While there are many blogs and articles on the internet offering tips and tricks for building links, there’s less on the actual anatomy of a winning link-building campaign. For this reason, we’ve decided to share our proven tips for creating the best link-building campaign to help you boost your search engine visibility and increase organic traffic to your website.
Here at Galactic Fed, we continue to deliver winning link-building campaigns in partnership with fortune 50 companies, small businesses, and start-ups, giving us unique insight into what works and what doesn’t when it comes to link-building campaigns.
If you’re entirely new to building links, it might be worth reading our introduction to link-building, which provides useful definitions and a step-by-step guide to the link-building process.
Let’s dive into the detail of how to build the best link-building campaign, from starting with excellent evergreen content and delivering people-led outreach, to getting specific with search operators.
What is a backlink?
Source: Moz
A backlink is a link from one web page on a website to another website. If a site links to your company’s site, then that’s referred to as a backlink from them. If your company’s website provides a link to another site, then that’s a backlink from you.
What is a link-building campaign?
A link-building campaign is the strategy that underpins, guides, and ultimately ensures your backlink-building efforts are successful.
Six proven tips for building the best link-building campaign
Galactic Fed’s six proven tips for creating a winning link-building campaign are:
- Start with great, evergreen content
- Prioritize continuous prospecting
- Keep it relevant
- Ensure people-led outreach, and
- Maintain your high-quality links
- Get specific with search operators
Start with great, keyword-optimized content
The backbone of every winning link-building campaign is excellent content.
What’s great content, you ask? It’s unique, fresh, and valuable to site users.
The content you aim to build backlinks to shouldn’t appear anywhere else on your website or the web. Google isn’t a fan of this and might not index or rank your web page if this is the case.
Great content is evergreen and fresh, meaning it’s search-optimized and stays relevant to site visitors for as long as possible. Google sees fresh content as content that links to or references recent news or research too. Google Trends is a helpful tool to use when working on fresh content, just pop in a search term and look at related topics to gain insight into trending queries that could help you add value to what you publish.
The perfect content length debate rages on among digital marketing professionals. However, Galactic Fed believes it’s best to develop content with depth and cover a specific topic in great detail. Google prefers web pages that thoroughly answer people’s questions and provides comprehensive solutions.
Lastly, the way you organize and structure content on your web pages plays an integral part in creating great content. Use headings and subheadings (H1, H2, H3, etc.) to make it easy for people and Google to scan your content and improve your site’s user experience in the process.
Prioritize continuous prospecting
Continuous prospecting means consistently reaching out to new sites to build links from new referring domains. To find the optimal fit with a brand’s keyword space, it is vital to prospect for relevant blogs and publications that you could approach to backlink to your content daily.
Prospecting regularly can take time, which is why several businesses decide to partner with backlink specialists who manage prospecting for them. If this is something you are considering, take a look at our guide to find out what to look for when it comes to backlink services.
Keep it relevant
This tip may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how many times backlinks are created to web pages that are not relevant to the original content.
The best link-building strategy doesn’t favor the number of prospects over relevancy to your content. Ensure any blogs or online publications you prospect have one-to-one relevance with the content you wish to build links to, which will enable you to set your link-building campaign up for success.
Ensure people-led outreach
Outreach performed by real people that aims to get links to the authoritative content on your site can help you illustrate your expertise by asking other people in your industry to help spread the word about the great content on your website. Focus on building partnerships over building links and engaging with the people and businesses in the same keyword space as you over cold outreach.
Google picks up on low-quality, paid-for links and can penalize your company’s website for doing so. It’s not worth going down the route of offering payment for backlinks (also known as black-hat link-building.) Stick to white-hat link-building, which consists of collaborating with other relevant businesses and securing backlinks that benefit site users.
Maintain your high-quality links
Maintenance and management of the backlinks you can secure can be an overlooked aspect of a link-building campaign, yet it’s one of the most critical parts. Check for broken links regularly to avoid losing traffic to your website and experiencing the knock-on effect of your search engine ranking being affected.
Maintaining the partnerships you make through link-building is vital, too. Schedule regular check-ins, and keep an eye on all of the backlinks to and from your website to other sites.
Get specific with search operators
Lastly, by pairing great content and consistent outreach with the use of search operators, you’ll set your business on the path to link-building success in no time.
What are search operators?
Search operators allow you to narrow down your Google searches using specific characters to help you acquire more tailored results. There’s a ton of search operators out there, but a few keys ones are worth utilizing specifically for link-building, allowing you to:
- Check a search term is in a URL
- Find the right contact
- Identify post opportunities
By placing “inurl:” in front of your search, it’s possible to find the exact category of pages you’re looking for. For example, if you’re on the hunt for directories to review and approach, you’d type in “inurl:directories” on your search results page, and Google will display only URLs with directories.
Use the search operator “email” to find valuable contact information for your outreach efforts.
Finally, try using a combination of search operators “inurl:write-for-us ‘keyword’” to help you find relevant guest posting opportunities your business can approach and contribute to.
A link-building campaign that delivers results
Link-building doesn’t just improve the SEO value of your web pages you secure direct links to but also contributes to your website’s overall “lift.” Good link-building can help bolster your brand and help you become established as an authority in your niche industry.
Always start with great, evergreen content, followed by continuous prospecting. Ensure the prospects you identify are relevant to your search terms and resources for people-led outreach once you begin contacting your prospect hitlist. Carve out time in your link-building campaign for maintaining the quality links you secure, checking for broken links regularly. Finally, use powerful search operators to help narrow down and get the most out of your link-building efforts.
We hope our six proven tips help you improve your company’s link-building campaign. Got a burning question about link-building? Reach out to Galactic Fed! We’ve got a whole team of link-building experts who would love to help boost traffic to your website and improve your search engine ranking through a winning link-building campaign.
