To help you discover the best link-building secrets, we asked SEO professionals and marketing leaders this question for their best insights. From incorporating social proof into your SEO strategy to giving testimonials online, there are several lesser-known link building tactics that can be used to boost brand awareness and authority online.
Try these 12 link-building tactics that work for building SEO authority:
- Incorporate Social Proof into Your SEO Strategy
- Remove Bad Backlinks
- Reach Out to Authors of Popular Blogs
- Get Creative and Do Some Pitching
- Gain Citation Links
- Research Your Competitor’s Competitors
- Fix Broken Links
- Track Influencers’ Activity
- Don’t be Afraid to Ask For Links
- Use Proactive Digital PR to High-jack News Stories
- Use Anchor Text
- Give Testimonials
Incorporate Social Proof into Your SEO Strategy
Social proof is a link-building strategy that is often overlooked in the marketing world, but can be extremely effective. Social proof is a term used to describe the human tendency to look to others for validation of ideas or opinions. In online marketing, social proof can come in the form of testimonials, reviews, or any type of testimonial that can be used to persuade a potential customer.
One way to incorporate social proof into your SEO strategy is to include testimonials on your website or in your marketing materials. This can come in the form of customer reviews on your website, a quote from a well-known expert in your industry, or even a quote from a respected leader in your field of work. Including social proof on your website can help to convince a potential customer to do business with you and can also help to improve your SEO.
Matthew Ramirez, Paraphrase Tool
Remove Bad Backlinks
First, you need to check for any backlinks to your website that are broken or not valuable overall and see if you can have them removed. Use SEO tools such as Ahrefs or SEMRush to help you do a backlink audit. These links can hurt your SEO, even if you have other backlinks that are great. So, deal with those and then start building new ones.
Miles Beckett, Flossy
Reach Out to Authors of Popular Blogs
As an SEO professional, I’m always on the lookout for new and innovative ways to improve my clients’ search engine visibility. One little-known link-building secret that I’ve been using lately is to reach out to the authors of popular blogs and request a link back to my client’s website. This can be a great way to get high-quality links from authoritative websites, and it’s a tactic that most people don’t think of.
So if you’re looking for a way to boost your SEO efforts, try reaching out to the authors of popular blogs and request a link back to your website. You may be surprised at how successful this strategy can be!
Aviad Faruz, FARUZO New York
Get Creative and Do Some Pitching
Source information from your niche or industry on places like Terkel or HARO. It’s a great opportunity since it gets your name out there whilst getting good links for your brand. Search for unused backlinks you can fulfill with content you already have on engines like Google, and pitch it to the site’s editor. Nobody likes to have broken links on their site, so this could be a win-win situation.
Brenton Thomas, Twibi Digital Marketing Agency
Gain Citation Links
One little-known link-building secret for SEO is to use what are called “citation links.” Citation links are simply links from other websites that mention your business, without actually linking to your website.
For example, if your business is mentioned in a blog post, but the author doesn’t link to your website, that’s a citation link. These links can be valuable for SEO because they show that your business is being talked about online, even if there’s no direct link to your website.
Adil Advani, Stream Digitally
Research Your Competitor’s Competitors
Every marketing expert will tell you to research your competitor’s content backlinks to inspire your own market strategy and content, but looking beyond your competitors can also add value to your SEO strategy. Check the backlink profiles of sites that link to your competitors and the backlink profiles of their competitors to provide you with a never-ending supply of fresh content ideas. To get started, there are plenty of free and subscription SEO tools and resources to grow your search traffic and reveal more marketing opportunities based on your competitors, your competitor’s competitors, and so on.
Marilyn Zubak, Snif
Fix Broken Links
One of the most consistently successful ways of link building is to search other websites similar to yours for broken links. Once you locate such an error, contact the website admin and propose your link instead. They will certainly be glad to hear there’s an issue that needs fixing and will see you as someone who went out of their way to not only report an error but also to correct it. More often than not, the owner of the page will happily insert your link in place of the one that broke.
Michal Laszuk, PhotoAiD
Track Influencers’ Activity
By being aware of influencers’ activity, subjects they discuss, and trends they promote, SEOs build a base of future partners or brand promoters. This is one of the little-known secrets of the industry that delivers accurate results. Especially if you consider an influencer not only a person famous on social media but also an authority, journalist, specialist, and strong voice within your vertical.
By keeping track of what people talk about, you can use the best possible moment to start cooperation, offer links exchange, or mutual promotion. After all, if you track industry news and press mentions of your brand, how can you not follow influencer activity? But there is more about monitoring influencers’ activity. When spotting opportunities, ambitious link builders offer influencers special deals or gifts or simply show how worthwhile it will be for them to include a mention or link about a particular brand.
Nina Paczka, Resume Now
Don’t be Afraid to Ask For Links
One little-known link-building secret for SEO is to not be afraid to ask for links. A lot of people think they shouldn’t ask for links, but that’s not true. It’s more important to make sure you’re asking the right people and in the right way.
Here are some tips:
-Make sure you’re asking a site that your target audience is likely to visit; don’t just spam sites that only cater to one niche.
-Ask people who have already linked out to similar sites; this is a great way to build relationships with other publishers and get them interested in linking out to your site as well!
-Don’t be afraid to respond if someone says no; many people say no because they haven’t had time to respond, or because they just don’t want their site associated with yours (in which case it might be worth trying again with another pitch)
Amer Hasovic, Love & Lavender
Use Proactive Digital PR to High-jack News Stories
Proactive Digital PR is a heavily underutilized link-building technique for SEO given it’s generally more time-consuming and requires creative and strategic thinking. But the effort can pay off many times over if executed successfully. Journalists will often link back to the original news source or expert’s website for reference.
Using Google Trends, search for trending topics relevant to your niche. News outlets are always on the lookout for timely and relevant expertise in a field. If you’re a brand with unique consumer insights or industry expertise, then you may have an interesting angle worthy of pitching to a journalist. Create a list of news outlets and journalists covering the story (tools like One pitch, Much Rack, Prowly may help). Craft your pitch with your angle and bonus points if your pitch includes unique data and stats.
Emily Amor, Digital Darts
Use Anchor Text
The link building secret most people don’t know is that when you are trying to rank a blog post, using the actual title of the blog post as the anchor text for about 50% of the backlinks to that page is the most effective way to move up quickly in the search results. The reason it works so well is because your title (if you’ve done the SEO properly) will contain at least your main key phrase and probably 2-3 other key phrases.
Because you are using the full blog post title as the anchor text it looks extremely natural to Google. It’s like recommending a book to a friend by telling them the name of the book. The sneaky trick is that Google is smart enough to pick the key phrases out of the anchor text and you get credit for them but do it in a natural way.
Adam White, SquidVision.com
Give Testimonials
No one talks much about this link-building technique but you can get wonderful high-authority backlinks by providing testimonials to partners, vendors, and employees. The best part is that this technique doesn’t take much time, so it’s easy for SEO experts to get high-quality links by providing testimonials.
Mike John, Coding Pixel
