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If you’ve been in the online marketing space for a while, you’ve likely come across the term ‘link roundup’ or something similar. Over the years, bloggers and SEOs have been using roundups to build relationships with others in their niche, acquire backlinks and build authority by curating their industry’s best content.
At Profit Engine, we rarely use this technique for our own or our clients’ SEO strategies. However, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad way to build links. We just find it a bit clichéd while it also requires quite a bit of effort to get good links using this method nowadays.
In this quick guide, I will be explaining what link roundups (sometimes also known as expert roundups) mean, reasons to publish roundups in 2022, and easy ways to spot quality links to include in your roundups.
Want to participate in link roundups by other bloggers? We explain the process in this detailed link building guide – be sure to check it out.
With that out of the way, let’s jump onto our topic of the day!
As search engines continue to evolve, optimising content for SEO is becoming harder with every passing day. Google and other search engines have one singular goal: connecting users to high-value content that they will enjoy interacting with and learning from.
What this means is you must ensure that your content always satisfies the needs of your target audience to get recognised by search engines. An excellent way to achieve this is by building link roundups.
Simply put, link roundups are curated daily, weekly or monthly lists that provide a representation of some of the best content you came across during that time frame. These pages are created with the sole purpose of linking out to other high-performing websites (ideally in your industry).
When creating link roundups, you list your favourite blog posts, tutorials or any other content and link out to their pages.
Here’s an example of a link roundup about social media on Capsicum Mediaworks:
When it comes to SEO, creating high-value content for your site should be your most important goal. As we said, search engines’ algorithms are designed to prioritise sites and content they perceive to be valuable.
High-value content, broadly speaking, is that which impacts your audience in a significant way. For example, it could enlighten, educate, inspire or even simply entertain them. The only way to ensure your site is considered high-value is by creating high-quality, informative, entertaining or insightful content.
Link roundups make it easy to accomplish this without planning out and conducting keyword research for an entire original post. By doing a weekly, monthly, or even daily roundup of the best content you’ve come across, you can easily create high-quality blog posts that your readers will find valuable.
This alone helps your page rank highly on search results as it is aligned with search engines’ goal of showing the most valuable content first.
At the core of building a link roundup, you’re just trying to help. You’ve come across some great content that you think your readers will benefit from, and you’ve gone that extra mile and compiled it all. Once they check out your listed resources and enjoy the content, you’ll be in their good graces.
But that’s not all; creating a link roundup proves that you’re hip to the goings-on of your industry. When you demonstrate consistently that you’re privy to emerging trends in your niche, it makes readers view your content in a whole new light.
You prove that you’re a knowledgeable, reliable and trustworthy source of information, making them more inclined to share your work or even link back to some of your content.
When you link out to posts by other sites, some will certainly take note of referral traffic coming from your link roundup. Depending on how much traffic it is or the quality of your post, the site owners may feel inclined to return the favour.
For example, some may choose to feature your website on their roundup posts too or look for opportunities to link out to your content. This helps a lot with link building, not to mention the referral traffic that this yields especially if they are a huge site.
What’s more, when a high authority site links out to your page, this indicates to the search engines’ algorithms that your content is of high value too. And that’s what you want!
When done consistently and at a high-level, link roundups can help push your website or blog to the proverbial next level. As you keep climbing the viewership ranks, you will become a prominent authority figure that other websites will love to reach out to so you can feature their content. The upside to this is you get to build valuable relationships with established bloggers and those on the rise.
Having covered all you need to know about creating link roundups, we now arrive at the crux. How does one go about finding link roundup link-building opportunities? Well, everywhere!
Below, we explore two proven ways to find good sites to feature on your link roundups for maximum impact on your SEO.
Yes, you read that right! Who knew that Twitter was more than a dingy backyard for evil people? Or that it could help with SEO stuff like link roundups?
Looking through Twitter is an excellent way to come up with content for your link roundup posts. When using the platform, we highly recommend sorting results by latest so your roundup posts are always up to date.
To get started, head over to the search tab on Twitter and look up the specific keyword plus the phrase ‘link roundup’. This could be furniture link roundup, roof repair link roundup, SEO link roundup, etc.
Twitter should return roundup posts that people in your niche have posted recently. Go through these posts and look out for high-authority sites that recur from post to post.
Head to Google and do the same thing. Other search strings that you can use include:
Note all the recurring sites as these will potentially be on your links roundup post.
After coming up with a list of sites or pages that you’d like to feature, it’s time to find their contact information. Scrape these sites or use a tool like Hunter.io to find the names and email addresses of people running each website.
Compile all this information and put it in a spreadsheet. I will be explaining shortly what to do with it.
Sometimes link roundups don’t get presented as such, which is why using search strings like ‘keyword + link roundup’ do not always guarantee you will find all opportunities.
Think about it: a weekly magazine writing a feature of the ten hottest spots in the city; a film culture magazine posting an article about the highest earning streaming platforms of 2022… These are all roundups, just presented in a different way.
If you go through some of the highest-ranking websites in your industry, you’re sure to find dozens of similar posts. Read through their most recent entries and see whether you can find any content to include in your links roundup. Chances are you will.
So you now have your list ready, probably even created your link roundup post, what next?
You don’t want to be the proverbial man who winks to a girl in darkness and hopes she will notice it. In marketing and pretty much everywhere else, you must reach out to others to let them know what you’re doing; otherwise, all your efforts will go unnoticed.
Having done all the hard work and compiled your link roundup post, it’s only fair to yourself that you inform all those featured about it. The following is a simple email template you can steal:
Hey there, [name]!
I thought your recent post about XX was spot on. I just published a link roundup post on my blog and included it. I’m sure my readers will find it valuable.
Here’s the article [insert URL here].
Your feedback is greatly appreciated. Also, a simple share might not seem like a big deal to you, but it would mean a lot to me.
Thank you and keep up the good work.
[Your name]
Consistently creating high-quality link roundups is one of the most effective ways to acquire backlinks you once thought were unachievable. What’s more, this SEO strategy comes with additional benefits besides building links.
As we said, they help you gain the trust of your readers while also allowing you to create high-quality content that Google loves to reward.
Sure, it may appear like an intimidating process, especially if you’re new to SEO, but it doesn’t have to be. If you can follow the exact blueprint that we’ve outlined here, there’s no way you won’t start reaping fruits soon.
Start now. Sooner than later, you will be surprised about how much you’ve learned by simply showing up and doing it every day. Good luck!