The Complete Guide to Link-Building

If you don’t know how it all works, read further to learn about how you can look for the right prospects and build relationships with the help of an effective outreach campaign.

Find The Right Link Prospects 

Scrap SERP Results 

One of the primary ways is to find relevant content opportunities in Google’s SERPs.

• Start with typing a niche search query in the Google search bar.

Next, you can use the Google SERPs Bookmarklet tool to download the search results into a list.

• You can go to Google’s search settings and set the minimum number of results to 50 or 100.

This way, you can get a list of 100 or more link opportunities with a single download. You now want to decide which ones you want to use for your link-building campaign. A nice way is to use a tool like Upper Ranks  Prospector. The tool shows you a quick preview of each of the URLs you paste in it.

It also gives you an option to ‘Accept’ or ‘Reject’ each URL. You can then export the list of final prospects to a CSV or an Excel file. You can add up to 60 URLs in this easy-to-use free tool.

Use the Skyscraper Technique to Find Link Opportunities

The Skyscraper Technique is a super-effective way to find quality link-prospects.

• You first need to find top-notch content in your niche.
• Next, you need to find sites that are linking to this content.

All of these sites are your link prospects. Let’s learn this method with the help of an example. For instance, let’s say you’re selling an email marketing tool, and some of your target keywords include the following:

A. email marketing best practices

B. email marketing best practices 2020

When you type these queries in Google’s search bar, you’ll find some of the top content pieces for these terms.

These are your top competition content pieces. Pop these in the SEMrush backlink analytics tool to find their backlinks and referring domains.

CoSchedule’s blog post on email marketing best practices has 75 backlinks and 37 referring domains. Similarly, you can check the link-profile of other competing content pieces. Put them together in an excel sheet and see which ones would be your best link prospects. Your goal should be to create an excellent content asset—something that’s better than your competitors. Once you have published a more substantial content piece, you can go there and reach out to all the selected prospects.

Prospecting for Guest Posts

Writing guest posts lets you have your personal space on authority sites. It’s a terrific way to build links and an online brand. But you need to be careful while scaling up your guest posting campaign. Don’t be lured into publishing posts on low-quality, spammy guest posting websites. Look for niche websites that accept guest posts. It is pretty simple.

a. Let’s suppose you’re looking for sites in the marketing automation niche. You can type the following search queries in the Google search bar, and you’ll get a bunch of options:
marketing automation + “guest post”marketing automation + “write for us” marketing automation + “guest article”marketing automation + “guest posting opportunities”marketing automation + “guest contributor”marketing automation + “submit blog post” marketing automation + “become a contributor”

b. Another innovative way to find guest posting opportunities is to make a list of influencers in your niche—especially those who regularly write guest posts. Pop their name in the Google search bar to browse through their author profile on different niche websites.

This way, you can make a list of quality sites to pitch your stories. Make sure you choose sites whose Domain Authority is higher than your site.

Prospecting Resource Pages 

Resource pages offer their audience some of the top niche content pieces and guides related to a specific topic. Resource page link-building is about finding a place in top-ranking resource pages in your industry.

In 2016, Moz surveyed 435 SEO professionals. 56% said they used resource page link building, making it the second most popular link building tactic amongst respondents.

Most resource pages are looking to include quality resources. That’s why some of them even have a submission form that allows content creators to submit their resources for your review and inclusion. Finding resource pages to reach out and pitch your content is no rocket science. To start building your resource page prospects, you can make use of Google search modifiers such as these:

travel intitle:resources inurl:links.html

travel intitle:links inurl: resources.html

travel inurl:.com/resources

travel inurl:resources intitle:resources

You can replace the main keyword and find many similar pages:

vacation intitle:resources inurl:links.html

vacation intitle:links inurl: resources.html

vacation inurl:.com/resources

vacation inurl:resources intitle:resources

Download the search results and see which ones are best suited for your link-building campaign.

Competitive Backlink Analysis 

The most evergreen way to find backlink opportunities is to do a quick competitive analysis. Make a list of some of your top competitors and check their backlinks in SEMrush or Ahrefs. In SEMrush, you can add up to five competing sites and find their backlinks and referring domains.

