The Essential Guide To SEO Backlink Campaigns

Link building is a crucial part of a successful SEO strategy. Building backlinks to a website drives organic traffic and improves its search engine rankings. In this blog post we explain the fundamentals of link-building, discuss how to gain high-quality links, leverage local SEO for link-building and evaluate link-building success as well as describe my own customised approach to the task.

Organic link-building strategies are composed of three elements: pitching new content or updates to news outlets and blogs, submitting guest posts to blogs and submitting listings in high-quality directories. We have developed custom software for the purposes of pitching new content and updates and include organic link-building in all of our SEO packages.

Link-building is the practice of getting links to your website placed on other websites. Websites with content related to a particular industry benefit from including links to industry sources: it makes them more authoritative. Outbound links give readers additional context to on-page information and link providers more credibility. Backlinks to your site are evaluated by search engines to produce a ‘domain rating’ metric: a rank out of 100. Your score in this metric directly impacts your site’s organic search performance.

The most fundamentally effective way to build backlinks is to ensure your website content is unique, easy to read and contains insights from experts. If content is official then it has a higher chance of persuading online communities to link to it on their sites. Infographics, videos and industry research are some of the most popular types of content on the internet. By producing these, website owners increase their chances of successful link-building outreach.

It is high-quality links that have the largest impact on a website’s domain rating. While low-quality links may be easier to gain en-masse, high-quality links have a better effect on website performance. Think of it like this: if you get 10 idiots talking about a product or service to each other at the pub, no-one outside that network will know anything about the aforementioned product or service. However, if you get 2 industry experts talking about the same product or service on television it can have a big impact on a business’s success. The same logic applies to link-building: low-quality link providers often don’t enjoy much visibility and therefore not many people will see the link to your website. On the other hand, high-quality providers receive tonnes of traffic and your site will enjoy more visibility if you can get a link placed in such places.

Local SMEs should focus link-building efforts in their local area. Local business directories, community blogs and local Government sites can be a great source of links if approached politely, convincingly and offering a valuable information asset. When a SME’s target market is located nearby its bricks and mortar store, use of location pages and a highly-visible local address on-site in addition to an optimised Google Business Profile can make local online communities more inclined to place a backlink to that site due to highly-visible evidence that a business serves its local area first and foremost.

Links from local sites (in fact, any links) should be hosted on anchor text that emphasises what users will find when they click the link. Targeting high-volume search terms with anchor text improves page rank and can drive referral traffic. Use of anchor text containing high-volume keywords produces improvements in a website’s visibility when these keyword are googled.

If a website is optimised for Google search, chances are it will slowly start to gain links organically as other website owners find useful information contained within its pages and use it as a source in their own content. Not all of these links will be high-quality, however. At some point, a website’s link profile needs to be evaluated to ensure its contents are high-quality. Toxic links from spam sites can be disavowed during routine search engine optimisation to ensure a website’s link profile remains distinguished. Toxic links can be identified by:

• A low domain rating on the link provider’s website,
• Low traffic on the link provider’s site and
• Spammy anchor text (hyperlink text that does not relate to your products or services).

These sorts of links can harm website performance and so should be disavowed as soon as they are identified.

Our link-building strategy is highly-customised. We love talking about it. 

We begin by using industy-standard SEO software (AHREFs) to identify high-quality link providers. We identify websites where:

1. Our clients’ content can be used as a source to enhance existing new or existing content,
2. Guest blog submission on topics related to our clients’ industry is allowed and
3. High-quality directories provide links to local businesses.

Once we have a list of websites in these three categories, we use custom-built software to crawl each site for contact email addresses. AI-powered software means the task can be completed in a couple of hours.

Following a successful crawl, we now have a list of (potentially) tens of thousands of email addresses. We next craft personalised email templates using spreadsheet data. Personalised emails politely ask website owners to update their content with new authoritative information and a link to its source (our client). We send out personalised emails en-masse. 

After outreach has been performed, we wait to collect. A lot of the time we get requests for payment in exchange for link placement. It’s extraordinarily common practice to buy links, however this is in direct opposition to Google’s regulations and can harm a website’s performance. Sometimes, we must accept that the website will not update an old article, but instead accept a guest post submission. In this second case, we write a topical guest post containing several links to our client’s site and make a submission. Whether its organic or sponsored, we acquire links and the performance of our clients’ websites improves.

When link-building starts to take off, we develop relationships with the community of journalists, bloggers, influencers and directory owners who have shared a link to a website’s content too – to gain additional high-quality links!

At the end of the day, link-building is a numbers game regulated by the need for high-quality content produced by industry experts. High-quality local backlinks drive website performance far more than a large quantity of links. A website’s backlink profile should be regularly evaluated to ensure it is of an exceptional standard. We have built the tools needed to get in touch with journalists, bloggers and directory owners at massive scale and acquire many links for our clients. If your business is looking for a link-building service, call us or reach out via our contact page to discuss a custom package. Link-building is also included in our standard SEO service.