Link Building Strategy 2026: Boost Qualified Traffic and ROI

Link building is a powerful lever for boosting a site's brand awareness, generating qualified traffic and improving rankings in search engine results. It must be approached with care and good judgement, because it is arguably the area of SEO that requires the most investment and carries the most risk. In this article, we define what link building covers, the main acquisition channels, the strategic approaches, its potential and its limits. We also look at Google's perspective and how it interprets different link acquisition practices. Finally, we share the Incremys approach: performance-focused, while keeping risk under control.

Link Building Strategy: Definition, SEO and GEO Objectives

In 2026, organic search is becoming a "hybrid" discipline that combines editorial strategy, data and advanced technologies (including AI). In this context, an effective link building strategy should not be managed as a standalone action, but as an integrated lever within an overall SEO programme — aligned with your content strategy, your target audience (personas) and measurable goals (rankings, traffic, leads and ROI). It also plays a growing role in GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation), because generative engines favour sources perceived as trustworthy, cited and referenced.

Backlinks: Definition and Their Role in SEO

Link building is an SEO technique that involves earning external links pointing to your website from reliable, relevant sources. The main goal is to drive more qualified traffic to the target page, so placing backlinks thoughtfully and strategically is essential for increasing perceived authority with search engines. As we explore later, link building tactics vary widely and each has its own advantages and disadvantages. A strong link acquisition approach should be grounded in thorough analysis, so it fits each business's specific needs and objectives.

A few useful benchmarks to understand what is at stake: according to Backlinko (2026), 94–95% of web pages receive no backlinks, and the page ranking #1 has on average 3.8 times more backlinks than positions 2 to 10. This highlights both the scarcity of links and their competitive importance.

Why Implement a Link Building Strategy? (SEO, GEO and Visibility in LLMs)

Why use link building? When multiple backlinks point to your site, it strengthens your popularity and brand awareness — one of the three pillars of SEO. With a well-executed link building strategy, you increase your website's trust signals for search engines. That typically translates into better rankings, because your brand is recognised as an authoritative source in its field. The more backlinks you have, the more your site benefits from authority transfer (or link equity), which Google takes into account. In short, here are the main benefits of an effective link building strategy:

• Your site becomes more credible in the eyes of search engines;
• Your rankings in the SERP improve;
• Organic traffic increases in both volume and quality;
• Your brand awareness grows;
• Your revenue improves.

In GEO, the objective broadens: it is no longer only about earning a click, but also about being cited as a source. With the rise of AI Overviews and the growth of AI-powered engines, authority signals (links, mentions, citations and reuse) become critical. For example, 60% of searches end without a click (Semrush/Squid Impact, 2025) and, when an AI Overview appears, the CTR of the first position can drop to as low as 2.6% (Squid Impact, 2025). In that context, being mentioned or cited can matter as much as direct traffic.

Link Building, Backlinks and Authority: Definitions and Differences

You will come across terms such as link building, backlink acquisition and authority building. In SEO literature, they all point to the same overall goal (growing a site's popularity and authority through inbound links), but with nuances:

• Link building generally refers to the overall approach to inbound links (quality, diversity, target pages, anchors and pace);
• Link building tactics focus more on execution and the methods used to obtain links (outreach, guest posting, PR, etc.);
• Authority refers to the outcome on the search engine side: a site recommended by credible sources.

In every case, quality and natural-looking acquisition remain central — especially with Penguin, Google's link-quality control algorithm.

Understanding Links: Types, Attributes and Signals

Internal Links vs External Links: Differences and Use Cases

When we talk about link building, we mostly mean backlinks — external links pointing to a target site. Alongside this, there is another important concept: internal linking. This refers to links within your own site that help users (and crawlers) navigate from one page to another. Visitors can access "deep" content (more than three clicks away from the homepage), and search engine bots can discover and crawl your pages. This matters because a page that is not indexed by Google has no chance of appearing in search results.

Examples of external link types include: links within editorial content, links from blog comments (comment spam), advertising links, links from social networks, cloaked links (shortened links), newsletter links (buttons with tracking), and PBN links (from private blog networks).

Backlinks vs Brand Mentions: What Do Search Engines and LLMs Value?

