Link-building plays a vital role in the success of a business. But it’s a time-consuming process that requires:

• Knowledge
• Skill
• Patience

Here’s the thing:

By using the right strategies, it doesn’t have to be complicated:

Keep reading to find out more:

The Role Backlinks Play In SEO

Backlinks have been an important part of SEO since 1998. The best way to look at backlinks is to think of them as votes for the site.

The more votes a page has pointing to it, the more Google deems the content worthy of taking the number one spot.

When the backlink algorithm was first introduced, it used to be a case of the number of links a page had. But this resulted in people spamming links wherever they could. Luckily times have changed now, and it’s about the quality of the links instead of the quantity.

Link placements need to be well planned. Without relevance, the link could cause damage that outweighs the benefit.

3x High Converting Link Building Strategies

As mentioned earlier, link building strategies have stood the test of time; this means there’s plenty of actionable strategies to be used.

Three strategies stand out above the rest. These techniques are super easy to complete but also have a considerable win rate:

Replicate Your Competitors Backlinks

This has to be on the list for the top link building strategies for a few reasons.

To start with, the top-ranking competitors in the same niche will be spending thousands of dollars trying to create the perfect backlink profile. And this means it’s super hard for the small fish to compete against them without a lot of hard work and a ton of cash.

Unless the business replicates its competitor’s backlink profile.

In essence, it’s all about working smarter, not harder.

When comparing the win-rate with the overall time spent on it, it’s easy to see why this strategy is so effective.

Here’s how it works:

Identify The Competitors

The first step is to identify the top sites for the chosen keyword. Doing this is super easy and only requires a quick Google search.

Just enter the chosen keyword into Google and make a list of the competitors on the first page. Don’t worry about how big their site is, all that’s needed is their backlink profile.

Find Their Backlinks

Once the list of competitors has been identified, it’s time to find their backlinks, which can be done using tools such as Majestic, Moz, or Ahrefs. In this article, we’ll be using Ahrefs for our examples.

In Ahrefs, enter the first URL into the Ahrefs site explorer and hit the search button.

Once the page has loaded, go to the left-hand side menu and click on ‘Backlinks’. You’ll then see a full list of sites linking to that page. Export the list of backlinks on to an excel sheet and do the same for the other targets.

Analyze Their Backlinks

This part can take some time; the idea is to get rid of all the spammy looking links, so all that’s left is high quality and relevant linking opportunities.

Once that’s complete, it’s about finding out how they got the link and how it can be replicated.

Once a solid understanding of the link has been found, it’s time to reach out to the site owner to score the link.

Provide Testimonials

This has to be one of the easiest and least time-consuming link-building strategies. With just a few hours of work, it’s possible to score high-quality links pointing directly to the businesses homepage.

This strategy aims to offer a positive testimonial for a product/service the business uses in return for a link.

Here’s a step by step guide for finding testimonial links:

Identify The Targets

This stage is about thinking of services/products that are relevant to the site, or that it’s used before.

The chosen products and services all need one thing in common for this strategy to work, and that’s an existing testimonials page or evidence that they publish testimonials on their homepage.

Create a list of possible opportunities in an excel sheet ready for the next step.

Pitch To The Right People

Finding the right people to pitch to can seem like a challenge at the best of times. Luckily there are a few tools that can be used to find their emails quickly:

• Hunter.io
• FindThatLead

These tools will provide a list of emails connected to the site. Making it really easy to find the right person to pitch to.

Once the emails have been found, it’s time to pitch to the sites and see if they’re interested.

Write Their Testimonial

Once they’ve got back to you and accepted the offer, it’s time to write the testimonials. Writing the perfect testimonial is super easy, especially if you’ve tried the product or service and can write from first-hand experience. Just make sure it includes things like:

• Description of how the tool/product/service helped
• The best part of the service
• A personal recommendation
• Results

If the testimonial contains these four things, it’s ready to go.

Guest Posting (It Really Does Work!)

Guest posting is the most popular way of building links to a page, and for a good reason, it’s super simple and very effective.

By now I’m sure you’ve heard SEOs debating whether a guest post is a white hat or black hat technique.

