You’re trying to increase your visibility on Google, but there are too many ranking factors to keep track of. Let’s find out 7 ways to build quality backlinks on your website.

SEO is complex

You’ve built a website. Great. But where’s the traffic?

Google’s ranking algorithm has grown more and more complex in the past decade, and the factors that determine search rankings change without notice.

This is why SEO is so time-consuming. Multiple different parameters are necessary for a page to rank and can be overwhelming to the uninitiated.

Building Links

But there’s great news too. Backlinks are a major contributor to a page’s overall visibility, and there are a number of ways to build backlinks without delving too deep into the SEO rabbit hole. They help search engines index relevancy of articles by including links to other websites with similar content.

Your ability to gather links will depend on the level of outreach you’re willing to invest time into. Organic links through content marketing efforts will come in slowly, but if you’re looking for some growth hack-y tactics that can scale with your blog or business, there are more effective ways to approach this.

Link building includes a lot of email outreach, so you’ll need a bit of software for both tracking and generating content leads. Consider CRM software options and a host of other tools as a means to help manage your outreach game so you don’t end up in the spam folder.

While the email component is important to keep in mind, link building can be fairly simple. Do a bit of keyword research, pick your target and we can get started. Here are seven successful backlinking strategies that have helped build our SEO playbook.

1. Produce Quality Content

There tends to be a lot of outreach and correspondence with other websites when building links for a targeted keyword or page. As a marketer, you have to offer the website lead a perspective that provides value to their article and its potential readers. That’s the goal of content marketing. Providing a valuable resource through research and quality writing is useful to other websites.

2. Newsjacking Big Stories

Newsworthy events can be great for traffic. Large news engines, such as The Telegraph or CNN, are always looking for a unique perspective on trending topics. One of the best ways to get links to your domain is through differentiation. What does your company or blog do differently, and how does it relate to this current news?

You can look for industry relevant events, such as conferences, acquisitions, or law changes, and incorporate them into your website’s blog. Give the event your own specific twist of expertise. This result offers news sites access to unique information that they are more likely to quote and link back to. Use your competitive advantage to help push your articles while doing outreach.

3. Broken Link Building

Broken links are harmful; they decrease the readability of a website and increase bounce rates. Blogs know that, and if you can manage to find a broken link to a competitor article on their site and build a quick piece to replace that, the incoming links attached to it can be yours.

SEO web crawlers like Screaming Frog and Ahrefs give excellent insight into the backlink and traffic structure of a website. They’re great for developing an understanding towards how a competitor is performing behind the scenes. By including your competitor’s domain URL in the crawler’s search engine, an in-depth analysis of their site structure, traffic volume, and link data is made available. You can find a competitor’s broken links here, and any blogs that are attached to them as well.

Once you find where the 404 error pages are listed, follow them to their respective articles, create or find a relevant piece on your site, and let the writer know that the article includes a broken link and there’s an error on their site. More often than not, once they are aware of the problem, they will replace the broken link with yours. You get to snag a link from a competitor, and the website has new insights from your blog.

4. Roundups

This fad, which has grown in popularity and albeit slowed down in the past few years is great for building links. Marketers like to do roundups of the best articles because it’s a great way to get both links, traffic, and linkbacks for simple content.

This one is a sort of two-way street because you can reach out to offer your content to roundups or create roundups and ask for link backs on these roundups. It’s a very unique and interesting way to approach link building.

5. Expert Tips and Quotes

Reach out to journalists for expert opinions! Blogs will be happy to accommodate your link in their article. One of the factors Google uses to rank pages is recency. Older content will rank slightly lower than new ones, and offering a new statistic, perspective, or tip to an older article can help a website boost traffic while providing your domain with a link.

Let’s pretend we’re pushing a page like domain registration providers. We would go on a web crawler like SEMRush (which offers free tools for link building) search for relevant keyword mentions. We find authors to articles with these keyword mentions, and we reach out to them with the link and something like this:

“Ranking factors for page relevancy include top-level domain (TLD) suffixes. A great step towards targeting a geospatial market segment can be made by setting up a local domain with your domain registration provider. TLDs such as .co.uk and .co.au are much better at reaching local audiences.”

It’s another form of leveraging your expertise that works wonders.

6. Guest Posts

Guest posts (like the one I’m currently writing) are a great tool for filling in links to other websites. This strategy is ideal because it helps you target the anchor text to your links in a much more deliberate way. When doing backlink outreach, you are at the mercy of the content writer, since they can change the anchor text of the link in whichever way they see fit. This is not the most optimal from an SEO perspective.

Guest post outreach also has a much higher rate of success, the only drawback being the amount of time necessary to draw out and write a quality guest post. However, the quality value outweighs the drawbacks. It borrows a website’s audience and gives your content net a further reach. It also gives you much more room for creativity, so if you’re looking for quality more so than quantity, this is an effective strategy that pays long-term dividends.

7. Infographics

Build infographics with interesting information for your audience. The data doesn’t even have to be yours, just make sure to cite the relevant sources and give them credit with a link back. Infographics are another unique approach that content writers can use because they give a visual aid to what can be very dry topics. Software products such as Canva and Piktochart are available to make quick infographic designs, the only downside again being that it requires a bit more time and energy to produce this quality content.

Infographics help push that differentiation factor; throw in local data or a competitive advantage your company owns (Ask sales for one if you can’t think of any) and you’ll have your links in no time. Just make sure when doing outreach to include a link to content that includes the infographic and not just a direct link to the infographic itself so you can keep those sweet Google juices flowing.

Building backlinks can be tedious and there’s a lot of outreach involved, but once the basics have been covered, the links will start flowing in.

Guest author: Alan Santillan, Content Specialist at G2 Crowd

Alan is a Content Specialist at G2 Crowd that loves writing about all things tech and SEO. Having spent the past couple years in the cold trenches of Fargo, you can find Alan adjusting to the sweltering Chicago heat while waiting for AI and our robot overlords to take over.

Related Reading:

• 7 Ways to Earn Links To your Site
• The importance of creating effective backlinks
• How to do Link Building: An introduction to the basics
• The 50 Best SEO Tools

This blog post is about:

• Backlinking
• SEO
• Building website traffic
• Increasing visibility online
• 7 Strategies to Build Quality Backlinks

Originally Posted: 19th September 2018
Last Updated: 22nd September 2020