In SEO, backlinks remain a major authority signal. In GEO, brand mentions (with or without a clickable link) can be increasingly valuable, because many AI citations do not generate clicks: around 72% of AI citations reportedly do not include a clickable link (GEO data). In other words, visibility and credibility can be built through:

• editorial backlinks (the classic approach);
• brand mentions in media, opinion pieces, comparisons and communities (forums, Reddit, LinkedIn);
• citations as a source in AI-generated summaries.

This fits a "SEO + GEO" approach: ranking well still matters because 99% of AI Overviews cite the top 10 organic results (Squid Impact, 2025), but off-site notoriety accelerates your chances of being cited.

Link Attributes: Dofollow, Nofollow, Sponsored, UGC

Dofollow and nofollow are link attributes — snippets of HTML that tell crawlers how to interpret a link. A nofollow attribute indicates that the link does not need to be taken into account. In practice, its SEO impact is usually limited. A dofollow link is the opposite and is typically the default when no attribute is specified: it tells Google to follow the link and potentially pass authority. When sourcing backlinks, it is worth checking whether the publisher uses dofollow links, as this affects authority transfer.

This is how links are characterised in HTML:

• Dofollow link: <a href="https://www.incremys.com/fr/content-factory" rel="dofollow">The Incremys Content Factory</a>
• Nofollow link: <a href="https://www.incremys.com/fr/content-factory" rel="nofollow">The Incremys Content Factory</a>

For a link building strategy to be effective, the links pointing to your site typically need to be dofollow. If you believe some external links are harming your organic performance, you should act: if you control the HTML, you can change the link to nofollow. Otherwise, Google Search Console allows you to disavow harmful links.

In addition to dofollow/nofollow, Google also recommends using:

• sponsored for paid or advertising links;
• ugc for links from user-generated content (comments, forums, etc.).

These attributes clarify intent and reduce the risk of links being reclassified as part of a "link scheme".

Link Anchors: Optimisation, Naturalness and Over-Optimisation Risk

Several factors determine the quality of an external link. Bear in mind that with a truly natural backlink, you do not control these criteria — the third-party site does.

• The linking domain is the first criterion. The third-party site should have solid authority and good visibility in search results. The surrounding content should be substantial and thematically and semantically coherent;
• The anchor text should naturally include relevant, strategic wording. It is best to avoid generic anchors such as Click here or Learn more. The surrounding text should be semantically aligned so the link does not look artificial;
• Placement matters. Ideally, the source page should not be too far from the homepage. On the page itself, it is preferable for the backlink to appear above the fold;
• It is better if the source page does not contain too many other outbound links, as each link may carry less weight;
• A backlink should not be placed in the footer of the third-party site. One high-quality contextual link is better than a link repeated sitewide;
• The backlink should feel natural — surrounded by relevant words and embedded in a sentence that makes sense, not dropped into a list of links.

Note: over-optimised "exact match" anchors (repetitive, overly commercial, too similar) are a classic manipulation signal. For long-term resilience, anchor diversity (brand, URL, generic, natural phrasing and long-tail) is a key safety net.

Recommended Distribution: Brand, Generic, Long-Tail, Exact Match

There is no universal "magic ratio" because your profile depends on your history, brand awareness and sector. However, a robust operational approach is to:

• prioritise brand anchors and URL anchors, which most closely reflect natural behaviour;
• add generic anchors and long-tail phrasing to mirror human, varied language;
• use exact-match anchors sparingly and only in a coherent editorial context.

The goal is not to "optimise as much as possible", but to remain credible to Google while helping target pages rank for their priority queries.

How Google Evaluates a Link Profile (Rules and Best Practice)

Trust Criteria: Relevance, Authority, Context and Traffic

For over 10 years, Google — through the Penguin algorithm — has targeted low-quality backlinks. Here is what this "link police" analyses:

• the authority and topic relevance of sites linking to you;
• anchor texts;
• the speed and frequency at which your site earns new backlinks;
• the distribution of TLDs (.fr, .org, .com, .info, .gov, etc.). For example, if you suddenly receive many links from unrelated foreign sites, it can look suspicious to Google;
• the dofollow vs nofollow ratio. There is no universal rule, but it is often recommended to have a small proportion of nofollow links. That said, having none is not necessarily harmful;
• sitewide links (footer, header, sidebar). These can be counterproductive when they come from sites unrelated to yours. That does not mean they must be avoided entirely, but they should be used carefully and sparingly.

