For those familiar with search engine optimization, you already know backlinks are a significant aspect of SEO and driving organic traffic to your website. For those that are new to the SEO game, we’re going to help you develop a backlink strategy for SEO.
To start, what are backlinks?
Backlinks are external links on another website that have a link that directs users to your site and content.
The value behind backlinks are that they draw users to your site in addition to the organic traffic that you’re already receiving from search/keyword terms.
When someone first learns of backlinks, they quickly realize the significance of them and go through a period where they’re reaching out to everyone and anyone to ask for a backlink. This ramp-up period is quickly followed by disappointment because of the realization of how hard it is to obtain backlinks, and the lack of automation to mitigate the manual labor aspect of it.
We’re not here to tell you we have some breakthrough automated software to do the work for you, the manual aspect remains. What we are here to tell you is that you can greatly increase your chance of success if you develop a backlink strategy for seo and stick to it.
Assumptions
Let’s dive into two assumptions before the backlink strategy is kicked off.
- You have quality content
No one wants to link their content to mediocre at best content. They want content that provides value to their audience and informs users. If you don’t have high quality content yet, here are some ideas to get you going.
- Your website is fast, responsive, user-friendly, and secure
Assuming your goal is to drive links to your website, your site needs to provide a great user-experience. Again, people will not link to a website that isn’t engaging for the user, secure, and fast. If you’re in the process of building a website that addresses these needs, or still require some help, check out this page for an execution plan .
1) Identify Websites that have domain authority
If it comes down to 10 backlinks from sites without traffic and trust, or 1 backlink from a high quality website, you would choose the 1 high quality backlink every single time. Now, to understand which websites have trust, Moz developed domain authority to analyze key factors such as backlinks and traffic. You can leverage their free SEO tools and add their extension to your browser to determine sites with higher domain authority.
You should find websites that are in the same industry that could use your expertise for their content. Follow steps below to identify websites that you can target:
Search for a term that you have high quality content for (how to brew coffee, baking a cake, throwing a football, how to gain backlinks)
Leverage the top 10 sites that come up on the search engines first page and use Moz’s free seo tools to determine which sites have authority
Continue on to step 2
2) Leverage broken link checkers
Now that you’ve identified websites with higher domain authority, run a broken link checker on their site to see if there are any broken links. Free tools to consider using:
If the analyzer identifies broken links, it will show you the original URL where you can determine the topic that the article was linking to.
3) Create content to fill in for those broken links
Unless you already have content created that can fill the void of those broken links, it’s time to create high quality content that users will want to engage with. Reaching out to sites with broken links and asking them to link to your mediocre content just won’t cut it; There are hundreds to thousands of people doing that already. High quality content will:
- Inform/entertain
- Answer questions
- Engage an audience
Within your own content creation, be sure to include external links to other articles/websites besides your own. The goal is to provide your audience unbiased perspective that gives them an array of information sources; Not just to have them navigate their way through ONLY your website.
4) Manual outreach
Here comes the fun part, now it’s time to reach out to website owners/contacts and let them know that they have broken links on their site. You should draft custom messages that will resonate with the receiver, this stands a much better chance at getting read than a pre-templated message that you just send out to everyone.
Within the message, include a link to the content that you’re proposing they link to so that they can see for themselves the quality of the content and determine if it makes sense to link to it. Remember, although you’re receiving value by gaining a backlink, your ultimate goal should be to provide value to these websites by giving them high quality content to help them inform their audience as well.
Continue to follow-up 2-3 times max before moving on to another website for backlink offers.
Experiment with different messaging throughout your outreach efforts, and refine your messaging that doesn’t seem to generate responses. You’re essentially A/B testing your outreach message.
5) Track your progress
By remaining consistent with your backlink strategy for seo, over time you will have accumulated backlinks. Leverage site audits to track:
- How many backlinks you’ve received
- If the backlinks are from sites with domain authority (if spam links, be sure to disavow)
- The increase in your domain authority from your backlink efforts
Last thought
Remain consistent and stick to your strategy. It’s also important that you’re experimenting with different messaging throughout your outreach efforts to ensure you’re impactfully communicating with website owners and contacts.
Contact us to learn more or if you have any questions and be sure to let us know how this strategy worked for you!
Gary McConnell Co-founded Rubicom Digital in 2019 with a goal of providing digital marketing consulting services in the B2B space.
Gary continues to serve as the Marketing Director of a Data Center-focused IT Provider, VirtuIT Systems.