Frequently Unasked Questions (FUQs)

Link building must support revenue-driving pages, sales initiatives, and brand credibility to justify your role as an SEO and investment by your team.

This is why we spend the first meetings exploring your business goals to build out a strategy that focuses on increasing the visibility of your core sales pages.

Once we start building links, we connect our efforts to ROI using established sales metrics from your organization.

There are two buckets for measuring the impact of link building:

• The metrics that align with SEOs: keyword rankings, traffic, share of voice, and number of links.
• The metrics that align with leadership teams: revenue, conversion rates, and AOV.

Using our impact reporting, we provide a very detailed analysis on how the links we get to your key sales pages impact both.

This makes it easy for you to see the impact directly and share with your SEO. It also makes it easy for you to share the most relevant data with your leadership team.

The clarity of our reporting is why our enterprise clients expand budgets, test new approaches, and work with us for the long-term.

Some executives may not see link-building as a priority or may have had poor experiences in the past. After nearly 20 years in the space, we get it. SEO can feel like a black box and backlinking even more so.

This is why we have built custom tools and reports to connect our efforts to key sales metrics, using controls in our reporting to provide additional clarity.

We also work very closely with our internal champions, providing them with the data, case studies, and arguments needed to justify backlink campaigns to key decision makers.

While our priority is to build effective link building campaigns for your business, we’re no stranger to SEO and the complexities enterprise teams face trying to implement on-page changes.

The approval process can be long and challenging, requiring several meetings and rounds of revisions to get critical changes live on the site.

Our strategies fit the complexities of these firms. Specifically, we can use unbranded link building campaigns to side-step legal and compliance approval processes. This allows us to get critical links to key sales pages while you work to green light other SEO changes.

Additionally, our clients lean on us for SEO advice as we’re often at the forefront of the industry—presenting our insights on stage at numerous SEO conferences every year.

We know what’s at stake for our champions.

They need to justify their role in the organization by showing their work impacted the bottomline. This is difficult when there are so many obstacles SEOs have to navigate internally to do their jobs—from weak buy-in to approval processes to explaining the complexities of SEO over and over again.

Over the years, we’ve managed to help our champions succeed and grow in their roles while facing often unpredictable search performance. They’ve over-delivered on KPIs, earned praise from their CEOs, been promoted, and even landed new roles.

Links that impact business metrics are great. But becoming an invaluable resource to our stakeholders is our real goal.

Relevance, not DR/DA or Traffic, indicates success. You need content that’s relevant to your buyer, written for a publisher with a contextually relevant link. This sends numerous positive signals of a valuable link, helping increase sales page ranking.Most link building agencies use DR/DA and traffic to charge a premium for these types of links even though there is no data to back up the claim that these links are better.

Additionally, metrics can be gamed. There are plenty of irrelevant sites that are part of private blog networks and/or offer the path of least resistance for agencies and link sellers. But they are not the best option for businesses looking for relevant, sticky backlinks to their sales pages.

Our goal for clients is to find them the best websites to bring visibility to their key sales offerings. This usually means getting placement from other relevant business websites that align with their ideal buyer (not high DR/DA and traffic websites.)

Many SEO leaders struggle to get leadership support because SEO results take longer than paid media and are more difficult to explain. Executives want to see financial impact, not traditional SEO metrics.

Without the right story on how SEO impacts sales metrics, leadership teams see SEO as a cost rather than a growth driver.

Citation Labs fixes this by:

• Aligning link-building efforts with core business objectives
• Providing clear reporting that connects links to revenue impact
• Positioning SEO as a competitive advantage within the organization

By shifting the conversation from "we need links" to "we need to increase organic-driven revenue," it becomes easier to justify and grow the SEO budget.

SEO leaders are often measured on organic growth, revenue impact, and alignment with business goals.

Citation Labs structures its link-building strategy to ensure that:

• Organic search performance improves in measurable ways
• The impact of SEO efforts can be clearly communicated to leadership
• Reporting ties directly to revenue, making it easier to demonstrate value

Instead of reporting solely on the number of links built and those page metrics, Citation Labs helps clients show how new backlinks contributed to business outcomes.

This makes it easier to gain recognition and career advancement for your efforts.

SCMOs focus on revenue and growth rather than SEO-specific terminology. When pitching a link-building campaign, the conversation should center on:

• Competitive advantage: "Competitors outrank us because they have stronger backlinks."
• Revenue impact: "More links to high-intent pages lead to higher rankings and more sales."
• Risk mitigation: "Google prioritizes authoritative backlinks—if we don’t invest, we fall behind."

