Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links.
If you want your web page content to rank well on the search engines, your content needs to be relevant to the search query and it needs to have links pointing to the content.
The more high-quality links you have pointing to your web content, the more likely your content is to rank on the search engines.
Anybody doing SEO in the current era struggles to get high-quality links at scale.
Unless site owners are entering an emerging market, links from powerful sites are needed to rank well in the market.
In this guide, we share methods that you can use to secure the high-quality links that you need for your website to succeed in SEO.
In this guide, you will learn:
- How to have the right targeting tactic
- What you need to prepare prior to launching your link building campaign.
- What you need to offer.
- How to demonstrate value.
- Securing the link.
Plan for success
The success of your link building efforts starts with the strategy, tactics, and planning that you will implement to get links to your web content.
Many people that implement link building pitch content that is already published on the website to webmasters. Or they create content that they think is good, and hope that people will link to it.
Instead, you want to validate in advance the content that people will link to and also validate that there are enough websites that would be willing to link to the content.
My rule of thumb is to validate that there are at least 200 websites that have already linked out to similar content.
I will typically aim to secure a minimum of 10 links, which gives me a 5% conversion rate.
Because we want to focus on getting links from high-quality sites, we need to adjust our tactics so that we find and qualify the high-authority sites that we want to go after.
To implement a successful link building campaign, you want to invest your time and resources so that you will secure links and positively impact the SEO results for your SEO campaign.
Identify your target audience
If you want to make link building easier, remember this.
Share content with people or publications that are willing to publish links.
Don’t focus your energy on trying to convince people to publish your link.
Focus your energy on providing link sharers with links to content that they will want to share.
Ask yourself, “Who is hungry for the content that you are publishing?”
This will concentrate your link building efforts and resources on a target audience that is actively sharing links on the web pages that they have access to.
This will also increase your chances to secure links.
Who are the link sharers that you should target?
Journalists
Journalists that publish in media publications are always looking for information sources to add facts to their stories. Credible journalists will always conduct “fact checks” to validate their information source.
If your story and information source provide value to the journalist, they will cite you and publish your link in their published piece.
The conversion rate can be high with the right story angles, information, and pitching techniques.
What steps should you take for this approach?
Seek new journalist relationships on HARO
You can subscribe to Helpareporterout.com, which is an email service that will send you call out requests from journalists seeking inputs for the stories that they are working on.
Because many of the journalists are working to strict timelines, they need quick responses and they are more likely to include your story pitch.
It is also a great way to develop your journalist database, which will allow you to reach out to those journalists again. Especially if they work across several web publications.
Seek new journalist requests on Sourcebottle
Sourcebottle works similarly to HARO. You can receive notifications via email for story requests from journalists.
It is also a great way to develop your journalist database, which will allow you to reach out to those journalists again. Especially if they work across several web publications.
Search for callouts on Twitter
You can search for callouts on Twitter using search operators and keywords in your niche.
You can contact the journalist directly and even build your journalist database.
You can use the following search operators to find opportunities.
#journorequest
#PRrequest, #BloggerRequest, and #journorequest
“Looking for contributors”
#bloggerswanted
#bloggersrequired
“Piece I’m writing”
“Looking for”
“Need an expert comment”
“Tell us your story”
“Looking for news stories”
“Like to feature”
“Press plug”
“Feature on”
“Story to share”
“Feature in a” +magazine
“Guest for” podcast
“Story to tell”
“Looking to interview”
“Source request”
@journo_request
“writing a piece for”
#journalists
Build your own database of industry journalists and web publishers.
You want to build your own list of journalists and contributors that you can reach out to and help with their stories or publications.
When you pitch them, you want to make sure that you are providing them with the benefits that they are after, which is to tell their story. You will need to link your information source to the story that they want to publish.
Note: Always validate that the journalist has a history of linking out to websites and citing their source before engaging with them.
Additionally, journalists are always looking for stories to share with their audience.
Check their content to see if they are known to link out.
What type of content should you pitch to journalists?
Journalists want to have a credible source for the information that they plan to share in their story. You simply need to share a published information source with them.
