Google has maintained that building backlinks remain one of the top three ranking factors. Such links from one site to another denote trust, authority, and vote of trust. Hence, marketers put in a lot of effort to build credible backlinks on their sites. No wonder that many brands aggressively pursue SEO link building.
In 2022, Google Penguin updates have made it mandatory to not only factor in link quantity but also link quality. This has made it more challenging for SEO marketers to build a robust link profile on their site.
This post will help you with some advanced link building strategies that work in 2022 and beyond.
Let’s dive in and check out these SEO link building techniques.
1- Link intersect
How good it will be if you come to know of sites that are linking to your closest competitors but not to you. You can benefit from the insight and fine-tune your link build strategy.
Link intersect is all about analysing the content of your own website and finding commonalities between your website and other trusted sites. This helps you identify link opportunities that can help you gain more links. At the same time, it also helps your audience find more content on your website because of the link to other trusted sites.
You can use the link intersect analysis tool from Moz and Ahref to carry out this task.
1.1- Why is link intersect important?
They help you uncover missing link opportunities. The rationale behind this is simple
- You come across sites that are linking to 3-4 competitor sites in your industry
- This means that there is a high chance they won’t mind linking to your site too
- But they will do so only when they know about your existence
- Once you know which sites are, you can craft custom email outreach campaigns to let them know about your existence.
This can be a smart way to come across sites that are linking to your competitor sites but not to you (as yet).
2- Skyscraper Technique
The skyscraper technique is another powerful link building strategy that helps you get more backlinks from authoritative sources. It blends amazing content and credible link building strategies of 2022.
SEOs have been using this strategy for years now. But with time, many have stopped due to its steep learning curve. However, today this strategy is one of the most powerful influencers on search engines.
2.1- How to do skyscraper technique in link building?
There are 4 steps of content planning and writing that help you build on your SEO skyscraper technique:
2.1.1- Choose the right keyword
- Your keyword needs to be relevant to the industry and the offerings.
- It needs to be valuable in terms of the cost of advertising.
- The keyword should be suitable for the right stage of buyer journey. So, you need to determine if you need to create content as per the top-of-the funnel phase (brand awareness blogs and articles), or late-stage (product demos and case studies)
- You need to be confident that you can create awesome content with your chosen keywords.
2.1.2- Get insights on top-ranking content for your chosen keyword
In this stage, you will assess the below points
- Do you really have the capability and skill to produce better quality content than the top-ranking content?
- Are your content competitors aligning with your business competitors?
- Do these content competitors sell the same product/service as you?
2.1.3- Develop better quality content
Content quality can be made better with these tips –
- Write in your native language that can be easily understood by your target audience
- Optimise meta tags to generate more clicks on the SERP page
- Add better appealing visual content like videos and infographics with the latest (contextual) data
- Make scannable content with subheadings and section breaks
- Keep short paragraphs and simple words for better readability
- Add weight to the content with links from credible sources like Wikipedia or newspaper sites
- Compelling, clear, and concise Call-to-Action buttons
2.1.4- Carry out the outreach campaign
You can see which sites have linked to you in the past. Then you can reach out to them and request if they can link to your skyscraper content.
This link building strategy not just helps you get more backlinks. You’ll also have the privilege of quoting and re-sharing high-quality content from authoritative sources, which in turn increases your authority.
Of course, when you aren’t well-known or as famous as someone like Neil Patel, it will be harder to get the recipient to link to this content. For this, you can start communication on the social media handles of the brand you are reaching out to before you send your outreach mail.
3- Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is one of the most effective ways to get high-quality backlinks. It is one of the most effective link building strategies that have been practised for years now.
Blogs with major authority are always a great place to start looking for guest bloggers.
3.1- How to find best sites for guest blogging?
3.1.1- Find credible sites
You need to be smart in this approach. You need to find sites that already generate a lot of traffic and get backlinks. Therefore, you should use tools like SEMrush website insights tool to identify potential resources in your niche.
3.1.2- Make sure they rank high
To find the best guest blogging spots that can help you rank higher on search engines, make sure to do a comprehensive analysis of each website by using tools like Moz. This will help you identify how much page authority a website holds as well as how many backlinks it already has.
3.1.3- Don’t forget PA rank
You then pick up the websites with high page authority. They have a great potential to drive more traffic to your website and increase your rankings on search engines.
You need to make sure that you select niche sites that have a good number of backlinks as well.
