We’ve explained the importance of link building in a marketing strategy and why it works. Now, I’ll look at essential strategies and tactics for getting links to your website.
First, I’ll explain three essential tactics for getting more links to your website. Then, I’ll go over some of the tools and services you can use to make outreach easier and more effective.
Three essential tactics for link building:
1. Link recovery: Find mentions of your brand that don’t link back to your site — or where the link is broken — and ask for a link.
Link recovery is the most basic approach to getting more links back to your website. By using a tools like Moz’s Fresh Web Explorer, you can search for mentions of your company or research. Of the three approaches I’ll outline, link recovery requires the lowest lift by outside publications because all they have to do is add a link to an existing article.
Sometimes, the source may have tried to link back to your website in order to give you credit but the link does not work, or is broken. These are the easiest targets, because the source has already demonstrated that they intended to link to your website, and by providing with the correct link, you will be helping them out.
You can also look at instances where the source simply did not link to your website. I would prioritize your outreach to these websites based on:
- Domain authority (DA), which predicts how well a website will rank in SERP (search engine results page), is a good indicator because getting links from other websites with high DA will boost your website’s authority over time in turn;
- Whether or not they used your research, and you can therefore ask them to link back to your website so readers can learn more, with the added incentive that they should give your research credit with a link; or
- If your brand is quoted or featured in their article.
On the other hand, if you are just an example in a list of many brands, it’s less likely that you’ll get a link.
2. Guest posting: Submit original or syndicated content to other websites for publication.
Guest posting is not only a good way to build your personal brand and thought leadership — it’s also a great way to get links back to your brand’s website. It requires a medium lift from outside publications because editors will have to revise and manage the publication process of your piece.
The key to a good guest post, especially early on in your relationship with a publisher, is to only provide content that is valuable to that publication’s particular audience. Do not mention your brand. (Except, of course, in your bio!) When linking back to research on your brand’s website, try not to do it more than once and make sure it’s extremely valuable to the post you are submitting.
Once you are an established guest writer and have a solid relationship with your editor, only then can you start to introduce your brand a bit, and link back to your website a little more often. You may be able to do this earlier on with publications that are directly relevant to your brand.
3. Content placement: Pitch content such as data package, reports, and infographics to reporters and bloggers for use in their stories.
Content placement requires the most lift on the part of the publication, because they not only have to read your research, look at your infographic, or examine your data, they also have to write something about it.
To make your content more accessible, decrease the lift by writing an excellent media kit that highlights all of the important information for them. Here, check out our Media Kit Template for Marketers, which we’ve used very successfully!
If you are able to offer content with original data, getting content placements will be easier because of the uniqueness of your insights. If you can’t, focus on offering in-depth reports that provide excellent curation and analysis of existing research. Infographics are also very desirable, if you have the design resources to produce them.
What tools do I need for link building?
Learn how to leverage the right tools to complete each of these essential link-building tasks.
- List-building, management, and outreach: Buzzstream is an excellent tool for marketing teams to use to coordinate their list-building and outreach efforts. It also has a toolbar plugin for adding contacts and websites to your lists.
- Alerts for mentions of your brand: Google Alerts, Buzzsumo, and Moz Open Site Explorer/Fresh Explorer are extremely useful for getting emails with up to date mentions of your brand. Sometimes one will pick up mentions that the others won’t, and who reports the mention first varies. Ideally, you would employ all three to cover your bases.
- How to evaluate mentions of your brand and prioritize target websites: The Moz toolbar plugin and Moz Open Site Explorer are unbeatable in terms of evaluating the domain and page authorities of websites and web pages. They also allow you to easily track links back to your website.
- Measuring referral traffic: You will need to continue evaluating the effectiveness of your placements by examining referral traffic and conversions. Google Analytics allows you to track both so you can find the most effective websites to place links, and make every outreach effort count.