers a good return on investment with long-term results that can withstand future changes to Google’s algorithms when a range of strategies are used.
A high number of natural backlinks pointing to your site from high-authority websites in your niche raises brand awareness, authority, and trust. Positive brand perception then influences customers’ purchase decisions, helping you grow your revenue and market share.