9 Highly Effective Link Building Strategies
For those of you new to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), link building is the process of securing good links from relevant websites back to your site. This helps to drive referral traffic from other websites.
More importantly, from an SEO standpoint, link building is among the important ranking factors in SEO. The more links you get from authoritative, trustworthy, and relevant sites, the better your site will rank on search engines.
But link building isn’t easy. In fact, with all the information available online on this topic, it’s hard to tell what actually moves the needle.
So in this blog post, we’ll feature tried and true link building strategies that will produce tangible results. Including increased traffic, higher conversions, and higher rankings on SERPs.
Without further ado, let’s get to the strategies:
1. Blogger Outreach
So you produced a piece of content that you think is good and has value for the audience you want to target, but nobody knows about it. Outreach is all about putting your content, products, services, or even brand in front of people in your niche by sending them personalised emails.
The goal is to convince those with large targeted audiences to create more buzz about you or your products, and link to your site. To find more outreach prospects, reach out to people who:
- Have written articles on the same topic
- Are mentioned in your article
- Have previously linked to or tweeted articles on the same topic
Outreach messages can often feel like spam. So, avoid that by sending highly personalised messages.
Take the time to skim read a few articles to get a feel for the blog, publication or specific writer. Identify some key points you took away from a given post or article and highlight that in the outreach.
For example, “I really loved the angle you took on your post (INSERT LINK). In my experience, too many people take the opposite view. So kudos for saying it how it is…”.
Then spell out why and how your piece of content supports their viewpoint. In short, make it a no-brainer wherever possible. You’re aiming to build a relationship here so don’t be fake or false in the process.
Instead, target sites that you think are genuinely in line with your style and viewpoint.
2. Guest Blogging
This is all about creating content for another site in your niche. They post it, and you receive a link to your site from your guest article.
Consider being a guest blogger on sites/blogs that already rank highly and have a good reputation in your industry. Unless you’re already famous, highly visible sites won’t easily accept your offer to write unsolicited posts for them. So start small.
Since you’re targeting more links, look for sites where readers are more likely to share the guest post. Use the likes of Buzzfeed or ahrefs to find topics that have been shared and linked to widely in your niche.
Then come up with a new angle or update on the post and reach out to the publications that linked to previous material (more on this later).
In the long run, your guest post will be exposed to a larger audience who are more likely to link to it. Guest blogging might be an old strategy, but it’s still highly effective when done right.
And like with most link building strategies, don’t overdo it. A guest post only strategy is obvious for Google to spot. So mix things up.
3. Broken Link Building
This strategy involves a few simple steps:
- First, find relevant pages or blogs with dead links
- Then create high-quality content similar to the broken resource
- And lastly, request the website owner link to your working resource
You might be wondering why you should do all that work for a single backlink. Well, if you paste the dead link into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, you’ll be able to see everyone that has linked to it. That’s more people who might be willing to swap out the dead link for a working one.
The easiest way to find relevant broken link building opportunities is looking for broken pages on competitors’ sites.
4. Link Reclamation
Most people spend time and money getting new links without keeping track of the old ones. Did you know that you’re probably always losing links?
You have no control over the sites/blogs that link to you. This means that they can resource the page or unlink your site from their post without notifying you.
Perhaps the content was rewritten and your link got removed in the process. If that’s the case, reach out and ask if there’s an appropriate place in the new content for your link.
Sometimes pages get deleted by mistake; if so, let the site owner know. They’ll most probably reinstate the page with your link on it.
Needless to say, reclaiming lost links is much easier than building new ones all the time from scratch.
5. Unlinked Mentions
If you’re well-known in your niche, chances are people write about you or your business. But many a time, they forget to link to your site.
Start by searching your business name online to get a list of results that mention your brand or domain name. Check for mentions without a link, with incorrect links, or with broken links. These are all opportunities to get a link.
The next logical step is to reach out to the person responsible for managing the page and, hopefully, convince them to convert that mention into a relevant link.
6. Co-create or co-author content
There are two ways to make this strategy work. First, make media-rich content that can be co-authored by two or more online publishers in your niche.
By simply putting their logos and names as co-authors, as well as including their ideas in your content, they can help promote your content in their networks.
While you’re at it, be sure to observe their design and writing style to minimise revisions in the content.
7. Link Out
Creating high-quality content and linking to other sites is a longer-term but effective strategy. Once you’ve linked to a given post, reach out to the author. Explain that you liked their post, found it helpful for your readers and that you linked to it from your post.
Mention that you’d appreciate it if they would give a shoutout on your post if they have time. They may or may not respond immediately, but you’ll have established a connection with people who can help you later on with your link building plan.
Linking out is effective because you’re providing value for others before asking them to do anything for you.
8. Social Media
Social media marketing can be quite helpful with link building. You can encourage engagement by actively sharing images, posts, and updates on social media networks.
This will expose your site’s URL, and brand at large, to a larger audience that could share your posts with others who, hopefully, will link back to you. These links are nofollowed, meaning they can’t help with building page rank.
Even so, the main purpose of link building through social media networks is to be discovered by more people in your niche. If they run or write for a blog then that is the source of link you’re ultimately looking to achieve. So the social network discovery is a stepping stones of sorts into a deeper relationship.
9. Replicate the Best Links from Competitors
There’s nothing as powerful as competitive analysis. With respect to link building, this involves investigating competitors to determine where they’re getting their links from, as well as what keywords they’re ranking for.
Now that you have the links, it’s time to use them for your own success. Start by creating high-quality and relevant resource page. Then, introduce the editor to your content and ask them to link to you instead.
This is one of the hardest link building strategies since your competitor probably has an existing relationship with the publication their links come from. Don’t give up though as quality content is key.
And if you can raise the quality above your competitors then who’s to say a publication won’t choose to link to you.
Conclusion
Link building takes time. Some of these link strategies work better for some websites than others. Therefore, test each strategy to see what works best for you.
Always remember that it’s not about the number of links pointing to your site, but rather the quality. Your real challenge is getting trusted, quality, and natural links.
