You may be reading this article because you thought keyword stuffing and spending exorbitant amounts of money on Google Ads would do the trick for your SEO, only to realize how wrong you were. Or maybe you’re just an internet nerd—which is fine by us!
In any case, a lot goes into dominating the search results—and one of the most vital pieces of the puzzle is link building, the process of obtaining backlinks.
If SEO was boxing, link building would be the one-two knockout punch. Just having links that point to your website boosts your search rankings greatly in the first place—but link building also inherently draws the audiences of other websites to yours… which, in turn, helps your rankings even more as traffic increases.
In this link building guide, we’ll share all you need to know to get started: the benefits, key strategies, pitfalls to avoid, tools, and trends to watch.
Keep reading if you’re serious about kick-starting your link-building efforts.
Link building is the process of gathering backlinks from other websites—preferably those with lots of authority. It’s not the same thing as internal link building, which is just the process of linking between posts and pages on your site.
Having lots of backlinks tells the search engines that your content is worth reading or checking out.
Well, let’s be specific—that’s only if it's a “dofollow” backlink.
A dofollow backlink tells search engines to follow the link and crawl the site on the other side—that is, your site.
A “nofollow” backlink, on the other hand, tells search engines not to follow the link. So those links won’t help you directly.
However, both backlink types send referral traffic your way. That’s a fancy term for people clicking through a backlink to your site. Referral traffic helps SEO indirectly by increasing overall site traffic. So nofollow links are better than nothing, but ideally, you’ll want to prioritize dofollow links.
Another component of link building is anchor text, the word or phrase that actually becomes the blue, underlined “hyperlink” that leads to your site. Relevant anchor text tells Google what your site is about and helps get more of the right people clicking through.
Link building is an absolutely pivotal piece of your broad SEO efforts. Like we mentioned at the beginning, no amount of Google Ads spending could do what link building can. Here are a few ways it boosts your site’s SEO.
Improved Search Engine Rankings
First and foremost, link building helps you gain favor with the search engines. The more backlinks you gain from relevant, high-quality sites, the more Google and other search engines see your stuff as valuable to readers.
Thus, they reward your efforts by ranking the individual linked page and the overall website higher in the search results.
And let’s be real: you must make it to the first page if you hope to capture any search traffic. Most Internet users never visit a website on Google’s second page. Rising in Google’s search rankings makes you look more credible and authoritative, too.
Hence, the importance of good link building.
As a result, you’ll have to take matters into your own hands, or—as we recommend—work with an actual link-building agency. Here are some of the best ways to get some tier 1 links out onto the web:
Higher search rankings, discussed above, and;
More paths from other sites to your site via the backlinks themselves.
Now, website visibility isn’t just about more people seeing your stuff. You want the right people to see it. Relevant visitors stay around longer, consume more of your content, and are more likely to buy. That means a higher SEO ROI for you.
Backlinks make this happen because, if you’re doing it right, you’re getting links from sites in your niche or adjacent niches. Having both search and referral traffic will majorly increase your website’s overall visibility.
Domain authority measures how likely your site is to score rankings in the search results. It can range from 0-100, with 100 being the best domain authority you can get.
Backlinks tell search engines your site is authoritative and worth checking out, helping you enhance domain authority.
Your perceived authority in the eyes of human users goes up, too. This is particularly true when gathering backlinks by guest posting on relevant sites, which we’ll get into more in a bit.
The way it works is, if you leave high-quality posts on big-name sites in your niche, interested readers will see you as an authority on the subject. That leaves a good first impression, boosting the chance they’ll click through and stick around on your site for a while longer.
We’ve already covered the organic search traffic boost you’ll get through higher search rankings, visibility, and domain authority.
However, you’ll also get more organic referral traffic, too. People on the linking sites will click through to your site. And since the linking site provides context to the reader with the backlink, readers clicking through will automatically be more relevant to your brand.
So if you can land a few backlinks from big-name sites, you could get a healthy stream of high-quality traffic that fits your website. That will mean more conversions and revenue.