Citation Labs provides reporting that translates SEO metrics into business outcomes, making it easier to secure buy-in from executive leadership.

CFOs are concerned with financial impact rather than SEO performance metrics. Instead of discussing domain authority, an SEO strategy should be evaluated based on:

• Cost efficiency: the return on investment for link-building efforts
• Revenue impact: how links drive qualified traffic and conversions
• Organic growth trends: improvements in rankings for high-value search terms

Competitive positioning: whether the company is outperforming competitors in search
By presenting link-building as a revenue-generating initiative rather than a marketing expense, it is easier to secure long-term investment in SEO.

Most executives expect PPC-style reporting, where results are immediate and quantifiable. However, link-building contributes to SEO growth over months, not days. And it’s not always clear and easy to illustrate this.

We’ve built a custom reporting tool that provides clear, revenue-tied reports to help you communicate impact to leadership. These comprehensive reports can be easily shared or cut up into smaller overviews for your leadership team.

Google exists to help get people the best information in the fastest possible way. The way it does this is by finding and sharing the most relevant, comprehensive answers to questions based on real experience and data.

Over the years, search has evolved. But this core tenant remains the same.

Knowing this, we create contextually relevant, expert content with publishers that showcase your brand and solution. By earning links this way, we future-proof our links against algorithm updates and evolving ranking factors.

Our retention rates for links are: 94% after 12 months and 85% after 24 months.

Our goal isn’t to increase the DR/DA of your website. We also don’t usually target content pages for backlinks.

Instead, we analyze your website against competitors to determine which pages need backlinks to increase their visibility and how many links they need. From there, we prioritize pages based on budget and business goals.

These are links to sales pages. They increase the visibility of your key offerings in search and in LLM tools, making it more likely that prospective customers will find your solutions on their buyer’s journey.

For businesses with heavy compliance and legal guidelines, we focus on our unbranded outreach. This approach allows us to conduct outreach, negotiate link placement, and create content without having to run every asset through complex approval processes.

Leadership teams want to allocate appropriate resources to the right channels to drive new business. Without showing the potential impact of any initiative, it’s very difficult to justify the budget for those activities. This is challenging with SEO as results are often delayed.

To defend your SEO budget from the start, we map out the potential link impact on your sales pages using our Link Impact Report. Each month, we update your team on the results of our campaign and show the impact of those links on the sales pages. We also use a control group to ensure the data we report is accurate.

As leadership teams see the value of link building, they are more willing to defend that budget. In several cases, CMOs have even increased this budget (as much as 5x by one client).

Enterprise organizations have very complex team dynamics and difficult internal politics to navigate. Without care, SEOs and their vendors can derail the momentum of campaigns. This hurts the internal stakeholders and negatively impacts the team’s perception of that vendor.

This is why we’re very careful with where our efforts end and your other teams' efforts begin. We are highly collaborative because we understand that momentum matters, so we work to build it with your team.

Having successfully navigated several complex internal relationships for large clients, we’ve gone on to support other teams within the organization—becoming the preferred vendor across the business.

Many vendors that sell these links have an existing network of publishers who will automatically add links to irrelevant content, creating the path of least resistance and the highest margin for them. They do this at scale and with no regard to strategy or business outcomes.

These cheap links are often low-quality with minimal (if any) relevance to the business, product, or customer. It’s simply a backlink. And you get the link you pay for.

Our strategy starts before the first call. Using in-house tools, we run reports on your website to determine the best sales pages to target and the number of links needed to increase visibility.

After our engagement starts, we meet regularly with our champions to provide current insights, new ideas, and support. From helping SEOs get critical sales data to better calculate ROI to support budget requests to experimenting with new approaches to link building, we help our champions exceed the expectations for their role.

The kind of links and results we get for our champions get them notoriety within their organization, promotions, and more budget for new campaigns.

Citation Optimization improves how your brand appears across the sources AI systems use to answer buyer questions, compare solutions, and form recommendations.

It identifies the prompts, cited sources, competitors, and content gaps shaping AI answers, then turns those findings into content, outreach, and link-building campaigns.

Traditional link building focuses on earning links.

Citation Optimization focuses on the context around the mention, including who the brand helps, what it does, when it fits, and why it belongs in the answer.

Link building is a component of Citation Optimization. But the overall goal is to surface the brand in search and AI answers, which requires a different approach.

Yes. Links still help build authority and source visibility, but AI answers need more than a link. They need useful surrounding context a system can retrieve, understand, and cite.

