You are probably aware that a backlink is among the top factors Google and other search engines use to rank websites. Websites with a healthy backlink profile stand a better chance of ranking highly in SERPs than sites with fewer or lower quality links. Your best bet for creating a healthy backlink profile is a robust link building strategy for your website.
What Is An Effective Link Building Strategy?
An effective link building strategy increases the quality and quantity of inbound links to your website. The main goal of creating a link building strategy is to enhance your website’s position in SERPs for your target keywords by getting relevant links from authoritative websites. Not only that, but once you start getting links from authoritative websites, you increase your business’s overall reputation (brand awareness), and you have a higher chance of getting more leads.
While the majority of backlinks you build can benefit your site, not all links will transfer SEO juice or value to your website. Here are some things to keep in mind when evaluating the quality of a link:
- Page Authority: Links emanating from pages considered authoritative have a higher potential of improving your PageRank than non-authoritative website pages.
- Website Authority: Websites considered an authority in your industry will transfer the most SEO juice to your website compared to a new website that is little known.
- Link Placement: You will get little or no benefit from links on sidebars, page footers, and other similar page sections.
- Website Relevance: Strive to get links from websites relevant to your niche. For example, if you run a fitness website, get links from sites in the health and fitness niche, not a sales blog.
- NoFollow and Dofollow links: To achieve a healthy backlink profile, you need both DoFollow and NoFollow links.
With that, let’s dive in and look at expert tips on creating an effective link building strategy for your business.
1. Prepare Your Website For Promotion
High-quality backlinks won’t do much for business if you don’t prepare the website. It needs to be well-designed and have some content already. Otherwise, there’s no sense in promoting it yet because nobody is looking for an empty website to read or buy products from.
Here’s a website SEO audit checklist with 9 essential things to do or check before the official launch. There, you’ll see almost every factor you’ll need to check and create protection for before promoting and building links.
The Overall Aspects Include:
- SEO – All the right, properly analyzed keywords have to be placed where they should be across the website. Make sure it’s easy for Google to find your site and crawl it successfully.
- Content – Your content has to be special, different from similar articles. Place the keywords inconspicuously and naturally, and, if possible, send articles for editing and feedback. In case of writing isn’t your best feature (you need critical thinking for that, of course), hire a professional SEO copywriter.
- Design – The design of your website is almost as important as its content. People will associate your blog and brand with particular colors. Choose a palette that fits the philosophy and message of your brand. A convenient layout and text format are also important for user experience.
- Customer Support – If you offer something right from the start, the support team (a couple of people if you’re a growing brand) should be ready. If not, encourage readers to leave comments and engage in light conversations with them.
2. Start By Publishing Link-Worthy Content
Start by creating top-quality content that other people want to link to when writing their articles. This kind of content should be at the top of your marketing funnel and have a broad appeal to get the much-needed attention.
The rule of thumb is that editors only link to website pages that are relevant to their audience. The higher the relevance of the content on a page, the higher the chance of attracting links from authority websites.
Concisely, link-worthy content is not only informational but also educational-based. It solves common problems, and answers frequently asked questions from the audience.
Here are some ideas to point your content creation plan in the right direction:
- How-to articles
- Inspirational content
- Research/case studies that are relevant to the industry
- Entertainment content
- Educational content
- Evergreen content/timeless content
Audit your existing content to identify gaps, then create fresh content based on the above list.
3. Collaborate With Link-Building Services
You can build links yourself by looking for proper blogs, reading tips, communicating with hundreds of people, asking them to post a link for you. However, this will take a lot of time and effort, and the level of our mission will go way up.
How’s the idea to buy quality backlinks from a reliable, top-notch service? Don’t be discouraged just yet. We all know how paid backlinks work. But it’s only if you buy from a company that offers super-cheap, spammy links.
Nowadays, it works differently. For example, visit the homepage of this backlink service, and you’ll see that it helps hundreds of websites to create a good backlink profile.
So, you purchase the time of a specialist in link-building, the person or a whole team in the UK, US, and other countries work for SEO improvement and smooth promotion of your website.
As a result, you get:
- SEO quality backlinks.
- Money and time-saving capabilities.
- No need for a whole link-building team.
- Improved backlink profile.
- Readers who are actually interested in your content.
4. Apply Strategic Guest Blogging Strategies
Guest blogging is still one of the most effective ways of building links to and from authority sites. Unlike before, when SEOs would get away with posting articles on random websites that were not necessarily relevant to the niche of the primary website, today, you have to put into consideration relevance.
Search engine bots are smarter than ever before and can tell whether a link is from a website related to your site. Thus, create a guest posting strategy that is authentic and strategic. Only target websites that are relevant to your niche and with high domain authority.
More importantly, the guest posts you distribute to the selected authority websites should be unique and packed with valuable content such as infographics and recent case studies.
5. Work On Your Brand
Branding enhances your appeal online to get more recognition from search engines and industry leaders.
The more people know about your brand and its offers, the more likely they will link to your articles. Natural links that are editorially earned and organic provide more SEO value compared to paid links.
An authentic brand that offers content with real value for the audience will increase the potential of getting natural links. Remember, your content is your brand and represents you in the competitive digital world.
Consistent blog posting gets more attention. And the more people know about your brand, the more inbound links you will get from multiple authority websites related to your niche. Note that companies with a robust blogging strategy get 97% more links than those without a blogging strategy.
