What link-building strategies are hitting the mark in 2023? What are the ingredients of successful link-building campaigns? How many links do you need to rank on page 1?

To get answers to these questions (and a few more), we’ve decided to lean on the expertise of leading SEOs and link-building agency owners. 

Dive in to check out the insights they’ve shared.

TL;DR

• Link building is the process of securing hyperlinks from other internet sites to boost the credibility and trustworthiness of your content and improve its performance in SERPs. 
• Guest blogging, creating linkable digital assets, link exchanges, or roundups are examples of popular link-building strategies.
• Paulina Wałczyk, the SEO Manager at Brand24Brand24, considers link-building from unlinked mentions a good place to start your link-building campaign.
• Irina Maltseva, the Growth Lead at Aura and Founder at ONSAAS, believes in the power of strong relationships for link-building.
• Georgi Mamajanyan, the CEO at Saynine.ai, finds LinkedIn particularly valuable for cultivating link-building relationships. He also stresses the importance of providing value to your prospective partners.
•  Milosz Krasinski, a SEO consultant, and the founder of Chilli Fruit Web Consulting, uses his expertise to build quality backlinks through HARO.
• For Olga Mykhoparkina, the founder and CEO at a SaaS content marketing agency Quoleady, ABC link exchanges are proving particularly successful at the moment. However, Olga recognizes that this can change quickly, so it’s important to be flexible and adapt to give clients the best ROI.
• For Alex Tachalova, the founder of the link-building agency Digital Olympus, a range of strategies, like creating link-worthy content, guest posting, and outreach, is necessary to build a healthy backlink profile and attract organic traffic.
• Olga also believes that the number of backlinks is not as important as the quality of the linking sites.
• Our experts agree that link-building requires consistent effort over time to render results.
• BacklinkManager is a link-building tool that can help you keep track of your link-building efforts. If you want to see how it can improve the efficiency of your team, book the demo!

What is link building?

Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites that direct back to your own. It’s a vital component of any SEO strategy, contributing to how search engines rank web pages.

Why is link-building important?

Link building can help drive more organic traffic to your website, as well as help boost its visibility. It can also help establish credibility and trustworthiness in the eyes of search engine algorithms.

How so?

A link is like an endorsement or a vote of confidence from one website to another. They convey to search engines that your site offers credible, valuable content that is worth sharing. 

Consequently, the more quality backlinks you have, the higher your site is likely to rank on search engine results pages (SERPs).

What are link-building strategies?

 Link-building strategies are techniques SEO professionals use to increase the number of quality backlinks pointing to their websites. 

Most of the techniques rely on a combination of two factors: creating quality content and building relationships with other authors, organizations, and website owners. 

Here’s a quick breakdown of the most popular backlink-building strategies. 

Unlinked brand mentions

This link-building strategy involves finding mentions of your brand that aren’t linked to your site and then contacting the publisher to request a link. 

This strategy can be effective because it involves minimal effort from the website owner or blogger. After all, they’re already talking about you. 

Linkable assets

Creating linkable assets means developing unique and compelling content that naturally attracts backlinks. 

This can include:

• Infographics and visuals
• Original research and case studies
• Interactive calculators (like a mortgage or NPS calculator)
• Free tools
• In-depth guides and tutorials.

Guest blogging

Guest blogging is a classic link-building strategy. In short, it involves writing content for another website in your industry. 

In your guest blog, you typically include a link back to your own site along with your author bio.

Broken link building

In this backlink-building strategy, you find broken links on other websites and then suggest your own relevant and active links as replacements. 

This approach works because it offers value to the other site. They fix an issue that could negatively impact their SERP performance and you gain a backlink. Win-win!

Resource page link building

Resource page link building involves identifying resource pages relevant to your content and reaching out to the owners or webmasters to suggest including a link to your site.

Help a Reporter Out (HARO)

HARO is a platform that connects journalists and bloggers with relevant subject matter experts.

By responding to their requests and providing input, you can earn high-quality backlinks from authoritative news sites.

Competitor backlink analysis

Competitors backlink analysis involves investigating where your competitors’ backlinks are coming from to identify potential link-building opportunities.

Testimonials

Many businesses offer the chance to write a testimonial in exchange for a backlink. 

This can be a quick win, especially if you’re a customer or client of that business, and have no reservations in recommending the product.

Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is about partnering with influencers in your industry to leverage their reach for backlinks. 

In short, direct links from their blog content, social media posts, or YouTube videos can help you secure backlinks also from their followers.

The Skyscraper Technique

This Skyscraper technique involves finding a piece of content in your niche that’s popular and well-linked and creating even better content. 

Once you have that, you reach out to people who have an interest in the subject area to show it off.

Digital PR

Digital PR involves creating linkable content and leveraging public relations strategies to convince journalists to write about and link to your content.  

If done well, digital PR can help you secure quality backlinks from high-authority news outlets.

Roundup link building

Many sites do regular roundup posts, for example, “best of the week” posts. 

The strategy involves identifying roundups relevant to your niche and contacting these sites to suggest including your content in future ones.

Link exchanges

The principle behind link exchanges is simple: I’ll link to you, and you’ll link to me. 

This technique may be risky because ‘excessive link exchanges’ are against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can incur a penalty. However, this is only the case if Google Gods deem reciprocal links unnatural, for example, with pages that are not related to your industry. 

Link reclamation

Link reclamation involves reclaiming links intentionally removed by the page owners or fixing broken links to your site. 

Sometimes it’s as simple as reaching out and mentioning a technical glitch to the website owner. Other times, it may require improving your content to make it link-worthy again.

Quora, Medium, and Reddit link-building

Platforms like Quora, Medium, or Reddit provide excellent opportunities to answer questions or provide information while including a link back to your site.

Even though these links are no-follow, they are still a good way to boost your brand’s online presence.

Local link building

For businesses with a local focus, this strategy involves getting backlinks from websites in the same geographical area. 

This could be by adding your site to local business directories, getting mentions from local media outlets, creating local guides, or sponsoring local events or organizations.

Podcast link building

Podcast link-building is another way to leverage the reach of other respected sites and content creators. 

All you have to do is appear on their podcast and have the host link to your site in the show notes and you’ve got your backlink.

Social media link building

Just like Quora or Reddit, social media mentions give you only nofollow links. 

However, they still direct traffic to your site and contribute to a diversified link profile.

What is the best link-building strategy in 2023?

There is no simple answer to this question. The choice of your link-building strategy depends on your goals, resources, and competition.

Let’s see what leading SEO experts and link-building gurus have to say on the matter. 

Use the right tools

Paulina Wałczyk, the SEO Manager at Brand24, finds link-building from unlinked mentions a good place to start your link-building campaign.

One of my favorite link-building strategies is obtaining links from unlinked mentions. Sometimes, people mention a business or brand without a link to their website. In these cases, getting a backlink from those mentions is easier… 

According to Paulina, the challenge is identifying the opportunities and that’s where having the right tools in your tool stack can make all the difference:

The secret is knowing WHO and WHERE is talking about your brand (or interesting topic) and turning these mentions into backlinks. Media monitoring tools like Brand24 make this easy by providing access to publicly available mentions that contain specific keywords – It could either be the brand name or strategic keywords. You can collect all results in one place by setting up a project on selected keywords, which are an anchor for a potential backlink. To get the most beneficial backlinks, you can filter the results by Influencer Score, sentiment analysis, or relevant categories of the source of mentions, such as blogs and news.

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Cultivate meaningful relationships 

Irina Maltseva, the Growth Lead at Aura and Founder at ONSAAS, believes that the ability to build robust long-term relationships is the cornerstone of successful link-building strategies:

To excel in link-building in 2023, prioritize relationship-based strategies. Remember, websites don’t grant links, people do… By nurturing relationships, you’ll effortlessly expand your network, enhance site visibility, and secure valuable link-building opportunities.

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One way to build such valuable relationships is by engaging with them on social media:

Engage with prospects on social platforms, follow their content, and interact with them in comments. Seek their advice and share your strategies.

Georgi Mamajanyan, the CEO at Saynine.ai, finds LinkedIn particularly valuable for this purpose:

First, you can build a personal brand on LinkedIn, outreach others, and even get link-building offers. Secondly, you can find your existing partners on LinkedIn to take your communication on a more personal level and have a quick chat whenever needed.

Provide value

For your link-building relationships to thrive, they need to be mutually beneficial. In other words, if you’re hoping to secure a backlink, you need to offer something of value in exchange.