AI systems can draw from publisher articles, comparison pages, industry resources, LinkedIn, YouTube, local/community sources, research pages, government resources, and competitor content.

Xofu is a proprietary tool by Citaiton Labs that helps identify the buyer prompts, competitor mentions, cited domains, and visibility gaps that shape AI answer visibility.

Citation Labs uses those findings to prioritize content, outreach, and citation work.

ZipSprout is a partner company that helps brands earn local sponsorship links and community-based citations from chambers, nonprofits, events, and local organizations.

These placements can strengthen local relevance and brand context across trusted third-party sources.

The work can include prompt tracking, source analysis, citation-worthy content, third-party placements, improved brand mentions, comparison assets, local sponsorship links, and AI visibility reporting.

Citation Optimization fits enterprise SEO and growth teams that already invest in search visibility and need a clearer way to improve how their brand appears in AI answers.

No. AI systems change by prompt, source mix, market, and answer surface. Citation Labs improves the source material and citation opportunities that influence how your brand appears.

Measurement can include prompt visibility, cited domains, competitor mentions, brand inclusion, citation quality, source gaps, improved mentions, earned placements, and changes across tracked buyer prompts.

This can include:

• Data-backed insights and research reports
• First-party surveys and expert interviews
• Frequently Unasked Questions (FUQs) that address knowledge gaps
• Interactive tools or calculators that provide immediate value

This content can go directly into your blog or be used to make your sales pages more link-worthy.

And with 68% of SEOs targeting blog posts and articles for links (compared to only 42% targeting product pages), there’s a lot of opportunity to outrank competitors on key pages.

Unlike traditional link-building, which often focuses on guest posts and outreach, citation-worthy content attracts organic, editorial links from high-authority sources. These links improve your rankings, organic traffic, and share of voice.

They can also make your key sales pages more authoritative and engaging. This makes it easier for publishers to link to these pages, increasing their visibility in search engines and LLMs, and driving more conversions.

Most content marketing focuses on publishing for traffic and engagement. Citation-worthy content is designed to help the buyer. This connection provides uniquely valuable assets to your customers, strengthening their relationship with your business.

Citation Labs evaluates your business, competitors, and customers to identify key concepts worth exploring. Content topics often center around:

• What topics are underrepresented online but highly relevant to your industry
• Which competitors are earning citations and why
• How existing content can be restructured to become more link-worthy
• Where unique tools can be created to aid your buyers
• What experts do your buyers want to hear from
• Which data is dated or confusing that can be updated and more easily explained

From there, we ideate with our team and map out potential ways of exploring these and other areas in a way that has not been done within your industry.

Citation-worthy content can be published as standalone assets (e.g., research reports, guides, studies) or integrated into sales pages to improve credibility, rankings, and conversions. A strong internal linking strategy ensures that the authority gained from citations benefits key commercial pages.

Yes. In many cases, elements like cost breakdowns, original data, or expert insights can be subtly integrated into sales pages to increase trust without disrupting the buyer journey.

For enterprises with strict approval processes, the initial focus can be on creating content assets first before transitioning into optimizing sales pages.

Many executives view content as a cost center rather than an SEO and sales driver. SEOs and senior marketers should emphasize that citation-worthy content:

• Attracts organic, high-authority links without constant outreach
• Improves trust and credibility, increasing sales conversion rates
• Supports long-term search visibility and LLM (Large Language Model) recognition

While customer data enhances content quality, Citation Labs can work around internal limitations by:

• Mining industry discussions on Reddit, forums, and review platforms
• Running first-party surveys to collect fresh insights
• Interviewing external subject matter experts to add credibility

We measure success in two buckets: SEO metrics (new links generated, engagement, share of voice, visibility, keyword rankings) and business metrics (conversion rates, ROI, and AOV).

Yes. LLMs prioritize high-quality, authoritative content when generating responses. Businesses that invest in original research, first-party data, and expert-backed insights are more likely to be cited in AI-generated search results, ensuring long-term visibility beyond traditional Google rankings.

Every piece of citation-worthy content is designed for long-term value, not just short-term engagement. If a piece underperforms, Citation Labs:

• Identifies distribution gaps and adjusts outreach strategies
• Refines the content based on link-building and engagement data
• Leverages internal linking to ensure SEO benefits are still captured

Citation-worthy content bridges the gap between PR and SEO. PR teams can use it to secure media placements, while SEO teams benefit from high-quality links and authority growth.

However, citation-worthy content is not a replacement for PR. Instead, it’s better to think of it as buyer community building—not getting link placement in mainstream publications.

