Is link building worth it for small businesses?

For a long time, SEO campaigns focused on producing better content and finding quality backlinks. However, with changes in the SEO world, such as the Core Web Vitals update and Google My Business's COVID news feature, the importance of link building for small businesses has come into question. While practicing SEO experts still value backlinks, a mini-experiment showed that ranking doesn't necessarily require many backlinks, and quality over quantity is key. Focusing on domain authority as a metric to increase rankability is not effective according to Google, and instead, quality backlinks from authoritative sources are crucial. Additionally, website audits can be more valuable than link building efforts in terms of SEO benefits.