Best Link Building Strategies in 2020 for Your Business

Link building can be incredibly difficult if you are not an experienced marketer, but even search engine optimization (SEO) experts with years of experience can find it challenging to build quality links. If you struggle to build links that raise the bar of your business’s online presence, then this article is for you.

There are dozens of different ways to build links, but not all links that are built result in the same thing for websites. This means that despite great content and good metrics, the links that you build may not make that much difference to your current rankings.

Strategy vs. Tactics

When you are forming a strategy, this is an overall plan on how you are going to acquire links to your website and use this traction to convert into leads, sales, or traffic (or all three). However, link building tactics are slightly different. The tactic is how you intend to achieve the objective, in this case, the objective is to build links that improve your website’s metrics.

The one link building strategy that you need is to create content and web-pages that people want to link to. By creating content that is unique and offers the reader something new, you save yourself time and money by doing outreach as it will come naturally. It may sound like the same thing you have heard hundreds of times in the past, but it works. This doesn’t mean that you need to post 5,000-word articles about your subject matter and interactive guides, but content with a unique take will be enough.

Manual Outreach

Most marketing experts will tell you that manual outreach is one of the best ways to acquire links to your website. Outreach is when you contact people in your niche and introduce your content to them. You don’t always need content, sometimes a tool, brand or product is good enough to get links pointed to it.

Building quality content is sometimes enough to get you noticed by content creators who link to you, but they may not always be authority figures in your niche. By reaching out to people, you can filter which websites are most relevant in your niche and which websites you would most benefit from if they linked to you. The main thing to remember when building links, is that quality is much more important than quantity. One link from an authority site in your niche can be worth more than 10 unrelated low-quality links. This means that it is worth investing time in building relationships in your niche and creating quality links as a result.

Broken Link Building

There are more passive ways of building links, that don’t require you to create and submit new content. Broken link building works by finding relevant content that already has some authority in your niche. The next step is to find links within that content that is broken. You then ask the people linking to the dead (broken) link to link to your content instead, based on the fact that it is similar to the broken links.

This is arguably the most fruitful way to build links for one main reason — the content that is linking to you is likely to already have some page authority and will have been indexed. Getting a link from a page that already has authority means that the quality of the link is likely to be higher than some fresh content. There are many tools that will help you find broken links on content and you can contact the owners of these sites, requesting that the broken link gets replaced with your functional web-page. Due to the volume of SEOs looking to have broken links replaced with their own, it can be difficult finding these links on authority sites.

Unlinked Mentions

This is when a website will mention your business by name, but not link back to your website. Tools like Ahrefs content explorer will be able to find when your brand name has been mentioned, from there you can see which mentions are not linked. Once you find what mentions are not linked, you can contact the editor of the article or owner of the website and request that they link to you. This may seem like a long-shot, especially if you have a new business. But to run an analysis of unlinked brand mentions can take less than an hour, along with contacting website owners. You may be surprised how many mentions you have received and to save time, you can filter out low-authority and spam sites.

Guest Blogging

Seen as one of the longest-standing methods of building links, guest blogging has been used for years. The concept of guest blogging is when you write content for another website and submit it, with a link back to your own website. In the past, many website owners would be happy to take on content from third-party content creators, nowadays not so much. As more people become aware of the influence that link building has on their website traffic, guest blogging has become quite saturated. The hard part about the guest blogging process is not creating the content itself, it is finding people that will let you post it on their site.

The trick to finding websites that allow guest blogging is to search: “write for us”. By searching this on Google, you will find a list of websites that welcome guest content. You can then reach out to them and find out what type of content they are looking for. Many of these bloggers that will appear in your Google search will have a “write for us” page, that allows content creators to submit their content to these sites.

Why Buying Links is a Bad Idea

Buying links may seem like a good idea, they are often inexpensive and a quick solution. However, cutting corners always has its downsides. Buying powerful links can be very expensive, with the average cost of buying a link being $352.92. If you are in a competitive niche, you could need many links to make a difference to your rankings. Considering that you will be spending around $350 on each authority link, this could be a campaign that you don’t profit from. You do have the ability to purchase cheaper links, often from private blog networks (PBNs), but these make little to no difference to keyword rankings and bring their own set of problems.

Not only is buying links expensive, but it can be risky in terms of rankings. If you are buying links that Google sees as unnatural, it could result in you receiving a manual action, which could set your rankings back months.

Link building isn’t a complex practice, but it is never easy. With high-quality, unique content and these tactics in mind, link building is more straight forward than you may think and it becomes an easier activity. Each site is different and depending on what content you are trying to build links to, each approach to link building will yield different results. If link building is something that you can’t get your head around, then maybe look into hiring a firm that covers global SEO agency services.