One essential operational point: a "strong" link is often a link that drives real, contextualised traffic from a page that people actually read. In 2026, behavioural signals (clicks, time on page, scrolling) are increasingly used as effectiveness indicators. A link that sends visitors to a page that satisfies intent is more likely to deliver long-term benefit.

Manipulation Signals: Link Schemes and Practices to Avoid

To curb spam, artificial link schemes, unregulated link markets, useless directory bots and other extreme tactics, Google enforces a code of practice. It clearly states that artificial links — anything other than links that appear naturally without being requested or paid for — are against its guidelines. Of course, the reality of the web is more complex. Many approaches exist, with varying levels of effectiveness and risk. When we talk about risk, we mean the risk of a penalty. Some businesses lose the entirety of their visibility and can even be removed from search results entirely due to major strategic mistakes. That is why it is important to find the right balance. At Incremys, we favour a strategy designed to keep risk to a minimum.

Google Penguin: What the Algorithm Penalises (and How to Avoid It)

Penguin primarily targets link profiles that look like manipulation attempts. In practice, the signals most commonly associated with risk (link devaluation, performance drops or even manual actions) include:

• incoherent acquisition spikes (abnormal velocity, sudden volumes without a PR reason);
• an overly high share of repeated exact-match anchors;
• links from thematically irrelevant sites, thin pages, or "disguised directories";
• unjustified sitewide links (footer/sidebar) on irrelevant domains;
• easy-to-detect artificial networks (publishing patterns, shared footprints, duplicated content).

The most reliable way to avoid this is to make links a logical consequence of useful content: relevant publishers, editorial context, anchor diversity, steady progression and strong target pages.

Link Building and E-E-A-T: Credibility, Expertise and Sources

Google values credibility and expertise through E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust). In practical terms, sustainable link acquisition often relies on proof: data, first-hand experience, studies, case studies and expert commentary. This is also a GEO requirement: content that includes statistics and expert data is 40% more likely to be reused by LLMs (Vingtdeux, 2025). That is why it is worth producing "citable" pages that can be verified — and then getting them amplified within legitimate ecosystems.

Backlink Analysis: Audit, Prioritise and Manage

Collecting Data: Audit Sources and Methods

There are many tools available to analyse backlink profiles. One of the most effective is Google Search Console. This free tool allows you, among other things, to review your links. In practice, go to the Links tab, then External links, then More. You can then select the page you want to analyse and identify the backlinks pointing to it. All external links can be exported in your preferred format (Google Sheets, Excel or CSV).

To go further, read our guide to Google Search Console, useful for auditing, indexation validation and tracking search signals.

To complete the audit, it is helpful to cross-check multiple sources (third-party tools, logs and analytics) in order to:

• deduplicate referring domains and better qualify source pages;
• spot new or lost links and velocity variations;
• prioritise actions (reclaim broken links, clean-up, competitor opportunities).

Metrics to Track: Referring Domains, Pages, Anchors, Velocity

For actionable analysis, do not stop at volume. Keep an eye on:

• the number of referring domains (diversity);
• destination pages (where authority flows);
• anchor distribution (brand, URL, generic, optimised);
• velocity (acquisition pace);
• attributes (dofollow/nofollow/sponsored/ugc);
• topical relevance and editorial quality of source pages.

As an indicator, Backlinko (2026) suggests that a high-quality backlink can improve rankings by around +1.5 positions on average (SEO.com, 2026), which helps quantify potential impact — assuming the target page is strong.

Competitor Analysis: Identify Link Opportunities

For a clearer, deeper view to support strategic decisions, Incremys offers a dedicated module for analysing off-page SEO. It shows your site authority, linking domains, and links from domains that your direct competitors have but you do not.

Competitive benchmarking is especially useful for identifying:

• media and partners that are authoritative in your sector;
• pages that attract links (guides, studies, comparisons);
• formats that are genuinely shared (tools, resources, data, expert articles).

A simple prioritisation method is to rank opportunities by topical relevance, likelihood of acquisition (contact accessibility, editorial line, publishing history), then business value (target pages and intent).

Link Profile Mapping: Pages That Attract Links and Pages to Strengthen

Mapping your profile means connecting "sources → target pages → performance". It helps you identify:

• pages that already attract links (keep them updated and strengthen them);
• strategic pages that receive no links (categories, pillar pages, solution pages);
• content angles to create in order to support revenue-driving pages.