Here’s Georgi’s take on it, based on his vast experience:

When outreaching for link building, there’s one important thing to always remember – the value you provide for your partners. For example, if you offer a backlink in return, make sure it’s from a trustworthy domain with good metrics. Or, if you offer a guest post article, let them know that it will be SEO-optimized. By providing value, you will build trust and good connections with other link builders.

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Leverage your expertise

One way to deliver value to your potential partners is to share your unique insights and expertise in your niche.

How can you do that?

Milosz Krasinski, an international SEO consultant, and the owner of Chilli Fruit Web Consulting, uses HARO to trade his industry knowledge and expertise for backlinks:

HARO is the bee’s knees when it comes to link-building! …Journalists hunt for credible sources to spice up their stories, and that’s where we, the experts, swoop in with our knowledge, charm, and unique perspectives. When you answer a journalist’s query and they find your response absolutely mind-blowing, they’ll often feature your insights in their article along with a link to your website. This is a great way to get backlinks from high-quality, DR>80 sites that do not offer simple link exchanges and don’t sell link placements.

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Constantly adapt your strategy

The link-building game is constantly evolving. What works today, may not be effective tomorrow. That’s why it’s necessary to adapt your strategy to offer your clients the most bang for their buck. 

With a pragmatic approach to link-building, Olga Mykhoparkina, the founder and CEO at a SaaS content marketing agency Quoleady, remarks:

We’ve tried a variety of link-building strategies for our clients: HARO, guest blogging, link exchange, etc. Some of those we had to discontinue as they stopped being effective in bringing ROI to our clients. Since ROI is always our focus we stick to what works the best. 

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What strategies are most effective in 2023 then?

According to Olga, it’s ABC link exchanges:

Essentially, it’s reaching out to relevant websites asking for a backlink from site A to site B in return for a backlink from site C to site A. This way, we are avoiding direct A-B exchanges that Google doesn’t really like.

Use a range of strategies

Alex Tachalova, the founder of the link-building agency Digital Olympus, champions the belief that building a healthy backlink profile requires a range of strategies:

The foundation of [driving traffic to your website] is actually creating a healthy backlink profile, which involves a bunch of strategies. In my opinion, the combo of link-worthy content created in-house, guest posts, and links obtained through traditional outreach is what can bring tangible results.

Digital Olympus put this approach to good use for their long-term client, Swagdrop. Here’s what they achieved in terms of organic traffic growth:

Prioritize quality over quantity

It’s widely believed that link-building is a number game and to outrank your competitors, you simply need to have more backlinks. 

With a lot of experience in the field, Olga Mykhoparkina disagrees. 

For her, the quality of the backlinks matters more and she’s shared some impressive results to back it up. Quoleady has managed to boost the SERP performance of these sites with just a handful of links. For example, they managed to improve the ranking of one of their articles from #9 to #1 in 2 months with only 7 links:

How do they choose the right sites to build links from?

We usually pay attention to:
– organic traffic on Ahrefs (1000+)
– DR (30+)
– the balance of outbound vs inbound links 1:5 is a dream, 1:1 is good, 5:1 is a no-go
– relevancy (same niche is ideal)
– when was the page last cached
– there should be no links to/from adult/gambling sites

And what site should you avoid?

We don’t recommend our clients building links from link farms, content mills, news magazines and other low-quality irrelevant websites as oftentimes they are designed to sell links so 1000 outbound links today can easily turn into 100K in a year thus making this backlink a waste of time and money.

Be consistent

SEO experts agree that link-building is a long game that requires consistent effort and investment.

Drawing from her extensive experience, Alex captures the essence of the matter:

…link building is not a one-time quick fix. If you want to achieve exponential growth in online visibility, link-building should be an ongoing activity. Otherwise, your website will yield its top ranks to other sites that get links consistently. 

Georgi echoes her views:

 I’d recommend keeping the process constant… if you build 50+ backlinks in one month and do nothing in the next 3-4 months, your website metrics will start to drop. So, whichever link-building strategy you’re working on, make sure you’re constantly building some backlinks and growing your website.

Conclusion

Successful link-building in 2023 requires a range of strategies. According to link-building gurus, the effectiveness of your strategies will depend on

• the quality of your content, 
• the strength of the relationships you build with authority site owners, and 
• effective use of the right tools to identify link-building opportunities and streamline your processes.

If you want to see how BacklinkManager can help you keep your link-building campaigns organized, sign up and start using it for free!