You can export the list of referring sites and refine your list based on the link-quality checklist. To know about the latest links of competing websites, you can set up link alerts in Ahrefs.

The unique feature helps you get regular updates on new and lost backlinks about the said URL. The tool also offers you web mentions alert—you can use that feature to track the latest competitor brand mentions. If you’re looking to know about your competitors’ shared links, you can use the Ahrefs link intersect tool.

Finding Broken Links

Looking for broken links on content pieces may sound like a tedious manual tactic, but can be very useful to find genuine link-building prospects. There are many valuable content pieces with dead links, and you could replace them with valuable content pieces!

You can use a free tool like dead link checker to find broken links in top niche resource pages and guide posts. Here is an example of a broken link from this email marketing resource page:

The web page from litmus does not exist.

Now, here’s how you can use this broken link to find new link prospects.

• Pop this dead link in the SEMrush backlink analytics tool to see a list of resource pages and guide-posts linking to it.
• Next, you can create an alternate content piece and pitch to all the link prospects.

Looking for Unlinked Brand Mentions

A great and legitimate practice to build links for your site is to find brand mentions that don’t have any links. It’s a simple tactic as you can reach out to a site owner and request her to add a link to your brand mention. You can use a tool like Ahrefs’ content explorer to find all of such unlinked brand mentions. Pop your brand name in this tool and choose the following features of the tool:

• One article per domain
• Highlight unlinked domains

You can export the highlighted web pages to get a list of all of your unlinked brand mentions.

Directories and Citations

First and foremost, you should build citations on Google and popular social media platforms. Linking to these top platforms is a bare necessity. Moving on to directories, you can look for the top and the most reputed ones in your niche.

Here’s a quick checklist on creating a list of niche directories for submitting your website:

• Analyze a directory’s strength by checking the Page Rank.
• Check the backlink profile of directories in Ahref’s or SEMrush before submitting your site.
• Review the details of each submission, including your website link.

Directory submissions are not a big part of your link-building process. Placing your site on a handful of notable directories can be beneficial to your link-building efforts.

Are your link prospects good enough?

You don’t want to come across as a cheap spammy link-builder shooting link requests left, right, and centre. As a well-mannered SEO manager, you need to start by figuring which sites are the most relevant for your link-building campaign.

Before you send out your outreach email, you must understand whether you’re adding value to your email recipient. The goal is to create a relationship that’s beneficial to both parties. Let’s take a look at some parameters to understand if a site is worth your outreach efforts:

• Check if the site is of topical relevance—that’s basic.

• Are you pitching a content piece that adds value to the site/post you’re pitching? For instance, this link-building guide would be a good fit for pillar content that educates the readers about Search Engine Optimization.
• Does the website have a high enough Domain Authority/Domain Rating? Choose a site whose Domain Authority is higher than your website.
• Consider other metrics such as traffic and ratio of referring domains to linked domains.

With this checklist, you’ll be in a better position to understand whether a content piece is a good link prospect or not.

Personalizing the Email Outreach

One of the critical pillars of your link-building campaign is email outreach. When you have many prospects and relevant content pieces to pitch, you need to go out there and break the ice. While you can find quite a few email templates to automate your outreach campaign, it may not get you the desired results. Why? Here are some drawbacks of relying on email templates to reach out to webmasters and blog editors:

• Many SEO professionals are using the same outreach templates. It is the reason why most prospects get frustrated and mark such emails as spam.
• When it comes to building long-term relationships with blog editors, running a bulk outreach campaign is the least effective.
• When you set up a mass outreach campaign, you end up mismatching the pitch with the prospect’s content piece. That’s because each prospect is a new content piece.

If you really want your link prospects to answer your email, you must create tailor-made outreach emails. Here’s how you to get it right:

• The first step is to not sound desperate for links. You need to come across as someone who’s looking to build a relationship.
• When you’re writing a personalized email, make it sound like one. Know more about the prospect and the website. Take a look at this template for a guest post pitch:

• Show genuine interest and showcase the quality of the content piece you’re pitching.
• Communicate that you know about the prospective site’s content. Tell the email recipient about how your content piece would be a good fit.
• Are you connected with the prospect on social media platforms? Use a common ground to start your conversation. Need inspiration? Take a look at this sample:

• Write an email like an expert or a writer and not an SEO professional who’s looking to meet her link-building targets. In-fact you could outsource outreach emails to a writer.

So whether you’re pitching to a guest posting site or a resource page, you can use the tips mentioned above to convey the value you can offer to your link prospects.

Chapter 6

In fact,

52% of marketers believe brand mentions impact organic search rankings. (Aira)

The ideal way to build links and press mentions is to display niche authority and build relationships with trustworthy niche sites.

Let’s learn about some essential Digital PR techniques that can help fetch quality backlinks for your business.

Tip Journalists on Platforms Like HARO

HARO is a free platform that helps connect PR professionals and journalists. Most journalists use this platform to look for experts who can share tips and advice for their upcoming stories. You can sign up on this platform as a source and start browsing niche queries. Once you create a HARO profile and select your business category, HARO sends you topical queries to your email inbox.

Here’s an example of what a HARO query looks like:

You can choose the most relevant queries and start replying to them. Be persistent, and you might land up with links on large publications like

Forbes and Inc. Here are some tips to win more features, links, and press mentions by offering to become an expert source on HARO:

• Make your submission comprehensive and valuable. Most reporters are busy and would not have the time to request for more information.
• Be quick at responding to queries. If the first few submissions are good, a reporter may not bother to go further.
• Write an email subject line that catches your reporter’s attention. At the same time, you need to make it authentic.
• One of the most critical success factors is value addition. Are you sharing a unique case study or experience? Because if you are, it will work to your advantage. Understand the story angle and ponder a while to know how to make your submission befitting and insightful.
• Communicate your credentials. If your business has won some awards or has been featured in other reputed publications, then you must mention it in your email. Establishing credibility is a crucial way to earn yourself a feature.
• Make yourself available for a call or to send more information.

Besides HARO, you can connect with journalists through alternate platforms like ProfNet, SourceBottle, and Muck Rack.

Journalists often post their queries on Twitter using the hashtag #journorequest—follow the hashtag to find relevant PR opportunities for your business.

Be relentless about understanding what journalists are looking for and creating value—that’s an excellent strategy to win a ton of quality backlinks to your site.

Tell Your Brand Story

If you didn’t already know it, then here’s a simple truth—the media is always looking for stories. They’re looking for authentic anecdotes that will find readers. Inspire news outlets and journalists with your brand story, and it’ll get you real backlinks and press mentions. Here are things you can do:

Talk About Your Brand’s Purpose

As a business, are you doing something that changes lives? Does your business help save the environment, or are you offering employment to a socially backward section of the society? Are you sponsoring a charity or giving away a service for free?

Creating a social impact helps you bring about positive change in society, and it naturally attracts media attention. Plus, you get to build a positive reputation for your business.

Business Achievements

Every business has its unique journey towards achieving certain milestones, such as client wins or awards.

• You can talk about how you went from 0-100 clients in the first 12 months in business.
• Maybe a story about how you and your founders started the business.
• Tell your audience about your company culture—the behind the scenes action.

Take a look at this example from Clif Bar and Company:

News outlets want to cover business owners who have used creative ways to grow their business.

Create a Viral Campaign 

Going viral with a video or a stunt may seem fancy, but it’s not as simple as it sounds. You need to brainstorm and execute many viral campaigns and ideas before hitting that one home run. A viral campaign gets you mass visibility and coverage plus backlinks. How to ideate a viral campaign:

• Create a script that’s exceptionally outrageous, funny or thought-provoking.
• Think of ideas that might get a very high number of social shares.
• You could try a scalable user-generated-content campaign and get a large number of people to participate.

For example, e.l.f. cosmetics created a viral TikTok campaign that received over 4 billion video videos, which led to unprecedented media attention.

