Best link building strategies

In part two, I listed a few dozen link building tactics and strategies for you to explore. But which of them are the best and most effective ones?

Here at Ahrefs, we’re big advocates of the following four:

1. Pursuing competitors’ links
2. Creating linkable assets
3. Content promotion
4. Guest posting

1. Pursuing competitors’ links

Competitor link research is one of the most fundamental activities in link building. Think about it. The top-ranking page for your desired search query has all the right links, which persuaded Google of its superiority. Therefore, by studying its links, you can figure out which tactics to use so that you can get similar links and outrank that page.

And this is where an SEO tool like Ahrefs is absolutely indispensable.

Just put the keyword that you want to rank for in refs’ Keywords Explorer and scroll down to the “SERP overview.” It will show you how many backlinks (and linking websites) each of the top-ranking pages has:

Click on any of these numbers, and you’ll see a report listing all of the links.

From here, your course of action is twofold:

1. Try to get links from the pages that link to your competitors
2. Study how those links were acquired and use the same tactics to get more links than your competitors

2. Creating linkable assets

In SEO, we use the terms “linkable asset” or “linkbait” to refer to content that is strategically crafted to attract links. Such linkable assets can take on many different forms:

• Online tools and calculators
• Infographics, GIFographics, and “Map-o-graphics”
• Awards and rankings
• Studies and research
• Industry surveys
• How-to guides and tutorials
• Definitions and coined terms

I’m sure that even in the most boring industries there’s a way to create an interesting piece of content that will attract links. So it’s always a good idea to study the websites of your competitors and see if they have any linkable assets that you could get inspiration from.

To do that, simply put their domain name in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and go to the Best by links report. This will show you which of their pages have accrued the most links.

As you can see in the screenshot above, three of the five most linked pages on the Ahrefs Blog (excluding the homepage) are data-driven research studies. That gives you a pretty good idea of the kind of content that attracts links in our industry.

3. Content promotion

No matter how “linkable” your pages are, people can’t link to them without first discovering them. In other words, even the best linkable assets have to be promoted in order to attract links.

Generally speaking, there are just three ways to promote content:

1. Influencers and communities
2. Advertising
3. Growing an audience

1. Influencers and communities

“Who will amplify this? And why?” According to Rand Fishkin, the answer to this question determines the amount of exposure that your piece of content is destined to get. 

“Who” refers to influential people and relevant communities in your space that might help to put your content in front of large numbers of people. And “why” refers to the actual merit of your content that makes it worthy of being promoted in the first place.

Fun fact. Back in 2015, I reached out to Rand, asking him to tweet my article. And his response was essentially a crash course in how this works:

2. Advertising

You can easily bring lots of visitors to your content with the help of advertising on platforms like Facebook, Google, Twitter, and the like. Alternatively, you can partner with selected influencers and content creators in your space and pay them to promote your content to their audience. 

Some people, though, find it hard to justify spending money to promote their content. Which naturally begs the question: How did they justify spending time to create it in the first place?

If you create your content with your business goals in mind, you should not have issues to justify spending money to promote it to people.

3. Growing an audience

Each time you publish and promote a piece of content, you’ll reach some people who will find value in it (or simply enjoy it). And it would be a real shame to part ways with these people and never be able to reach them again, wouldn’t it?

That’s why you have to work on growing your audience. Which can be done in a few different ways:

• Ask them to subscribe to your email list
• Ask them to follow you on Twitter/LinkedIn/Instagram/TikTok
• Invite them to join your private community on Slack/Discord/Facebook
• Retarget them with Facebook/Twitter/Google ads

With every new cool piece of content that you release, your audience should be getting larger and larger. And the more people follow your work, the less you’ll need to bother about promoting your content manually.

4. Guest posting

According to a 2022 survey by Aira, guest posting is the third most used link building strategy among professional SEOs.

As discussed earlier, asking for links without offering anything of value in return barely even works these days. But guest posting is not like that. You’re offering a quality piece of content in exchange for an opportunity to link to your website from it. That sounds like a fair exchange of value.

Here at Ahrefs Blog, we have a “write for us” page, inviting our readers to contribute a guest article for us. And yet, we reject the vast majority of pitches we receive. Our standards for guest contributions are very high.

So here are two simple tips that will help you get published in the top blogs of your industry:

1. Start small and work your way up

It is much easier to get the attention of the top blogs in your niche when you have a solid portfolio of published content on slightly smaller blogs. 

So before you pitch a guest article to the owner of a DR80+ blog, make sure you have a published DR70+ piece to show them. And before you pitch that DR70+ blog… well, I’m sure you get the idea.

You can use Content Explorer to quickly find relevant blogs of required “authority.” Just search for a related word or phrase in page titles and use the “Domain Rating (DR)” filter to narrow down results:

2. Make an irresistible offer

What do blog owners want? They want to grow traffic to their blog.

So if you can persuade them that your guest article will rank well in Google for its target keyword and bring them consistent search traffic, it will be an easy sell.

And that’s where the previous tip is absolutely invaluable. If you can show some actual examples of your past guest articles that rank well, I bet you’ll get the deal easily.

A somewhat lesser-known guest posting tactic is to find an underperforming article on their blog (in terms of search traffic) and offer to do a complete overhaul with the goal of improving its Google rankings. In many cases, the blogger will be happy for you to do that.

Just open the Top pages report in Site Explorer and use the “Traffic” filter to find underperforming articles easily: