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About 73% of small businesses have their own websites, and every year it becomes more vital for companies to have a strong online presence.
Running a business is hard work, even with the right tools, funding, and a great idea. The world is a competitive place, with many businesses vying to be the best in their industry. It’s tough to drive traffic and turn it into paying customers without effective digital marketing platforms.
Getting found online shouldn’t be difficult, but this isn’t the case. If your online business has yet to take off, you may need to reevaluate your digital strategy. An outdated website with a poor design will have it pushed to the back of search engine results.
Link acquisition can help your company rise above the competition. High-quality and high-authority links work as backlinks. You should know how to build and use them to your advantage.
Here’s a guide that covers everything you need to know on how to build high-authority backlinks.
The Benefits of Link Acquisition
There are various things you can do to get the most out of your website, and building high-quality links is one of the most effective. Having a solid link acquisition plan in place will help drive a huge amount more traffic to your site. This will lead to a significantly better bottom line and ROI.
Some of the benefits of link acquisition include:
- More organic traffic
- Increased visibility
- Higher revenue
- More brand exposure
- Improved conversion rate
- More referral traffic
- Forming valuable relationships and partnerships
It can take some time for these benefits to take effect, but it’s well worth putting in the time and effort as it will help your brand a lot in the long run.
Good and Bad Links
One of the first things you need to understand is that not all links are good. As such, you want to make sure you know what links will benefit your site, and what ones won’t.
Good links are ones from natural, high-authority sources. Ideally, you want them to be topical or relevant to your industry. Make sure you use suitable anchor text and link to high-quality page content.
Bad links tend to use over-optimized anchor text and lead to poor-quality sites. You should avoid linking to sites that are irrelevant or outdated. Many sites also implement paid and promotional links, but you should avoid this if you want to improve your SEO.
Link Building Strategies
There are a range of strategies you can implement. Working with a link-building specialist is the best way to do this. They have a solid understanding of backlink strategy and can effectively implement a plan that will help boost the results your website produces.
Brand Monitoring
Brand monitoring involves observing other brands to see if they’re suitable for forming a connection with. This is a good way to secure ‘low-hanging fruit’ links, which are generally considered easy to implement. Once you find suitable brands, you can approach them and discuss linking.
To do this, you need to keep an eye on relevant brands that you want to link with. There are various tools that you can use for this. They allow you to set a brand’s name and will monitor them for mentions online.
You can set them to send email alerts whenever any brands you’re watching are mentioned. You can also set them to monitor specific keywords if needed.
Once you find an ideal article, you should be able to get the journalist’s or webmaster’s contact details using Google or BuzzStream’s contact details scraper. You can then send them an email to ask them about linking. Be sure to be polite yet persuasive.
You want to give them a good reason to link to your site. Frame your email with the context of their audience in mind, and explain how linking with you will provide future value to them.
Link Reclamation
This strategy involves looking for historic content that mentions your brand, products, or services. You can then work to secure links from these sites. This is one of the more simple strategies to use, but it can still be very beneficial.
There are online link reclamation tools that will give you details of links that your site has lost. You can filter the results to find suitable links on high-authority linking pages. Some of these tools will even show the reason that a link has been lost, making it easier to determine which ones to try to reclaim.
Depending on the links you find, there are several ways to go about reclaiming them. You won’t always be successful with this, so hiring link-building services will help increase your chances of reclaiming links.
Commercial Relationships
When it comes to link outreach, you’re often best looking close to home. Almost every business has commercial relationships with other brands, and these are ideal for success. Forming such partnerships can yield various benefits and obtaining natural, credible links is one of them.
You can look to the following to form potential partnerships:
- Partners
- Stockists
- Charities
- Sponsorships
Once you’ve found a suitable organization to consider, develop a strategy that details how you can work together and how it will benefit both of you. This will encourage them to agree and will help ensure your links are genuine and authoritative.
Journalist and Blogger Opportunities
Journalists and bloggers have a huge amount of influence online, and they can present some of the best opportunities in terms of link-building. They’re already writing on behalf of authoritative publications, so working with them is a reliable way to get quality links.
There are media and PR relations tools that can help you with this. Journalists can post inquiries on these platforms, and brands are able to respond.
You can offer advice, guidance, and expertise on topics that are relevant to your business. If bloggers or journalists like a response, they may feature it in an article they’re writing.
