Venchito Tampon

Link Building Plan: 7 Steps to Better Backlinks (No More Guesswork)

Link building plan is the operational blueprint that turns your link building strategy into measurable outcomes, timelines, and specific actions required to acquire backlinks for your site - helping you achieve your campaign objectives.

Having a documented plan will help your team navigate their tasks and maintain focus, maximizing resources to scale your link building campaign and producing quality output that surpasses what your competitors can do.

A couple of reasons why link building plan is a must for in-house SEOs, agencies, and enterprise teams:

• It centralizes efforts on things that matter to the business - given that there are many routes you can take in link building, the links you get or earn must ultimately contribute to the overall business objectives. 
• It pushes you to achieve as many quick wins as possible, especially for SEO agencies that operate on a pay-per-link model - knowing you'll have guaranteed links at the end of each month eases a lot of stress and ensures you're delivering on agreed-upon expectations.
• It helps you persuade internal stakeholders or clients to invest more budget in link acquisition, as they can see the value of the work right on paper - your link building plan. 
• It measures your actions and adjusts elements of your tactics to create higher-quality links - without a plan, you wouldn't know where your campaign is failing. 

Bring these compelling reasons to your link building plan. 

Having a Strong Base

The success of any link building plan can be traced back to the SEO strength of the website and its internal capabilities to obtain or get backlinks.

Part of the link building plan is to ensure that the pillars of SEO are in place, so that links will have a more significant impact on their destination pages and the overall site's link equity and authority. 

I won't delve into all fundamentals of SEO, but here are the ones you should prioritize:

• Crawlable and indexed pages by search engines (especially the most important pages and the ones you want to build links to).
• Produce helpful content assets you can later use as a value proposition in outreach or direct destination pages for links (from which you can include internal links to pages you want to rank for).
• Well-optimized pages (meta tags, headers, internal links, etc.) - for less competitive keywords, applying this basic optimization can help you show up in a good position on Google's SERPs.
• Optimize the page speed of target pages - as you only have a few seconds to impress your link prospects when you send content for link requests.

Apply basic optimization before any link building efforts to get the maximum value from your link building campaign.

How to Create a Link Building Plan

Now, let's go over how to create a link building plan:

1. Understand The Business, Target Audience, and Link History

Knowing your target audience (whether for your own site or your clients) is crucial to creating a link building plan that meets the exact needs of your target customers. 

Given that it's possible to hit both the business goals and ranking objectives of your client when you acquire links from websites where your target customers are also engaging in ("hitting two birds with one stone").

The best way to learn more about your audience is by asking the right questions and gathering the correct information directly from your organization (for in-house SEO specialists) or from the client (for agency SEO). 

Create a questionnaire you can send over to your client or internal stakeholders. 

Here's a sample list of important questions: 

• Who is your ideal customer? What are their demographics, interests, and online behaviors?
• What distinguishes your product or service from competitors? What value do you offer that others don't?
• Who are your main competitors in your industry?
• Have you previously engaged in link building or SEO efforts? What were the outcomes of those initiatives?
• Do you have existing relationships with influencers or distributors? How have these relationships been utilized in your marketing efforts?
• Are there any other details or insights about your business that could inform our link building strategy?

With these questions, you'll have a better understanding of the business, its target audience, and any previous link building campaigns (the ones that worked and that didn't).

Having all this historical data enables you to manage client expectations and set campaign objectives that are more realistic to achieve, which leads to the next step in creating a link building plan. 

Pro Tip: One of our standard practices as a link building agency when working with clients is conducting a quick analysis of their backlink profile during the proposal stage - to review their historical link data and examine their previous links. It includes assessing:

• Top referring pages to see which pages are driving the most referral traffic - view this best in their Google Analytics data or Ahrefs' Top Referring Pages. These are the types of backlinks you need to get more of for your site. 
• Types of content assets that are attracting passive links from publishers who are citing their work as additional references - build more of these assets and create a "flywheel" effect, and expect to have incoming links every month.