You can pitch the following types of content to journalists.
- Transformation stories
- Case studies
- Contrasting Opinions and points of view
- Experts methodologies
- Gifts
- Products for review
- Interview
- Pictures/Images
- Quote
- Authorship
- Information source (Links)
- Expert commentary
- Statistics
- Reports
- Expert page
You can conduct research in advance by doing a keyword search in your industry and looking for published content where journalists have shared external links.
Content curators
Content curators are publishers that find content that’s already been published and share it with their audience on the web. You will typically find the content is in the form of roundups, reviews or newsletters.
You want to find these authors or editors and then reach out to them to pitch your content.
You want to make sure that these content curators definitely link out to web pages.
You also want to see if they publish on more than one platform; or even regularly on the same platform.
How can you find these content curators?
You can use the following search footprints to find content curators in your niche.
Search operators
Intitle:(publishing type) + (target keyword)
Inurl:(publishing type) + (target keyword)
- Roundup
- Link roundup
- Link carnival
- Link party
- Best of articles
- Top
- Product Reviews
- Best articles
- Best “keyword”
- Latest “keyword”
- Guide “keyword”
- Link roundup
- Expert tips
- Expert tips
- Expert roundup
- Quotes from experts
- Webinar/Seminar archives
- Lists
Case studies
People love to share case studies. You can incorporate case studies into your campaign and validate that people in your niche or industry are willing to share insights from your case study.
You will need to have insights or data that you can share.
You can share case studies that share the following stories.
Before and after
What was the situation?
What actions were implemented?
What was the result?
Insights into facts or statistics
Share facts, quotes, expert insights and statistics to validate and give context to the content that you are presenting.
Success story
Share your story of growth and development, and how a goal was achieved.
Learnings from failures or setbacks
If something didn’t work, share the reasons why you think it didn’t work.
Case study list [3]
Statistics
If you have the resources to conduct studies and research, you can publish a set of validated statistics as a web page on your website.
You can choose to get primary or utilise secondary data and attribute the sources.
You can make the content “Easy to consume” for your target market.
You will need to do a keyword search for “statistics” or “stats” or “facts” with related keywords in your industry.
You can collect a list of websites and validate that the web pages all have links going to them.
You can then pitch those linking sites once you have published the statistics on the web page.
You can even opt to visually display your data in the form of an infographic.
Testimonials
If your web business is using products or services, collect a list of all of the suppliers and check their testimonials and reviews sections on their websites.
You may find that they publish links in the form of testimonials, client portfolios, work that they’ve done, case studies or more.
This can get you a link from an authoritative page on their website.
Note: The relevancy of the page may vary. The positive is that regardless of the relevancy, you will still obtain a link that will pass PageRank to your website. So it will still be seen as a positive vote for your website by the search engines.
Students
There are millions of students learning everyday in different academic institutions. All students are faced with the task of sourcing and citing information sources in their work.
The great thing about this market is that there are so many fragments of the market that you can target.
- Different markets will have different scales and authority.
- Elementary school students
- Middle school students
- Senior students
- College students
- Undergraduate university students
- Post-graduate students
- Students undertaking private studies
Almost all students will be required to share their published work online.
To leverage this, you simply need to give students what they want and need, so they can successfully reference your website in the work that they publish.
Students typically need to cite information sources either from primary or secondary data. They will typically look for:
- Quote sources
- Published reference in a web page, blog, magazine or book source
- Studies
- Abstracts
- Journals
- Statistics
- Facts
- Data pools
- Interviews
Data publishers
There are organisations that dedicate their resources to providing information and data for certain industries and economies. You can help these organisations by publishing data from information sources.
Typically, you will need a sample data size of 1000 people. You can then collect the data and share the insight with the organisations.
Some of these organisations include:
- Nielsen.com
- Bureau of statistics
- Hoovers.com
- BBB.org
- Wikipedia (You can check at the page level to see who links to the information on that page. )
- Hhs.gov
- https://www.statista.com
- https://www.change.org/l/au
You can easily do a search on using the following search operators.(using intitle or inurl)
- Statistics
- Stats
- Facts
- Fact check
- Data
What types of data are useful?