Businesses should ensure cross-team collaboration to maximize impact.

Success is not just about getting links—it’s about placing the right links in the right context.

Citation Labs prioritizes hyper-relevant, unique placements that support a company’s sales and marketing objectives, not the metrics of the linking page.

We look for publishers (often small businesses) that are in relevant industries (often adjacent) and identify content gaps on their websites. Then, we create contextually relevant, unique content to address those gaps with a link that supports the content.

A successful link meets those requirements, ensuring that the link will support the sales page and will likely stick around for the long term.

Domain Authority (DA) and Domain Rating (DR) are often used as shorthand for quality, but they don’t guarantee real business impact. Citation Labs focuses on placing links where they will drive meaningful visibility and conversions, not just where they look good in a report.

We measure success by changes in rankings, visibility, share of voice, and revenue impact. Our reporting connects backlinks to organic traffic, conversions, and business growth. This shows your leadership team the impact our work has on business metrics.

Note: We do not use the DR/DA or website traffic of linking pages as success metrics. Instead, we’re looking for websites that are relevant to your audience.

Most link-building agencies require SEOs to manage outreach, strategy, and reporting internally. Citation Labs provides a full-service approach, from strategy development and outreach to impact reporting, ensuring that SEOs can focus on broader initiatives.

Executives often struggle to see the impact of SEO efforts. Citation Labs’ Impact Reports are designed for easy sharing with marketing and leadership teams, helping SEOs justify spend and build internal credibility.

Many agencies build links that disappear within months. Citation Labs has an 85% retention rate after 24 months. This is because we seek out relevant publishers, giving them content designed to serve the needs of their buyers with contextually relevant links.

In short, it’s not spam. It’s content that serves their business goals, meaning our links stay much longer than other vendors’.

Many in-house SEOs struggle to get visibility for their work. Leadership teams tend to see SEO as a black box, not fully understanding how it helps the business generate more revenue.

Citation Labs helps SEOs drive measurable results, communicate impact effectively, and build internal support for SEO initiatives. Our goal is to help you stand out in your organization. This is why our champions get praise from their leadership teams, promotions, and exciting projects to manage.

It has taken us nearly 20 years to build a system for finding prospective publishers, conducting outreach, following up, and getting placements.

To streamline this process, we built custom tooling and a tech stack to automate aspects of our process and support more personalized pitches. We’ve also learned how to turn “No” into “Yes” with publishers and what types of content they value.

Building a similar team and tooling in-house would take considerable time and resources. Rather than getting new links to key pages, you’ll need to invest in training and development.

As such, our clients often find it more cost-effective to work with us. However, we have helped train in-house teams to run outreach internally.

Many companies hesitate to invest in link-building because they don’t fully understand its impact. Citation Labs provides business-aligned reporting, competitive benchmarking, and real-world case studies to help teams justify the investment to leadership.

We’ll sit through numerous meetings with stakeholders, attend conferences with them, and answer their most difficult questions. We also provide guidance for our champions on how to sell link building internally. And we even go to bat for them when discussing budget.

Citation Labs works with several enterprise clients, meaning we’re regularly refining our process and building new tech to support it. At the same time, we’re also heavily involved in the link-building space. We host events, meet with experts, and run experiments in The Lab.

We take all of this expertise and funnel it into our ongoing engagements with clients. This helps us identify new opportunities and adjust outreach tactics to maximize long-term success. It’s an iterative approach that ensures campaigns remain effective as search landscapes evolve.

Enterprise organizations have very complex team dynamics and difficult internal politics to navigate. Without care, SEOs and their vendors can derail the momentum of campaigns. This hurts the internal stakeholders and negatively impacts the team’s perception of that vendor.

This is why we’re very careful with where our efforts end and your other teams' efforts begin. We are highly collaborative because we understand that momentum matters, so we work to build it with your team.

Having successfully navigated several complex internal relationships for large clients, we’ve gone on to support other teams within the organization—becoming the preferred vendor across the business.

Over the years, we’ve learned to create reporting your CMO will love.

Our monthly link impact report is not a simple spreadsheet of new backlinks with DR/DA and site traffic. Instead, we use control groups to show the impact of new links on key sales pages every month. The reporting breaks down the share of voice, keyword ranking, and visibility changes on each page.

All of these insights are connected to ROI using existing sales metrics from the organization and industry conversion benchmarks. The output is a clear overview of how our link-building campaigns increase sales and conversions on the core pages we target.

We know what’s at stake for our champions.

