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Link-building is an essential process in off-site SEO. It shows your target audience and other businesses that you’re out there finding your place in a niche and establishing a reputation. When used right, it helps you build authority, grow your audience, and improve search engine rankings. 

In this article, we’ll help you do that by presenting some of the most effective white-hat link-building strategies that will grow organic traffic and help you establish leadership without making the mighty Google suspicious of you.

How Link Building Impacts Organic Traffic Growth

Many strategies will increase your share of organic traffic due to an easy correlation:

High-quality backlinks → Better ranking → Greater organic traffic

As you can see, it’s indirect but very strong. Backlinks are an important ranking factor that shows your reliability. With that comes a higher ranking and, consequently, more organic traffic to your site through search engines.

So, by analyzing your backlink profile, getting new links and removing bad ones, you’re going to establish authority and leadership in your niche.

Where to Start with link building

We recommend starting with analyzing the existing backlink profile if your site isn’t completely new. Establish:

  • The number of backlinks from unique referring domains
  • Anchor text variety
  • Domain quality of the websites linking
  • Backlink dynamics, etc.

All these parameters will show you the quality and health of your backlink profile so that you know how to further build your link-building strategy. 

The next step of your link-building strategy is checking competitors’ backlinks. This is a must for every business for two reasons:

  • They may do something you don’t
  • They may have gaps you can fill in your strategy

To analyze both your backlink profile and your competitors’ link-building strategies, you need reliable automated software. To find backlinks, use SE Ranking’s Backlink Checker tool. Once you enter a domain, the tool shows the domain trust score, along with a list of all the backlinks, dofollow/nofollow links ratio, anchor texts, and much more. All of that is put in graphs for faster understanding and reference.

Img cr: SE Ranking Backlink Checker

After those two steps are done, you will know the most important things:

  • Your point A (the condition of your profile)
  • Competitors point A

From there, you can start building your own strategy based on the approaches we present below.

Link-Building Strategies to Grow Organic Traffic

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It’s time to build some high-quality links using the best white-hat tactics available.

Guest Posting

One of the most popular and wholesome link-building methods is guest posting. It helps achieve multiple goals:

  • Boost brand awareness
  • Build links
  • Establish authority
  • Get more referral traffic

There are thousands of great blogs that accept guest writing. Here’s what you can do to find them:

  • Go online
  • Write a query with your focus keyword, industry, niche, etc. and intitle:”write for us”. The phrases may range from “write for us” to “contribute to our blog”
  • Pitch your content and get accepted

Alternatively, use the backlink checker to find a list of such websites.

We also recommend reaching out to websites that don’t state that they accept guest posts. Many owners will be glad to have a free piece of high-quality content on their sites. Try, and you’ll get rewarded. For 10 webmasters that say “No”, there’s one that will say “Yes” and get you a high-quality backlink that’s better than 10 mediocre ones.

Link Magnets 

The term “link magnet” has many definitions, and they change with time. Earlier, we said that the best magnet was a high-quality, relevant longread. Later, we said it was a neat infographic others could link to.

But now, we say some of the best link magnets are case studies and statistics. Really, almost every article needs some clear data from studies and analyses to be deemed relevant.

By the way, did you know that 66.31% of pages don’t have backlinks?

Only ⅓ of pages have links referring to them. This opens a whole lot of opportunities for your website! Conduct research, a survey, a quiz, or compile data and create your own niche-specific link magnet!

Broken Link Building

This sounds much more difficult than it actually is.

Basically, you have to look for broken backlinks where you could insert your content. Then, write a similar article.

After that, contact the webmaster and say that you have just the article to fill the vacant position. And finally, get a backlink without too much effort.

By the way, your competitors can do the same to you, so check your website for broken links. You can see if you have any in Google Search Console or by using some automated website audit tool.

Local Directories

Submit your website to a local directory. It’s like a phonebook of the 2020s where you can find websites of businesses based on their niche and other qualities.

Choose a directory by:

  • Location.
    If you’re a local business, say, in California, using a Texas directory isn’t the best choice.
  • Relevance.
    It should be niche-specific or at least have a section with similar businesses.
  • Trust score.
    Make sure the website itself is of good quality and has a high domain trust score.

Crowd Marketing

Crowd marketing is a relatively new term. It’s basically your online presence and interactions with the target audience. Here’s what you can do to build links and bring usefulness to your TA:

  • Answer prospects’ questions on Quora
  • Interact with them on Reddit
  • Look for issues you can solve on social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.)

All you have to do to gain an inbound link from an interaction is post a link to your article or homepage in the answer.

Wrap-Up

We recommend that you use several strategies to build links. A diverse backlink profile makes you a more credible source for both people and search engines. Establish leadership through guest posting, look for broken links to fill the gaps with your content, and encourage crowd marketing.

Also, don’t forget that for every task there is a digital tool that will help you achieve results faster and with little effort. Use the backlink checker by SE Ranking, Search Console, and other helpers you find useful. 

And never be afraid to reach out to relevant websites, even if they don’t mention on they’re website that they’re open for collaboration. The worst that can happen is a rejection, nothing too dramatic.