If you have ever done link building, you likely know that it can be very tedious and take a lot of dedicated effort! Here are some tips for refining your strategy to make sure you use your time wisely.
4 Link Building Tips for 2021
Don’t Strictly Focus on DA
While it can be really hard to not want to get a lot of highly rated sites when it comes to their domain authority, keep in mind that in a lot of cases websites that are relevant to your specific niche or those in your city will likely not have super high DA’s.
So don’t disregard what could be really great links for your company just because the website doesn’t have the highest domain authority out there. Plus, local links have value in Google’s eyes too!
Go for Quality, Not Quantity
Did you know that the total number of backlinks you have doesn’t matter? This is according to John Mueller of Google in one of Google’s recent office hours sessions.
For example, he presented a situation where a website got a link from the homepage of a major news site:
“We try to understand what is relevant for a website, how much should we weigh these individual links, and the total number of links doesn’t matter at all. Because you could go off and create millions of links across millions of websites if you wanted to, and we could just ignore them all.
…Or there could be one really good link from one website out there that is, for us, a really important sign that we should treat this website as something that is relevant because it has that one link. I don’t know, maybe from like a big news site’s home page, for example. So the total number essentially is completely irrelevant.” (Source)
Look into Traffic Forecasting
A great way to get backlinks that we have talked about in previous posts on our blog is doing broken link building. This is a tactic that revolves around conducting outreach to websites that have dead links where you have a piece of content that could replace the broken link.
While there are many ways to approach this type of link building, one great way to start is by diagnosing sites or pages with broken links that get a high volume of traffic. And if a page you are linked on gets a lot of traffic, it can lead to your site getting traffic as well.
Tools such as Ahrefs can allow you to get details on specific sites or pages.
Do More to Get More in Return
When it comes to outreach for links, many places aren’t interested in hearing pitches or just learning about writers in order to work together. People like editors, journalists, and others are busy – they likely don’t have the time to go back and forth with someone they aren’t sure will, one, provide quality work or, two, prove to be a good fit for their brand.
If you decide to start broad outreach to target websites, be sure to have some deliverables. This could include taking the time to write up an informative article on something newsworthy, or creating a great infographic they could share on their site.
Sometimes you have to put the real effort in even before you have a concrete connection in place that could earn you a link.
