Link Building & Link Earning Tactics

"Link building" is as intrinsic to SEO as the words "Google" or "ranking." But doing it right is easier said than done, and doing it effectively as an art. We've invited one of the SEO industry's foremost link builders and author of our own Beginner's Guide to Link Building, Paddy Moogan of Aira, to share his knowledge and experience in this arena.

There are a range of signals that Google uses to determine which results to display and the order in which they appear. While we know a few of them for sure, such as site speed and mobile responsiveness, there are many factors that are not revealed. There are also many that Googlers themselves may not understand completely due to the growing use of machine learning.

Having said that, links have always been a key ranking signal and are likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. While links as a ranking signal have developed tremendously, it's difficult to find a set of search results where a domain ranks well consistently with zero links.

It’s also important to remember that "links" aren't a single signal on their own. Each link is part of many related signals that determine whether a link passes value or not and how much value it passes.

Moving away from the technical aspects of link building, you need to have the right mindset for link building, as well. It really comes down to creating a website that is naturally link-worthy, thus removing the need to proactively build every single link that you get, a practice that is unsustainable for most websites.

If you can make your website link-worthy, links will come naturally — and this is the most scalable and sustainable way to build links. Making your website link-worthy isn’t easy, but can be done via methods such as:

• Providing great content for your users

• Having a product that is truly innovative or different from competitors

• Being an expert in your field

Of course, other link building tactics and outreach should still be used and can be very effective. But you should also have one eye on the long-term strategy, always asking how you can make a website naturally link-worthy.

When it comes to the bigger SEO picture, we know that links are an eminently important signal, but you must consider other factors as well, such as technical, on-page, and content signals. When combined, you give yourself the best chance possible to rank well in organic search results. Even if you have a fantastic link building strategy, don’t forget to maintain and improve the other core elements of SEO, too.

Historically, link building has been thought of as an isolated activity which takes place on its own, independent of other marketing activities. This was at least partly because, as with SEO in general, many traditional marketers didn't understand it but were sold on its importance.

SEO and link building are not as effective if they take place in isolation. Sure, you can still get results, but SEO is moving more and more toward being part of a wider marketing strategy, which means that it can leverage other activities as well.

Link building shouldn't be thought of as a set of tactics that you just execute on. Instead, you should have a strategic approach to it and think about things such as:

• The value that link building brings to a business to help make it link-worthy

• How this value connects to real business outcomes, such as leads or revenue

• What resources you need from other areas of the business

• How you’ll measure success and communicate it to the wider business

As mentioned above, implementing a strategy that combines proactive outreach and link building with making your website link-worthy is crucial.

Having this holistic approach will help ensure that you’re not operating in a silo and that you’re connecting link building to other areas of your business.

Next, we'll cover different approaches to measuring links and understanding which ones may make the biggest difference in traffic and rankings, along with business outcomes such as revenue.

Once your link building strategy is set and you’re underway, you must measure your work to understand the effectiveness of what you’re doing and demonstrate its value. There are a few ways that you can measure link building. We’ll cover them below, along with the pros and cons of each one.

Volume of links

There are various tools you can use (such as Link Explorer) to measure the volume of links to a domain and then track this number over time. You can also manually measure the links that you build via your own outreach and record these over time as well.

The advantage of this measure is that it's very easy to do and is usually a direct result of the SEO work that you're doing. For example, if you engage in a tactic such as broken link building, you can see exactly how many links you were able to build as a result of that work. This lets you understand which activities are the most worthwhile and effective at generating volumes of links.

The downside of this form of measurement is that not all links are created equal and your raw volume of links isn't actually very useful without additional context, such as the authority and relevance of those links.

One quality, authoritative, relevant link could do more for you than a hundred low-quality ones. Yet if you only measure link volume on its own, those hundred low-quality links may be misconstrued as more successful.

You can use the volume of links as a measure, as long as you add other context too. We'll dive into that below.

Quality of links

Quality is generally pretty subjective, but when it comes to link building, there are some good ways to understand and measure the quality of a link. The two core ways are:

• Relevance of a link

• Authority of a link

Let's talk about relevance first.

Relevance isn't binary. You can't just look at a link and say whether it's relevant or not. For example, you may get a link to your website from another which is in the same industry and contains content that is similar to yours, but what if that link is pointing at a piece of content you’ve created which is on a completely different topic — would you consider that a relevant link?

What if you somehow get a link from NASA to your coffee beans website? Space exploration isn't exactly relevant to the grinders and beans that you sell, is it?!

This makes relevance really hard to measure, especially at scale. But it's possible to do by using your own experience, instincts, and asking a few basic questions when looking at a link:

• If the link is on another website, how likely is it that a potential customer for your products would see that link?

• If the link is to a piece of content that you've created, would that content resonate with your ideal customer?

• If someone at your company who has zero knowledge of SEO and link building saw the link, would they be happy with it?

These can help you understand whether a link is relevant to your business or not. Despite this not being the most objective measure and hard to scale, factoring relevance into your link building measurement at some point is really important. This is because the more relevant links are, the more likely they are to put you in front of potential customers and to generate real traffic.

When it comes to authority, there are many third-party scoring methods that aim to replicate Google PageRank. Moz has developed their own proprietary authority metrics: Domain Authority and Page Authority. These measures can give you an approximate idea of how much value a particular link has. It’s not foolproof, and no third party can perfectly replicate Google PageRank, but they can be good enough to get a rough idea of how much authority a link has.

Using third-party metrics is a good thing, but you should always keep in mind that these metrics are not used by Google themselves. This means that they are naturally limited in their usefulness and, similar to link volume, shouldn’t be used without context.

Rankings and organic search traffic

Ideally, your link building should have a positive effect on your organic search rankings and, as a consequence, your traffic as well. As we learned earlier, there are many signals that Google uses to determine organic search rankings, but building the right kinds of links is a strong one and should help you rank better.

However, it can be hard to measure the direct effect of the links you build on organic search rankings and traffic. It's just not as simple as being able to say "we built 10 links and our traffic went up by 20%." Despite understanding some of the signals, none of us knows exactly how the Google algorithm works and even if we did, every website and industry is different.

Building ten links for a brand-new coffee bean website is likely to have a bigger impact than building ten links for an established website that sells car insurance.

This makes our lives harder as SEOs, but not impossible. It's also easier if you’re able to control or at least have some influence over other important areas of SEO, such as technical or content.

The main thing that many of us can do, regardless of how much control we have, is to measure organic search rankings and traffic objectively over time and look for consistent improvement. You can use tools such as Moz Pro or Google Search Console to check rankings and Google Analytics to check traffic.

Referral traffic

Another way to measure the effectiveness of link building is to look at how much traffic is sent via the links that you've built.

It's easy to get so caught up in measuring rankings and organic traffic that you forget you can generate traffic directly from links, too. This happens when someone sees your link and then clicks on it, leading to a visit to your website.

Now, not every link that you build will send traffic — and that’s okay. But one part of your approach should be to build links that do lead to referral traffic. This may be as a result of launching a great piece of content or a new, innovative product feature that gets picked up by industry experts.

Setting expectations is important here because as mentioned, not every link will send lots of traffic. For example, if you get a link on a page because of a great resource that you’ve created, but your link is just one amongst 100+ other links on the external website, the chances of someone clicking on yours is reduced by quite a lot.

With that said, it's a great measure to use and pretty simple via tools such as Google Analytics.

One of the most sustainable ways to make your website link-worthy and allow for you to conduct proactive outreach is to invest in creating content. If your content is genuinely useful and resonates with your audience, it stands a good chance of getting links either naturally, proactively, or both.

Creating content that is naturally link-worthy and relevant to your audience and products is tricky. Doing it over and over again with multiple pieces of content is even trickier.

The process for this could be a guide in itself, but here's an overview of how you can approach creating content that is link-worthy.

Set and agree on your objectives

Start by being very clear on what you're trying to achieve with this activity. If your goal is to generate links from certain types of websites, then this will naturally shape the content that you create. If your goal is to generate traffic directly, then this will shape the types of websites that you try to get links from.

You should also bear in mind that some objectives will take longer than others to achieve. For example, hitting a link volume target may be much quicker than seeing the effect on your organic search traffic.

Idea generation and research

This is a key step in the process and focuses on producing ideas that are likely to trigger interest from other people and resonate with them. In particular, you need to come up with ideas that are likely to make people link to them.

There are a number of ways to ensure that you come up with ideas that are link-worthy, but here are some things to consider:

• Will the idea resonate with your target audience?

• Has the idea been done before? If so, are you adding value or making it different?

• Can you execute the idea in a way that brings the idea to life? Do you need extra expertise, such as subject matter experts or copywriters?

• Can you list lots of websites who you can contact in order to promote the content?

• Is the idea relevant to your brand and something that you can credibly talk about?

• Can the idea be used again in the future and not be a one-hit wonder?

Start by coming up with plenty of ideas, then narrow them down using questions like those above. In particular, the final question is an important one when it comes to making your website link-worthy, because it means that you’ll focus on ideas that can exist on your website and be relevant for a long time to come.

Eventually, you should end up with a small number of ideas that you feel very confident in and that can meet your objectives. You can then move onto production.

Production

This stage is when you take your idea and bring it to life. This may be in the form of copywriting or it could be design or development.

Whichever it is, you need to ensure that your core idea doesn't get lost during the production phase. This can happen very easily because when an idea comes to life during a design or copywriting phase, you can get excited at seeing something tangible.

However, you need to keep your original idea at the forefront of your execution. Otherwise, you could end up with a piece of content that is produced beautifully, but doesn't have the angle or hook that you need in order to meet your objectives.

At this point, you should also consider where on your website the content will be hosted. This may be on a blog, a resource section, or on a standalone page. When considering what's possible, try to ensure that your content isn't published on an orphaned page, meaning that Google can't crawl from within your website or that users can't find it.

Outreach

At the outreach stage of the process, it's time for you to promote your content piece to relevant websites and try to earn links and coverage. This is where the hard work you did during the ideation and research stages really pays off: if you have a strong idea that resonates, it will be far easier to have success with your outreach.

The key things to remember here: take time to find websites and people who would genuinely be interested in your content. Go for quality over quantity and avoid mass-emailing lots of websites at once.

Take the time to customize your outreach message to each person that you contact so that you stand out and earn their attention.

The process for content-led link building isn't a simple one to master and will necessarily take time, but being able to replicate a successful process will help you add content to your website sustainably, making it link-worthy and allowing you to conduct outreach, too.

There are endless ways to approach outreach. You can read about a core process in our link building guide, but one thing to mention in particular is how to approach building relationships in your industry and how to get your wider business helping, too.

As link builders, we often only think about building relationships when we're actually promoting something. But the truth is, you can build relationships before it comes to promotion, and help others along the way.

Look at your core industry and see who the prominent journalists, bloggers, and influencers are. Follow them, engage with them, help promote their content, and send them feedback on their work. This starts to open the door for the future and helps you begin to build those all-important relationships.

Another approach you can think about here is using other resources and expertise from within your company. For example, if you have a senior figure who's happy to share their views and opinions on industry topics, ask her if she'd be interested in providing quotes or being interviewed by journalists. If she says yes, go ahead and offer her time and expertise to key contacts and see if they want to have a chat.

Next Up: Technical SEO

Technical actions to improve search results.

This chapter was written by Paddy Moogan, link builder extraordinaire and co-founder of digital marketing agency Aira.