Here’s some quick common sense for you on link building:
- Building backlinks can take a long time
- More than 66% of web pages have no backlinks at all
- Backlinks are one of the most crucial of Google’s ranking factors
We covered the critical importance of link building in our 2023 guide to link building, but the fact remains this: businesses might acknowledge that they need backlinks, but few of them have the time to build them on their own.
There are actually more strategies for building backlinks than you’ve probably heard of.
Some don’t require that much effort! Other strategies? Sure, they can take a while.
At LSEO, our SEO experts can augment your in-house team by using these link building strategies in the background while your team continues to focus on its daily tasks.
What are those strategies, the ones that can really make a difference for your domain authority and overall organic ranking power?
Let’s get into them.
Create Killer Content
Let’s start with a simple, well-known, and effective link building strategy: creating awesome content to which many others in your niche would want to link.
It goes without saying that content that has a lot of expertise, authority, and trust (E-A-T, anyone?) around it will be naturally linked to by other content creators on the Internet.
It’s all in how you present it, though, too. Listicles are hugely popular and have been for a long time.
That’s because listicles take long, otherwise dense content and turn it into more digestible, bite-sized chunks.
The other benefit? People like linking to listicles because of the way the information is presented.
Share Original Infographics
Another natural way to gain relevant backlinks to your site is to create and share infographics. People love infographics essentially for the same reason they love listicles: because they present dense information in more digestible ways.
The process for you, the creator, will involve research; infographics are often used to communicate statistics on a certain topic. But the end result will be a concise and very shareable piece of SEO content.
Make sure you optimize it with a keyword-infused file name and alt text, but organic rankings are not the primary way we’re looking for backlinks here.
You’ll want to create an embed code and then share that everywhere you can. Put it on social media, and reach out to influencers and others in your industry directly to encourage them to share it with their followers.
People love infographics because they can refer to the statistics they present without having to do that research themselves. It’s a great natural way to earn backlinks.
Practice Broken Link Building
Broken link building is a tried-and-true classic link building strategy.
SEOs love it because it’s natural and it promotes that healthy, Google-friendly competition among businesses for creating the best content for users.
Broken link building consists of finding broken external links on other people’s websites and presenting the website owners with replacement content for those links.
You point out broken links on these sites and offer up suitable replacement pages to link to; it’s a give and take.
The benefit to you is that, if the publisher agrees, you get those backlinks for yourself.
The only pain point you might encounter is that you have to have the content ready to go. If you don’t have it on your site already, you’ll have to create it.
Reclaim Your Own Broken Backlinks
A simple way to earn backlinks after you’ve been at it for a while is to audit your own website in Semrush or Ahrefs and find your broken backlinks.
Your own backlinks most often break because you moved or deleted some of your pages at some point. It’s okay. It happens.
But when you redirect those broken pages to working pages, you regain all the backlinks you lost.
See how easy?
Guest Post
Guest posting is an old link building strategy, and it still works if you approach it the right way.
The idea of the guest post is that you create an amazing piece of content for a website in your niche. That guarantees the content’s relevance. You then reach out to websites with healthy traffic and domain authority and ask them to post it for a backlink to you.
Ideally, website owners will do it if the content truly benefits their readership.
You may remember Google’s own Matt Cutts famously declaring guest posting dead way back in 2014. He was reacting to the level of spam to which guest posting had sunk in the SEO world.
And he wasn’t exactly wrong: people paying for the opportunity and all that.
But if you produce actually good, relevant content for a website, without offering money or anything else spammy, and the publisher posts it and gets you the backlink in the process, that’s a good backlink.
A word of advice, though: make sure the site where you choose to post is actually relevant to your own site, because that’s the only way Google’s going to assign any SEO value to the backlink.
Use HARO
Here’s one of my favorites. Use HARO, or Help a Reporter Out, to get natural backlinks.
If you don’t know, HARO is a platform where journalists can put questions out there for their stories and get quotes back from experts in that particular niche.
It’s pretty simple: when you answer, you get a quote in the story. And the story will feature a link to your website.
But you should be careful here. Answer only those queries that cover subjects in which you are a true expert. You shouldn’t take HARO frivolously. These are professional journalists who need real insights from real experts.
So, don’t answer anything and everything just to get a backlink. Only the relevant links will help you.
Do Interviews
Another quick link building strategy that’s sort of related to HARO is to be interviewed by someone in your niche and have the interview be published in text form.
Just like HARO, this will get your name and brand out there and earn you a relevant backlink from the publishing site.
Create Some “Best of” Lists
Just like infographics, listicle-type “best of” lists tend to earn natural backlinks because they have done the work that other content creators want to reference.
In the SEO industry, you might create a “Top SEO Tools” post and update it every year. Then, when people write about SEO tools, they can refer their readers out to your more comprehensive post.
Turn Unlinked Mentions into Backlinks
Another easy way to earn backlinks is to turn unlinked mentions of your company or brand into backlinks across the Internet.
It works like this. Say someone mentions LSEO in a list of digital marketing agencies, but there’s no link there.
Well, it would be better if there were.
You’ll find mentions like that from the Mentions alert in Ahrefs. You’ll then reach out to the website owners and ask if they’d link to you in that brand mention.
They have no good reason to refuse. After all, they already mentioned you and so probably think you have something of value to offer.
Write Case Studies
Case studies are a good category of content to create for the middle section of the content marketing funnel, the evaluation stage.
That stage is where customers will be investigating how you stack up against your competitors in their search for someone to hire for whatever problem they’re having.
But case studies are also good pieces of linkable content because, like infographics, they summarize complex information in digestible form and are easily referenced in other content.
If LSEO writes multiple case studies on our success with certain past clients, we can promote those all over the place and share them with interested parties.