Connect with Influencers on Social Media

When it comes to building links, niche influencer relationships can make a big difference. Try connecting with influencers through social media channels like Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You can start building a relationship by quoting an influencer in your blog post or a social media update. You can find the best of industry influencers using platforms like Traackr.

Once you know an influencer, there are many ways to start a collaboration:

• Offer them a free product to review it and write about it in an upcoming review post or listicle.
• Ask them for a sponsorship opportunity. Many niche bloggers and influencers have a sponsored content program.
• Reach out to them with a piece of original research or a press release.

Niche influencers have a big audience, and that’s why getting links through influencer-partnerships is a terrific option.

Become a Guest On Podcasts

Podcasting is the content format of today. People love listening to podcasts because of their personal and engaging nature.

One of the things you can do as a business owner is to become a guest on niche podcasts. The strategy works well to help you:

• Fetch publicity and followership.
• Establish yourself as a thought leader and a sought-after expert.
• Get quality backlinks for your business.

How to get booked as a guest on some of the top podcasts in your industry? The fastest way is to hire a podcast booking agency.

• They help you to build up a profile and reach out to the most relevant industry podcasts.
• Such agencies also help you create a strategy around the podcast interview.

Alternatively, you can hire an in-house team to do all the legwork. Since podcasting is fast gaining ground as a popular content format, you must use this channel to build quality links for your business.

Promote Content Assets

The more you spread a word about linkable content assets, the higher their probability of earning links and mentions. Here are some common and effective ways to promote your content:

• Make sure that your content pieces are optimized for search and user intent.
• Share every content piece on your social media channel.
• Repurpose content to use it for different formats and channels. For instance, you could convert blog posts into videos and slideshow presentations.
• Create a newsletter to share your content pieces with your list of contacts.

Content promotion helps you build content popularity and visibility—a necessity to attract quality sites to link to it.

Share Expertise Through Omni Channel Publishing 

In today’s times, you have the option to display your expertise through various content platforms. The best way to come across as a thought-leader is to be persistent about publishing content. Here are some ways to expand your audience through and become a leader in your niche:

• Publish articles and expert updates on LinkedIn.

• Use YouTube to create helpful videos for your audience.
• Publish unique and useful answers on Q&A sites like Quora.
• Repurpose your existing blog posts and put them up on Medium.
• Become an active community participant by commenting on authority blog posts.

• Submit content on well-known niche syndication platforms.
• Create content for community websites and platforms.

Digital PR is about expanding your online footprint and offering quality content to your target audience. It’s an automatic route for getting more content shares, links, and mentions.

Chapter 7

Buying Backlinks

Another quick way to get quality backlinks is to buy links for your business. In this section, let’s explore paid backlinking as a way to get quality links for a website. Plus, you can check out our link-price calculator as well.

What are Paid Backlinks?

Paid backlinking is a way to get a quick backlink from a domain by paying a fee for it. Paid backlinks are different from organic backlinks. The former is earned through quality branded content. You simply buy the latter by getting a site to agree on linking to your website or content piece.

All said and done; all organic backlinks don’t come for free. You need to either hire an agency or an in-house team to earn those precious organic links.

Do You Buy Backlinks?

Try our link-building pricing calculator

TRY IT NOW

Do Paid Backlinks Work?

Studies show that paid link-building does work for many businesses:

78 percent of companies who buy legitimate paid links consider them to be efficient backlink building opportunities.

69 percent of businesses using paid link buying considered their campaigns to be efficient

• Paid backlinks are a faster way to get more links—this way; you can get quick search rankings for your website.
• If you’re in a niche where most businesses are buying backlinks, you have no option but to purchase links for your business.

Are Paid Backlinks Risky?

Although paid links have their benefits, they come with a fair share of perils.

• Paid-backlinking is strictly against Google’s webmaster guidelines.
• If Google finds out that you’re buying links, it may impose a hefty penalty on your site. It can cause your site to lose all the traffic you may have earned so far.

How and Where to Buy Backlinks?

