How to Build a Strong Link-Building Strategy for Lasting SEO Results
As soon as people started using web browsers to look for the answers online, SEO immediately positioned itself as one of the most effective online marketing strategies in existence. When you think about it, SEO makes a lot of sense.
According to a recent survey, 68% of online experiences start with a search engine query. And we are talking about the volume of 5.9 million searches processed by Google each minute. This market is truly massive and you can see how putting your website on the top of the SERP can go a long way in helping your brand pop on the mainstream radar.
Still, doing SEO doesn’t necessarily mean doing it right. If you want to achieve long-lasting results and keep driving traffic to your website for a foreseeable period, you need to put your efforts on solid foundations.
Let’s see how you can build a strong link-building strategy.
Identify your target audience
If you truly want your SEO strategy to stick to a landing, this is an absolute must. The traffic you will generate and how willing your audience will be to follow through the links you have offered will largely depend on your ability to put out something that resonates with their needs, interests, and personal preferences.
Be sure then to conduct thorough market research that will take into account your clients’ data, user engagement metrics, psychographic profiles, and segmentation datasets like age, interests, hobbies, and professional background. Information like these will give your future efforts a much stronger sense of purpose.
Spend time analyzing the competition
Creating a strong link-building strategy is all but impossible without taking a look at competitors’ backlink profiles. No need to worry – this practice is not considered unethical. You are simply looking for gaps and opportunities just like in any other fair competition. What to look for? Well, you can try scouting for high-authority sites that link to direct competitors but not your website, look for recurring link patterns, and find similar ways to emulate successful practices.
As for the tools you will use to reach these goals, they mostly boil down to regular mentions like:
- Moz
- SEMrush
- Ahrefs
- Morning Consult
Provide genuine value to other sites
Focusing too heavily on your personal marketing goals will drastically narrow down the list of sites that are willing to link to your website. That is why you make sure that you are offering genuine value to the readers and allow for easier network building. This job will be made much easier if you simply do your research and reach out to the sites organically related to your brand and the topics you write about.
The other way to extend the network of your associates is to increase the authority of your site since the website with the high DA and PA scores traditionally gets more links. As for how to achieve that, you can follow these couple of guidelines:
- Create high-quality content
- Root out bad links
- Make effective use of internal linking
- Improve on-page SEO
- Optimize user experience on mobile
Use automated management tools
Link-building is a tried and true marketing approach that we have been using for decades now. It is only expected that these days, you have a very solid offer of reliable tools that will help you to drastically streamline, and even automate some of the associated link-building activities. Also, by using professional link building management software you will also get a simple dashboard where you get easy access to countless vital information like link health, expiry dates, and cost.
All these things translate to higher productivity, smaller margins for error, and stronger ROI. Sure, some of these things can be managed with Google Sheets, but that doesn’t necessarily mean this is the most efficient way to do it.
Leverage guest blogging opportunities
Guest blogging is one of the main pillars of any sensible SEO strategy. This strategy also makes one of the most effective ways to build a robust link profile since you are not only getting very high-quality backlinks as well as increasing your reputation in the industry. How to meet these goals? Well, you can try some of these tried and true approaches:
- Identify organically related websites – You can use tools like Moz to assess the website’s DA
- Build relationships – Ideally, before you try pitching your content to a blogger, you should have some existing relationship on social media or share the blogger’s content
- Optimize your biography – A compelling resume packed with links to your website and previous works will make the outreach much easier
- Follow up the publishing – If you want to build a stronger relationship with a blogger as well as supply your article with stronger traffic, publishing should be followed up with promotion on your social media channels.
Use social media to put your content on the map
Speaking of social media channels, we would like to point out that even though social media signals are not among the official factors Google uses for ranking, they certainly contribute to the overall visibility of your links. This can translate to some very tangible numbers. If we take a look at the B2B market, we will see that LinkedIn, for instance, scores the highest visitor-to-lead conversion rate at 2.74%, which is three times higher than direct competitors like Twitter and Facebook.
Knowing nuances like these and leveraging the promotion potential of these social media channels can prove to be a powerful asset in expanding your link profile.
Conclusion
Well, we hope these couple of tips on how to build a strong link-building strategy will help you take your SEO game off the ground and make your brand register on the mainstream radar. Of course, you should take everything we have talked about above only as a starting point rather than a definitive guide. So, use the foundations we gave you to build upon with your insights and goals. But, as long as you are moving in the right direction, every step you make will be a step forward. And the strategies we gave you will set you on the right course.