You can collect data and statistics based on the following.
- Price index (How pricing has changed over time/inflation)
- Wages and salary index (Average pay over time)
- Market performance (growth, demographics, import, export)
- Government involvement (Economic growth per industry, reform impact by industry, grants, recognition)
- Health (injury, causes of death, mental health, sickness, impact on health conditions)
- Turnover (Amount of sales, returns, manufacturing, fulfillment)
- Technology & innovation (job creation, efficiency, productivity, disappearing jobs)
- Utilisation of hours (Recreation, employment, unemployment, productivity)
- Environmental impact (increase or reduction in waste, health, displacement, productivity, wellness)
- Gender comparisons (male, female, LGBTi)
- Social trends (health conscious, lifestyle changes, cultural changes)
- Historical snapshots (Data now vs data 10/20/50 years ago)
- Consumption habits (purchases, food, drinks, tourism)
- Wellness (health and fitness habits)
- Indigenous communities
- Crime & Justice (Domestic violence, drugs, security, rehabilitation)
- Education (Schools, workforce)
[4]
Web publishers
This refers to those people or organisations that are committed to publishing content regularly.
These content creators are usually:
- Bloggers
- Editors
- Curators
- Online magazines
- Online journals
- Information sites
- Wiki sites
- User-generated content websites
You can use search footprints to find the types of content they are sourcing for their publication.
- Write for us
- Contribute
- Become a contributor
- Guest post
- Guest blogger
- Guest post guidelines
- Contributor guidelines
- Submission guidelines
- Submit post
- Work with us
- About the author
- Author bio
- Author profile
- Updated
Broken link building
Broken link building can be a great way to secure relevant and authoritative links in your industry.
However, the success will greatly depend on the value that your web page content provides to the page that has the broken link.
You will simply pitch for the link to your content to replace the broken link that is on the web page.
How you can find broken link opportunities.
You will need to run crawls on websites to find links to broken URLs.
You ideally want to find relevant websites or web businesses that are no longer live.
What types of sites will you need to research to find these opportunities?
- Links pages
- Roundup sites
- Curation sites
- Major directories
- Sites that are no longer in business
- Expired domains
You can simply run these in a tool like Ahrefs to find links to broken urls and see if you can pitch content from your site to replace the broken link.
Search footprints you can use to find sites that are no longer in business include:
- “service not available”
- “page no longer exists”
- “this website is no longer updated”
- “this page is no longer updated”
- “no longer available”
- “website closed”
- “service no longer available”
What do you need to do before pitching them?
Make sure that the content that you want to pitch them is exactly what they want to share.
Keep the email simple. Tell them the problem (broken url) and offer a replacement to something better.
Track your results
Aim for a conversion rate of 2% or higher so you can get impactful links.
Get your content right so you can pitch for links easily.
Before you start pitching for links, you need to make sure that your website provides an “Irresistible offer” to the target market.
This refers to:
- The product
- The aesthetics
- The features and benefits
- The story
- Incentives and offers
- Valuable information
You want to maximise the conversions by making sure that all of these boxes are ticked.
You also want to include triggers that will prompt visitors to share the content.
Success starts with having something valuable to share.
It can be the difference between getting 1 link or 100 links. And 1 piece of shareable content can change the outcome of your site’s SEO performance over the long-term.
If you publish mediocre content, expect to get mediocre results.
Pitching something that is mediocre will make it difficult to acquire links.
Product
The product that the site offers needs to appeal to a specific niche market and it must also be scalable to promote in that market.
The product must offer features and benefits that are clear to the target market.
Additionally, there must be a strong interest from the market to engage with that product. If not, the product offering needs to be optimised and refined until the product has “raving fans”.
What are some of the ways to improve the product’s appeal?
- Convenience
- Cosmetic appeal
- Micro-niche appeal
- Aligning with consumer trends
- Improve based on user feedback
- Saves time
- Provides a solution to their problem
- Stops their frustration or agitation
- Automates a process
Aesthetics
Below are a few ways you can improve the engagement through the aesthetics on your web page.
