Backlinks: the questions we get asked most

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. The questions about backlinks that come up most often on our calls.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

Do we need to care about this?

A handful of relevant links beats hundreds of irrelevant ones. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Can it wait until after launch?

Occasionally. More often the post-launch version costs several times the pre-launch one. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one.

How do we know it is working?

Being genuinely useful is still the most durable link strategy. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

What this looks like day to day

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Three things worth confirming about backlinks before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Bought links are a risk that eventually gets priced in — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.