In practice, this brings off-site work closer to your content strategy and internal linking, so authority flows towards the pages that generate leads.

Tracking and Reporting: Measure Impact on Rankings, Traffic, Leads and ROI

Serious tracking goes beyond counting links. You should connect acquisition efforts to measurable outcomes: ranking gains, organic traffic growth, conversion improvements (demo requests, forms, enquiries) and business value.

To structure your dashboards and 2026 KPIs, you can draw on our resources: SEO Statistics 2026: the Key Figures to Track and GEO Statistics: Trends and Indicators. These benchmarks help you incorporate newer KPIs such as visibility in AI answers, alongside traditional rankings.

Backlink Quality: Spotting Good Links vs Toxic Links

What Makes a High-Quality Backlink: Relevance, Editorial Value, Placement and Context

In any link building strategy, it is important to understand that there are good links and bad links. Natural backlinks fall into the first category. As the name suggests, these links exist because a blog or third-party site appreciates your content or products. There is no quid pro quo: no link exchange, no payment for publication, no compensation in kind such as sending a product. These natural backlinks are also the only type explicitly tolerated by Google. The search engine can demote sites that use artificial backlinks — except in certain cases, when they are clearly flagged with appropriate attributes (nofollow, ugc, sponsored).

Operationally, a good link also makes sense for the user: it supports the narrative, offers a complementary resource and has a realistic chance of being clicked (and therefore of sending traffic).

Toxic Links: Signals, Examples and Impact

Links from adult sites, casino or gambling sites, hacked sites, or sites with no connection to your topic; links that arrive in bulk by the hundreds; robot-generated links — these are all suspicious and potentially harmful in a link profile.

The main risk is not always an immediate penalty: Google may simply ignore (devalue) the links. The problem then becomes twofold: wasted budget and time, and a profile that is harder to interpret and improve.

Cleaning Up a Link Profile: Removal, Disavowal and Prevention

To reduce the negative SEO impact of hostile campaigns against your site, check which domains appear in Search Console. The tool lets you upload a disavow file listing the "bad domains", so Google can filter them out.

As a preventive measure, the best "firewall" remains: gradual acquisition, strong topical relevance and technically solid target pages (speed, mobile, security). With traffic being predominantly mobile (around 60% of global web traffic) and 53% of users abandoning pages that take more than 3 seconds to load (Google, 2025), slow pages can undermine the real impact of links because visitors leave too quickly.

How to Build a Link Building Strategy: A Step-by-Step Method

Define Your Goals: Awareness, SEO, GEO, Acquisition and ROI

Developing a link building strategy is a long-term process that requires organisation, flexibility and attention to detail. The methods described below are not mutually exclusive — quite the opposite. Used efficiently, they complement one another and can significantly improve organic performance.

Before you buy or produce a single link, set measurable objectives: target rankings (top 3, top 10), organic traffic, conversions/leads, share of voice and — for GEO — citation frequency, AI share of voice and the quality of AI-driven traffic (often more qualified). ROI is straightforward: (campaign gains − campaign costs) / campaign costs.

Choose Target Pages: Pillar Pages, Categories and High-Value Content

Links work best when the target page is genuinely worth recommending: useful, well-structured, up to date, fast and aligned with intent. In many sectors, the formats that perform best are comprehensive guides, pillar pages, comparisons, studies and solution pages. To frame these choices, aligning with an SEO content strategy is often essential.

Build an Anchor Strategy: Coherence, Naturalness and Safety

A robust anchor framework typically mixes:

• brand anchors (brand name, product, team);
• URL anchors;
• natural generic anchors ("learn more", "this guide", etc.);
• descriptive topical anchors;
• a limited share of heavily optimised anchors, used sparingly.

The goal is naturalness, not repetition. Anchors should reflect the variety of phrasing that real people use.

For additional safety, ensure "anchor → target page" consistency: a descriptive anchor should point to a genuinely relevant page, not a generic one. This coherence reduces artificial signals and improves conversion.

Action Plan and Timeline: Prioritisation, Velocity and Budget

Link building should be managed as an action plan: prioritise the pages to push, sequence publications and smooth acquisition over time (velocity). In terms of budget, a useful market benchmark: the average cost of a backlink is estimated at $361 (SEO.com, 2026), with significant variation by sector and publisher authority. This makes quality/cost trade-offs — and ROI management — essential.