Backlink Analysis
Many businesses can improve their strategies by observing their competitors. You can watch what a similar company is doing to understand what’s working well for them and what isn’t. You can then apply what you learn to your own strategies to achieve success.
By observing and analyzing a competitor’s backlink profile, you should be able to identify opportunities and form relationships with other sites that link to them. Taking advantage of another company’s link acquisition success can help you build a stronger backlink profile for your own business.
Don’t just look at the links they have. You want to figure out how they’re getting these links.
Consider the context of the best links they have. Determine what made these other sites link to them and you may be able to implement the same approach into your strategy.
Collaborative Articles
Collaborating with others is a great way to increase your brand’s visibility. You can build links by collaborating with journalists, bloggers, and influencers to produce new, quality content. Doing so can help you generate high-authority links from reliable sources.
The most effective way to do this is to build relationships with people who operate in an industry or niche that’s relevant to your brand. It’s also more beneficial if they already have a sizable community, as this will help improve brand advocacy and engagement. There are a few different ways you can make collaborative articles that are ideal for your link acquisition strategy.
Look for influencers who operate in a suitable niche and collaborate with them to produce specific content. They will likely have expertise that can help you make the content more valuable and credible.
After creating a piece of content, you want to get as much out of it as you can. Ask any collaborators you work with to also share the content with their own audiences.
Depending on the nature of the collaboration, they might not always link to the content. Despite that, building these relationships can still be very helpful as they open doors to work together again in the future.
Interviews
Aside from influencers, you can also collaborate with industry experts. One useful content type you can make use of is Q&As as they can provide a lot of value. You can then use these to generate backlinks from authoritative sites within the relevant industry.
It’s best to do this using a similar strategy to that of collaborative articles. Your goal should be to create quality content and build relationships. This can be a long-term strategy that will help you build quality links and gain visibility.
Try to identify thought leaders in your industry who would be suitable for collaboration. You want to find people with an active following so that your links are put in front of people who will have an interest in your brand.
Make sure you can offer them value so that they’re encouraged to collaborate with you. It’s best to go to them with a basic structure as well as a timescale for the collaboration. Encourage them to share the content with their audience once it’s ready.
Evergreen Content
There are plenty of elements to a content marketing strategy, and evergreen content is among the most valuable. This is content that is high-quality, in-depth, and directly responds to the needs of your audience. The idea is that it will secure backlinks over time as other sites reference and endorse it.
When creating evergreen content, there are a few factors to consider:
- What are authoritative websites in your industry covering?
- What are ‘hot topics’ that relate to audience problems?
- What’s your target audience searching online?
- What competitor content is most linked to?
Answering these questions will help you generate quality evergreen content that will lead to more backlinks.
Moving Man
This is a technical link acquisition strategy that you can implement under certain circumstances. This is typically done when:
- A brand is changing its name
- A brand is changing its URL
- A brand has closed down or is no longer in business
In these situations, websites that link to these brands will have broken URLs. You can take this opportunity to step in and ask them if they would prefer to link to you instead. This will give them a reliable source to link to for their audience while increasing your backlink network.
Broken Links
This is similar to the moving man strategy and involves targeting existing links that no longer work. You can find these using a crawling tool. Target one of your competitors, and it will reveal all broken inbound links.
You can then contact the webmasters of the various sites with these links. Explain why they will benefit from replacing these broken links with ones to your site.
This is a great way to build new relationships with authoritative brands. It will also give you an edge over your competitors who aren’t bothering to do this. Even if a webmaster decides not to link to your site, they’ll appreciate you highlighting the broken link which is a good way to start forming a relationship with them.
Survey Campaigns
You can use survey campaigns to gather valuable data about relevant topics. From this, you can tell stories along with their outcomes in compelling and engaging ways. Presenting these to targeted media can help you gain natural, authoritative links.
Accumulating data in this way is a good method of creating content that’s accurate, detailed, and reliable. This will help gain the interest of journalists and media partners.
When doing this, make sure you consider the questions in your surveys carefully. They need to be relevant and engaging, but you also want to ask questions that will get responses that align with your campaign objectives.
Your Link Acquisition Strategy
You can use any or all of the techniques above to improve your link acquisition. Bear in mind, however, that it can be quite challenging, and it may take a while to see the results.
If you want to ensure you’re getting the most out of your strategy, you should work with a digital marketing agency like Emerge Digital. We can help with link acquisition and offer various other services that could help your brand. Contact us today to find out more about how we can help you.
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