Manual Link Building Vs. Automatic Tools | Which is Better?
Acquiring links from other websites is an essential component of SEO because it increases the visibility of your website. “Backlinks” are the name for these links. Getting these Backlinks takes time and effort, yet it’s essential for drawing Google’s attention to your website.
With so many link building strategies available, how do you decide which is best? There are several aspects to take into account, which might make this a difficult decision. Discovering link opportunities, posting to directories and forums, leaving blog comments, and outreach campaigns are just a few services that SEO platforms and link-building tools offer.
With this comprehensive guide, discover the advantages and disadvantages of both manual link building campaigns and using automatic backlink tools so that you can decide which link-building strategy will bring the best results for your website.
Read along to find out whether manual or automatic link building technique is better.
What is Manual Link Building?
Manual link building has been intensely studied for some time and remains popular. In simpler terms, it is an active attempt to gain more links to your website from external sources. Manual link building has been a successful link building strategy for a very long period.
Guest blogging, which has been popular for a while now, is yet another technique. You simply have to reach out to other websites in your niche and offer them a highly informative, authentic article. In return, you can ask for a link back to your website. It is a highly effective strategy to boost your website traffic, gain invaluable high-quality backlinks, and position yourself as a leader in your industry.
By connecting with other bloggers and websites, you have the opportunity to showcase your expertise and reach new audiences that can benefit from your content. With successful guest posting, you can increase brand awareness, improve SEO ranking, and establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry.
For instance, with a comment outreach engagement, you can receive a steady flow of traffic to your business. Genuine comments are valued by search engines like Google, and because it does not place a constant emphasis on links, ranking for them may be simpler than for comments that are primarily concerned with backlinks.
When used properly, press releases are a good link-building tactic. A Press Release is your company’s statement on any particular news, incidents – and this puts your name on many popular and high-traffic news websites.
In the world of digital marketing, backlinks are a crucial factor in determining a website’s authority and search engine rankings. One way to obtain high-quality backlinks is through competitor backlink acquisition – the process of analysing and replicating the link building strategies of your competitors.
Although automated link building tools have gained popularity in recent times, manual competitor backlink acquisition still remains a highly effective strategy. By manually acquiring backlinks from your competitors, you can gain a competitive edge and improve the authority of your website. It might be a more time-consuming process, but for marketer or link building agencies, it is proven to deliver sustainable results that will help you stand out in the digital world.
Pros and Cons of Manual Link Building
It’s true that manual SEO is quite demanding and takes up a lot of time, yet there are some excellent reasons to bear with it. However, it would help if you weighed the pros and cons of manual SEO before deciding.
Pros of Manual Link Building
Manual SEO techniques can be beneficial for your website. These include on-page and off-page optimization, which can help to improve overall website visibility and rankings in search engines. Additionally, manual techniques also provide more control over the entire process:
- Quality control- Manual SEO Link building offers complete control over your optimization plans. If you like to be in the driver’s seat and understand the advantages of digital marketing, then manual SEO is definitely a more suitable choice.
- Track the SEO Strategy– When you go with the manual SEO route, you get to supervise each task and ensure it’s done according to plan. Plus, you can check your progress for different functions and predict how successful they’ll be. Want to get your website ranking higher on search engines? There are various SEO approaches you can take, and one of them is creating and optimising a particular keyword. A practical approach, but it takes some manual effort.
- Customised outreach– Despite the availability of automated software, many still prefer a manual process for digital marketing as it gives them more control over the links and their ranking in search engines such as Google. You can make a customised outreach to the audience. Having this will save you time controlling the external links to your website, the content quality, and the web pages around them.
Cons of manual link building
Manual Link building can be a daunting task for beginners. Hence if you own a website, you can also try experienced link building services that will help you achieve your goals.
Here are the reasons why:
- Time-consuming- Doing SEO manually can be time-consuming and tedious. An SEO expert/assistant may take hours to submit ten websites to search engines.
- Requires expertise- While SEO can be costly due to the manual process involved in executing the tasks, it allows you to employ a sizable team of professionals who can handle the workload efficiently.
- Limited scalability- Manual SEO processes could be faster, taking significant time to implement. With search engine algorithms changing rapidly, any delay can result in substantial losses concerning traffic and potential business opportunities leading to limited scalability.
What is Automatic Link Building?
