A link building strategy is a plan that involves getting a site owner to link back to your website. It’s well known that a strong link profile is one of the most important ranking factors for Google.
You can hire professional link building services to take care of this for you, but if you’re tight on budget, you’re probably wondering how to do it yourself. In today’s article, we’ll show you which link building strategies work and which one’s don’t.
3 Proven Link Building Strategies
Here are 3 link building strategies that we’ve had great success with:
- Guest Blogging
- Niche Edits
- Passive Links
Guest Blogging
We love seeing blog posts about how “Guest blogging is DEAD!” Why? Because that bad press means less competition for us. Guest Blogging is very much alive and well.
It’s one of the tried-and-true link building strategies that still works in 2023.
Don’t let that fool you though. Guest Blogging is getting much harder due to the sheer number of emails that people send. If you’ve ever thrown up a contact form on your website, you’d know what I mean.
Each and every day we get hammered with terrible outreach pitches from all over.
There are several keys to creating an effective Guest Blogging strategy.
The Setup
Step 1: Build your prospect list
There are several ways to build prospect lists but by far the quickest way is to scrape one.
One of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to do this is to scrape Google Search.
Enter long tail keywords that your ideal prospects would probably create blog posts around and then scrape that list.
Step 2: Filter Your List
You want to make sure that you’re reaching out to prospects that are relevant to your own site. It’s also important to filter your list by a set of quality metrics that meet your minimum criteria.
You can choose something like this:
- DR between 40 – 70
- Domain Traffic of at least 500
Don’t go too overboard with this.
The stricter you are with your criteria, the fewer prospects you’ll have.
Step 3: Get Their Emails
Finding people’s email addresses is as easy as using a tool called Hunter.
It may be time consuming but it’s worth going after personal emails instead of generic ones. You’ll have a much higher chance of getting a reply.
The Execution
This is where most people fail miserably.
Anyone can create lists, everyone can get contact details, but not many people can write a great email template.
We get hit with tons of terrible email pitches. In order to stand out, you’ve got to be outstanding.
The best way to do that is to personalize your templates as much as possible. You can do this through scraping or segmenting your lists in the beginning.
Try to stick to this formula:
- Personalize first line
- Address the problem
- Offer a valuable solution
- Soft CTA
The offer is key here. Don’t just offer a “value piece of content”. Instead give them something that’s actually valuable like custom professional graphics, unique data points and a KW research driven blog post.
AND…keep it short and sweet. Use emojis and memes. Come across as a human being and not a link beggar.
Relationship Building
We’ve landed some of the best links from building relationships. Relationships lead to all sorts of great opportunities like link exchanges on high powered UR blog posts.
Building relationships takes more time but one powerful link from a relationship can be worth 10 or even 15 guest post links from random sites.
The Setup
Step 1: Scrape a list of websites with specific problems
Some examples could be: a slow web page or an outdated blog post that’s ranking at the bottom of page one.
Step 2: Filter your list
Step 3: Nab their contact details
The Execution
The key is to build a relationship. Don’t go for the ask right away.
Instead, mention the problem in your email template and ask them if they’ve ever considered fixing it.
If they haven’t, you’ve now brought it to their attention. From there you can send them a personalized loom video explaining why it’s bad. Serve them up the solution and then go for the ask.
This obviously doesn’t scale very well but if you carefully select your prospects and they have powerful pages that you can get a link on, it’s worth doing.
Passive Link Building
This is the holy grail of link building strategies because once you set it up, the links come to you.
The idea is to create a piece of content that is so unique and valuable that people would be foolish to not link to it.
The Setup
Step 1: Research The Topic
You have to identify which topics are garnering natural links. A simple way to do this is to scrape a list of keywords in your niche that have a high KD according to Ahrefs.
High KD means the top ten results have a boatload of links.
Step 2: Determine The Link Velocity Of Those Keywords
You need to look at which of those keywords are picking up links consistently. Not all high KD keywords will garner natural links.
For example, a topic could have been trending, gained a ton of natural links in a short period of time and now doesn’t get any.
Stick to evergreen topics that make sense.
Step 3: Create The Page
The Execution
You need to go all out on this one:
- Hire an amazing graphic designer
- Put interactive elements on the page
- Include unique data points
Make it literally perfect. Then build as many high-quality links as you can to it.
Once you hit the top five, you should see the links start to roll in naturally.
Link Building Strategies With Lower Success Rates
Here are 3 link building strategies that can work but may not produce the best results:
- Broken Link Building
- Resource Pages
- Link Roundups
Broken Link Building
Broken link building is a strategy where you find dead pages across the internet.
You reach out to the website’s links pointing to these dead pages and ask them to update it with a link to your resource.
The Problem
There’s no real value here.
Most pages with broken links are old and site owners don’t want to be bothered updating it.
It’s also difficult to find relevant sites with broken links.
I’m not saying that it can’t work but it’s incredibly difficult to scale and the success rate, we’ve found, is very low unless it’s a brand mention.
Resource Pages
Resource pages link out to pages with helpful resources. These can work and are some of the most “White Hat” links you can build because they look 100% natural.
The Problem
Link resource pages can have 20-50 outgoing links on one page. If you become the 51st link on that page, you won’t get much benefit from that link.
There’s not much link equity to be had once the pagerank splits 51 different ways.
If you are going to target resource pages, look for ones with a high number of referring domains pointing to them.
If these resource pages are linked off of the website’s navigation menu and the site is high authority, then it could be worth going after.
Link Roundups
Link Roundups are used as ego bait to link out to influencers in your space. The idea is that you butter up these people in hopes of building a relationship with them and eventually getting them to link to you.
Link Roundups can work but we haven’t had much luck with them.
The Problem
Link Roundup pages are similar to resource pages in that they don’t really have much link equity. If you build links on roundup pages, chances are it’s not going to move the needle.
Should You Pay For Links?
Let’s not kid ourselves, Link Building is hard. Many times, when you do outreach, you’ll get rejected, ignored and a lot of the time you’ll get websites asking for money.
Should you pay up? It depends. You can still build links for free, but the landscape is shifting towards a pay to play environment.
If you are going to pay for links, you need to be sure they are relevant links and are actually worth it.
To do that, it requires skills, experience and expertise that you’d learn over a long period of doing this kind of work.
Here’s What You Should Do Instead
Leave it to the pros.
All of this is time consuming, difficult and labor intensive especially when it comes to building out full scale campaigns.
We all know that if you want visibility you need to build links.
So, take the next steps, contact us to get started!
