Link Building for Beginners: Complete Guide to Get Backlinks in 2021

razsmiths (31)in #backlink • 3 years ago

And Bank Rate's mortgage calculator has over 3,500 links from unique websites. Data-studies and case studies are also a great type of content that attracts links. For example, our study on featured snippets has earned over 1,200 referring domains. And it doesn't even need to be your own data. This page has gotten 570 referring domains and it's just a curated list of stats on coffee. Bottomline, if your content is a helpful resource for their audience or it supports arguments they're making like a stat or fact, then your chances of earning backlinks increases.

Now, the second part to link building where creativity is required is the pitch. Building links means you need to reach out to authors and editors and ask them to link to you. Just like in sales, these people are called "prospects." Now, it's called a "pitch" for a reason. You can't just ask people to link to you without a good reason. Let me put this into perspective. Imagine someone showed up at your door and they asked you for money. That's it. You'd probably be speechless and just shut the door. Now, if they told you that they were raising money for a good cause in your community, you might consider listening to them. And that brings us to the first part of the pitch. You need to have a good reason to contact people. Generally speaking, the better the reason, the higher your chance of achieving your goal. So in that door knocker scenario, they might say something like… "Hi Bobby, my name is Samantha and I'm a part of the Ahrefs' Tigers soccer team. The reason I'm here is because our team recently lost funding so I'm trying to raise money to help our team get new uniforms. Since your daughter Felicity played on our team a few years ago, I thought you might like to help." I'm wondering if you'd like to donate $10, which will pay for half of one of the Tiger's uniforms?" Now, if you were Bobby, would you give Samantha $10? Maybe. But another key point to note is that the pitch is personalized, which can also help improve your link conversion rates. Now, how do we take this pitch from a "maybe" to a "probably?" Let's add on to Samantha's pitch. "Since we're registered as a charitable organization, we'd be happy to provide a tax receipt for any donations above $10." Now the pitch has just gotten stronger and could even lead to higher valued donations. And this brings us to the final part of the pitch and that's the value exchange.

Yes, some people will likely link to you if you have a good reason for contact and your content matches the criteria we went through before. But if they're getting something of value in exchange for a link, whether that be a resource that adds value to their blog or free content from a guest post, then your chances of getting a link increases. But remember, things like exchanging links for money or doing excessive link exchanges is against Google's Webmaster Guidelines. The same goes for sending products to a person in exchange for a backlink. So you'd need to get creative here to stay in line with the rules. And I won't expand on this because it's just so highly situational based on the page you're trying to build links to. But we have a full video on using negotiation and persuasion for link building, so I'll link that video up in the description. Now, as you can see, link building is both an art and a science. Pitches are also highly situational and will vary from person to person. But there are quite a few link building strategies that are streamlined and have been proven to work time and time again. So let's go through some of these strategies and I'll explain what it is, why it works, and how you can do them. The first link building strategy is guest blogging. Guest blogging is when you create content for another website. And the reason why this strategy works is because there's a clear value exchange. They get great content for free, and almost always, you should be able to get a link back to your site; whether that be within the content or in the author bio. So the way guest blogging works is to find other blogs in your industry, pitch and agree on a relevant topic, and then you would write a post for them. One way to find other industry blogs is with Ahrefs' Content Explorer. Just search for a topic related to your niche. Next, set the One page per domain filter since you don't need to pitch the same site multiple times. You can then set a Domain Rating filter to something like 40-60 to find websites that have decent website authority. Export the results and start pitching. The next link building tactic is called resource page link building. This is where you get backlinks from web pages that curate and link out to useful industry resources. Now, this strategy works because the sole purpose of the pages' existence is to link out to helpful and useful resources. So if your content is great and you bring it to their attention, you're actually helping them fulfill the page's purpose. The basic process is simple.

First, you find industry resource pages, then you reach out to them and suggest your resource for inclusion. The easiest way to find relevant pages is to search in Google with a query like intitle:resources inurl:resources.html and then a phrase related to your topic. Visit the pages and see if they're actually resource pages that link out to other external pages. Then it's just a matter of reaching out to the ones you want to be mentioned on. You can also use Ahrefs' SEO toolbar, which will show you important SEO metrics like Domain Rating, URL rating, as well as both page and domain level search traffic estimations right within the SERP. The next link building strategy is broken link-building. Broken link building is a tactic where you find a dead link on a page, create your own page on that topic, then ask everyone linking to the dead resource to link to your page instead. The reason why it works is because webmasters who care about their site don't want to lead their visitors to broken pages. So oftentimes, they'll replace the dead link with yours. Now, there are quite a few ways to find dead pages with backlinks.