I wrote this article in collaboration with my colleague and friend Danny Grainger, a backlinking pro and copywriter to boot. With my experience building content strategies, and his knowledge about gaining backlinks, we’re bringing you the best advice for using content to get backlinks without having to spend extra cash.
Search engines have a singular goal—to show users the best possible answer to their query. But with more content on the internet than ever before, it’s become increasingly harder for businesses to get their content to rank above their competitors.
Enter the backlink.
Backlinks demonstrate authority and trustworthiness – signals that indicate value and legitimacy of content. Out of the 200 ranking factors Google uses to determine what makes a web page worth listing on the first page, backlinks may be the most fickle factor to achieve.
But without backlinks, you’re going to struggle to pick up steam and get your SEO strategy off the ground. And getting backlinks by paying for them, or worse, using link farms and old directories, just won’t cut it in 2021.
We can see just how much impact backlinks have on a websites’ rank in search engine queries by evaluating the backlink profiles of top-ranked search results:
- The top ranked Google search result has, on average, 3.8X more backlinks than subsequent positions
- The more domains linking to a page, the higher that page ranks in search results
- Sites with backlinks from more established domains (higher DRs) rank higher than those with lower DR backlinks
But getting backlinks to your domain is not easy.
It takes outstanding, original content.
It takes time.
And it takes creativity.
But it can be done—even in 2021.
We’ve put together some of the best strategies for acquiring backlinks—and all of these strategies still work well and are sanctioned by Google as of writing this article. But before we get into those strategies, let’s start with some basics, in case you need a refresher.
What are backlinks?
Backlinks are links from a page on one website to a page on a different website.
Backlinks often appear as text in a different color. In this article you’re reading, and many others, they are blue. In this screenshot from Danny’s website, they’re orange:
Backlinks are essentially references from other websites. They are usually put in place by whoever has control over uploading the content—this may be the writer themselves, an editor, a publisher, or a web developer.
When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), however, backlinks play a crucial role in driving organic traffic to your website.
Why are backlinks important?
We know Google uses a number of factors to determine what content it wants to list on the almighty first page. One of these factors is high-quality backlinks. You can think of backlinks like getting references for a job. A backlink from a reputable website is sort of like an employer saying, “Helen is a reliable and trustworthy employee. I can’t recommend her highly enough.”
If one website that is already trusted in Google’s eyes links to a lesser-known website, they are basically telling Google, “I trust this website.” And the more websites that link to your site, the more trust Google will have in you, and the easier it will be for you to win at the SEO game.
In fact, the highest ranked results in Google typically have the most backlinks;
Unfortunately, you can’t get links from just any website. It’s not just the number of backlinks you acquire, but how reputable the sites linking to your site are in the eyes of Google.
What determines a good backlink?
There are two important factors that determine a good backlink:
1. It’s from a website that his relevant to your own business or industry
2. It’s from a website that has established domain authority
The best backlinks will have a blend of these two factors, but the first factor (relevancy) is more important. It is bad practice to seek backlinks from high-authority websites that have nothing to do with your business. So if you run a company that sells pet toys, you don’t want a link from a financial planner website, even if it is from a very authoritative website.
What determines a website’s authority? It’s not a perfect science, but there’s something known as domain ranking (DR) that guides us in the right direction.
DR is an SEO metric used to assess the backlink profile of a webpage—it assigns a domain a number between 0-100. There are a number of websites and tools that produce these rankings, but our favorite comes from the premium SEO tool Ahrefs.
The higher the DR, the more authoritative and trustworthy the domain, scored on a scale of 100.
Getting backlinks from sites with higher DRs means the authority and DR of your site grows. There’s no official number that designates a “good” DR. But generally, if you’re looking for a link that might move the SEO needle, aiming for backlinks from sites that have at least a 30 DR score is a good start.
By the way, my friends over at Databox have written a great article about how to improve your website’s authority. Highly recommend checking it out if that’s a focus for you.
Here, we take a deeper look at 6 of the best backlinking strategies you can use in 2021 to bring in more backlinks and grow your websites’ DR. This, in turn, will get more visitors to your site, and increase your profit margin.
The 6 best backlinking strategies for 2021 and beyond
Now that we know why we need backlinks, we need to learn how to secure them.
Each backlinking strategy we discuss, though different, all have value as their fundamental characteristic.
Website owners and people only share and link to content they find valuable.
If you offer useful advice, inspirational material or an expert opinion, people consider this valuable information and want to hear about it. This content might be comprehensive how-to guides, well-researched stats articles, or engaging infographics.
Take Facebook for example.
Ranked as the internets’ top domain, Facebook has over 94 billion backlinks from more than 35 million different domains.
This is because people appreciate and engage with information on Facebook, so they share it. Which gives it a perfect DR score of 100, and makes it the internet’s #1 domain.
