Mastering Link Development Campaigns in 2024 [Complimentary Guide]

Upon inputting your domain URL and your primary rivals, here’s what you receive:

Backlink Gap in Semrush and Backlink Opportunity in Ubersuggest operate precisely alike.in a similar manner.

Just a friendly reminder: Pursuing competitor connections is insufficient, as you’ll merely be playing catch-up. To surpass them, establish connections that they lack, particularly when dealing with top-tier websites.

Search for damaged links

Websites with pertinent broken links are appealing opportunities because they are already linking to a page related to yours. By aiding webmasters in discovering and replacing their broken links, you’re doing them a favor. This enhances your likelihood of success.

How can you identify broken links?

Enter the domain you wish to obtain a link from into Ahrefs Site Explorer, choose Broken Links from the sidebar menu, and it’s done.

Alternatively, you can utilize a Chrome extension like Broken Link Checker, but this necessitates visiting the actual page you wish to inspect.

Upon identifying broken links, you may be fortunate to have a similar resource available on your site. If not, you might want to create such an asset from scratch or utilize a web archive to restore it.

It’s understood that you should also monitor links pointing to your site and promptly restore any lost ones.

Track unlinked brand mentions

Unlinked brand mentions are another easily accessible opportunity.

Securing unlinked mentions is one of the most efficient methods of link building.

This strategy works effectively for reputable brands. Websites that mention your brand without a backlink are already familiar with your business and how it addresses particular challenges, facilitating negotiations.

!Antonio Gabric, Outreach Manager at Hunter

Antonio Gabric

Outreach Manager at Hunter.io

There are numerous tools you can employ to monitor brand mentions. Antonio suggests Mention, but you can also discover them with SEO tools.

This is how you can do it in Ahrefs:

💡Pro Tip:

1. Enter “your brand name” and filter to exclusively search for “in content” results.

2. Configure the filters (DR, ST, language, etc.)

3. Insert your domain URL in “Highlight unlinked”. This will highlight results mentioning your brand without a link.

4. Export exclusively highlighted pages.

Develop Link-building Assets

Once you’ve identified your potential prospects, it’s time to craft assets that they may find favorable to link to.

Pitch guest posts/contributed articles.

Guest posts are articles that you craft for another website or blog. In return for contributing a valuable piece to their content, you receive a backlink to your site.

However, obtaining guest posting opportunities, particularly unpaid ones, can be challenging.

How do experienced link-building experts approach it?

Inquired Irina Maltseva, Founder at ONSAAS and Growth Lead at Aura.

When pitching guest posts, personalize your approach. Thoroughly research the target blog to comprehend its content style and audience preferences. Customize your pitch to demonstrate how your post will enrich their readership by addressing a gap or presenting a fresh perspective on a relevant topic.

A meticulously researched, tailored pitch not only showcases your authentic interest but also significantly enhances the chances of your guest post being accepted.

!Irina Maltseva, Growth Lead at Aura and Founder of ONSAAS

Irina Maltseva

Founder at ONSAAS and Growth Lead at Aura

Data Visuals

Proficiently produced infographics are an effective link magnet as they convey a wealth of information in an easily digestible and visually appealing layout.

Here’s a notable example:

This interactive infographic on data breaches and hacks has amassed 5.5k links from 2.0k domains.

There are two approaches to creating infographics.

One option is to craft infographics related to trending keywords and share them with websites covering the topic to enhance their content.

Alternatively, you can research infographics with numerous backlinks, enhance them, and propose them to sites that linked to the originals.

You could take it a step further by engaging with your prospects through guesto-graphics.

What exactly are they?

In essence, they are tailor-made infographics in the niche that your prospects focus on. Subsequently, you reach out to them and inquire if they’d like to link back to it. To add further value, you offer to compose a brief guest post around it.

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Facts & research

Accurate research and statistics constitute one of the top link sources.

They are highly appealing to bloggers and freelance writers as they assist in substantiating the argument they are presenting and enhance the credibility of their writing.

Simply observe the State of Marketing by Hubspot to comprehend the significance. The report has garnered over 28k links from 8k domains.

What if you lack the resources to conduct original research?

