Creating high-quality content is arguably one of the most beneficial things you can do for your website and its users. While it is not easy, it can strengthen the brand value of your business and improve traffic and conversions. However, none of this matters if your content is not visible to your target audience.
That is what a lot of businesses fail to understand. Good content on your website is only half a battle won. You need to make sure that the content you produce reaches the audience and is visible to your users. Fortunately, there is a fairly simple way you can do that – Link Building.
It helps boost content visibility via other websites and in the search results. However, in order to obtain free/valid links to your website, you will need to follow specific guidelines and methods to ensure you are doing things the right way.
That is where professional content marketers can lend their expertise.
There are over 200 million active websites and many more registered domains in the world, and the majority of these websites present a unique brand and value for their audience and in their market. To compete, you need to find ways to get out there. The more website URL mentions you receive from other websites, the better your search results will become.
Backlinks are important to more than just Google. Other search engines follow suit. So, by focusing on building your backlinks, you’ll be appealing to not just Google, but also Bing and other popular search engines to help you grab results from those as well.
In this post, we’ll go through how to produce and exploit linkable assets, how to find relevant linking opportunities, how to connect with site owners in a way that entices them to link to your content, and what to do once you’ve acquired those precious backlinks.
Table of Contents
#1 Understand Your Audience
In order to boost traffic to your website, you must first understand two things: 1) who your current audience is and 2) what your ideal audience looks like.
Conduct some research to learn more about your target audience. This will not only help you understand them better, but it will also allow you to evaluate who your target audience is and whether or not you are already reaching them. The information you capture will assist you in retaining and expanding your current audience, as well as reaching new audiences who are interested in what you have to offer. It will also help you target websites for backlinks that are more relevant to your audience.
Let’s understand this better with an example. A company began with a primarily web developer-focused audience. However, they wanted to widen their audience to include a broader range of WordPress users (while keeping our initial audience). As a result, they tailored their material to a broader audience. But that is not enough to reach their audience. They required links from other websites where these WordPress users could be located.
Armed with this info and an understanding of their new audience segment, they began targeting websites frequently visited by marketing agency owners and decision makers, bloggers, and others who would be interested in WordPress from a less technical perspective. Grabbing these links sends signals to search engines about this new audience segment so they can serve up your content to a wider audience.
Simply put, you can only get quality links if you understand and know your audience. So, your first step should be to learn more about your target audience.
#2 Find Trusted & Valuable Sites for Links
When you’ve determined who your target audience is, it’s time to compile a list of websites that can assist you in reaching them. Look for websites that already have a following from your target demographic. Links from these websites can help you contact people who are interested in your website but are unaware of it.
It is important to note that you do not want a link from every website. A link from a spammy website or a website that has nothing to do with your topic is worthless. It can even backfire and harm your rankings in some circumstances. You can use an SEO tool like SEMrush to analyze your backlink strategy and avoid/remove toxic or spammy backlinks.
Avoid spamming websites, paying for links, and other link-building NO-NOs. A link building strategy isn’t a gimmick. Obtaining these links should appear to be a routine marketing activity and part of a comprehensive SEO strategy.
Let’s break this down a little.
Relevance: The links you build must be relevant both in terms of your target audience and the context of the landing page or blog.
Value: The page or content from which you want to gain a link should possess authority. In other words, it should have traffic and provide value to an audience.
Trust: Look at the backlinking neighborhood of the website you’re contacting for trust and authority. In case there is link spamming or the content on their website has low quality, you should generally avoid that website.
Use Tools: Marketing professionals recommend looking at indicators like domain rating and domain authority using SEO tools by Moz, SEMrush, SEO PowerSuite, and Ahrefs, just to name a few. Also, use Majestic’s Trust Flow and Citation Flow.
With that said, do not focus too much on domain authority. While these third-party metrics are important for gaining a basic notion of the kind of sites to reach out to, they are not used by Google, and relying on them too much can result in missed opportunities.
#3 Create Unique & Quality Content
If you are constructing links for your website, a lot of website owners you reach out to may check your website for quality content. Basically, they do not want to link to a low-quality website. They do not want to compromise their linking profile. So, if you want to persuade them, make sure you’ve published quality content on your website or blog.
Before building the backlinks for your website, you must ensure that you have published the best quality content. Your posts should be well-structured and well-written. Be sure to fully cover a topic, and craft content that adds tons of value for readers.
If you provide high-quality information on your website, users will be more likely to share the links with their connections. However, if you exclusively produce low-quality content, you’ll hear (or read) crickets when you send out that link building correspondence.
#4 Get Creative With Your Outreach
You should keep in mind that every phase of the link-building process involves people. When you’re developing content, keep your target audience in mind.
Sending genuine, individualized outreach can make your emails more memorable and boost your chances of forming a mutually beneficial relationship with another site. To make this conceivable, you must tackle it by connecting with site owners outside of email, social media, or direct phone contact – in addition to those mediums. Focus on building real relationships, and the links will roll in organically.
You must persuade the site owners of the benefits of connecting to your material for themselves and their readers. That is why useful, audience-focused content is so important since if you aren’t providing unique content, you aren’t truly forging that relationship. For this, you need to define a dedicated email outreach strategy.
#5 Track Your Link Status
Once you’ve obtained a link, send a thank-you email to the site’s owner. If you accomplish this, you will be able to strengthen the relationship between your brand and theirs.
After creating a link, you should maintain track of it so you can check the progress on a regular basis. If your link is no longer on the page, it is perfectly fine to contact the site owners. Finding out why your link was removed may enable you to reclaim it or warn you that it is time to change your content strategy a little.
Do not forget to pay attention to the internal linking of the page that received the backlink. Because the product or promotional pages are unlikely to receive many backlinks. As such, internally linking those conversion-based pages to pages with a larger backlink profile will assist you in funneling link equity to them.
In a Nutshell
One of the most important factors in search engine results is the link profile of your website. Remember that Google is more concerned with the user experience you provide than with the number of links pointing to your pages.
Be smart and strategic when it comes to blogging, social media marketing, search engine optimization, and any other link-building techniques you employ. The real challenge for you is not link building, but rather earning quality, trusted, and natural links. That’s because it’s no longer about the quantity of links—it’s the quality.
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Hi Anthony,
What a great article! I recently wrote a blog post about the benefits of link building, and how it is an important part of SEO., To be honest, I learned a lot from your resources and blog posts. I really appreciate you sharing amazing information about link building. This post cleared my doubts and gave me so many insights to improve my process, and I just want to thank you for educating me. Looking forward to reading more of your work.
So happy you were able to take a lot of value from the content here. Link building is such an important and effective tool, and if executed properly, it can really help catapult your site to the top of focused search results. Thanks for reading!