Why Relevance Beats Geography in Link Building

We spent three months trying to rank a software product for its “DNA” keyword.

Built more than 30 backlinks. No results.

The site wasn’t moving in search results. We were close to giving up.

Then everything changed within a few days. The project website hit top-5.

This is how it happened.

A listicle article we contacted weeks earlier finally added our client.

That listicle was ranking below position 50 for the same keyword, with most of its traffic coming from India.

Still, it was relevant and already ranking, so it looked like a decent but not special link.

After the content update, the listicle with our client’s mention jumped into the top 15 in US search.

Soon after, Google added our client to the Overview panel with a link to that listicle.

A few days later, the client’s website reached the US top 10. Yesterday, it hit top 5.

It turned out that the content update on the referring page already ranking on Google outperformed all other backlinks.

That one link pushed the client to the top 5 for their “DNA” keyword.

And helped the listicle’s traffic grow too!

The more we work with backlinks, the clearer it becomes that relevance matters far more than geography.

So we suggest digital marketers and link builders not limit themselves to links only from their target countries. Focus on relevance instead.

Our Keyword Match feature in the Guest Posting Marketplaces Inventory Tool helps you find relevant websites by content.

It’s language-agnostic, meaning it finds publishers with matching topics no matter what language the website is in.

You can still filter results by language, but we invite you to give other regions a chance.

The prices may be lower, and the results might surprise you.

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