How to acquire quality backlinks? Check out the best techniques
Currently, in the digital marketing scenario, three strategies stand out for producing demonstrably positive results: 1) link building associated with press relations services, 2) creation of attractive assets for links and 3) identification of opportunities through mentions.
Let’s delve deeper into each of these approaches, analyzing their subtleties and consequences.
1.The decline of guest posting and the emergence of link building through press relations.
Around 2020, John Muller, who leads Google’s Search Relations team, announced via Twitter that links originating from guest posts no longer provide significant value.
Despite having been declared approximately two years ago, the decline of guest posting as a link building tactic had already been in evidence on the digital scene for a few years.
The change in the pattern of content consumption, with the preference for social networks over blogs, and the widespread abuse of this strategy, transforming it into a significant source of SPAM, contributed to the progressive decrease in the value attributed by Google to the links obtained through this method.
But news organizations are more than just trustworthy information providers and efficient means of distribution.Strong technical metrics are typically present on news websites, including strong domain authority, a large backlink network, a sizable monthly visitation count, regular updates, and a prominent placement on search engine results pages (SERP).
These factors make press outlets excellent sources of links, and the most advantageous thing: these sites need to publish a substantial amount of quality content to keep their audience engaged, making them more receptive to external contributions.
The distribution of stories by link builders to journalists and editors establishes a relationship of reciprocal benefits. However, to ensure the effectiveness of this process, it is essential to present pertinent, original and truly captivating content.
How to deliver valuable information?
According to data from a survey conducted by journalist Jacqueline Lafloufa, original narratives and unpublished information appear as the two main sources for creating new reports.
The conclusion is that creating guidelines that meet these criteria is an important step towards getting your content published in a wide-reaching vehicle, right?
Wrong.
Providing valuable information to a journalist depends significantly more on your relationship with the press than on the quality of your content. An excellent article has little value if it does not attract the attention of the editor or publisher relevant to your objectives.
To avoid wasting effort, it is essential that this task is ideally performed by a press relations professional, and not by a technical SEO specialist with little or no experience in journalistic contact networks.
Another aspect to be highlighted is that, for journalists, obtaining specific information also represents a challenge.
The research conducted by Jacqueline highlights that, for 71% of reporters, the biggest barrier to accessing specific data is companies’ resistance to sharing it. This situation creates a vast opportunity for professionals who regularly interact with clients.
This creates an innovative approach to link building, which we will discuss below.
Data-Driven PR: the evolution:
What company or brand wouldn’t aspire to be recognized as an authority in their niche?
Furthermore, what company or brand wouldn’t aspire to obtain spontaneous publicity, gain excellent links and reinforce the reliability of its product by becoming the holder of a relevant market index?
Generating research, studies and data aimed at the general interest of the industry and, mainly, the media, and transforming them into relevant topics is an activity that goes beyond the conventional limits of press relations and approaches what we call public relations, or PR (Public relations).
In practice, the Data-Driven PR approach unites press relations and Business Intelligence teams with the common objective of creating unprecedented data, considered the most valuable currency in disseminating news.
According to the research conducted by Jaqueline Lafloufa, mentioned previously, consolidated communication channels with sources represent the second most important source of information used by journalism professionals. In this context, the core of this work lies in building solid relationships, which is the crucial element for the success of the strategy.
2. Build linkable assets
Content marketing represents an attractive tactic for gaining customers or an audience, based on the production and dissemination of relevant material in different formats, such as text, images, videos and infographics.
However, the relevance of content is not restricted to communication between your company and your target audience. It plays a crucial role in the search engine optimization (SEO) of your website.
Although this issue is extensively debated in our industry, numerous experts still indicate that creating content capable of improving the performance of your SEO strategies remains one of the pre-eminent challenges to be overcome.
Producing quality content is not as easy as it may seem, just like links, they are as crucial as they require considerable effort.
By investing in creating an effective content marketing strategy for your company, you will not only improve your website’s performance in the search results (SERP) and the user experience on your pages, but you will also increase the likelihood that your content will be turn them into attractive resources for links.
One of the most notable assets on the web is the well-known epic content.
This type of epic content consists of a comprehensive guide on a specific topic, an extensive article divided into subtopics that covers, even if superficially, all aspects related to a given subject. To improve online visibility, it is essential to focus efforts on creating links, as they are recognized as valuable for gaining citations and links naturally.
The text you are currently reading, for example, represents comprehensive content on the practice of link building.
These types of content, due to the extensive amount of information they offer, are often referenced by other materials.
Some good examples of linkable assets are:
- Studies and research;
- News, etc.
- Infographics;
- Special content pages and/or sections within a website;
The creation of a linkable asset in a research format, for example, constitutes the essential starting point for implementing a Data-Driven PR strategy.
3. Analysis of new opportunities: broken links and mentions
Producing and disseminating relevant content is the key to any successful link building strategy, although there are other approaches. One of these is to actively seek links through mentions, Hyperlinks citations is one of them.
For example, suppose brand X was mentioned in a magazine or blog, but the reference did not include a hyperlink to the brand’s website. Given this, opting for a direct approach to the website owner responsible for the mention can result in a high-quality backlink.
To implement this strategy, it is essential to monitor mentions of your brand name. This can be done through tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush, or using the free Google Alerts option.
If the website you work on is an e-commerce site that resells products from different brands, you may discover valuable opportunities for backlinks on pages that highlight partners and resellers on those brands’ own websites.
An additional strategy for gaining valuable mentions in the form of backlinks involves identifying broken links. If your website has been online for a few years, it is likely that some pages have gone offline, been replaced by others, or have had URL changes.
In this context, an effective solution would be to contact the administrators of the sites containing these links. Simply request the URL correction to make these backlinks valuable again.
Implementing this strategy requires extracting a report identifying broken links and subsequently working with the editors of those sites.
Internal Linking: Building Links Within Your Own Website
After covering external links in depth, it is crucial to highlight the often underestimated importance of internal links when planning SEO authority-building strategies. This practice plays an essential role in effective link building, positively impacting the site’s visibility and performance in search results.
Internal links, contrary to what it may seem to the less familiar, play a crucial role in SEO strategies. Its function goes beyond simply connecting related content or guiding the reader within a targeted structure.
Internal links play a fundamental role, making the website itself share authority between pages, efficiently optimizing the Page Authority of the main pages.
In a study on SEO for e-commerce, we observed a significant correlation between the prominent positioning of pages and the number of internal links that these pages obtain.
