Whether you’re paying for links or using natural organic techniques to build local SEO backlinks, doing it right can significantly impact your website’s ranking and authority.
The challenge is that your backlinks need to be relevant and authoritative because a low-quality backlink profile can have the opposite impact and damage your reputation and position in the search engine landing pages.
The best backlinks are relevant and high-authority. We’ll work through what this all means so you know how to get good backlinks that will improve your SEO performance.
Key Factors in Securing High-Value Backlinks
Before we move on to tips, tricks, and techniques, let’s pause for a second to qualify those elements of a backlink that make it a highly prized asset in terms of Google rankings and business credibility.
Paid Versus Earned Backlinks
Generally, paying for links is much faster and more certain than trying to earn them organically.
That doesn’t mean you can’t use both, and paid-for backlinks are available much quicker! However, search engine bots prize quality over quantity, so a few of the right backlinks from high authority domains, which have been “organically” placed, are more valuable than many low-quality spam links.
And, it’s worth noting that there’s no reliable way for Google to discriminate between a link that you paid to have placed and a link that was placed editorially without your input. So, paying for links is definitely an option, but you’ll have to decide whether the cost is worth the benefit for your site.
Relevance in a Link-Building Strategy
Another factor to bear in mind is that your backlinks should be relevant. In other words, a referring link from a website in a related sector, or listing businesses in your area, is more valuable than a link from a random blog that has no bearing on your industry.
For example, if you were a beautician with backlinks from spas, beauty business listings, and beauty style guides, Google would consider these meaningful. If those same backlinks, without a relevant anchor text, were from a mechanic and a structural engineer, the bots might raise an algorithmic eyebrow and perhaps discard them altogether.
Google has been preaching semantic relevance for years now, and on several occasions indicated that the content of a referring page is a signal about the content of the target page. That means, that a link from an automotive blog will be slightly more valuable for the site of a mechanic than for the site of a beautician.
Strategies to Find Excellent Quality Backlinks
Let’s move on to some techniques and approaches you can deploy to ensure you have a great spread of backlinks from diverse sources that positively influence your search engine position and visibility.
Skyscraper Content
As one of the big SEO trends for at least the last decade, skyscraper content is both simple and smart.
Short blog creation can be hit or miss, but when you publish a long-form piece of content with multiple subsections, linking opportunities, data analytics or stats, and real-world value, you can multiply your organic backlinks. As a rough guide, you need to aim for the following:
- One standout piece of content of 10,000 words or more
- High levels of detail with supporting data and plenty of links
- Comprehensive topic coverage surpassing all existing titles
Most businesses will look for a competing publication and then craft theirs to make it better–with a longer word count, more questions answered, more products or brands featured, or more price comparisons. When you create something so heavily detailed, you have a considerably better prospect of attracting backlinks from other sites that don’t have the time or resources to compile anything comparable.
Of course, organic backlinks don’t often happen by chance, so you need to engage in promotions by reaching out to partners, influencers, industry experts, and other sites, often with a hint that they’re welcome to share if they like the piece.
Outbound Link Building
Another idea is to consider the outbound links you support on your domain and look for reciprocal links. If you have a backlink or two to a high authority website and send a lot of traffic their way, there is no reason you can’t look to build a relationship.
Google tools won’t give you an outbound link report, but you can use SEO tools to assess which links have the most activity. Collaborative content is mutually beneficial and can add value to both brands, so it’s always an opportunity worth exploring.
You can also create content specifically about tools that your business uses. Companies love reviews about their services and will often gladly provide a reciprocal link in exchange for an honest review of their offering from a customer.
Creating Unique, Linkable Content
Lastly, let’s not discard the value of creating first-class content that is a natural way to attract backlinks from sector experts, bloggers, and influencers.
One fundamental truth about creating linkable content is that everyone loves data. If you can provide fresh and useful data for ANY industry, it will be easy to get people from that industry to link to it.
But, remember the key word is useful data. If you start churning out data about irrelevant topics, even if it is accurate and fresh, it will be hard to make anyone care about your content.
It can take time, investment, and expertise. Still, the value of premium content speaks for itself, and using SEO insight reports to find topics and pages with the highest traffic can be a great way to pick a powerful title that resonates.