Links still remain as one of the most important search ranking factors.
That’s why many businesses are heavily investing in this side of SEO. Not only that it boosts the website’s potential to dominate search, but the ability of link building to get brands in front of thousands of targeted audience through content distribution.
The question still holds, “How to get quality backlinks in this day and age?”.
Well, with a few vital principles, you can make your SEO team a robust department that pushes your website to dominate for target keywords while enhancing your brand presence from a relevance and authority standpoint.
So, here are some link building tips to build your brand in your industry
Think About Branding, Not Just Link Building
Best agencies offering link building services would know exactly what links are for.
Backlinks for search rankings — but, that’s not the only end goal. Many factors come into play when you execute a link building campaign that significantly affects your website’s branding standpoint.
When you think branding, you’re not just aiming for a one-time shot backlink from a DR80+ website. But you’re actually checking the website’s quality in terms of its audience targeting, affinity category, industry competition, content depth, and other vital considerations to help you assess whether a website is worth getting a backlink or not.
You pursue websites to help your brand increase potential customers. This would come from people who read, consume and learn from your distributed content.
And when this content is comprehensive enough to serve your target website’s users, you rest assured to have referral traffic coming to your website. That’s branding in practical.
Invest In Evergreen Content Assets
Thousands of companies invest in content marketing. So to stand out for your given topic, you’ll have to know what makes your content irresistible and different.
One type of format that we invest in for our clients is evergreen.
Evergreen content assets have a lot more benefits than other styles and formats of content. To name a few, here are some of its advantages:
- It continuously attracts new visitors from search and other viable sources (as the topic remains relevant for a long time).
- It acquires natural backlinks from publications, curators, and content creators (most evergreen content is comprehensive enough and perceived as a good reference for industry readers).
- It establishes the brand’s authority (having a long-form style, with helpful information, it is seen as a product crafted by industry practitioners and experts).
If you invest in evergreen content assets, you get long-term benefits of search rankings, lead generation, and a strong brand presence in your space.
Invest In Key Relationships With Industry Publishers
Quality is more important than quantity. If you invest in quality relationships, you get a higher number of backlinks in the long run.
One of the biggest mistakes SEOs make is pursuing thousands of website owners with the hopes of getting 50 or 100 links down the road.
While that’s not impossible, if you’re doing that regularly, your team will likely go burnout, or you won’t have a repetitive process to deliver backlinks for your website.
The key here is to invest in key relationships and focus on the quality of links, not just quantity.
Take a look at your business. If you’re an in-house SEO, ask your managers or executives if they know part of their networks that happens to have a blog, owns online businesses, and other web properties.
Make a list of all these people with their respective websites. You can also add any new contacts you gathered from your own link discovery, such as local and regional publications and content creators.
Then with your pitch, you don’t simply send any generic emails, but with a substantial value that will lead to long-term relationships.
You should aim to build instant connection, so the publication would be receptive enough to offer you regular content contribution. This way, you can submit new articles and publish them on their blog, resulting in multiple authoritative backlinks.
Pitch With A Value Proposition
If you’ve been in the digital marketing industry for a while, you probably received unsolicited emails from bloggers and webmasters.
No value whatsoever, only with the hopes of getting a single backlink from your website.
This kind of activity is scalable but doesn’t add any value to the business they’re pitching to.
In today’s age, where many things are crying to get someone’s attention, making your pitch as irresistible and unique as possible is very important.
The reason being is that you want your email outreach campaign to get higher open, click, and link placement rates — all these are possible if you provide a unique value proposition.
Unique value proposition is different from one business to another, from one industry to another market, and from what your brand can offer against your competitors.
Here are some unique offers you can provide in your email pitch:
- Topics for content that’s possible to rank for keywords they haven’t targeted yet.
- Content partnership — where your content team and the other party’s content representative will team up to create a more comprehensive topic than other similar competing pages.
- Short-term (3 to 6 months) premium access to your software product that they can use as an individual (or business-wise).
- Visual data that’s interesting enough to be covered by local and regional journalists.
- Update their old existing content to make it fresh and more enjoyable to read by their blog readers.
- Offer free testimonials for their services or products without the need to ask for free access to their tool.
You just have it — a few simple, unique value proposition offers that will make your email stand among the rest of the pitches.
Check Backlink Quality When Prospecting Websites.
Gone are the days when you can simply reach out to any website, get backlinks, and dominate your target keywords quickly.
There is a must of backlink check nowadays. That is basically knowing your set metrics and using them as benchmarks when checking for potential websites to get backlinks from.
Together with your SEO team, identify your core set metrics.
These metrics include topical relevance — as to the extent of your brand in terms of topical reach. For example, would it go too far from your blog’s theme, or would it be okay to consider shoulder markets if they have existing articles related to your website?
Another thing to consider in terms of backlink metrics is the website’s authority signals. Third-party link analysis tools like Ahrefs could easily measure this. You can quickly check using the tool the domain rating of a particular website.
You may also check other factors like traffic drops — to see if a website has been hit by penalties and couldn’t recover from its fall.
Different link building companies and SEO teams within organizations have different sets of rules regarding backlink qualification. The key is to set this up initially before you proceed to discover backlink prospects for your website.
Focus On Continuity, Not A One-time Off Campaign.
I’ve talked to some entrepreneurs saying that link building is a one-time activity. They mean that once a certain number of links has been hit for a specific campaign, their team or an online business should suddenly stop building links.
That is a loophole and the main reason why their competitors dominate the search game, while those mentioned reluctant business owners get left behind.
The key to ongoing SEO success is to think long-term, not short-term.
Link building should be perceived and executed as an ongoing activity. It doesn’t stop until you dominate the top search results for your target keywords. And even if that happens, that are untapped fresh keywords Google and other search engines are receiving from users.
Build an SEO or link building team that’s powerful enough to build high-quality backlinks with a long-term impact on your online business.
You can start by educating your SEO team with the best practices of link prospecting, link qualification, content creation, and outreach. Or you may opt to hire outside team members such as content writers and virtual assistants for contact finding and email pitches.
This way, you’re putting yourself in a mindset of executing link building as a long-term plan, where you need enough resources to get results from your work continuously.
Conclusion
Change your mindset when it comes to link building. Your behavior and results will vary depending on how you think link building. Know that when you build backlinks for your website, it portrays what your brand is about — its relevance, authority, and valuable contribution to the industry.
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