If you follow the industry’s best practices and stick with purchasing quality backlinks, the link-buying process can be fruitful. Ensure you do not buy links from spam sites or freelancers who offer bulk links for a low price. Here are some channels to buy backlinks for your site:

Guest Posts

When it comes to quality link-buying, then guest posts are your number one bet. There are two ways to buy guest posts:

• Reach out to bloggers who are open to selling links. Work out a deal to publish a guest post on their site along with a paid backlink.
• Hire an agency to create quality guest posts on your behalf. Pay the agency to get the guest posts placed on high-authority websites in your niche.

Private Blogging Networks

Private blogging networks are created for the sole purpose of passing on link juice to a specific web property. Many such PBNs offer paid links to other websites in the niche.

• Although buying links from a private blogging network is considered a black hat technique, many businesses find it useful to get quick rankings for their website.
• Not all paid links come from PBNs, but PBNs mostly offer links for a fee.

If you decide to buy a link from a PBN, make sure to analyze the site’s quality and domain authority.

Product Reviews 

When it’s about legitimate link-buying, getting a paid product review is one of the best options.

• You can reach out to a prominent niche blogger to crack a collaboration deal.
• Offer a free product trial plus a fee to get a backlink on their website.

Links in Existing Content 

When you go out there to buy backlinks, you’ll find many sites happy to link to your content or site pages for a fee.

How do links in existing content work?

• Start by finding prominent blogs in your industry. You need to pitch a relevant content piece for inclusion in their site. Pay a fee for link inclusion.
• You can also hire an agency to get you such links for a price.
• Buy a niche edit link for a slightly lower price. Niche edits are often cheaper because such links may be a slight deviation from your niche.

What’s the Cost of Buying Backlinks?

Let’s now look at some of the critical factors that determine the price of a link.

Publication Popularity

We’re all looking to buy links from high-authority websites. That’s why the higher the Domain Authority of a site, the more the demand, and the pricier the link. Besides the site DA, you need to look at its traffic and content quality.

Niche 

Backlinks in every industry are different. The cost varies as you move from one niche to another. For instance, the SaaS niche cost will differ from the price of links in the real estate niche.

Brand Authority

How much a link costs you is also determined by the Domain Authority and popularity of your site. If you have a high-authority, you’ll find it easy to get more links at a lower price. But if your site is still new, you should be ready to shell out more money for each backlink.

Do-Follow vs. No-Follow Backlinks

One factor determining the cost of backlinks is whether it’s a Do-Follow link or a No-Follow one. Do-Follow links work better and cost more.

Anchor Text 

If you go for exact anchor text in a backlink, it’s price may go. Flexible anchor texts come at a lower price. The idea should be to match the context of the link you’re placing on a site.

To get detailed know-how on paid link-building, you can check out our in-depth guide on buying backlinks. And, if you wish to get an instant estimate on the cost of buying links, do check out our fantastic link price calculator tool.

Chapter 8

Final Thoughts – What’s The Future of Link-Building

Links are and will continue to remain a decisive ranking factor. Search engines like Google have a mission to improve searcher-experience. That’s why they continue to keep a check on spammy and manipulative link-building practices. Therefore, high-quality link building remains an essential part of a winning SEO strategy.

Links are and will continue to remain a decisive ranking factor. Search engines like Google have a mission to improve searcher-experience. That’s why they continue to keep a check on spammy and manipulative link-building practices. Therefore, high-quality link building remains an essential part of a winning SEO strategy. Infuse awesomeness in branded content and make use of personalized outreach campaigns to get to the desired outcomes. Combine your link-building efforts with robust Digital PR strategies, and you’ll stay ahead of your game. Last but not least, you don’t need to build links for the sake of links, but for the sake of creating value and for making authentic connections with authority sites.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Is link building still relevant to SEO?

Yes. Keyword research is still important, but in a different way than has been practiced in the past. The skillful use of words continues to be important because it will still improve your users’ experience and your overall online marketing strategy.

How do I start building links?

Starting link-building process includes researching a topic relevant to the subject matter, creating high-quality content on your website, curating the best up-to-date SEO advice, citing and linking to your sources, and optimizing your post for featured snippets for primary keyword phrases

Which backlink is least important?

Some backlinks that have little to no value include paid links, article directory links, forum links, and non-newsworthy press releases