Tips to Improve Your Link Building Strategy

For many, link building seems to be one of the more laborious SEO tactics, but it is still a valuable factor for impacting your rankings. Before you can start to reap the benefits of link building, you need to lay the groundwork first. Here are a few ways to get started with building a portfolio of links with quality content from authoritative sites.

• Take Inventory of Your Onsite & Social Media Content

• Press releases: Offsite

• Social posts: Offsite

• Guest blogs: Offsite

• Blogs: Onsite

• Landing pages: Onsite

• Microsite: Onsite (because it is a part of your root domain)

• Analyze Your Onsite Metrics and Most Popular Backlinks

• Headlines and headers

• Text

• Images

• Layout

• Run a Competitive Backlink Audit

• Create a Backlink Audit and Outreach Sheet

Before you can brainstorm new content, you should take inventory of what you currently have. Create an excel sheet and label content by where it is housed, offsite and onsite. Here are a few examples:

After you list the types of content you distribute, pick out the themes that each of your pieces of content can be bucketed in. This is how you outline your inventory.

Content planning can feel like a guessing game, but it doesn’t have to be. Pull metrics from live content to analyze and highlight which topics receive the most engagement from your users. If you want to take your analysis a step further, use Google Analytics’ content experiments to set up testing for:

For your backlinks, record the most popular link referrals as well as the hyperlinked text. Any links you earn without manual outreach are great examples of the topics users find resourceful and are willing to refer to others.

Just like you do with your audit, run one for your competitors as well. This will give you better insight into their content marketing strategies, as well as what conversations their company is being invited into. Also, highlight authoritative sites that are linking back to your competitors. If you can figure out the topics that interest them, you can brainstorm and propose content ideas to them.

Make sure you are pitching topics that align with your overall content strategy.

To track your efforts and keep an updated list of collaborative sites, create an excel sheet to list other partner sites, the content they typically publish (including your own), and analyze these posts to see how much traffic is referred each month from them.

The more active you are with your backlink effort, the better you will  be at understanding what resonates with your users and benefits your business case. Want to learn more about our SEO strategies? Our specialists are waiting to hear from you.