- Web page template
- Use of high-quality and engaging images
- Use of videos
- Use of GIFs
- Use of lists
- Use of tables
- Use of headings
- Use of table of contents
- Use of call-out boxes
- Section splitting (E.g. with colours)
- Use of quotes
- Testimonials and reviews
- Typography
- Line and paragraph spacing
Identify the features and benefits, then state the on your website.
You want to show the strong features and benefits of the product that you are offering and present it on your website.
What are some appealing features?
- Design
- Long-lasting
- Return on investment
- Tax deductible
- No fees
- Free bonus
- Discount
- Guarantee/Warranty
What are some appealing benefits?
- Solves a problem
- Creates interest
- Creates engagement
- Lifestyle
- Health
- Victory
- Risk-free
- Save money
- Receive a bonus or gift
[5]
Sell the story.
If you want to create interest, you need to have a story. So you need to create a narrative that will get your target audience interested in the offering on your website.
Identify the types of stories that your audience tend to engage with.
See how you can align a story narrative with the type of story that they would like to engage with.
Then share the story with the audience. Continue to refine the story until it becomes irresistible and attracts advocates in that market to share your story online, which will result in links from word of mouth promotions.
Provide incentives or compelling offers.
You need to prompt the visitor to your content to act, so they will share your content. This means you need to incentivise them and tell them the actions that they need to do.
Incentives can be as simple as:
- Share this with friends that might find this helpful.
- Add this to your bookmarks or favourites
- Share this on social media (Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc)
- Tag a friend
Share valuable information.
The most important thing is that the content that you share is valuable to the target audience. The content must appeal to their motives, wants, needs, and desires. It should also be tied to a sense of urgency to get them to act on their impulse. You can do this by alerting them to:
- Financial costs or impacts
- Sense of loss
- Time impact
- Health impact
Ask yourself if the reader is “sold” after they have finished reading the content.
Find scalable opportunities
The success that you will have with this tactic depends on the scalability. You want to find as many links as possible that link to the content.
You ideally want to find a minimum of 200 pitching opportunities and aim for a 1-5% conversion rate.
This will allow you to secure 2-10 links, which may be enough to impact the SEO rankings for your website.
Monitor the impact on your site’s rankings and web traffic. Then scale up if you want to see more impactful results.
Fail faster.
Acquiring high-quality links is a numbers game. The more you pitch, the more opportunities you can secure. You need to know your conversion statistics and get through the people that don’t want what you have to offer as quickly as possible.
What are some of the challenges that you will need to overcome?
Relevancy
The only way you will have a chance of getting the site to link to your content is if they relate or feel like the content is relevant to their audience. You need to take the guesswork out of this as quickly as possible by identifying a group of sites that are prepared to link to the content.
You should ideally identify a minimum of 200 prospects prior to creating the content, so you will have the scalability to acquire 10 links, if you have a 5% conversion rate.
Don’t make the mistake of creating the content first and then trying to sell or pitch it to an audience.
Find the demand for the content, and then give it to the audience once the content has been published.
Commercialism
One of the biggest things that deters people from linking out is the fact that the site that they will be linking to will gain a commercial benefit.
There isn’t really a way to get around it. People that have no intention to link out to any commercial website will not be persuaded to do so, even if they find the content valuable.
So it is in your interest to identify and qualify those sites that are likely to link out to your content, regardless of the commercial aspect.
In the end, it will be a numbers game. So you want to focus on pitching and qualifying as many prospects as possible quickly, so you can identify those sites that have no intention of linking out to you.
You can then focus on getting links from those sites that have every intention to share and link to the content that you have published on your website.
Let us know how you go with securing high-quality backlinks.
Thanks for reading.
Resources
- Google’s Webmaster Guidelines on Link Schemes
- Google’s Webmaster Guidelines
- Ninja Outreach Case Studies
- Australian Bureau of Statistics
- Richard Bayan – Words That Sell
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