In a B2B organisation, a good practice is to align publication and outreach with key marketing moments (launches, studies, events). This makes acquisition spikes look more credible and helps secure PR coverage.

Improve Link Building: Quick Wins and Long-Term Levers

High-impact quick wins include:

• strengthening internal linking from pages that already receive traffic towards your revenue-driving pages;
• asking for a link from sites that mention you without linking (unlinked mentions);
• updating pillar content with recent figures and adding FAQ sections (SEO and GEO impact);
• fixing broken links (on your site and pointing to your site).

Long term, the most stable lever is producing "linkable" assets (data, studies, guides, tools) and promoting them through the right channels.

How to Get Backlinks: Acquisition Strategies

Link Bait: Data-Led Content, Studies, Tools and Reusable Resources

The goal is to create content on your own site that third parties naturally link to, without any direct intervention on your part. To achieve this, what you publish must be exceptional and clearly differentiated. Examples of content likely to attract natural backlinks include:

• infographics;
• training resources that help users develop new skills;
• tutorials;
• in-depth guides that solve specific problems;
• original videos — either highly informative or with a distinctive tone;
• giveaways or promotions.

Worth noting: long-form content beyond 2,000 words earns +77.2% more backlinks (Webnyxt, 2026). But structure matters as much as length — especially for GEO citability (clear headings, lists and FAQs).

Digital PR: Press Relations and Editorial Links

Press outreach can be a strong lever for some businesses, but the prerequisites are significant. The press tends to cover either already-notable brands or genuinely innovative products or services. That said, web services can help distribute press releases to relevant professionals, with no guarantee of outcomes. As we discuss later, it is also possible to publish on press sites for a fee; this is often the preferred route within link building programmes. Press links are, of course, highly valuable.

In B2B, Digital PR works particularly well when it is built around a tangible asset: a proprietary study, a data-driven benchmark, an industry index or a documented case study. This makes it easier to earn coverage, links and citations.

Guest Posting: Editorial Framing, Site Selection and Quality Control

Sponsored articles — sometimes euphemistically called guest blogging — remain one of the most common approaches for securing high-quality links. They can deliver excellent ROI when managed properly. The advantage is control: you can influence the conditions, content and costs. The downside is that this is time-consuming and requires strong processes, tools and people. In many cases, it is easier to use a specialist provider to run off-page SEO campaigns. For this purpose, Incremys created a Backlinks module that identifies the most relevant publishers in its catalogue. You choose the domain, the anchor and the target URL, and a draft is delivered a few days later for approval before publication.

To scale and de-risk this area, you can rely on our quality inbound link acquisition module, designed to frame publisher selection, anchors and target pages.

A commonly overlooked quality checkpoint: the publisher should be capable of generating real visibility (indexed pages, traffic, editorial consistency). A dofollow link on a page that never ranks and is never read is mechanically less valuable.

Turn Mentions into Links: Request and Process

Another tactic is to use Google Alerts, or any monitoring tool, to track where your brand is mentioned online. If you are cited as a source or someone has used one of your images or infographics, contact the site and ask them to add a backlink.

To increase success rates, keep the request structured: provide the exact URL to add, suggest the ideal placement and explain clearly why it benefits readers (proper sourcing, better user experience). In B2B, a short, factual message tends to work better than anything overly promotional.

Reclaim Broken Links: Detection, Qualification and Outreach

Over time, links disappear. By monitoring links manually or with dedicated tools, you can spot when they are removed and contact the site to request reinstatement. This requires consistent tracking and should be planned whenever you change URLs on your site. Links pointing to changed URLs will be redirected if you have set up redirects correctly. However, a direct link generally carries more SEO value than a redirected one.

Before outreach, qualify the source page: indexation, topical relevance and link placement. This helps you avoid "reclaiming" weak links or links that were removed for valid reasons.

Link Exchanges: When They Are Relevant and How to Limit Risk

Link exchange involves placing reciprocal links between two domains. This practice is prohibited by Google's guidelines and is easy for Google to identify and discount. To try to avoid detection, some practitioners use triangular exchanges (site A links to site B, while site C links to site A). Using this pattern repeatedly increases the chance of being flagged by Penguin, with harmful consequences (devaluation or penalty). At most, this should be used rarely and opportunistically. In general, we advise against investing effort in this approach.