Before using specific tools and methods for an automated link-building process, balancing manual and automatic operations is crucial. This helps in ensuring that the approach is practical as well as efficient. Link building with automation can be a great way to maximise the benefits of technology, allowing you to take a more comprehensive approach to your campaigns.
It is not a shortcut to success but an effective and efficient tool for achieving superior results. Automated SEO is an effective way to implement your SEO strategies with minimal effort. It’s a cost-efficient solution that requires minimal input and results in improved online visibility and increased organic traffic.
Let’s understand the advantages and disadvantages of the Automatic link building process.
Pros and Cons of Automatic Link Building
Automating some of your SEO tasks can offer various benefits. For example, some of the advantages of using automatic link-building are as follows:
- Efficiency and speed- Automated link-building tools are a great way to save time for SEO tasks. You can easily schedule them to spend your time more efficiently on other tasks. Automated SEO is an economical and efficient approach for optimising one’s website for search engines. It is also much faster and cost-effective compared to manually doing SEO tasks.
- Scalability- You can easily handle tedious and time-consuming tasks like site audits. This overall increases scalability. You can check for broken links or keyword density, tags, and Meta content on large websites.
- Ease of tracking and analysis– Keeping track of your keyword rankings is now easier than ever, thanks to such Automaticlink-building tools. A study of your competitor’s backlinks, keyword density, tags, and Meta content can be quickly undertaken to determine effective techniques. This makes it simple to replicate these practices for success.
Cons of automatic link building
As we have gone through the benefits, here are some drawbacks of using the Automatic link-building process which must be addressed. Let’s take a look:
- Risk of spammy or low-quality links- SEO software, when misused, can create low-grade backlinks. A rise in the number of users creating links on the same website could lead to the simple deletion of your links. Such backlinks can be detrimental and result in your site being penalised by search engines.
- Little or no Value Addition– There are automatic commenting tools that can locate hundreds of blogs, comment on them, and add links back to your website.
In many cases, the blog owners or forum admins won’t approve your posts simply because of lack of value, or for being too generic.
For instance, if you leave a comment on another blog post and it doesn’t contribute anything worthwhile to the topic, it might not be advantageous for other people to read your comment. - Dependence on tool reliability- Many SEO software is more focused on quickly producing a large amount of content, which could lead to issues down the line. Quality should always be the primary focus when it comes to SEO.
Top Automatic Link Building Tools- Brief overview of popular tools
Are you tired of manually link building tools? Don’t worry; automated link-building tools are available that can simplify the process. Here are some of the most reliable ones to choose from:
- Ahrefs- Ahrefs is an incredible automated tool for link building. It enables comprehensive backlink analysis and helps save time and resources. This fantastic tool can provide beneficial information about the quality of backlinks, such as Domain and URL Ratings. All this data can be valuable for your SEO campaigns! Analyzing your competitors’ links can help create an effective link-building strategy. It can help you identify sources you hadn’t considered before and uncover new opportunities for your business. They offer seven days of trial at just $7 to get a feel for registering to the program. Subsequently, the plans commence at $99 monthly.
- SEMRush- Semrush is a comprehensive tool for all your SEO needs. It can help you with link-building campaigns and simplify managing other SEO tasks. This fantastic tool offers tremendous insights regarding link audits, enabling you to conduct comprehensive backlink analysis. A complete report on the backlinks to your website can be generated, which will include information such as the anchor texts, geolocation, and authority of those linking sites. One of the best aspects of this link-building platform is its ability to distinguish between high-value and low-worth backlinks. Semrush provides you with unique insight into your competitors’ backlink profiles. With this tool, you can uncover the domains connected to them, the anchor texts used, and the domain authority of referring sites. This, in turn, helps you identify potential growth opportunities.
- Moz Pro- Moz Pro is a top-tier platform providing digital marketing solutions. With a comprehensive suite of tools, you can manage and improve your website while keeping tabs on your rivals’ linkages. It is easy to keep track of your anchor text, check the spam score, monitor page authority and observe domain authority with this tool. You can research backlinks and see which ones hurt your website’s performance. In addition to this, it will uncover new avenues for building links that can help strengthen your website’s visibility. Utilising this technology can exponentially boost your online presence and visibility. Moz has developed an index of links that they crawl and index. This makes it easy to find new websites and other resources at a faster rate.