Aggregate and organize data already published by others. By doing so, you make it easier for writers to access the information they require, increasing the likelihood of them linking to your content rather than to the original sources.

For instance, the article by Adam Connell below, published merely 20 days ago, contains no original data, yet it currently ranks 4th in Google SERP and has been linked to 57 times.

Success stories and assessments

Case studies, akin to original research, offer valuable and practical information for writers who are eager to link back to them to fortify their narratives.

For example, Brian Dean’s seminal case study on employing the skyscraper technique to enhance his web traffic has attracted over 8.7k backlinks from 2.5k websites.

What about assessments?

Compose an honest and precise evaluation of your prospect’s product or service, publish it on your site, and forward it to them. If they appreciate it, they’ll share it on their social media and link back to it.

You can also combine both strategies by crafting a caseinvestigation involving a merchandise. To illustrate, you can collaborate with a software as a service (SaaS) product provider on a study showcasing their tool.

Conversations and audio programs

Interactions with industry specialists and opinion influencers work wonders in terms of link-building.

What makes them so impactful?

Primarily, they enhance the value of your content by offering distinctive and reliable insights that may not be easily accessible elsewhere. This alone is adequate to attract links.

Moreover, when you highlight someone in a conversation or podcast, they are likely to share the content on their social media to recognize the visibility you’ve provided. This will increase its exposure, and bring in referral traffic and links.

Furthermore, why not switch roles and participate in podcasts as a guest to secure links from their episode pages?

Explore podcasts relevant to your field and contact the hosts to propose yourself as a guest. Take a look at the Let’s Talk Link-Building episode featuring Dmytro Sokhach, the Chief Executive Officer of Admix Global and Editorial.Link, for instance.

To find reputable podcasts in your specialization, utilize Google, popular streaming and podcast platforms like Spotify, or SEO tools.

Ensure to assess them before proposing, as it’s not worthwhile to spend your time on podcasts that don’t entertain guest appearances, have limited reach, or worse, are no longer active.

Formulate a Robust Link-Building Outreach Strategy

Outreach is the subsequent step in the backlink endeavor.

You could wait for individuals to link to your resources naturally, but that’s not the most effective way to unleash their complete link-building capability.

To achieve that, actively promote them by reaching out to potential connections and requesting a link.

Let’s examine a few suggestions on how to execute this efficiently.

Customize emails and emphasize value for prospects

Personalization is essential in the outreach process.

Indeed, data from Editorial.Link indicates that well-personalized outreach emails can garner a 45% response rate, while generic ones only achieve 8.5%.

Wondering why?

Simply look at these two sample emails from Ben Goodey, an SEO strategist and founder of How the F*ck.

The second email begins with a personalized opening, is more detailed, and demonstrates that you are familiar with the individual’s work.

There’s another factor that renders the second email superior.

It offers value by pinpointing a gap and providing a solution in the form of a guest post.

This is crucial: when approaching, give your contacts a compelling rationale to link back to your content.

Assuming your linkable assets are of top-notch quality and value, this should not be challenging, though.

Establish connections with influencers in your industry

Fostering relationships with influential figures in your sector has numerous long-term advantages.

It’s an opportunity to consistently secure high-quality backlinks, enhance your own credibility, and expand your reach and visibility, to mention a few.

How do you cultivate such relationships?

Influential individuals may initially be hesitant to link to pages they are unfamiliar with. It’s a substantial risk to their hard-earned reputation. Moreover, they are inundated with collaboration requests, so cold emails won’t suffice.

Therefore, commence by engaging with their content on social media to draw attention. Once you are on their radar, reach out and offer them something valuable, such as a complimentary link. Then, request a link in return.

Collaborate with organizations sharing your beliefs

During relationship-building, concentrate on individuals and organizations that align with your principles.

In marketing, it’s imperative to collaborate with entities that resonate with your core values. This tactic ensures that the links you establish are not only potent but also authentic, thereby fortifying your brand.

Strive for quality in your partnerships over quantity. Engage in projects that resonate with both your audiences, such as shared content or events. Regularly assess these partnerships and be prepared to adapt. This approach accomplishes more than just fostering links; it bolsters your brand’s credibility and trustworthiness.