If you do proceed, restrict it to legitimate partnerships (customers, suppliers, ecosystem partners) and prioritise contextual links that are not systematic and are genuinely useful for users.

Sponsored Content: Quality Criteria, Compliance and Attributes

Sponsored content can be worthwhile if the publisher is genuinely editorial, topically aligned and capable of generating visibility. For compliance, a sponsored attribute may be required depending on the context. What matters most remains publisher quality and article coherence, because a "paid" link on a weak site is often cost with little value.

To reduce risk, avoid platforms that overly standardise publications (clear footprints, repetition, overloaded "partners" pages). Prefer environments where the article can realistically rank, be read and remain online.

Links on Free Platforms: Limits, Risks and Alternatives

Your link building strategy can also include manual backlink placement on platforms where you can publish yourself. Identify blogs, forums, platforms and community spaces aligned with your topic, and place a few links in a subtle, helpful way. While this can be time-consuming, it is free and fully under your control. That said, a forum link typically carries a lower SEO impact than a link from a well-known, authoritative publisher. A once-common — but increasingly outdated — practice is mass-posting blog comments. This prohibited, often bot-driven tactic is known as comment spam. Similar abuse includes "spam referrer" tactics aimed at polluting Google Analytics reports. Automation is a hallmark of link building that is both ineffective and high risk today, and Google actively targets these patterns.

A useful GEO alternative: contribute to community platforms (forums, Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube) with genuinely helpful answers. In AI engines, a significant share of citations comes from these platforms (GEO data), which can improve visibility even without a direct backlink.

PBNs: Why They Are Risky and What to Do Instead

This approach involves building a network of blogs using expired domains (among other sources) to leverage existing authority and create backlinks to your main site. It can be effective, but it is difficult to execute well. Blogs must be updated regularly with quality content, which has a cost. There is also a real risk of being penalised by Google: the blogs must not exist purely to manufacture links. Target page choices, anchor distribution, and the quality and topic relevance of the blogs all matter. This strategy requires significant investment and its potential is often directly correlated with risk. It is viewed as questionable by Google and is typically run by experienced teams. Without that expertise, penalties are highly likely. We do not recommend this strategy to our clients.

Instead, invest in durable editorial assets (guides, studies, comparisons) and distribution (Digital PR), which strengthen both SEO performance and GEO citability.

Link Building and Content Strategy: A Combined Lever (SEO and GEO)

Create "Linkable" Content Aligned with Search Intent

Link acquisition performs best when it pushes pages that deserve to be recommended. In 2026, the key is intent alignment and strong structure (lists, explicit headings, concise answers), because that also facilitates AI extraction. To frame this work, a GEO content strategy complements "classic" SEO by targeting citability and multi-channel presence.

Internal Linking: Amplify the Effect of Backlinks on Strategic Pages

Internal linking is a multiplier: it redistributes authority to the pages that matter (categories, solution pages, pillar pages). Without internal links, some of the benefit stays "stuck" on the linked page. In practice, connect content by topical proximity and funnel authority towards your business pages.

Adapt Link Building for GEO: Trust Signals, Citations and Sources

With AI interfaces on the rise, the "link → click → conversion" path becomes less linear. A combined SEO + GEO approach also targets presence in sources and citations. Generative engines rely on external authority signals and informational reputation. In that context, earning mentions in media, communities and reference resources becomes a natural extension of a link building strategy.

Editorial Orchestration: Planning, Briefs and Production

To scale production and avoid one-off efforts, a clear content programme is often the foundation: topic selection, planning, formats, briefs and ongoing updates. This makes it easier to create assets that are genuinely shareable, then promote them through off-site campaigns.

Figures and Trends: SEO/GEO Indicators for Managing Link Acquisition

KPIs to Track: Profile Evolution, Share of Voice and Business Performance

In 2026, data is essential for managing performance, anticipating trends and maximising visibility across increasingly diverse and generative engines. Beyond links, track:

• the evolution of referring domains and anchors;
• rankings and organic traffic (with a focus on the top 3, which captures 75% of clicks);
• conversions/leads and business value;
• visibility in AI answers (citation frequency, AI share of voice, brand mentions).

