Let’s say you want to up your link-building game, but you don’t have the time or willpower to draft up a full guest post for each link.
Inserting niche edits into an existing piece of content is a much faster and simpler method for building links.
Though you won’t get the same authority boost that comes with writing good guest posts, you’ll be able to save huge amounts of time and get more link juice and traffic for less effort.
This article is all about the specifics of making niche edits. For more info on why Google loves its backlinks in general, read our full guide on backlinks for SEO.
Niche edits offer a fast, cost-effective way to acquire backlinks without extensive content creation.
They allow you to leverage the established authority and traffic of reputable sites for immediate SEO benefits, which is ideal if you’re not yet an expert in your field.
Effective outreach is crucial for successful niche edits, requiring targeted prospect identification, personalized messages, and clearly articulated value-add.
Niche editing is a link-building strategy that involves inserting links to your website into pieces of already-written and published content. Niche edits are also known as contextual backlinks or link insertions—and it’s pretty easy to see why.
If executed the right way, niche edits will provide link-juice and traffic benefits for you, and overall value benefits for the collaborating website and its readers.
Now, let’s be clear right from the start. Niche edits are not:
Guest posts, which involve inserting links into an authoritative article you write yourself, to be posted by a collaborating website;
HARO link building, where journalists link to your website as a source for their research;
Buying backlinks, which is exactly what it sounds like: paying a company to build backlinks for you.
Generally speaking, niche edits are more of a “one-and-done” link building strategy, with less relationship-building involved than for, say, guest posts. The introverts reading this may be cheering internally—but be warned. The open-and-shut nature of niche editing comes at a cost: Niche edits are not the best for conveying authority. If you want to really position yourself as an expert on a given topic, niche edits pale in comparison to guest posts.
We’ll get more into this below, but that’s why you want to be very particular about when to use niche edits vs. guest posting or other link-building methods.
Broken link building is the process of finding inactive links on other websites that lead to error pages, and suavely inserting your own links instead. After all, who could say no to that?
At Profit Engine, we like to think of broken link building as a subset of niche edits. It’s not always the most effective niche edit strategy, but it’s up there for sure, and we’ll cover it in more depth below.
Here are some scenarios where niche edits really shine above other forms of link building.
If you need to build as many links as possible in as little time as possible, niche edits are the way to go.
Let’s say you set some goals for how many backlinks you want to have by the end of the month, and you’re nearing that deadline with little to show for it. Or maybe something unexpected came up, taking your time and focus away from link building and onto some other pressing concern.
In these scenarios, niche editing fits the bill perfectly. In fact, the outreach process (which we discuss more below) is actually the most time-consuming part of the whole thing—once you have an interested collaborator, you just insert your link and then you’re done.
And because “time is money,” niche edits drastically reduce your costs per link acquired. You won’t need to spend any substantial amount of time drafting up full content pieces for each link, like you would with guest posting.
Niche edits allow you to leverage existing authority and increase your credibility if you’re not quite an expert in your field yet.
Imagine you just started a fintech blog. Even if you really do know what you’re talking about, no one online is going to believe you if you have less than 10 posts and barely any regular readers. But if you can grab a few niche edits from a veteran blogger in a related industry, your credibility will instantly go up. Readers already trust that blogger—and if that blogger thinks your stuff is worth reading, the readers will think the same.
Now, you might be wondering why we’re not recommending guest posts here. If you want to build authority in your field, aren’t guest posts the best way to do that?
Guest posts are the best way to build authoritative links—but you need some authority to start with. It’s highly unlikely that an industry expert with a large following is going to allow you to publish a full guest post on their website without at least some proof that you know what you’re talking about.
This is why niche edits work much better for building authority from the ground up, when you don’t have any yet.
This is sort of a continuation of the last point—but niche edits are a perfect link-building strategy if you’re in an ultra-competitive niche.
Even if you’ve built up some authority in your field, you’re going to find it difficult to land guest posts if you’re competing with tons of others who have even more authority. If this is you, consider shifting your link-building focus to niche edits rather than guest posts. You’ll find you start to get more responses from potential collaborators, as your “ask” is much simpler and takes less time to grant.
Finally, niche edits are an excellent way to quickly fix out-of-date articles that cover constantly changing topics.
As an example, let’s say one of your favorite bloggers has a piece from a few years ago in which they mention Twitter and its main owner at the time, Jack Dorsey. If your blog just released a piece on how Elon Musk bought Twitter and renamed it to X, you can reach out to that blog, subtly rewrite a few sentences, and insert your link.
In a way, this is similar to broken link building, as you’re finding faults with the content on authoritative blogs, and positioning your own backlinks as the solutions to those faults. Website owners will have a hard time saying no!
(As a side note, if Elon sells X in a few years and we haven’t updated this article, please reach out to us with a request for a niche edit.)
