How to Build a SEO Backlink Strategy

One integral part of creating an effective SEO campaign is formulating a solid backlink strategy around your content. As you continue to post more content, you’ll certainly increase your site’s positioning for new keywords, but backlinks can help expedite your domain authority and trust scores with Google and other search engines. Most tools use their own ranking system and call it different names, like domain score, trust score, etc. However, it’s primarily attributed to the volume and quality of websites that link back to your website.

Receiving a backlink from Bob’s local computer store (no offense, Bob), is clearly not the same as a link from Forbes.com. That’s because Forbes has receives over 40 million organic visitors a month, on top of the millions of keywords they rank for and the millions of quality backlinks to their site. While Bob may be a respected member of the local community, his authority in the digital world doesn’t come anywhere near Forbes.

Now, there are two different types of backlinks we want to look out for. Good backlinks, such as those coming from Forbes.com, and toxic links. Toxic links are exactly what they sound like– bad links. If a website has a low authority score and appears spammy, you’ll want to disavow these links with Google Search Console. You’re letting Google know that this link is suspicious and you want nothing to do with it. Thus, you are removing the potential negative impact of these links. It’s important to monitor your backlinks using an SEO tool like Moz Pro or SEMRush. Whitelist the ones that have a good rating, and disavow those that do not.

So how do you get these good backlinks? First of all, create great content. The better your content, the more likely it’s going to get clicks, views, and shares. Each share creates a new backlink. More importantly, who is sharing this content? For example, if a top influencer in your industry mentions your website, that’ll go a long way. Not only are you gaining viewership from that authority, but gaining a quality link as well.

Another tactic to building backlinks is called brand monitoring. Using a tool like SEMRush or any other SEO tool, you can scan the internet for mentions of your brand. If that site’s authority and ratings are good, you can send them a note and ask for a backlink. You’ll be surprised that most people are willing to help, and maybe you could return the favor as well. I suggest saving an email template with this request and shooting it out to a list of contacts you’ve formed from the brand monitoring.

Guest blogging can also be an effective way to get backlinks. If an influencer in your space is willing to blog on your site, you’re bringing a lot of their dedicated fans with them. Alternatively you could also post guest articles on influencer channels as well to link back to your site.

If you already have a lot of great content on your site, this next strategy should be an easy one. Simply re-post your content on other platforms, such as Medium, YouTube, Vimeo, and create a backlink to your content as the original source. While this is technically duplicate content, Google is smart enough to parse this as such, and it shouldn’t negatively impact your scores. Fun fact– while Google is the largest search engine with a 90.91% search market share, YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine. There are over 3 billion searches a month on YouTube.

Lastly, appealing infographics can go a long way in building up your backlinks. Infographics are a valuable source of data created as visual story. They’re incredibly powerful pieces of content that are likely to increase your blog shares. If there’s a lot of data to present in your article, consider having a designer create an infographic to make that data easier for readers to take away.

Following these tips can help increase your page rank much quicker. However, at the end of the day, content will always be king. If you focus on creating a customer matrix of quality content, the backlinks tend to work themselves out. If you have any tips or comments on backlink strategy, leave us a note below.