The benefits of link building should now be clear—as if you needed any convincing!
Now it’s time to discuss the best strategies you can use to build those valuable backlinks.
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Feature-based strategies just mean creating original content to feature on other websites, with links pointing back to your own site.
One of the cornerstones of link building is making high-quality, keyword-optimized, genuinely helpful and shareable content. The more helpful and shareable it is, the more people will, well, share it. And as it gathers more eyeballs, your chances of getting links goes up.
But you have to go beyond your own blog and website. You need to “grab some territory” on other sites—especially big-name sites—through guest posting.
A good guest post doesn’t just secure you a backlink. It also frames you and your site as an authority on the topic. So the backlink itself gains favor with Google, and the content secures more clicks from the linking site’s readers.
Another way to leverage other people’s audiences is through niche edits. Niche edits involve asking website owners to insert your links into existing relevant content.
It’s like guest posting minus the effort of crafting original content. The most you’ll have to do is add a few sentences or refresh their content a bit.
Lastly, get some infographics and other visuals in your owned and guest content. These offer another way to convey information. Visuals get plenty more shares than just written content in a lot of cases. Some sites will even skip the content and link directly to your infographics, too.
Outreach and Relationship Building
Network is net worth. Corny, but we just couldn’t help ourselves—sorry.
Building industry relationships can lead to plenty of link building opportunities from reputable names.
Start by looking for key industry influencers and websites. Engage with their content, sharing insights and building a connection. Don’t “push the sale” on getting backlinks. Instead, give value by showing your content and discussing how it can help their followers.
Over time, the influencer will be more inclined to share your stuff with their audience and link to it.
Growing and maintaining these relationships can lead to a steady source of high-quality backlinks over time. It also makes it easier to preserve backlinks. If you provide continual value to the audience of an influencer or website, they’ll make sure to keep their links live and working.
Jump into niche-related social media groups and get involved in group discussions. Once again, don’t shamelessly self-promote. Mention your content or expertise where it fits as you share your ideas, rather than just barging into a post and dropping your content.
Fixing broken links is an often overlooked way to secure easy backlinks from high-quality sources.
The first step is finding broken links on authoritative websites. Ideally, target web pages with tons of links—the more links, the higher the chance one’s broken. Only, make sure you’re not on a link farm: a spammy website with no other purpose than providing valueless backlinks to anyone and everyone.
You can find web pages manually, but many link building tools can do the leg work for you. The time you save will usually outweigh the investment in the software.
Once you find a good “broken link” site, the next step is to reach out to the website owner or administrator. But you can’t be pushy or wordy.
Give them a relevant compliment about the page. Then, let them know a particular link is broken (maybe it’s pointing to the dreaded “404 not found” page).
Finally, tell them you have a page or post that might make a good replacement. Frame it as a way to help them by ensuring their readers can click through to a valid and helpful page.
Here are a few places to look for broken links:
Resource pages, especially on niche-relevant sites (linking to helpful resources on a given topic)
Speaking of broken links, maintaining your existing backlinks and fixing any broken ones can give you an easy link building boost. Using the right tools can help you keep an eye on your backlink profile and spot any links the moment they stop working.
Good link building can pay off in spades. But there are pitfalls along the way—mistakes that can cause all that link building time and effort to go to waste. If you’re not careful, they can even hurt your SEO rankings.
Avoid the following when building your backlink profile.
Over-optimization of anchor text is when you try to use only exact-match, keyword-stuffed phrases for anchor text. Yes, it’s good to get a highly relevant keyword in your anchor text, but focusing too hard on this can harm you.
For one, it looks spammy and manipulative to search engines. Google will penalize you for this. It sounds unnatural to humans too, annoying readers and making you look a little less authoritative.
Finally—it could affect your relationship with the linking site. It’s fine to lightly ask for particular anchor text in certain instances, but getting on a linking site’s case if they don’t use exactly what you want every time can sour them on linking to you.
So over-optimization wastes your time while wrecking your search rankings, reducing referral traffic, and damaging relationships with influencers and industry websites.