In the end, does it really matter?

Google only wants to see the right metrics for the site, and smart guest posting does just that.

The idea behind guest posting is to create a high-quality piece of content with a link pointing to the page that needs ranking.

Here’s how that works:

Find Target Sites

The first thing is to find sites that will accept a guest article. The ideal website would have a high domain authority and traffic.

For this, head to Google and try searching for terms like those listed here:

These will show thousands of potential targets to outreach too. Don’t focus too much on the authority or traffic just yet.

The purpose of this step is to find targets for a guest post.

Choosing The Right Blogs

Once a list of targets has been created, it’s time to see if they’re worth the time linking too. To do this, tools like Ahrefs come in very handy.

Enter the site in question into the Ahrefs site explorers search bar. It will then take you to a page which shows the Domain Rating (DR) of the sites.

If the DR is high for that niche keep it on the list, if low with little to no traffic, delete it, along with any spammy looking sites that are just obvious link farms.

Pitching The Sites

Once the site has been qualified, it’s time to pitch out to the site owner. Again finding the emails with the tools mentioned in the previous section, it takes seconds.

Make sure pitches are unique to the site, it’s the best way of getting a response. Don’t get disheartened if they don’t message back the first time.

Chances are they are super busy and receive A LOT of emails. Send a couple of follow-ups before moving to the next email.

Create Stunning Content

Once the site owner has accepted the terms, it’s time to start writing the content. The most important thing to include is the link back to the page.

But that’s not all, they should also include:

• Links pointing to their site (internal links)
• Quotes with backup links (other external links)
• Images/videos

Make sure the content contains as much value as possible and more importantly keeps their audience in mind.

BONUS: Mention Monitoring

There were only supposed to be three link building strategies in this article, but this was too good to leave out.

This strategy works best for people that already have a respected brand in their niche.

If the brand is already well known, there’s a good chance someone has mentioned it in an article.

But here’s the thing:

Sometimes people forget to link to the site they’ve mentioned, which is something that can be fixed quickly. Just follow these simple steps:

Find Blogs That Mention Your Brand

Use Google’s search command to find sites that mention the brand. This can be done by searching variations of:

“horizonwebmarketing.com”-inurl:horizonwebmarketing.com/

This will return a list of URLs mentioning the domain of this site, but not the page from the blog.

Here’s a pro tip:

Make sure to play around with the site name in your searches, it’s incredible how many people can misspell the site’s name.

The sites to look for are ones:

• With broken links
• Which lead to a 404
• Or which mention the blog with no link

If any sites in the search engine results have any of these problems add them to an excel sheet.

Reach Out

Again this all about reaching out to the right people. Once the email address has been found, it’s time to pitch the idea to them.

For maximum effect, make sure the outreach is unique to the site, if it isn’t, chances are it will get ignored.

But most importantly, don’t forget to send follow up emails if they don’t reply.

Can You Trust Link Building Services?

Link building campaigns take a lot of time and cause a lot of stress. So it’s understandable why people are turning to link building services.

But can they be trusted?

In all honesty, this industry can be real shady at times. The amount of sites that get penalized due to shoddy link building services is scary.

The thing is:

Spammy and low DR links can kill a site… quickly.

And with so many link building services out there, it’s easy to get burnt.

On the other hand, they can be a godsend. Think about it.

The amount of time it takes to launch a full link building campaign is huge. But link building services make it easy.

They already have an extensive database of sites that accept links. And if they’re good the sites will be risk-free of penalization.

To find a link building service that’s trustworthy, a lot of research needs to be done thoroughly. One such service we’ve found that does the hard work is matthewwoodward.co.uk.

Rounding Up

It’s almost certain that link building will play a vital role in SEO for years to come, which is why it’s beneficial to jump on the train now.

There are tons of link building strategies out there that work. But the ones covered here far outperform them all.

And if time is lacking, it might be time to call in the experts. Link building services can provide quick, quality, natural links to a page.

Happy link building!

(Do you have a favorite link building technique we haven’t covered? Or…have you had an experience with a link builder that’s hurt your domain with shady links? We’d love to hear about it in the comments.)

Nick Barefoot