2. Set Your Goals and Campaign Objectives

Goal setting is what actually gives direction to your link building campaign.

And the most important goals for a link building campaign in achieving a holistic organic marketing campaign are the following:

• Improve the site's domain authority (DR) to have a competing ability to rank for its target keywords (both for commercial and informational terms)
• Generate more demand for the business by acquiring customers directly from referring pages and landing pages that rank well for their target keywords.
• Enhance brand visibility and recognition by being more visible for non-branded searches and/or increasing branded searches.
• Amplify the reach of specific content assets to gain more visibility, engagement, and opportunities to passively earn links by ranking for queries that publishers search for to find more resources.

Next, set campaign objectives based on these goals and your understanding of the business, its history, and the target audience, as outlined in step 1 of this link building plan guide.

These objectives are more actionable, realistic, and easy to understand, which you can include as the initial section of your document to send to your client or internal stakeholders.

Before I show you how to create these campaign objectives, let me first walk you through where we get data for setting campaign objectives: 

Through Link Gap Analysis

What is link gap analysis? 

Link gap analysis is the process of identifying the differences between your website's backlink profile and those of your competitors. It sets a clear benchmark for the number of links you need to build to specific pages of your site and helps you spot areas where your competitors may have missed or overlooked opportunities. 

Link gap analysis aims to estimate the number of high-quality backlinks to target each month that meet specific metrics, such as sites with an Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR) of 30 or higher. This becomes part of your campaign objectives, focusing on both the volume and value of links you desire to pursue for your site. 

Start your analysis by selecting the page you want to rank for and identifying the top-ranking competitors for the page's target keyword. Ignore big competitors (i.e., big eCom brands like Amazon) and look for ones within your range of site authority. 

Run a quick check using Ahrefs to see how many links your page currently has and those of your competitors.

Filter the links that/are:

• Come from sites with DR30+.
• Has traffic of at least 1K
• Within the specified target country/audience (if you're targeting local/international)
• In-content
• Dofollow

The remaining links from filtering are what you consider, conservatively, to be the number of high-quality backlinks to your page. Do the same for your top-ranking page competitors. 

Then calculate the difference between these two numbers, which will give you the link gap count you should aim for.

For more detailed steps on how to do link gap analysis, check out our guide on competitor link analysis. 

Define Campaign Objectives

Campaign objectives are the more granular part of your link building plan, as they deal specifically with what you want to achieve in your link development campaign that will impact your site's branding, SEO, and conversion. 

Here are examples of campaign objectives:

Site Rankings

Obviously, the goal of link building is to improve target pages for both head terms and long-tail keywords. This is especially true for the key buyer terms your business or client wants to rank for. 

Example of Campaign Objective: The main objective of this link building campaign is to rank for dance socks (and other keyword variants like “contemporary socks”, “ballet socks”, and “dancing socks”) in the UK.

Pro Tip: 

As a link building consultant, I typically suggest achieving quick wins - keywords that are more achievable to rank given the current site's authority and its existing backlink profile. 

And part of the SEO quick wins is utilizing internal linking to help important pages increase their keyword positions by adding internal links from other related pages.

Brand Sentiment and Reputation 

Beyond rankings, you want to acquire links that will help improve your target users' perception of your brand - as this could also positively affect how you appear on AI platforms. 

Example of Campaign Objective: We also want to improve the brand's sentiments and reputation for this website [SiteName] by only getting links from link sources you want your brand to be associated with, and focusing on the type of links and link placement on the page where you're likely to get clicks. 

Link Velocity

One of the common mistakes I've seen SEO specialists make is aggressively building backlinks in the first few months without considering the site's current domain authority and potential risks associated with sudden spikes in link velocity. 

Unnatural link velocity can actually raise red flags in Google's algorithm, putting your site at risk of manual actions or algorithmic penalties, especially for new domains or sites with limited initial authority. 

Example of Campaign Objective: Given the site's authority, DR5, we will focus on acquiring 10-15 contextual backlinks per month that align with the site's existing domain authority. This pace helps us ensure steady, sustainable growth of the site's domain authority while staying within safe thresholds. 