So, to get backlinks to your domain, the key to success is creating and publishing valuable, shareable content.
1. Using stats roundups to generate interest
100% of people love stats.
Well, at least 100% of content creators do.
Statistics are easy ways to prove a point. They demonstrate trends, they show research, and are great supporting information for any statement.
Using and referencing verifiable sources with statistics also gives credibility to an article.
Because of this, bloggers, writers, and journalists frequently backlink to statistics pages in their citations.
Take a look at the analysis for the search term “SEO statistics”.
The top four articles all have hundreds of backlinks to them. The sites that snag those spots are likely getting loads of SEO power from those links.
You can capitalize on this by conducting your own research and creating a stats roundup specifically for your niche. You don’t need to generate big reports and surveys yourself—a roundup features stats from other companies that have already done the research, with your commentary to pull them all together.
Say, for example, you’re an SaaS brand that offers website translation.
First, you need to decide on an appropriate title. Let’s say you go with “20 statistics demonstrating why you should translate your website in 2020”.
You’d hunt around for reputable surveys and studies to find stats like:
- How many people search in multiple or single languages
- How much traffic translated websites attract compared to single-language websites
- Search engine rankings of translated v. non-translated websites
- Market sizes of each languag
Once you’ve collected this valuable, credible information, you publish it in a listicle article on your website
Then it’s time for outreach. First, you can reach out to anyone whose stats you used in the article to let them know they’ve been featured. (Make sure you’ve given them credit and a backlink to their report!)
Then you can directly reach out to editors and blogs owners who might be interested in this data. Look for blogs that discuss the same topic that you covered in your roundup, and send them an email with a link to your blog.
If you can find a specific stat on their site that is outdated, you can politely point it out and ask them if they’d like to replace that stat with one of your own—and a link back to your article, of course.
This process is labor and time intensive, but it’s one of the most assured ways to start building backlinks to your own website.
2. Getting your foot in the door with guest blogging
There have been rumblings in the SEO community that Google is now penalizing websites for publishing guest posts. As a result, the concept of guest posting has gotten something of a black mark on it—but it can still work.
The reason Google penalizes website for backlinks is, presumably, because those guest posts don’t align well with the rest of the site’s content or intended audience. (As we mentioned above, you ONLY want links coming from sites that are related to your industry.)
But if you can get your guest blogs published on a relevant, high-quality website, you can still get a quality back link.
When you write a guest post, your content will be posted on someone else’s site—this isn’t only good for your brand reach, but also for your backlinking strategy, because usually you can put a link back to your website somewhere in the copy (often in the bio at the end).
The tricky part is finding the right guest blogging opportunities, but once again, our trusty SEO tools can help us. Using a tool like AHREFS (or something free like Ubersuggest), enter a search term relevant to your industry, and look for websites or authors that frequently publish on these topics.
With AHREFS, your search results might look like this:
This will give you a list of websites to target for your guest posts. Now, go through them and look on their “submit” or “about us” pages for guidelines on how to submit a guest post. Some blogs will want you to pitch an idea, but others may require a full article for submission.
You can also use LinkedIn or Twitter to find the authors or publishers of these sites. If they don’t accept cold emails, building a relationship on social media is another route you can take.
If you plan to write an article to submit, you can save yourself time by writing an article that would be suitable on a number of different websites. This way, if you get rejected by one site, it may find a home on another. Just remember to tailor the piece slightly for the site you’re submitting to by adjusting the tone of voice, and never publish an article more than once to avoid plagiarism and duplicate content.
3. Broken-link replacement
Strong backlinks are good for SEO—but broken links are a different story. Any website that has a broken link (one that points to a page that no longer exists) is risking their SEO integrity.
For this reason, webmasters and publishers are usually happy to have broken links pointed out to them, especially if the person who points it out happens to have a more appropriate link for them to replace it with.
To use this strategy to its full potential, you can use an SEO tool to find websites that have broken links. Then it’s a matter of looking through your own content to find something to replace it, or barring that, creating a new piece of content to submit for replacement.
To find broken links, you first need to identify websites where you’d like to be published. (See the previous strategy to learn more about how to do this.)
Once you have those targets in mind, head over to a Broken Link Checker and enter in the domain. You’ll get a list of broken links like this:
Now, it’s just a matter of outreach once again. Find the contact details for these websites, and send them a polite email pointing out the backlink, and providing your link as an alternative.
4. Using infographics or videos to make a splash
If you use videos or graphic design in your own content, you may be sitting on some backlink opportunities already.
Good content marketers know that integrating videos, infographics, and other visual elements into their articles is a smart strategy.
The problem is, few people have the time or skills necessary to create these assets for their content. That’s where you come in.
If you’ve recently made a piece of visual content, you can gain a backlink by finding a home for it on someone else’s content. This is as easy as doing a Google search for related content.
