A link building strategy is at the heart of your off-page search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. By regularly acquiring more links to your site following your plan to the tee, you can rank higher on search engines and generate more organic traffic.
This post discusses what should comprise your link building strategy and a few tips to help you get started.
But before we begin, let’s get something out of the way first:
Link Building Strategy is Not Link Building Tactic
A link building strategy is not the same as a link building tactic.
The former refers to the plan you will implement to build links—the latter talks about the approach you’ll use for your strategy.
For example, broken link building and guest blogging are examples of link building tactics. In your link-building strategy, you can include both to generate higher-quality links pointing to your site.
The goal of your strategy is to include the best and most appropriate tactics for building links. While broken link building and guest posting are effective tactics in their own right, using both may not be the best tactics for your strategy, depending on different factors.
Types of Link Building Tactics to Include in Your Strategy
The challenge now is researching tactics that will guarantee high-quality links to implement as part of your strategy.
Below is the shortlist of the most popular and effective tactics for building links and a short description of each:
- Guest blogging – Pitch topics to write for a website with a link to your site on the content or the author bio. This specific link building service is sought-after due to its organic and white hat approach.
- Broken link building – Find your competitors’ broken pages and identify if they have lots of referring domains. If so, recreate the broken page on your site, reach out to the site owner, and ask them to replace the broken links on their site with yours.
- Link reclamation – Identify lost backlinks and reach out to site owners asking them to place your link back.
- Niche edits -Also known as link insert, email site owners and ask them to include a link to a relevant page on your site to an existing page on their site.
- Aged domain 301 redirects – Purchase a domain name with existing authority, recreate its site, and create backlinks to your money pages.
- Private blog networks (PBNs) – Buy aged domains and create relevant websites for each. Ideally, use the blogs to link to your best backlinks and strengthen them.
The last two tactics hover in the black-hat link building territory since search engines view them as manipulating their algorithm. In this case, avoid them unless you have experience creating backlinks using both tactics.
Niche edits is a legitimate link building approach that has received a bad rap in the SEO community. This tactic is not the same as SAPE links and hacked niche edits, both of which are spammy link building techniques that could cause more harm to your site than good. When done correctly, niche edits allow you to maximize the link juice flowing to your site from web pages with existing authority.
Tips in Building a Robust Link Building Strategy
To get links from other websites, you need to give them a very good reason to link to you. Site owners don’t just link to websites just because they were asked to do so.
Part of the link building process is to foster trust with your target sites so you can compel them to link back to a chosen page on your site.
Below are ways that can help you build trust with other website owners to help make your strategy a success:
Create Link-Worthy Content
Other websites link to a resource page or a blog post that is useful and valuable to their readers. It makes them appear knowledgeable to their target audience, which encourages them to revisit the site in the future if they have questions regarding the same topic.
On your part, you need to provide other sites with content that they would want to link out to in one of their blog pieces.
Similar to Brian Dean’s Skyscraper Technique, you must create a page that covers the topic better than anyone else and has lots of links pointing to the top pages ranking for its keyword. This way, you can reach out to the sites linking to the pages and offer your page as a better alternative.
Unlike the Skyscraper Technique, you don’t have to write long-form content just for the sake of making it long and covering the topic from head to toe. Being mindful of the topic’s intent allows you to create straightforward but beneficial content that people would want to read and link to.
Develop a Sustainable Outreach System
Most of the tactics you’ll include in your link building strategy involve sending out emails to site owners asking them for a link. In this case, you must set up your outreach system for sending and responding to emails and securing your links in an organized manner.
Using an email client and a spreadsheet to keep track of the emails you’ve sent and the links you’ve built is inefficient. You’re better off using tools like Mailshake that automate the drip email campaign. This way, you can upload the initial and follow-up emails to be sent to prospects, so you don’t have to log in to your email account to send them manually.
While the campaign is going on, you can monitor your email campaigns’ open and reply rates. Use this data to refine your emails and hopefully increase the rates of your future campaigns.
Scale Your Strategy
One of the most significant issues you’ll encounter with your link building strategy is the low success rate. No matter how good your emails and your pitch are, only a tiny fraction of your prospects will open your email, let alone follow through with your link request.
So, you need to find as many relevant link prospects as you can and send emails to them. Outreach link building is quantity over quality—the more emails you can send, the higher the chances of getting a backlink.
Once you’ve reached a point of scaling your outreach efforts, use email verifier tools like Hunter. It will extract potential emails and names to send your campaign. You can then upload these to your email automation tool to simplify your outreach workflow further.
Conclusion
Building a link building strategy requires intensive research and putting the right tactics in place. These enable you to secure links that will help move your website up search results.
Unless you’re well-versed in building links, getting the strategy right from the get-go will prove difficult. In this case, you are better off hiring link building companies like Linkplicity.
Their experience and know-how in developing, launching, and monitoring link building strategies will help your website rank on other search engines for your target keywords.