Concisely, work smart to improve your brand continuously. One sure way of achieving this goal is by consistently posting highly valuable content that matches the audience’s needs.
6. Do Competitor Backlinks Analysis
Failing to monitor what your competitors are doing to get backlinks is equivalent to shooting in the dark and expecting to hit the target.
A comprehensive competitor backlinks analysis will pinpoint exactly what they are doing to get more links than you and the link sources. You will also get insights on keywords for which Google and other search engines rank higher than you.
Ubersuggest is the best tool for doing this form of competitor analysis. All you have to do is visit the website and type in the website URL of the competitor in the search bar.
The tool will, in seconds, generate a detailed report, but your main focus should be on their links, so click on the backlinks option.
By doing so, you will see a list of all the sites they are getting links from, their domain authority, and page authority.
Armed with this information, you have won half the battle. Start reaching out to these websites for links by submitting quality guest posts. Look at their blog page for an idea of the type of content they publish for insights on what wows the editors.
7. Apply The Broken Links Strategy
Did you know that 42.5% of websites have broken links? Creating a broken link strategy is your best bet if you are on a tight schedule and rarely get time to write fresh content for your blog or guest posts.
In fact, lack of enough time to create content is one of the primary reasons why B2C companies find it difficult to consistently churn out stellar content that spurs engagement with existing and new customers.
A broken link building strategy is pretty simple as it entails locating website pages with broken or dead links that no longer work. Such links often lead the audience to a 404 page.
Reach out to the web admin with a suggestion to replace the broken link with a similar link to an article posted on your website that contains similar or even better content.
8. Be More Active On Social Media
Social media is a marketing powerhouse due to the huge number of active users. Companies with robust social media marketing strategies often find it easier to connect with customers than companies that are not active on social platforms.
In the context of link building, Ahrefs recently got hundreds of links from five states, yet they hadn’t included them in their outreach plan. Their active social media efforts worked magic for them, proving that these platforms are not only marketing powerhouses but also backlink goldmines.
The secret to getting the most results from social media platforms is by first doing audience research to know their location, interest, age, and type of content they engage with the most on the different platforms.
After that, create content matching their interests and expectations when they visit your page. Note that the human brain processes visuals faster and more efficiently than blocks of text. Thus, share more visuals, such as infographics and photos, instead of text-only posts.
Monitor the engagement levels that each type of content achieves to know what you should create more of and what you should stop sharing. For instance, if you get more likes and comments when you share videos than infographics, then focus on creating better videos and improving the infographics.
9. Leverage Resource Links From Trusted Websites
Most highly authoritative websites such as Huffington Post, Forbes, Social Media Examiner, and Copyblogger have dedicated resource pages. They post resource articles on different topics and industries to save their audience time that they would have spent scouring the web for the same information.
For example, if you offer digital marketing services, you can write resource articles such as:
- Top 25 Digital Marketing Tools that You Must Have
- 30 Email Marketing Hacks Used By Top Performing Brands
- 50 Copywriting Content Marketing Tools for Busy Marketers
Ensure that your list is as accurate as possible and that you link to the cited resources. Confirm that the links are functional and lead the readers to the right pages.
Once you publish the resource articles, rest assured that the mentioned brands will reach out and reciprocate by giving you a free backlink from their respective websites. Email them informing them of the article and possible anchor text soon after it goes live to get maximum results.
10. Analyze Your Backlink Profile
The last step is to analyze your backlink profile every now and then and do damage control. If you see broken links to your posts, fix them. In case some websites turned out to be of poor quality, try to delete the link by communicating with the owner or using the Google Disavow Tool.
Make sure your source is mentioned on sites with a medium to high rating. Search engines prioritize those and will index your pages more quickly. Plus, the audience will become curious and you may get loyal readers and leads.
There are many tools for analysis. Consider browsing through Moz; you’ll find a treasure chest of recommendations and instruments there.
Final Thoughts
An effective link building strategy is what you need to play in the big league in your industry. Continuously monitor your link profile using reputable tools such as Ahrefs and SEMRush to ensure no toxic or spam sites are linking to your website.
You could also free up your schedule by outsourcing this task to a reputable digital marketing agency. Please feel free to share more link building strategies in the comment section.
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Link Building FAQ
Q: Why is link building so hard?
A: Link building can be challenging because it requires finding high-quality, relevant websites willing to link to your content. It demands time, effort, and often creative outreach to build authoritative backlinks that improve your website’s SEO.
Q: What are your primary problems with link building in 2023?
A: In 2023, link building challenges may include increased competition for quality backlinks, evolving search engine algorithms, and heightened expectations for content quality. Balancing these factors while staying up-to-date with best practices is crucial.
Q: When should I start link building?
A: You can start link building as soon as you have valuable content to promote. However, ensure your content is well-prepared, and your website is technically sound before beginning. Quality content and a solid foundation are key for effective link building.
Q: How do you ask for a link building?
A: Requesting backlinks can be done through outreach emails to website owners or content creators. Craft a personalized, polite message explaining the value your content provides and how it aligns with their website. Be clear and respectful in your ask.
Q: What is a link-building penalty?
A: A link-building penalty occurs when search engines, like Google, penalize a website for manipulative or spammy link-building practices. Penalties can result in lower search rankings. It’s essential to build links ethically and avoid black-hat techniques to prevent penalties.