For example, let’s say you’ve made a 5-minute explainer video titled “How to create the perfect Instagram ad.” Head over to Google and start searching for articles on similar topics (“how to make instagram ads” or “instagram ads tips” for example).
Next, reach out to the original creators of these articles. Tell them you love the content, and that you’ve created something you think would add to it. Then attach your video or infographic, and ask them if they’d like to feature it in their content piece.
If and when they do, you can request that they link back to your original website as a source, and voila! Instant backlink.
5. Demonstrate your expertise by participating as a guest on Podcasts
Over the past 2 years, podcasting has exploded.
From only 550,000 active podcasts on Apple Podcasts in 2018, as of December 2020, there are over 1.68 million live podcasts.
Every industry imaginable is podcasting.
Being a guest on a podcast is a fantastic way to build your personal brand, demonstrate your expertise, get your name out there, and secure backlinks to your website.
Some podcasts publish a transcript of each episode, which will contain a backlink to the guests’ website, and others will include the link in the guest bio. Either way, this is a good strategy to not only boost your personal profile on relevant podcasts, but also obtain a backlink from a trustworthy source.
To start guest-podcasting, all you need to do is sign up to a podcast matching service like Pod Match, which is kind of like Tinder but for podcasters and podcast guests. Be sure to look for podcasts that are truly relevant to your experiences or industry—as with any backlinking technique, your goal should be to provide valuable and relevant information above all.
6. Use HARO and HelpAB2BWriter to take your backlinking to the next level
You may have heard of HARO – Help A Reporter Out – a unique service where journalists source expert opinion and insight on whatever topic they happen to be writing about. If you sign up as a source, you’ll receive daily emails from reporters looking for expert quotes or interviews on dozens of topics, from technology to finance to lifestyle.
Unfortunately, though HARO can help you get backlinks from DR70+ websites, it’s hella competitive. For this reason, businesses who are serious about getting backlinks to their website may choose to outsource their HARO pitching to professionals
Using HARO is a great strategy, but we also recommend you check out the newer, very similar platform Help A B2B Writer. It works just like HARO, but is less focused on journalism and more focused on (obviously) B2B writers.
Help A B2B Writer Out was only created in 2021, and is still growing in size, but we’ve had some magnificent success with it. Using it in conjunction with HARO will help you gain backlinks faster.
How to write an email that will get you a backlink
The people who manage websites with good domain authority or public guest posting opportunities get a lot of emails asking for backlinks. To stand out from the crowd, here are a few tactics you can use when sending emails to potential backlinkers:
Before you send, do your research
It can be tempting to fire off a quick email once you see a potential backlink opportunity, but your email will be deleted pretty quickly if it’s clear you haven’t done your research. Before you reach out, take time to review the website—particularly the “About Us” page and a few of their blogs (if you’re targeting their blog content). Make sure you understand what the business is about, what tone they use, and what kind of content they are publishing. You can then weave in this knowledge throughout the pitches you write to show you are genuinely interested in their business.
Tack on a personal note
Cutting and pasting a generic email message to several backlink opportunities is a recipe for failure. It takes a bit longer, but every time you write to a new opportunity, you want to include a few observations that are specific to the website you are pitching to. For example, you might write something like, “I was reading over the article you posted on the future of AI, and I love the way you talked about the history of robotic automation.” This shows the reader that you aren’t just another backlink spammer looking for a quick opportunity.
Keep your intro short and sweet
You’ll need to introduce yourself at some point in your email, but going on too long about yourself will cause the reader to lose interest (and not respond). Introduce yourself in two or three sentences at most, and tailor your intro to the website you’re writing to. (For example, if you’re pitching to a cooking blog, you might say, “My name is _____, and I’m a former personal chef and current food blogger.” You can then toss them links to your website or social media profiles, in case they want more information.
Focus on the value you can offer
The thrust of your pitch should always be focused on the value you are offering to the person. You don’t want to come out of the gates asking for a baclink—that will land you in the “deleted” bin. Instead, talk about what you think you can bring to the table. You might say, “I noticed you didn’t have any articles on livestreaming on Instagram—I know a lot about that subject and would love to write a post for your site on it.” Another example: “I noticed you had an article about the best SEO tactics for 2021, but you don’t have any stats about organic traffic. I thought you might be interested in this blog I wrote, which has some awesome stats you could include in the article, like this one…”
The goal here is to make it easy for the person to figure out what you want quickly, so they don’t have to do any guesswork. You can gently mention the backlink toward the end of your email, or in follow-up emails. Example: “I’m not looking for any payment for the guest blog, but I would love it if I could include a link to my website in there at some point.”
Getting backlinks to your website is still a big part of a successful SEO strategy. Getting those backlinks takes time and dedication, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll see the payoff it brings.
