8 Link-Building Tips To Help You Grow Your Business

In 2019, most SEO experts stated that link-building is one of the primary SEO strategies they use to help them rank in search engines and build site authority. In fact, 92% of marketers believe that, in five years, links will still be the ranking criteria in Google algorithms. But, if link-building is this crucial, why are most marketers not putting it into practice?

According to a study by Backlinko, 94% of the world’s content gets zero external links. So the question is: Is building an external link some neuroscience?

Most marketers fail to implement link-building because there are few resources that provide an in-depth explanation of how to do it. Thankfully, we can offer you the help you need to start building links to your site. In this article, we will look at 8 link-building tips that can help you grow your business.

1. Use Guest Blogging to Your Advantage

Guest blogging remains one of the powerful tools for building links to your website. When done correctly, it can boost your site’s authority, increase organic traffic, and generate qualified leads. Start by creating a guest blogging strategy to help you get more value from your guest blogging efforts.

One way to strategize is to write for sites in your niche with a higher Domain Authority (DA). Writing for sites with a DA of 71 and above helps build links of value to your site. This is important from an SEO perspective. Use Moz's link explorer to verify the DA of any site. Also, ensure that your content is relevant to the guest blog site.

Links generated from websites of different niches and with no topical relevance reap little or no value. There are several ways of discovering guest blogging opportunities in your industry. For example, a keyword search for the words “ “your niche” + “guest post” would return millions of hits.

Do this consistently and you'll build a top-notch backlink profile. Schedule with your team on the topics and the sites you would blog for. Use Google sheets to prepare your schedule or a scheduling software like ZoomShift.

2. Create and Share Infographics

Infographics are a great way to tell a story. They serve as tools for driving traffic and leads to your website. People, including sites, are always happy to link to infographics. According to a study by Neil Patel, infographics can help you earn approximately 178% more links to your website.

In 2012, Copyblogger created an infographic titled “15 Grammar Mistakes.” To date, the infographic has received over 6,500 tweets, 60,300 Facebook likes, 2,000 LinkedIn shares, a massive 194,600 pins, and over 500 comments.

So it’s no surprise that 65% of marketing brands use infographics. The good news is that you don't need an expert to help create high-quality infographics. HubSpot’s free infographic templates can guide you to build one quickly. Similarly, we recommend that you make an infographic on topics relevant to your niche.

3. Be Active on Social Media

The introduction of multichannel marketing has changed the way marketers reach their customers. One of the platforms that can help you boost your site for organic traffic and links is social media. Marketers leverage platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to push their content to a larger audience and build inbound links to their sites.

It doesn't matter if you're new to this. You can also maximize the platform to your advantage. First, identify a target audience that will resonate better with your content. Then, regularly update your site page with educational content that links back to your page.

Also, there are several ways you can induce your audience to share your content. For instance, Twitter makes this more friendly and easier with twittable nuggets like “Click to Tweet” and “Tweet This”. Including these nuggets in your content can help increase inbound links to your website and rank high on search engines.

4. Use Resources From Reputable Websites

Build links to your site by publishing a curated resource on authority sites in your industry. A resource list from some of these sites is a way of killing two birds with one stone. The list is informative and relevant to audiences who log on to your sites and will entice these authority sites to link back to your page.

After creating a resource list, send an outreach email to the sites in your list. It will surprise you to know that a number of them will be pleased and willing to link back to your content.

They will be more inclined to return the favour because you have established a level of trust in their brands in the minds of your audience and linked to their sites as well.

5. Use Broken Links Strategy To Your Advantage

Are you a busy marketer? Do you hope to generate backlinks to your site but don't have time to repurpose content as guest posts on other sites? We’re here to let you know that you can still generate links without blogging.

An easy yet equally proven way to do this is by fixing broken links. Broken links are links that lead to non-existing pages. Scan for these broken links on high authority sites in your industry and reclaim them. You can either do this manually, but that won't be advisable looking at your busy schedule.

Fortunately, several web crawling software can help you automate this process. Examples of such web crawling tools include Screaming Frog, Dead Link Checker and Link Juice Recovery tool. Once you have identified a broken link for a keyword in high-ranking content, reach out to the site owners or Webmasters and suggest replacing it with relevant content from your site.

6. Expand Your Personal Branding

You can easily reach a target audience if you have a great collection of content on your site. If you continually feed these audiences with relevant content, you can grow as a thought leader in your industry. With time, your audience, including your competitors, will create an impressive image of you and your content style called branding.

By expanding your brand, you can organically generate traffic to your site in a more convenient way. If people can resonate better with your content and view it as informational, they will gladly share your content with people in their space. In addition, with a solid brand, it is easy to get more backlinks.

For example, if you’re conversant with digital marketing, you might come across the name Jeff Bullas. Over the years, Jeff has built a reputation for himself and has grown an audience base. He is ranked by Onalytica globally as the number one digital marketing influencer. Each year, Jeff gets a million visitors to his site and a social media tribe of 700,000 followers.

So whenever he posts a new article, it doesn’t take much effort to push it out there. This is because Jeff has a pool of hungry audiences who are keenly waiting for his next article. Replicating what Jeff and other industry giants do isn’t impossible. You can also grow your brand by regularly identifying an audience and providing them with valuable and educational content.

7. Examine The Backlinks Of Your Rivals

Identify the industry giants in your niche and examine their backlinks. Naturally, these high-ranking sites are doing something different that is keeping them on top. Copy their backlink strategies and implement them. Look out for the keywords these sites are ranking for and note where these backlinks come from.

We recommend that you use a tool like Ahrefs to help automate this process. The process of spying on your rivals to examine their backlinks should be an ongoing project. Use Bookafy to schedule and assign these tasks on a weekly or monthly basis to team members.

8. Copy The Leading Links Of Your Competitors

It is time to gain a comparative advantage. After you and your team have gathered enough information on the keywords, your competitors rank for, and the sites that link back to them, the next step is to maximize this information to your advantage.

Are your competitors building links organically or through paid marketing? For instance, if they’re blogging for specific publications, contact them and offer to write for them. Before pitching those publications, scan their site to see how best you can contribute to their collection of articles.

Most guest blogging sites will welcome the idea of linking back to your site. It’s a win-win situation. They have relevant content to keep their audience glued to these sites, and you also have backlinks to yours. Sometimes, competitors can generate links from paid marketing and networking with other industry influencers.

Whatever the case, find out how you can copy their strategies and implement them better. We recommend that you use software like UberSuggest to help you gain insight into the strategies that are working for your competitors and how best you can adapt and improve them to gain a comparative advantage.

Bottomline

Building external links to your site is not that difficult. All marketers, not just industry thought leaders, can leverage this SEO strategy to help them rank higher, increase organic traffic to their site, and build authority.

You can start by expanding your brand. Growing a solid brand in your niche can help you become an industry giant. In addition, this can make it easier to apply other link-building strategies like guest blogging, social media, broken links, and using resource lists from reputable sites.

Also, refrain from black hat SEO practices like comment spamming and building links using appropriate strategies that help you rank high in search engines and maintain your site’s integrity. Have it in my mind that not just any link, but links from high authority sites are what help you feature on a search engine’s first page.