Link building can be a complex and time-consuming process. There are many different tactics to get to the end goal. Link building doesn’t always mean creating long blogs or interactive guides. For some businesses, the product or service itself is often link-able. In this beginners guide to link-building, we will look into various tactics for you to focus your efforts on.
Outreach
Outreach is simply reaching out to different people within your niche and introducing them to your content. However, this isn’t limited to content, as it might just be your business, brand, personality, products or services as long as it’s valuable and useful to them.
The best people to outreach to are ones who have linked to similar articles or topics or those that include your target keyword within their articles.
To discover this Content Explorer is a great tool. Simply, type in your keyword or phrase and it will pull up all the related web pages. To then find people who have linked to similar articles you can add a filter to Content Explorer. This will filter pages with referring domains and your job is to find a relevant page and see all the sites linking to it.
Once you’ve narrowed down your outreach targets you’ll need to find their contact information and send them a personalised email. Remember, outreach is all about building relationships which means your first email needs to align with this.
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging requires you to write an article for another website, within your industry, once they publish it all you need to do is link to it.
This is one of the oldest link building tactics. You need to be clever about it and avoid sites advertising guest blogging. Instead, cleverly pitch to sites relevant to your own. If the content is well written, value-adding and free, it’s a hard offer to refuse.
Broken Link Building
Broken link building is a great and simple tactic that involves finding a broken link that’s relevant to you on a website. Next, you need to create a piece of content similar to the one of the broken link. Finally, ask all sites linking to the dead resource to link to your new content instead.
This process sees great results as you already know that the sites your targeting are willing to link to pieces relevant to you. Not only are you fixing their broken link issue but you’re also providing them with fresh, high quality and relevant content.
Using Ahref’s Broken Link Checker you will discover every site that links to that dead resource, so although it seems a lot of effort for one backlink the potential backlinks to be gained could be significant.
Unlinked Mentions
On some occasions, other sites will mention your business without linking to your website. These opportunities are an easy steal as you’re already halfway there! The author is already familiar with your business so all this requires is you to reach out and convince them to link to you.
Link Reclamation
Links are lost all the time either because the link was removed from the linking page or the linking page no longer exists. However, often reclaiming lost links is easier than building new ones.
Often when sites rewrite their content they might drop your link. If this is the case then find a new place within their content for your link and reach out to them ensuring your politeness is not pushy.
Link building is all about trial and error, testing and assessing what works best for you, your strategy and your business. Once you’ve mastered the technique for you, link building will become a lot more rewarding and a lot less effort. Contact us to find out more about how we can supercharge your SEO and get your site to the top ranking.