These sites will naturally use your desired anchor text where relevant as you build relationships. Don’t worry too much about getting the exact anchor text you want.
Ignoring The Relevance of The Linking Site
Not all backlinks are created equal, and links from irrelevant websites are especially unequal. They simply won’t offer a sufficient ROI for the effort you put into building them.
At the very best, they won’t impact your domain authority or SEO much, while also wasting time and money. At worst, search engines might hit you with penalties since they can look manipulative—even if you unintentionally got the irrelevant links the right way.
Plus, any referral traffic won’t stick around your site long, because readers probably won’t be interested in your content if they’re coming from a website that deals with something totally different. Dwell times will fall and bounce rates will rise.
So, focus on relevant backlinks from niche-popular sites or from sites relevant to the linked page’s content.
Keep your audience in mind, too. Niche-relevant links are good, but it’s even better if the site linking to you has a similar target audience. For example, if you run a personal finance blog for millennials, getting baby boomer visitors isn’t terrible… but getting a link from another millennial-focused blog would be way better.
A few high-quality backlinks beat a barrage of low-quality backlinks in the eyes of search engines, any day. Besides, low-quality backlinking sites will lack the traffic necessary to get a good payoff in referral traffic.
Now, some low-quality backlinks are more innocent, and they could still be relevant, even if lower-quality.
But worse than these are “toxic” backlinks. These are unnatural, spammy, and often completely irrelevant links from low-quality link farm sites you definitely don’t want associated with your brand.
The bad news is you can accidentally acquire these toxic backlinks since those sites may decide to backlink to you without you even asking.
The good news is the right tools can help you find and ditch these toxic backlinks.
Finding and building links manually is technically possible, but it takes too much time. Link building tools are a much better idea because they'll save you time and find better backlink opportunities than you’d be able to find in the first place—unless you’re some kind of link-building wizard.
Nowhere is this clearer than through the initial process of prospecting and analyzing backlinks.
For example, AI-powered tools like Profit Engine handle a lot of the leg work involved in researching the competition, analyzing gaps in your backlinks vs. the competition’s, and seeing which links are worth pursuing.
These tools can look for things like domain authority, relevance, and anchor text diversity—not to mention the competitor’s rankings for your keywords.
Good tools also tell you which links will lead to short-term gains… while drawing up a broad roadmap for long-term success.
But link building doesn’t end after you get solid backlinks. All-in-one link-building solutions like Profit Engine will also keep you updated on your backlinks and those of your competitors after you build them. If anything breaks or disappears, you’ll be able to fix it promptly.
Those are the basics of what link-building tools can help you accomplish. Some nice extras to look for include:
Outreach templates and template creation, and;
Automatic link-building reporting.
Now let’s talk about how to measure your link building progress and set realistic goals for your link building campaigns.
Here are a few things to monitor using your SEO and link-building tools as you slowly but surely build your backlink profile:
Domain Authority: This is a numerical score rating your site’s search authority and relevance. Many factors go into Domain Authority, including backlinks. If this number starts rising after you get backlinks, that’s a good sign.
Referral traffic: This represents visitors hitting your website directly from linking sites. More overall referral traffic means your backlinking efforts are paying off, especially if the users stay on your site for a long time. Monitor which links visitors are coming through and the traffic volume for each.
Organic traffic: This represents the growth in non-ad search traffic landing on your site. It’s a bit harder to attribute organic traffic directly to link building efforts, so cross-reference this with other metrics to see if link building is responsible for any increases in organic traffic.
Keyword rankings: Backlinks are generally pursued for the purpose of boosting specific pages and keywords. Check out your keyword rankings and those individual page rankings when you get new backlinks pointing to those pages. If your rankings start climbing, you’re on the right track.
Bounce rates and dwell time: Bounce rate is the ratio of how many visitors leave after only seeing one page divided by total visitors. Dwell time is how long a user spends on your site. Both tell you how relevant your site is to the users landing on your site—especially relevant for referral traffic. Lower bounce rates and higher dwell times tell you that your traffic is genuinely interested in the content on your site.