Then, we gradually increase the pace as the site authority and organic traffic continue to grow (potentially from 15 to 25 target links). 

Pro Tip: 

For new sites, we always recommend taking the link building pace at a slower rate, with an average of 5 to 8 links per month (with 8 being the maximum). 

We want to see the impact of these few links on their direct page. If there is a significant effect, we either increase the links pointing to the page until it reaches the highest position possible (the top 3 positions) or consider allocating other links to the site's other essential pages that may need a boost in rankings. 

Link Diversity

The types of pages you point your backlinks to matter, especially in the early stage of the link building campaign - when you are still proving that the links acquired actually improve the page's search performance.

Our link diversity approach depends on the current site authority and its existing backlink profile. 

For new sites, we often recommend building the majority of the links (80%) to the homepage to boost its ranking power, while allocating 20% to the site's main product category or service pages - as it'll be much easier to contest for head terms when the website has a higher domain authority.

Then, as the site's domain authority grows, we will focus on building more links to product and service pages and blog content. 

3. Identifying Potential Link Partners

Prospecting the right link opportunities is often the determining success factor of a link building campaign, as the value of a link depends on the types of people and sites that would link to you. 

Use your link building campaign's objectives to direct your team to the right types of link sources. For instance, if one of your campaign objectives is to increase positive brand sentiment and improve your brand reputation, working only with publishers and entities you want your brand to associate with is essential. 

Examples of these are:

• Potential brand partners (vendors, suppliers, future brand advocates, etc.).
• Trusted and authoritative voices in your space (authors, thought leaders, personalities, and in-house experts).
• Content creators with targeted communities (to absorb their social media followers and turn them into actual visitors or customers for your site).

Here are our best link prospecting methods, regardless of the industry of our clients:

Competitor Link Analysis

I wrote a detailed guide on how to do competitor analysis, but let me give you a couple of tips here:

Always start by reverse engineering competitors you can compete with - this means avoiding trusted brands that Google already favors (e.g., Amazon and Walmart). 

Instead, target ranking competitors within your site's authority range. If you have a DR30 site, focus on competitor link analysis for websites with a domain rating (DR) between 20 and 60.

Another reason for choosing sites you have chances of competing is you want to be realistic as much as possible - the backlinks you get from reverse engineering mid-level competitors are easier to replicate given their existing resources and value proposition - since they aren't too far ahead of you in terms of authority, branding, and SEO budget. 

Filter the links based on scalable link building strategies. 

There are several link building strategies in SEO - both basic and advanced, where you can almost guarantee the conversion rate when doing outreach campaigns using those strategies. 

Focusing on the type of links that a specific strategy targets can make the process easier when picking potential link targets through competitor backlink analysis. 

For example, you can quickly check resource pages on the list by filtering words like "links" or "resources" and see if your competitor has acquired any links from resource pages. Or, if you want to look for "where to buy" pages for eCommerce, you can filter the list by "where to buy", "store list", and "retailer". 

Leverage Link Intersect

You can automate competitor link analysis using Ahrefs' Link Intersect feature - it shows you the links pointing to your competitors but not to your site, giving you quick access to the list (instead of manually reverse-engineering competitors individually). 

Link Search on the Web

Go beyond the usual competitor backlink analysis route and start looking for potential link sources that are relevant to your industry.

At SharpRocket, we're big fans of Ahrefs' Content Explorer. All of our team members are accustomed to using it to explore different advanced search filters, keywords, and variations, which helps us get the best results for potential relevant linking pages.

Target Active Authors 

On top of exclusively prospecting for websites, you can also directly look for the top active authors in your industry.

The best part about this approach is that you can leverage these authors' existing networks and relationships, especially on the websites where they have already contributed content.

With many high-end, authoritative publishers with strict editorial guidelines — where they only accept experts and experienced contributors — you can penetrate these sites by contacting authors who already have published content there.

Brand Partners

Besides the typical link prospecting methods most SEO specialists use, i.e., competitor link analysis and manual or automated link search, spotting brand partners as part of your link prospecting list is still an effective way to build your site's reputation and topical authority.

The best links will come from domains that elevate your site's branding and reputation—these are link partners that target the same audience you want to engage. 

The common mistake I've seen in-house SEO specialists make is ignoring sites with lower domain authority (i.e., those with an Ahrefs DR 20 or less), even if they are obviously topically or locally relevant to their brands.  

Pro Tip: If you're not in the hustle of delivering guaranteed links every month (i.e., monthly link deliverables for link building agencies), you can go after these weaker brands but with higher brand and niche relevance, seeing that they have the potential to grow in the future in terms of authority and given the legitimacy and sustainability of the business they're in. 

Here are some examples of low-authority but brand-relevant sites: 

• New websites of legitimate vendors and suppliers in your industry 
• Upcoming authors with targeted niche communities
• Social media influencers with unoptimized websites for SEO (but with assets you can leverage for content amplification and more brand discovery through collaboration and other co-marketing opportunities).

Client Block List (or "Do Not Contact" List)

One standard practice we integrate into our link prospecting process is creating a client blocklist, which is basically a list of all the websites we or our client don't want to reach out to. 

Having this initial client blocklist as part of your link prospecting process can help eliminate inefficiencies in outreach. You don't need to spend time reaching out and following up with prospects from whom you don't want to get links. 

A few examples of these websites are:

• Competitors that offer similar products or services.
• Affiliates and existing partners requested by the client for non-contact
• Referring domains already linked to the client's site - as the client wants all new backlinks to come from domains that weren't previously linked to their site.

4. Create Linkable Content Assets 

I've discussed this part extensively in my guide on creating conversion-oriented, linkable assets. 

But here are some actionable tips:

• Tie the linkable asset to the problem you want to solve (i.e., Franchising 101 and 102 guides for my target coffee franchisees).
• Publish first-party data or insights.
• Identify the step before the solution 
• Offer zero-friction tools or techniques that don't require emails to access (e.g., editable templates, checklists, scripts, and visual frameworks)
• Apply unique expertise to sales pages (e.g., use case scenarios, in-house scoring systems, internal testing protocols, etc.).

There are two approaches to leveraging linkable assets: 

• Develop and use them as a direct value proposition for outreach, so that target websites link to these pages. 
• Distribute the exact linkable content asset to selected link partners (i.e., choosing authoritative websites with a larger audience, email list, or social media following).

5. Manage Outreach Campaigns 

Outreach campaigns are still effective in acquiring high-quality backlinks, but the approach has evolved over the years. This is because publishers and webmasters have detected the same patterns and outreach angles that most SEO specialists use to get links from them. 

And since then, they have ignored the majority of pitches that offer the same intent or purpose in emails. 

I've covered different angles and tactics in my guide on link building outreach, but let me repeat a couple of actionable tips here:

• Product-comparison add-on outreach. 
• Content refresh and upgrade.
• Reverse outreach
• Stats-driven outreach 
• Keep initial messages short. Brevity in outreach makes it easier to send semi-personalized mass emails while forcing your outreach team to focus on the value that matters most to your target link prospects (removing fluff and unnecessary introductions in emails).
• Educate publishers by using simple, non-technical terms, persuading them of the value of your content pitch - i.e., it helps increase their search traffic as your content targets a relevant keyword, which can rank and earn organic traffic.
• Stay updated with industry happenings and suggest more unique or highly specialized topics for guest posts not yet covered on their blogs.

6. Monitor Backlinks and Do Quality Assurance

The next step in your link-building plan is to monitor new backlinks to your site. These will come from webmasters you have reached out to using manual outreach or from publishers who cite your content as a reference in their articles.

You can manually check each domain in your outreach list for backlink monitoring or automate the process using link building tools like Ahrefs' Alerts and Mangools. 

Part of good link monitoring is having quality assurance (QA) on the links placed, as one benefit of doing so is making early remedies for recently acquired links that don't meet the necessary criteria.

Review each live backlink based on:

• Target pages - the backlink must point to the target page of your campaign.
• Quality of content - conduct a second quality review of the content distributed to link partners (i.e., check if the guest post is well-optimized for SEO).
• Link placement - verify that the backlink has been placed (does the publisher actually link to you, or do they simply mention you without a link?) and is correctly positioned in the relevant section of the content. 
• Link attribution (dofollow or no-follow attributes)

Checking the quality of backlinks will help you take remedial efforts, such as requesting to add links for unlinked mentions - a much better approach than doing outreach months after your brand has been mentioned. 

7. Prepare a Link Report

Preparing a link report is the final phase of the link building plan, which is part of a monthly SEO strategy for in-house SEO specialists and SEO agencies offering link building services. 

The practice of reporting live backlinks to internal stakeholders or clients has numerous benefits for both parties - SEO practitioners and those receiving the report, including:

• Increases buy-in for stakeholders and clients, as they can see the better value of every link acquired and how these links affect the site's entire SEO performance, branding, and organic revenue. 
• Persuades clients and internal managers/directors to increase their link building budgets to tackle more competitive link building campaigns for high-value keywords.
• Forces in-house SEO teams to innovate by either A/B testing outreach copies or angles to increase link conversions, or trying new link building strategies from other observed industries where those strategies have proven effective. 

Now, let's move on to preparing a link report.

A monthly link-building report isn't as glamorous as what other SEO bloggers try to portray. It is basically a collection of all the critical work you've done and future activities you want to pursue for next month.

Here's our recommended list of things you should definitely include in link building reports:

• URLs of published links
• Date when links were added (could be based on when the page was indexed, whether it's a new page, or the time of notification by the publisher/webmaster in emails).
• Link metrics in columns (Ahrefs' DR, site traffic, etc). - also include average DR for all links acquired
• Anchor text used in backlinks
• URL of backlinks' target pages
• Link building tactics used 
• In-progress notes (i.e., waiting for approval for content created by your team)
• Next steps (i.e., continuous link prospecting and outreach, to publish specific linkable assets, or execute a new link-building strategy)

Plan For Link Building Success

The only way to guarantee success in link building is to plan and execute relentlessly - nothing else beats a well-thought-out link building plan. 

Learn about our link building services and contact our experienced strategists to help build more backlinks to your website. 

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by Venchito Tampon

How to Get Backlinks in 2025 [Leveraging What Works]

Take it from someone who's been building backlinks since 2013.

Getting backlinks today is more about leverage: scaling link building campaigns through the right teams, repeatable processes, and strategies aligned with your business objectives and the realities of your industry or client’s space.

This guide isn't a rehash. It's a deeper look at how to get backlinks today - what's really important, and what's getting backlinks in 2025 that nobody's talking about yet. 

If you're tired of the "same-old" link building tactics and looking for real-world methods that earn links and scale, keep reading: 

Target Pages That Drive Revenue

One of the common mistakes SEO professionals make is diving into the actual execution of link building campaign without having the right strategy.

And when I say strategy, it's not solely about the type of links you want to target and the methods you use (content seeding, product-led link building, listicle outreach, etc.); it's also about choosing the right pages to build backlinks to.

Too often, link builders focus on blog posts or generic guides, as they are easier to pitch, but these don't always align with what actually drives sales or leads. 

One high-impact link building skill is learning how to align link building efforts to business objectives, so you can push rankings where it matters most. 

Here are a couple of ways to pinpoint what pages to build links to:

Ask the client what matters most. 

Start by asking the most direct question: which pages drive your online business? If they don't provide the answer, you simply get access to their Google Analytics and Search Console. 

Get clarity on 

• What offers or services generate the most revenue?
• Are there specific categories or seasonal products to push?
• What pages are being prioritized by internal stakeholders - i.e. top management? 

The answers you get will tell you where your link building needs to support business goals, so you're not just building links to pages for traffic's sake. 

Use Ahrefs to find pages that need a push. 

One of the simplest yet smartest ways to prioritize is to find pages that are already ranking in positions 6-20 for high-intent keywords. These are the pages closest to winning, and they often just need a handful of quality backlinks to break through.

Go to Ahrefs → Site Explorer → Organic Keywords. Filter for positions 6 to 20. Look for keywords with clear buyer intent (e.g., "buy", "services", "top X", "best [product]"). 

 

If you see that top competitors have 25 to 30 referring domains, and your page only has 5 to 10, you can close the gap with focused link building.

Look at conversion-driven pages. 

See which pages consistently generate leads, sign-ups, or purchases, and if there are any high-converting pages stuck beyond page 1. 

The idea is to build a few targeted backlinks to a service or product category page that drives actual revenue. Better building links to blog posts (of course, there are exceptions, but prioritize commercial pages in that matter). 

Benchmark against competitors' top-linked pages.

Reverse engineering your competitors by assessing how they attack their link building campaigns. 

You can use link intelligence tools like Ahrefs to see which pages they build more links to (i.e., tools, data posts, etc.). This would give you insights and help you decide whether you need to:

• Build direct backlinks to your own target page
• Create a supporting asset to pass link equity through internal links
• Build domain authority first to compete against their top-ranking pages by creating more backlinks to your homepage or top-level content. 

If you're working with a site under DR30, start with homepage or top-level page links to build overall authority so that you can rank for more competitive keywords down the line. 

However, for more established domains, you need to focus on revenue-driving pages, such as product category pages, high-intent service pages, or core solution hubs.

Audit Content Library to Find Link-Worthy Pages

Replicating what works already on your site in terms of earning links is the best way to get more quick wins (double down on what works).

The advantage is that you already have resources in place, such as your internal team, subject matter experts, and knowledge base that helped produce those initial assets. Instead of starting from scratch, you can double down on what's proven to work and get more links with less friction.

You can also strengthen relationships with publishers who've linked to you in the past. By offering updated or future-related content (that you will then publish), you create opportunities for recurring links (not just to the original asset, but to other linkable pages within your site that also deserve visibility). 

In our link building agency, we first identify which content assets from the client's site can be effectively used for the link acquisition campaign, typically for content-led link building, product-led outreach, and link reclamation. 

Start by reviewing all indexed pages and use tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush to extract performance data. Then, assess:

• Which URLs already have referring domains?
• Which content types earned links before (e.g., guides, templates, stat roundups)?
• Are any of these pages still relevant, or can they be refreshed and relaunched? 

This creates a clear map of what content to push again for backlinks. 

Here's how to tie scalable link building strategies to the existing assets of your site: 

• Content-led link building: Use evergreen blog posts, data roundups, industry guides, templates, or tools to create resource pages for outreach and contextual placements. 
• Product-led outreach: Repurpose product pages, feature updates, or comparison assets to secure links from reviewers, bloggers, or roundup articles in your niche. 
• Link reclamation: Identify pages with outdated URLs, past press mentions, or unlinked brand citations, and recover lost opportunities through targeted outreach and cleanup.

Auditing the content library and replicating what works is strategically sound, as you link the right asset to the right link building tactic, creating a stronger semantic relationship between the content type and its intended backlink. 

» Not all backlinks are created equal. Learn the different types of backlinks and which ones actually move your rankings.

Systematize Link Building Strategies You Use Often

Random tactics don't sustain results; repeatable systems do. That's why one of the most valuable steps to scale link building is to build internal processes around the link building strategies you rely on most.

At SharpRocket, we’ve built robust, battle-tested processes for product-led outreach, content-led link building, and brand link reclamation. 

We've created process maps that guide how our team operates on a daily basis. And by having the team fully own the tactical execution, it frees us (executives and the strategy team) to focus on the more strategic elements of link building, such as competitive analysis, campaign ideation, and client-specific customizations. 

In terms of systematizing strategies, automation can dramatically speed up the tactical side of the process, especially in prospecting, data gathering, and link building outreach.

Here’s how we streamline our workflow:

Ahrefs for Prospecting and Research

We use Ahrefs' Site Explorer to analyze competitor backlinks and identify high-authority referring domains worth pursuing. Another Ahrefs feature, its Content Explorer helps us find topically relevant articles and linkable pages that align with our assets.

Hunter.io for Contact Discovery

Using Hunter.io (with its Chrome extension), we collect and validate email addresses directly in our prospecting spreadsheet, allowing the team to skip manual email digging.

Gmass or Smartlead for Outreach Automation

These tools enable us to send bulk, personalized outreach emails, schedule follow-ups, and monitor open and reply rates, all while managing campaigns within Gmail or a dedicated outreach platform like SmartLead. 

Internal Prospecting Workflow

We manage everything using Google Spreadsheets, equipped with a duplicate checker to ensure no overlapping outreach. We also use monthly master tabs for historical tracking and role-based assignments based on each team member's niche or outreach strength. 

Having a robust system like this makes it easy for us to assign link prospects, avoid collisions, and delegate tasks clearly, all while keeping the campaign agile and accountable. 

» Tired of basic link tactics? Discover advanced link building strategies that focus on quality, context, and long-term SEO results.

Use Co-Authoring to Get Strategic Content Placements

Co-authoring content is a strategic way to earn high-authority backlinks while leveraging another person's distribution reach. It creates a mutually beneficial exchange: you produce a content asset worth sharing, and your co-author uses their platform, relationships, or publication access to distribute it. 

 

The best way to initiate this is to produce high-utility, original content on your site first, which will serve as solid proof of your expertise's caliber, before engaging in outreach efforts to ask publishers to co-author with you. 

The key is positioning the collaboration as a value-first exchange. 

Here are a couple of ways to succeed with this approach:

Offer a Complete Draft or Framework.

Do the hard work for your co-author to make collaboration easy for them. Reach out with a nearly finished piece or a clear outline that aligns with their target audience. 

Leverage Interview-based Contributions.

Send targeted authors a few insightful questions (not a full list of questions most SEO bloggers did in the past for long round-up articles). 

Then, incorporate specific responses to relevant sections in the content. This makes the content more comprehensive and collaborative, giving co-authors a reason to co-promote or publish.

Co-own Distribution

Structure the deal so that they receive distribution through their network (e.g., social media followings, newsletters, client blogs, partner newsrooms), and you retain authorship or co-authorship credit, along with the backlink. 

Target Authors, Not Just Publications

Focus on building relationships with individual authors or editors who frequently contribute to your target outlets. It is much easier to do co-authorship than a cold editorial pitch to the publication itself. 

» Want to earn links by building your personal brand? Learn how to use authorship to improve link building and grow trust with publishers.

Analyze How Writers Actually Link To Sources

If you want to earn backlinks that last (either from creating linkable assets that passively earn links or through manual outreach), you need to understand how real writers reference content. 

 

Spend time reviewing how top-tier publications and trusted blogs link to external sources. Pay attention to:

• Where the links appear within the article 
• Preference of linking (reason for linking - e.g. how I chose the brands for this list). 
• What kind of content do they link to (guides, original data, statistics, thought leadership)
• How the link is framed (look at the sentence, not just the anchor)
• What type of anchor text is used (descriptive, partial match, branded)

Writers often use descriptive anchor texts, not just exact match keywords, because they read more naturally and fit the editorial tone.  For instance, instead of simply using "link building agency," you'll see publishers using descriptive anchor texts, such as "this case study by a leading outreach firm" or a "comprehensive breakdown of scalable link tactics."

Understanding how editorial links work can help you craft content to become more linkable, as it aligns with real-world citation patterns. 

Think and write as if you're writing for top-tier publications. Match the content to how publishers could cite your work.

You can also use it to inspire your outreach campaigns with better angles, as your outreach suggestions mirror how writers structure references. 

» Want backlinks from high-authority sites? Learn how to get DA 90+ backlinks with practical, white-hat strategies that actually work.

Build Strategic Alliances. 

One of the sustainable methods to get hard-to-replicate links is by building genuine relationships with like-minded entities (people, brands, or organizations that share your values, audience, or goals).