3.1.4- No spammy posting techniques
One caveat, though. Try to avoid using spammy guest posting strategies in order to gain more and more backlinks.
4- Broken Link Building
When there is a broken link on the content, readers aren’t able to click on it. They are unable to get extra information on the topic being discussed in the content. This leads to a poor reader experience. If you are in the same niche as the broken link source, then you can reach out to the content creator to suggest your own content as a replacement.
4.1- Benefits of broken link building
When you do so, you get the below benefits
- You get links from pages that have good authority in the eyes of search engines
- You have analysed the topic discussed in the main content, and hence your link will be a good extension to the narrative
- You can inherit links that earlier belonged to your competitors. This way, you can pull some of their authority to power up your SEO strategy
Do you see the benefits here? The target site would never want to bring down the overall user experience of the reader. Hence, they will be more than happy to act on your suggestion of replacing broken links with your credible link. This means that this strategy has the best possible acceptance rate, provided you know who you are targeting.
4.2- How to find large scale broken links for link building?
The hardest part is to do this technique at scale. You can randomly find one or two broken links. But what if you can scale it up to 30 or 50 broken links? The impact would be much more significant. Here’s how you can do it:
4.2.1- Find highly linked broken pages
First, make sure who your competitors are. All you need to do is Google the keyword you are pursuing. The top search results will be your competitors.
Ahref’s free backlink checker will help you find all backlinks for a particular domain. Look for dead pages on competitor sites when you filter by ‘404 not found’ pages on the Ahref tool. Check the referring domains and see what they have written about. Now you can create the same content and request the target site to replace the broken link with your content. Of course, the content needs to be around the industry you are serving.
4.2.2- Find dead links about a particular topic
Another way to approach this strategy is to find broken pages about a specific topic. Not many tools are available to help you search broken pages with backlinks about a specific topic. But Ahref has done a nifty job with its content explorer tool.
4.2.3- Pursue resource pages
Blogs like ‘100+ SEO resources’ or ’50+ PPC tools’ are attractive sources to discover dead pages. This is because content creators rarely update them after publishing. Since they have a lot of backlinks from third-party sites that go on to build the content, this can be a good avenue worth exploring.
Just before we wrap up this section, it is worth mentioning that the broken pages need to be vetted thoroughly for two reasons-
- You need to verify that the broken page has good quality backlinks to inherit the juice with your replacement page.
- Your replacement content needs to align with why people linked to these broken pages
5- Moving Man Method
This is another technique to get contextual backlinks. This is a term coined by Backlinko’s Brian Dean. It focuses on replacing outdated links with your own.
5.1- What are outdated links?
The concept is simple: you promote a piece of content or resource on one website. Then contact the owner of a similar site and ask them to swap the old for your new link. The objective is to reach out to old contributors on sites that you have previously contributed to. You can encourage them to replace your outdated link with the “new, better” one.
These aren’t actually broken links.
5.2- How to find non-updated links?
For example, SEOMoz changed its name and URL address to moz.com. But many companies and individuals that linked SEOMoz didn’t update their link to moz.com. As compared to broken links, these are perfectly working links (the SEOmoz links get redirected to moz.com)
So, these are non-updated links that carry anchor text and URL of the older site.
Do you need another way of finding such outdated links? Well, there are companies that simply put up a ‘page not available’ link instead of deleting the page from their site. You can search for strings like
- “Page no longer exists”
- “Website shut down”
- “Service no longer available”
Now that you know this find the sites that link to the outdated URL. You can take this URL and put it on a backlink checking tool like Ahref. This will give you a handful of link opportunities to perfectly valid sites.
5.3- What to do next after identifying outdated links?
Now that you know which sites point to outdated URLs, you can reach out to them. You can inform them about the use of outdated links. Then you can subtly suggest they add your link to their content.
If you think they will not take any action, then think twice!
You are providing twice the value to the site linking to an outdated URL
- You are informing them and giving a heads up about their outdated link (which may be leading to a poor user experience for site visitors)
- You are offering them a replacement resource which is valuable. This way, they don’t have to alter their content. They can simply replace the outdated text with your content URL.
6- To sign off
The role of link building in SEO will never change, but the strategies and tactics to be used will change with time. If you want your website to rank higher on search engines, it is important that you find a strategy that works for your industry and also helps improve your on-page optimization efforts. Hope these tips will help.
