Your free link building plan
Not sure which links to build? This free link building plan shows you the links, anchor text and link frequency that will get your SEO on the right track.
Why you need a link building plan
Every good link building strategy starts with a solid plan. A link building plan is essential if you want to rank high in search engines.
Even if you have a well-optimized website, there are a number of offsite factors that influence how well your website will rank in Google search results, including:
- Number of backlinks to the site
- Quality of the backlinks
- Authority of the inbound links
How to create your link building strategy
- Analyse the search results for your target keyword to identify how many backlinks each of the top ranking results have.
- Identify how many backlinks your content currently has, and therefore how many more links you need to build.
- Analyse the authority and relevance of your current backlink profile.
- Plan how you will build the required baclinks.
To help with this, we’ve developed a free link building tool for you to use. This planning template will help you map out exactly which types of links you need to include in your link building campaign in order to achieve your target number of backlinks.
Analyse search results
To determine how many backlinks each of the top search results have, you’ll need to use an SEO tool like SE Ranking, SEMrush or Ahrefs. By entering your competitor’s website you’ll be able to find out exactly how many links they have, what they are, and the rating of those links.
Some of these SEO tools can also give you a ‘keyword difficulty rating’ for the keyword you’re trying to rank for. This will also be an indication of how many links you’ll need in order to rank in the top 10 search results.
Identify how many backlinks you need
Then it’s time to analyse your own backlink profile. What’s the quality of your backlinks? Are they relevant to your industry? Is there any value added by having multiple sources of backlinks, or is it better to focus on just a few high-quality ones?
By comparing your competitors’ backlink profile with your own, you’ll be able to determine how many links you’ll need to build to make up the gap. This is just to give you an idea of the total number of links you’ll need to build, but you’ll still need to consider the quality of those links.
Authority & relevance of your backlinks
The total number of backlinks you have is not the only factor that will affect your search rankings. The authority and relevance of your backlink profile is equally important.
Relevance goes without saying – the more relevant a website is to your niche, the more valuable an inbound link from that website will be.
The authority of websites you’re building links from is important also. However, you shouldn’t only target high-authority websites. As you implement your link building strategy, you should have a number of backlinks from both high and low authority websites. It’s much more natural to have a range of links like this.
Create your link building plan
Download the free link buiding plan and start scheduling the types of links, frequency and timing of your link building efforts.
By creating a schedule for the links you will build, you will effectively put your link building on auto pilot, so that you build an effective backlink profile over time. You’ll create a natural assortment of guests posts, niche edits, links for anchort text diversity, and even social media mentions.
Once you have a link building plan, it will be much easier to build the right links at the right time over the coming months.
What is link building and why is it important?
In a nutshell, link building is the excercise of building backlinks from external websites to your site.
Backlinks are important for several reasons. Firstly, they show that your content is valuable enough for someone to want to link to it. Secondly, they show that you are an expert in your niche. Finally, they indicate that people actually want to read the content you produce.
For any site to be successful, it needs to get more visibility and links to its content. The more backlinks there are pointing to your site, the more likely it is to be found by search engines and visitors. Additionally, backlinks are an indicator of authority and credibility, which can help boost your rankings in search engines.
It’s also a good idea to monitor backlinks once you’ve built them. Backlinks can be lost for a number of reasons, so it’s important to monitor the status of your links. You can then reach out to the site owner if you notice a link is no longer active.
In addition to inbound links, site owners should also ensure that they are also creating relevant internal links to their content. Creating internal links between each blog post and key page on your site will help search engines effectively crawl all your content.
By adding relevant contextual internal links from your homepage to your inner pages will also help to pass authority throughout your site. This is particularly important since the foundation of good link building strategy is building branded and natural links to a site’s homepage. Having internal links from the homepage with relevant anchor text will mean your inner pages also receive some benefit from the backlinks your homepage receives.
Why are link building strategies important for SEO?
Search engine optimization in 2022 is still very much influenced by a website’s backlink profile.
As much as some SEO experts say that Google is paying less attention to the number of backlinks a site has, stronger backlink profiles still correlate with improved search engine rankings.
Because backlinks are still an essential part of SEO strategy, it is essential for site owners to include link building efforts in their digital marketing. It can take a long time to build a solid backlink profile full of quality links, so it is important to maintain an active link building strategy.
Is link building worth it?
Link building outreach can be very time consuming and can have a low success rate. However, when done right, this is still one of the best ways to build quality links from sites in your niche. Because the success rate is so low, it makes sense to build processes for your link building outreach, so that over time your reach out to as many site owners as possible.
Guest posting is an excellent way to supplement your link building outreach. There are many paid guest posting services that make the task of guest blogging outreach easier. Using these services can be as easy as selecting the domain rating (or number of referring domains) that you’d like to target, specifying your niche, and the link building service will reach out to relevant site owners on your behalf. We’ve found this the best way to build consistent, relevant, high quality backlinks.
Whether it’s a dofollow link or a nofollow link, every link can be beneficial to search ranking performance. Nofollow links are part of a natural backlink profile. Many niche directories (which can also be good for local SEO) often use nofollow links for their listings.
What are the best link building techniques?
The most common and effective link building techniques are:
- Link building outreach
- Guest posting
- Niche edits
- Content marketing
Link building outreach
Link building outreach involves contacting site owners and requesting that they link to your site.
Of course, it’s not that simple, so there are a number of ways you can increase your chances of obtaining a link.
Broken link building involves identifying sites that have external links to articles that no longer exist, and then reaching out to the site owner to ask them to link to your site. To find sites with broken external links, you can use SEO tools, or an SEO agency should be able to help you.
Once you’ve identifed a website in your niche that has links that are broken, you can reach out and request a link to an existing piece of content on your site. Alternatively you can create a new, relevant piece of content on your site that the other site owner can link to from their broken link.
Listing your site in trustworthy directories is another way to increase your site’s exposure.
Guest posting
Guest posting is the practice of publishing articles on other websites in order to build a following and reputation, as well as receive a link back to your site. As long as your guest posting efforts are genuine and are intended to bring value to the other website’s audience, they can be a white-hat way to build backlinks to your site.
It can be a laborious task to find website will to let you guest post for them. Fortunately, a link building service will often provide a guest blogging outreach service.
When writing your guest post, it’s important to focus on the audience of the website you’re posting on. No one wants to read an article written only for search engines, and the site owner will be more likely to promote quality articles on social media.
Niche edits
Niche edits are a way to find existing pages or blog articles that are relevant to your niche, and building links from them.
One of the benefits of using niche edits is that they are generally faster because you’re linking from existing content. Also, because the existing content has already been indexed by Google, your links can immediately pass authority and referral traffic.
Content marketing
Content marketing is the process of creating and distributing high-quality, shareable content that builds awareness, engagement and ultimately leads to sales. It is aimed at generating reach, awareness and traffic in a variety of ways from digital marketing to social media campaigns. The goal is to create engaging content that attracts your target audience.
Content marketing can take many different forms, including blog posts, white papers and infographics. It can also be done in-house or outsourced. The goal is always to build awareness and engagement with your target audience by creating quality content that connects with them on an emotional level.
By publishing helpful and shareable content, you increase the likelihood that people will link to your content over time.