Check out past data and look at what kinds of tactics and content scored you the most backlinks—then investigate the quality of those backlinks. See what kinds of outreach were most effective, too.
Then it’s time to set goals
First, know your larger business objectives. For example, if you aim to boost sales, your focus might be increasing product-focused keyword rankings or getting more backlinks to your product pages.
Now that you have the objective, you can drill down to set specific short-term and long-term goals that will move you there.
The keyword here is “specific.” Your goals need to have numbers. They can’t just be “get more backlinks.” Or even “get more backlinks from high-quality websites.”
A better goal would be “earn 10% more backlinks from sites with X Domain Authority by the end of next quarter.” That’s a lot clearer and it will allow you to actually track progress in a definable way.
In the early stages, compare the past period’s data against the goals you’ve set each time you review your progress. If things are wildly off, that’s okay—it’s hard to set precise goals at the beginning when you have nothing to compare against.
Simply revise them and keep chugging along.
Like anything digital, link building trends change with advancements in technology.
If you hope to keep an edge over your competition, don’t keep yourself in the dark.
Voice Search and Its Impact on Link Building
Voice assistant devices are proliferating, and people are using those devices to run Google searches and buy products more frequently by the day.
Now, people speak and write differently. This means you’ll have to start targeting keywords that fit speaking patterns—think conversational phrases.
People are also more likely to speak in complete sentences when searching, since it’s easier to speak than type out full sentences.
Another thing to keep in mind:
Voice assistants let users multi-task while they search the web. For example, someone can cook dinner while looking up something on Google.
The nature of this interaction means the searcher won’t be scrolling around a page of search results anymore. So getting to the top of the results is even more important than ever. The SERP featured snippet will only grow in importance.
Don’t forget that people mostly search via voice from their mobile phones. So your site has to be lean, fast, and easy to navigate on a smartphone screen.
Speaking of mobile, many mobile voice searches are for local business information. If you’re a local business or an agency helping local businesses, you must prioritize voice search optimization.
The Role of AI in Shaping Link-Building Strategies
AI programs have been around for a while, under the surface. But ChatGPT took the whole world (not just marketing) by storm in 2022, and now plenty of people are seeing the power of AI in link building. We’re not saying the world is going to end soon—but it is a pretty big deal.
For example:
Some SEO software providers, like Profit Engine, are adding cutting-edge AI features to their solutions. The AI takes most of the “grunt work” off your plate, like finding and reaching out to good link-building candidates.
AI is drastically changing content marketing, too. Some AI tools can analyze users and their behavior, then spit out relevant content within your parameters that your target user is most likely to engage with. It can also analyze existing content and recommend more SEO and user-friendly changes.
SEO is constantly changing. Search engine algorithm updates and tech developments like voice search and AI constantly shift the landscape—you can’t get complacent, or you’ll fall behind.
And similarly, link building never really ends. There’s a lot of work up front to find and score good links. Then, once you have a great link profile, you have to maintain that and continue building more as your competitors do. The rewards increase, but so does the effort involved…
Unless you have cutting-edge solutions like Profit Engine on your side.
Really—this isn’t just some last-ditch attempt at pushing our product. We actually can help you, like we’ve helped countless other brands before.
Profit Engine’s AI-driven link building protocol does all the research and rigorously screens links so you don’t waste time on anything but the best.
Businesses can handle their own SEO much more easily, and agencies can take on more clients and charge higher fees since they can deliver better results.
In either case, you get better backlinks and more revenue… and can spend more of your time on other things that are a lot more fun than link building.
(And let’s be honest—there are a lot of things more fun than link building).
Reach out today to see how Profit Engine can accelerate your link building.
An industry-leading AI link building strategy.
After years of experience growing brands just like yours, we know what gets results and what doesn’t. We’ll stop you from spending too much time, resources and money on backlinks that don’t help. We’ll stop you from building links on harmful or useless websites. We’ll use our AI Link Strategy to analyze your competition and give you a personalized action plan.
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