!Tomasz Niezgoda, Chief Marketing Officer and Co-Founder of SurferSEO

Tomasz Niezgoda

the Chief Marketing Officer at SurferSEO

Track Links and Assess Advancement

The final phase in the link-building process involves evaluating your progress. This encompasses monitoring the new backlinks and their impact on your key indicators.

Utilize ranking utilities to monitor keyword enhancements.

If your goal is to enhance your rankings for specific keywords, leverage a tool like Ahrefs Rank Tracker.

It’s user-friendly. Just input your domain and the keywords you wish to monitor.

The report generated by Rank Tracker provides insights on:

• Share of Voice (SOV) – the proportion of clicks from organic search traffic landing on your site
• Average position – for all the monitored keywords
• Organic traffic – over time 
• SERP features – like featured snippets, top stories, or thumbnails – a total of 15.

You also receive detailed insights about the performance of each tracked keyword.

Semrush provides similar functionality in its Position Tracking tool, and if you wish to check individual keywords, why not use Ahrefs’ complimentary Keyword Rank Checker:

Examine Google Search Console for new backlinks

Google Search Console is a free straightforward tool that lets you monitor basic link statistics, enabling you to pinpoint new links pointing to your domain.

After selecting Links in the side menu, you will obtain details on:

• Total external links
• Top linked pages 
• Top linking pages

Track domain and page authority fluctuations

Domain and page authority are 2 exclusive metrics formulated by Moz to forecast the likelihood of a website or webpage ranking in SERPs. Semrush and Ahrefs present their own analogs -Influence Level and Website Ranking.

In determining them, one of the factors taken into account is backlinks, so SEO professionals frequently utilize them to monitor the efficiency of their link-building campaigns.

The premium versions of the aforementioned tools enable you to monitor past trends, which is ideal for tracking advancements.

Here’s how it appears in Semrush:

To examine the current DR/DA, you can utilize the free Ahrefs or Moz analyzers.

Proven and effective link-building methods

Submitting guest posts, fixing broken links, reaching out for unlinked mentions, or sharing infographics are not the exclusive successful link-building approaches.

What are some others?

• Help a Reporter Out (HARO) – acquire links by providing assistance to journalists and bloggers seeking expert contributions.
• Link-insertions/niche edits – convince an editor and webmaster to include a link to your page within their content.
• Sponsorships and scholarships – extend a scholarship to a local student or sponsor an institution or event to gain links from their sites. For example, SurferSEO sponsoring the Chiang Mai SEO conference.
• Expired domains – purchase expired domains in your niche with strong backlink profiles and establish redirects to your site.
• Link exchanges – obtain links from websites in exchange for naturally including a link to their content on your site.

Common Traps in Link-Building

Not all link-building strategies are ethical and can have severe consequences if caught employing them.

Here are a few to be cautious of.

Avoid engaging with low-quality spammy link networks

In an effort to enhance your SEO performance, you may be enticed to resort to low-quality or spammy link networks.

Don’t do it!

While this may lead to a temporary surge in web traffic, it is likely to damage your reputation in the long term.

This is because involvement in such schemes violates search engine regulations and can lead to penalties, reduced rankings, or even deindexing.

Steer clear of excessive optimization of anchor text

Over-optimizing anchor texts is another dubious practice disapproved by search engines.

Anchor text over-optimization occurs when you excessively employ an exact match keyword or key phrase as the anchor for your link, particularly in an unnatural manner that does not integrate well with the sentence structure.

Consider these two sections linking back to an article with a slug /white-hat-link-building:

Final Thoughts

So there you have it. This is how you execute a link-building campaign, starting from setting objectives and progressing through prospecting, asset creation, outreach, and tracking.

The main point to remember is that link-building is an ongoing process. It necessitates regularity and perseverance at every stage of the journey.

Nevertheless, the initial time and effort invested in creating linkable assets and establishing mutually beneficial relationships will make it progressively simpler to create links and channel traffic to your websites in the future.

Need assistance with backlinks? Reach out to the Editorial.Link team for personalized consultation.