- Majestic SEO- Majestic offers various tools as SEO solutions, and here we are going to discuss their linkbuilding Tool. It offers Link Intelligence data, which makes it stand out from other backlink checker tools. As opposed to Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Moz Pro, which does more than just backlinks, Majestic solely centres around this aspect. Simply put, Majestic does not provide keyword research, on-page SEO assessment, and site audits. Instead, its exclusive focus is on backlinks. You can register for free, but the pricing starts from £39.99/month.
- BuzzSumo- BuzzSumo is a cloud-based platform that enables you to explore the most favourable engagements, content, and outreach opportunities from social and search media. Additionally, it evaluates the attention of an Instagram page relative to various other Instagram accounts. The score scale goes from 1 to 100, with higher numbers representing greater social engagement. New users can try out the features of BuzzSumo for free, with a 30-day trial period.
Comparing Manual and Automatic Link Building Techniques
If you are thinking of using Link building techniques and seem confused between Manual and Automatic Link building, here are a few points that you should consider before choosing the one that you need:
A. Speed and efficiency– Automation certainly makes life easier in terms of content creation, but following up and keeping track of leads and link requests can be time-consuming. Automatic link building can surely do a large amount of work in less time but manual link building will have a special human touch and personalization to it that can help you reach a wider audience and be more efficient in the long run.
B. Quality and relevance of backlinks– In order to build links, you’ll need to find the pages that link to your website. You should determine how you’d get a backlink before you go hopping around trying to get links from random URLs. Domain Authority plays a part in how well your external links perform on the SERPs. Put in the time and effort to improve both and you’ll see your rankings go up. Google’s SERP rankings are determined by scores that range from 1 to 100, with higher scores indicating a greater likelihood of the page appearing higher in search engine results. Niche relevance is an essential factor to consider when it comes to backlinks. Linking from a website in the same niche as yours will help your ranking, while links from sites related but not the same won’t be as beneficial in case of Manual link building.
C. Cost and resources– When opting-in for a backlink service, the agency should offer more than usual. Are you getting what you paid for? Does the agency size justify the cost? Ultimately, it boils down to how confident you feel about investing your money in a particular service. When comparing services, consider the price and features available to you. What do you hope to gain from this investment? Quality backlinks are great for your Google rankings as they help to drive organic traffic. However, the direct impact on revenue may vary depending on your website and where the link takes viewers. Measuring a return on investment from these links can take time and effort. So you better be wise while choosing a legit link building agency for your site.
Choosing the Right Link-Building Technique for Your Business
Link building is an integral part of SEO and marketing, but it requires much research and time. It’s always been that way and will likely continue to be so. However, due to the expansive range of available tools, marketers can complete link-building campaigns more quickly and efficiently. Automation also allows for greater flexibility when taking on the task.
Proper link-building techniques offer a range of capabilities, such as automating emails with a personal edge, uncovering domains associated with your niche, and allowing you to gauge the success strategies of other competitors. To ensure your website is successful, it’s important to use legitimate SEO tactics and stay within the bounds of organic backlinks. Avoid using unethical means like PBNs, as algorithms across search engines may be picky about this.
It is critical to make a mindful decision when choosing the best option for your business, as it also depends on the size of your industry. Don’t just go with the cheapest or easiest solution; carefully weigh all your options.
Combining manual and automated SEO can be a great way to optimise your website’s ranking. However, it all depends on the tasks you need to accomplish. To achieve a successful SEO campaign, it is essential to establish a comprehensive strategy and have a long-term vision. Making the right decisions now will bring positive results in the future.
Conclusion
SEO is constantly changing, and many of the best link-building tools and software available can help in different aspects of the optimization process. Utilising these will enhance the effectiveness and productivity of your optimization efforts.
Despite having some automated features, SEO also needs a human touch. It requires manual interpretation of data to make the best decisions and optimise websites correctly.
Automated tools are handy for research, analytics, and metrics. Nevertheless, they can only partially replace a human SEO specialist experienced in strategizing and providing creative input.
Though manual and automatic both have their functions- benefits and drawbacks, choosing the most reliable link-building strategy depends on the size of your business or industry requirements.
We hope this guide has been insightful in providing you with an idea of the various link-building tools and techniques that will help you grow your business. Stay with us for more helpful tips related to link building!
