How do you know when you're spending too much on link building?

It depends on the competition, really, can't give you any estimates.

The first thing I would do Grimace is determine what keywords are working for me in my particular niche, and use those. Then I would get backlinks to those pages for those keywords, or, even go so far as to see if I could secure a exact name domain for the keyword term.

Backlinking is a numbers game, and it's pretty much an on going process. But before you waste all your time and effort on getting lots and lots of backlinks, make sure your content is good. Remember, you need to create content for human beings, not the search engines!

In my entire time online, I can tell you this one simple fact. Not once did I ever make a sale to a search engine! Hope that helps.

of course you firstly need to assess what your return on outlay will be. then be very very careful with your cash. there are plenty on here who have good reviews by their friends and the services won't make a dent on your rankings at all. we are big users of services and have been through heaps of them.

pm me if you want to know who i rate as actually delivering and having the affect they say.

When you're operating at a loss.

Hi grimace_86,

The phrase match data doesn't tell us anything about the specific keyword(s) you are targeting. What is the exact match data?

What is the competition like on the 1st page of SERP for your targeted keyword?

You aren't going to get much traffic until you are on the 1st page of SERP for your keyword. Use the allinanchor: operator to see how much effort your competitors have put into promoting the specific keyword you are targeting. Analyse their backlinks and estimate what you must do to best their efforts.

Once you have a reasonable estimate of how much link building you are going to need to do to compete, you can then estimate your cost of building that promotional campaign. Obviously, you want to weigh your estimated costs against your expected value from achieving those rankings, in other words, how much you will potentially earn in profit.

(Estimated Gross Profit Potential) - (Estimated Promotional Expense) = Estimated Net Profit
(Estimated Net Profit) ÷ (Estimated Promotional Expense) = Estimated ROI

By calculating the ROI you can compare your promotional campaign to any other advertising or promotional efforts using a comparative metric.