They need to justify their role in the organization by showing their work impacted the bottomline. This is difficult when there are so many obstacles SEOs have to navigate internally to do their jobs—from weak buy-in to approval processes to explaining the complexities of SEO over and over again.

Over the years, we’ve managed to help our champions succeed and grow in their roles while facing often unpredictable search performance. They’ve over-delivered on KPIs, earned praise from their CEOs, been promoted, and even landed new roles.

Links that impact business metrics are great. But becoming an invaluable resource to our stakeholders is our real goal.

For the sales call, we need the in-house SEO leader. These senior-level decision-makers usually have the role of:

• Head of SEO
• Director of SEO
• SEO Manager
• Outreach Manager
• Director of Search
• Senior Director of Search
• Head of Growth
• Comms
• Rev Ops
• Performance Marketing

This ensures that you get the most value out of the call as you will prepare several in-depth, technical reports to share beforehand.

Some companies seek quick SEO wins, while others invest in sustainable link-building strategies that provide long-term value. Understanding whether the goal is scaling rankings over time or fixing an immediate gap helps Citation Labs craft the right approach.

During the first call, we will run a few audits and put together a report for you to share with your internal team that connects projected efforts to ROI.

This starts the conversation with leadership teams around ROI for link building. It also shows how our reporting works and how we connect efforts to business metrics. Both make it easier to communicate the value of link building internally from the get-go.

However, our long-term goal isn’t to justify the link-building budget—it’s to grow that budget.

Many companies approach link-building as a general SEO tactic, but success depends on solving specific business challenges.

You may be trying to correct a traffic drop. But what are the consequences of that decrease in visibility? Are competitors gaining visibility in LLMs while your brand is absent?

Before reaching out, define the primary outcome you need to achieve. If needed, we’ll work with you on call to help you further define your goals.

You should have a clear view of how SEO will fit into your company’s growth engine. Link-building should align with sales, demand generation, and content marketing efforts.

Before engaging, businesses should ensure they have clear goals that tie SEO to revenue, pipeline growth, or brand positioning.

While we mostly meet with Lead SEOs on sales calls, our champions work directly with key stakeholders to get buy-in on backlink campaigns.

These stakeholders are:

• PR Teams
• Content Teams
• The CMO
• PPC teams
• Legal
• Compliance

And we provide our champions with the data, assets, and discussion points they need to successfully navigate those conversations.

Many businesses struggle to connect SEO efforts to business impact. Citation Labs provides reporting tied to key metrics like traffic, conversions, and revenue, but companies should assess whether they have the right tracking and analytics setup to fully measure success.

It has taken us nearly 20 years to build a system for finding prospective publishers, conducting outreach, following up, and getting placements.

To streamline this process, we built custom tooling and a tech stack to automate aspects of our process and support more personalized pitches. We’ve also learned how to turn “No” into “Yes” with publishers and what types of content they value.

Building a similar team and tooling in-house would take considerable time and resources. Rather than getting new links to key pages, you’ll need to invest in training and development.

As such, our clients often find it more cost-effective to work with us. However, we have helped train in-house teams to run outreach internally.

We’ve worked with many clients who have had poor experiences with low-cost link vendors and link-building agencies. From these engagements, we’ve learned what didn’t work, why, and where the service can be improved. And we used those insights to further develop our service.

We’ve also refined our process, approach to strategy, and tactics over the years as link building (and SEO) is a continuously evolving industry. In every engagement, we bring our experiences, experiments, and education.

This mindset of continuous evolution through reflection has helped us continue to help our clients outperform their competitors.

Over the years, we’ve learned to create reporting your CMO will love.

Our monthly link impact report is not a simple spreadsheet of new backlinks with DR/DA and site traffic. Instead, we use control groups to show the impact of new links on key sales pages every month. The reporting breaks down the share of voice, keyword ranking, and visibility changes on each page.

All of these insights are connected to ROI using existing sales metrics from the organization and industry conversion benchmarks. The output is a clear overview of how our link-building campaigns increase sales and conversions on the core pages we target.

We know what’s at stake for our champions.

They need to justify their role in the organization by showing their work impacted the bottomline. This is difficult when there are so many obstacles SEOs have to navigate internally to do their jobs—from weak buy-in to approval processes to explaining the complexities of SEO over and over again.

Over the years, we’ve managed to help our champions succeed and grow in their roles while facing often unpredictable search performance. They’ve over-delivered on KPIs, earned praise from their CEOs, been promoted, and even landed new roles.

Links that impact business metrics are great. But becoming an invaluable resource to our stakeholders is our real goal.