Benchmarks: Volume, Quality and Acquisition Pace by Sector

There is no universal pace, but benchmarks help set expectations: Backlinko (2026) suggests it takes on average 220 backlinks to reach position #1 (to be interpreted in light of competition and quality), and that a quality backlink can move rankings by around +1.5 positions. The average cost of a backlink is estimated at $361 (SEO.com, 2026). These figures reinforce the need to prioritise "quality + ROI", rather than simply chasing volume.

The Incremys Link Building Strategy

Our agency sets the bar high on quality while keeping risk measured. Campaigns implemented 10 years ago can still produce positive effects for businesses that focused on quality. Conversely, brands that made riskier choices not only lost their investment but also harmed their visibility. In short, some would have been better off doing nothing — and that is exactly what we advise decision-makers when they present high-risk plans. Google and other search engines keep improving: only quality-driven strategies avoid sanctions and benefit from algorithm updates.

A Performance-Driven Methodology: Analysis, Planning and Automation

1 — We verify the site's technical health. This is the non-negotiable prerequisite for off-site SEO to be fully effective.

2 — We analyse the link profile. If needed, we clean it up using Google Search Console.

3 — We select publishers based on several criteria:

• You do not already have a link from the publisher;
• The publisher links to your direct competitors;
• The publisher can publish content that is relevant to your business;
• The link is dofollow;
• The link is guaranteed to remain live over time.

4 — We write an article using Incremys technology, designed to rank highly for its target keyword.

5 — We publish the article.

6 — We monitor performance over time.

The fact that the article is built to rank is a real differentiator compared with many common approaches. Typically, brands publish "good enough" content, but nothing exceptional. When one of our articles ranks first thanks to our technology, the link gains visibility in the SERP and is therefore clicked more often, which increases its value in the eyes of search engines. This benefits both the host site and the client site.

Opportunity Detection: Keywords, Content to Create and Pages to Push

Upstream of campaigns, we identify the pages with the highest potential (pillar pages, solution pages and expert content) and the topics most likely to attract links naturally. This step aligns with the content strategy, the competitive landscape and the level of effort acceptable for the client.

ROI Measurement: Tracking Rankings, Traffic and Conversions

We connect off-site actions to business indicators: ranking gains, organic traffic growth, leads generated and ROI. In 2026, we also integrate GEO-oriented indicators (visibility and citations), because performance is no longer measured solely by clicks — especially when 60% of searches end without a visit.

FAQ: Link Building Strategy

How Can You Earn Backlinks Sustainably?

By prioritising editorial links from relevant sites, using natural anchors, maintaining a steady pace and linking to strong target pages (content quality, UX, mobile and speed). Data-led assets (studies, guides, comparisons) tend to be the most sustainable.

How Many Backlinks Do You Need to Rank?

There is no universal number. As an indication, Backlinko (2026) estimates that the #1 page has around 220 backlinks on average, but the gap mostly depends on competition, relevance and the quality of referring domains.

How Long Does a Link Building Strategy Take to Deliver Results?

Link building is a medium-to-long-term lever. Depending on competition, it often takes several weeks to several months to see stable gains, especially as Google gradually recalculates authority signals.

Which Backlinks Should You Avoid at All Costs?

Links from hacked sites, artificial networks, off-topic content, link-stuffed pages, and unnatural bulk acquisitions (sudden spikes) that resemble manipulation schemes.

In Link Building, Should You Prioritise Quantity or Quality?

Quality. A small number of relevant editorial links can outperform hundreds of weak links. Low-quality links also increase the risk of devaluation or even penalties.

How Do You Know Whether a Backlink Genuinely Improves SEO and GEO?

By linking the backlink to measurable outcomes: target page uplift (rankings, impressions, clicks), improved conversions, increased brand visibility and — on the GEO side — more citations and mentions for strategic queries (tracked via manual tests and monitoring tools).

Conclusion: Building a Sustainable Link Acquisition Strategy

Alongside quality content creation and on-site optimisation, link building is one of the fundamentals of SEO — and it is also the most expensive strategic lever. For that reason, it should be used with great care. With significant budgets, a well-executed link building strategy can be a genuine game changer for a business. Increased brand awareness feeds through to the SERP and, by extension, to the conversion of commercial goals. However, while the technique is powerful, it is not without risk. That is why professional support for off-page strategy matters. Working with an experienced partner saves time and improves performance, which directly impacts the ROI of link acquisition campaigns.