Let’s go over some niche edit best practices. The pointers below will help drive more traffic over to your site from your niche edit links, and make your collaborators more likely to continue working with you on an ongoing basis.
Focus on relevance over reach. Given a choice between an ultra-popular website with no relevance to yours and a moderately popular website that is highly relevant, you should choose the second every time. This doesn’t mean the website has to be in the same industry or niche as yours—but your content has to be useful and make sense to its readers. If not, your backlinks (if you can even land them) will be unproductive at best.
Fix broken links. Broken link building is a very efficient niche edit strategy, as you’ll be solving an undeniable problem for the collaborating website: links that lead nowhere. We recommend using tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Dead Link Checker to find broken links, and then reaching out to the website owners via email. If you want an even more efficient solution, consider a full-on link building service that handles all the work for you.
Add context when needed. Remember our example above with Twitter? In that scenario, you couldn’t just plop in your link and be done with it—you’d need to strategically rewrite the bit of copy around the link to provide the updated info. You’ll find this is needed in many other niche edit scenarios, and you should lean into it as much as you can. Readers don’t like random links, so use proper anchor text and rewrite certain sentences to add any needed context.
Add value. At the end of the day, there’s only one reason why a website owner will say yes to your niche edit request: it provides value to them. If you take none of the other advice in this guide, take this advice. In order to land as many niche edits as possible, and in order to actually drive traffic to your website through them, you have to provide real value to the collaborating website and its readers. If you can do this consistently, you’ll have more niche edit opportunities than you can count.
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Don’t overload the page with links. If you find a perfect piece of content for a niche edit, don’t put links everywhere you possibly can. Choose one, two, or maybe three key spots in the article where your links can be the most helpful and relevant, and leave it at that.
Don’t include links to obscure pages of your site. Put yourself in the reader’s shoes, and imagine you clicked a niche edit link that leads to your website. What would you like to see? Probably a page that actually contains the info you were expecting from the link’s placement and anchor text, as well as some sort of call to action (“Become a subscriber,” “Buy the product here,” and so on). You definitely would not want an obscure page that leaves you confused and wanting to click away due to boredom.
Don’t work with sketchy link-building agencies. Since niche edits are so quick and easy compared to long-game strategies like guest posting, SEO agencies often tout their ability to build you a massive number of niche edits very quickly and very cheaply. This isn’t always a red flag, but it can be. On the other hand, our team at Profit Engine knows how to build quality niche edits that won’t get you penalized by Google.
For a full, detailed guide on the dos and don’ts of link-building outreach, read our full link building outreach guide.
For our purposes here, we’ll go over some basic things to keep in mind when reaching out specifically for niche edit opportunities.
Here’s a basic three-step process for finding ideal niche edit prospects:
Use SEO Tools: Like we mentioned earlier, tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Moz are great for finding websites in your niche and with high domain authority.
Check Relevance: Once you’ve narrowed down a shortlist, double-check that your content would make sense and actually provide value for the target site’s readers.
Evaluate Content: Look for specific content pieces that are crying out for links to additional resources (that you can provide). Also look for broken links.
If you don’t want to do any of these steps, there are reputable link-building agencies out there that would be more than happy to do all of this grunt work for you.
Once you’ve identified a concise list of your ideal prospects, it’s time to make contact.
Though it may feel like a relic from a past age, email is still the number one way to reach out to fellow businesses for collaborations. Start with a personalized email to your top candidate. Use their name and mention specific details about their site or content you genuinely appreciate.
Most importantly, clearly explain how your niche edit will add value to their content. At no point should the website owner be asking, “What do I gain from this?” You should make that abundantly clear from the start.
Also, as we mentioned in our article about guest posts, eliminate hidden costs for the website owner as much as possible. Below the main body of your email, outline your exact proposition for your niche edit. Explain where you want to insert the link, what the anchor text would be, and how you’d rewrite the surrounding content (if even necessary). The website owner should simply have to say, “Okay!” with no clarifying questions needed. You’ll find eliminating these hidden costs will greatly boost your response rate.
But if you don’t get any responses, follow up a few days later, and then a few days later after that. Don’t put undue amounts of pressure on the website owner. If they’re still not responding, just move on to the next prospect on your list.
And finally, if this all feels a little intimidating, consider outsourcing your link building efforts to experts who have been conducting outreach and getting results for their clients for years.
Building links with niche edits is not as big of an ordeal as doing so with guest posting. While this makes them less ideal for building authority, niche edits are perfect when you want to:
Build links quickly and cost-effectively;
Start slowly building authority from the ground up;
Target highly competitive niches;
Update cutting-edge topics with new information.
Our team at Profit Engine would love to get started building links for you ASAP. In fact, we have an entire page dedicated to niche edits and how we go about building them.
And by the way, strategy meetings are totally free—what do you have to lose?
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