Then, if someone wants to recommend a digital marketing agency to a business that’s looking for one, that person can share our case studies as proof of our track record. We also earn a backlink along the way.
Hold Giveaways with Influencers
If you provide a product of any kind, digital or otherwise, you can contribute your offerings to influencers who regularly hold giveaways and contests with their followers.
Your product will be given to the winner of a contest, and then you’ll get not only the promotion but the link from the influencer’s channels!
Create Curated Content
This is another awesome content-based link building idea that isn’t too far off from my suggestions on listicles and “top” or “best of” lists: curate content for your followers.
In whatever your niche is, chances are good that your readership will benefit from a lengthy resource in which you, an industry expert, organize and recommend other resources from around the Web on your particular area.
You can organize these curated resources by category or any other way you want to do it. But this content would read essentially like a list, and you can introduce and comment briefly on each item. Tell your readers why you felt they could benefit from this or that.
Where’s the link strategy here?
You’ll promote this piece of curated content for the purpose of getting backlinks. Remember, people want to link to useful content that they hope can benefit their own audiences.
Make this curated content useful, and then promote it.
Feature Up-and-Comers on Your Own Channels
No matter what industry you’re in, if you can feature someone else on your own website or social channels, you’ll make them happy and probably encourage them to share it with their own followers. You earn a backlink, too.
Now, this strategy only works if you are not direct competitors with the individual or group. And even though a backlink is still a backlink, it would also be ideal if the party you highlight or profile had a decent audience of their own.
That way, you get some nice referral traffic along with your backlink.
Write and Share Newsworthy Content
Creating newsworthy content for backlinks is a fun link building strategy because the buzz already exists around your topic.
This doesn’t mean you have to be a news site or a journalist of any kind. But if you attend events in your niche, whether in person or virtually, write about them afterward. Make your observations into a listicle-type blog post in which you share your thoughts or other insights.
Then, promote that content on all your channels so that others can see it while the news cycle around that event is still going strong. People who also attended will be likely to share your content with others.
And you could earn backlinks from it.
Create Cornerstone Content
As part of your content marketing strategy, you may decide that your site could use cornerstone content.
Cornerstone content is generally long-form evergreen content that lays out a company’s services and philosophy. It’s meant to be there on your site all the time, ready to show visitors of all kinds what you’re about.
Cornerstone content is also extremely shareable and linkable because it’s so comprehensive and will essentially never go out of date.
You have a lot of opportunities to get your cornerstone content to rank organically, and when you promote it, as well, your chances of earning natural backlinks go up.
Do Local Outreach
Another easy (and humanitarian) way to get your name out there and possibly earn a backlink is to reach out to your local community to contribute in charitable ways.
Help at a homeless shelter, donate to an animal hospital, or collect food for people around the holidays. Usually, organizations that do this kind of work will feature the groups that help them as a way to say thank you.
It’s a pretty straightforward way to earn a backlink while doing some good for your fellow citizens.
Contribute to Expert Roundup Articles
Content creators know that expert roundups are great ways to generate useful content that people actually want to read. This stuff is just like the curated content I discussed above. It focuses on a specific topic, but instead of just pulling resources on your own from all over the Internet, you’re soliciting the opinions of experts in the industry.
Those experts are happy to contribute because it gets their names and expertise out there to your audience. It also gets them a backlink.
This is a link building strategy you can deploy in 2023. Find existing roundup posts in your chosen industry and see if you can get the publisher to add in a contribution from you.
Create Interactive Content
Interactive content such as quizzes and surveys can be a lot of fun for users. This type of content serves multiple purposes simultaneously. It lets people interact with your website in an entertaining way while still encouraging them to think about their needs and how they relate to what you can offer them.
The other cool thing about quizzes and surveys? They’re so shareable. Friends or business associates who are interested in the same subjects can share with each other, getting that content more traffic.
If your quiz or survey ranks well, there’s a greater chance it will get picked up by bloggers and influencers and shared with their audiences, earning you natural backlinks and more traffic.
Link Internally
I get that we’re talking about backlinks here, but you can help the ranking ability of individual pages on your site by employing a smart internal linking strategy.
How does Google tell which of your pages are the most important? Multiple ways, but one of those is by determining which pages have the most internal links pointing to them.
Create topic clusters around your most valued subjects, ensuring that all the supporting pages point up to the pillar page. They aren’t exactly backlinks, but they’re links that you can plot out and control yourself.
Write Ultimate Guides
Okay, final strategy here: write ultimate guides to things.
People also call these content pieces “complete” guides or “definitive” guides, but the point is, they have to be comprehensive roadmaps on how to do one specific thing.
Now, what’s the point of this? Why do ultimate guides earn backlinks?
It’s because of the comprehensiveness of the content. There are few people who will put the time into creating content of that caliber to put on their websites for free.
Why do people do it, then?
It’s exactly because few others are doing it. When everyone else is writing their post on just one part of that subject, they can link to you because you cover the rest of it. You put the hours into documenting every square inch of that topic in one post.
How many others are going to do that? How many others will create “A Complete Guide to Core Web Vitals”?
Not that many. Those people are going to be happy to have your resource available, because they’ll send their readers to you for more information.
Plan Your 2023 Link Building Strategies with LSEO
Natural backlinks are one of Google’s most crucial ranking signals today. The search engine wants you to create really awesome content that people want to link to on their own.
While great content will attract links on its own, it does often take more active reachout to get your killer content in front of the people who would want to share it with their followers.
If you’d like to start earning more and better backlinks, let’s have a talk. LSEO is the most trusted link building agency in the business. We’d love to turn our link building strategies your way to help you improve your rankings and get found by the audiences who matter to you.
Contact us now to learn how we can help drive your growth.