The central premise is to form strategic content alliances with emerging voices and influential players in your space. 

Look for people or brands with these attributes:

• Share similar goals or serve a common mission (e.g., ethical brands, open-source communities, educators).
• Target the same audience, but aren't direct competitors.
• Hungry for growth, visibility, collaborations, and amplification, as they are still emerging influencers in your industry.
• Publishing regularly and investing in their website or content marketing.

Relationships take a long way in accumulating multiple link opportunities, often without the need for formal outreach. 

Here are a few examples you can gain from relationship-based link acquisition:

• Content syndication: One party amplifies others' content, and other publishers share yours, including a contextual backlink in their article.
• Cross-promotion: Mutual link exchange, where you link to their relevant article as a reference, and they reciprocate in future content.
• Co-created content (mentioned earlier): Roundups, webinars, or shared research pieces often include backlinks to both parties.
• Earned mentions: As they reference case studies or success stories, you're more likely to be cited naturally.

By doing what's unscalable (building relationships), you scale link building as you increase your trustworthiness and respect in the industry. This passively attracts links from other like-minded publishers, leading to better semantic proximity and more editorial trust for your site.

» Struggling to build links in a small niche? Here’s how to build backlinks in very small niches without relying on big content or outreach lists.

Use AI to Deepen Research, Then Humanize for Link-Worthy Content

If you rely on what other SEO publishers teach about AI-written content to pass AI detector tools and could rank well in Google's SERPs without human editing, think again.

Instead of using it to generate entire articles that may lead to generic, lifeless content, you can use AI to go deeper into research and insight discovery. 

By augmenting your content creation strategy without fully automating it, you create a significant edge in your content-led link-building campaigns. 

As a content publisher for a decade now, I've seen how AI today gives you instant access to diverse perspectives, alternative phrasings, and emerging subtopics, all of which will help you build deeper, more comprehensive content that resonates well with writers, editors, and readers. 

Marie Haynes, in her recent article, explains how she uses AI as a research assistant, not as a ghostwriter. Her best content writing tip is to input complex industry topics and let AI surface fresh questions, find patterns, and offer varied perspectives that might have been missed. 

The output from here are refined topics that you can use to make the final content richer, more nuanced, and closer to the intent behind user searches.

Kevin Indig makes the AI-assistant writing process even more actionable. He breaks the editing process into four rounds that turn AI output into link-worthy editorial content.

 

The elements that matter:

• Structure: Rearrange sections to create a logical flow and clarity, and remove redundancy to ensure the content directly addresses search intent. 
• Language: Eliminate robotic phrasing. Vary sentence lengths. Use plain, human language.
• Humanization: Add personal opinions, stories, metaphors, cultural context, and emotional cues - things AI can’t replicate.
• Polish: Check for SEO alignment (headings, internal links, CTAs), fact accuracy, and final readability.

Helpful content assisted with AI's deeper research helps you create a connection with your target audience, making it even more attractive for link building, as the content:

• Shows original thinking
• Demonstrates deep and real expertise
• Provides depth and clarity (easy to read, easy to skim)
• Feels authentically human (in other words, engaging)

The best content today comes from creators who know how to steer the algorithmic output with human judgment, insight, and originality, resulting in content assets that get cited by other publishers in their space. 

Exclusive Directories

Creating your exclusive directories that feature other businesses in your industry can be a lever to develop relationships with other publishers. And it’s also a way to increase trust and visibility for your site, being the host of the directory.

 

Choose a segmented audience you want to include in your directories. Examples could be:

• Vendors, service providers, or platforms that your audience actively seeks
• Indirect competitors: companies that serve your target market, but offer solutions you don’t
• Influencers, creators, or niche-specific brands are gaining traction in your vertical
• Thought leaders and educators, especially those who are underrated and don’t have an active social following, have significantly contributed to the community through their expertise.

The real power of exclusive directories lies in their shareability and ego appeal. When people are mentioned in a top list or featured as a trusted vendor, they are often proud of the recognition and naturally want to share or link back to that page.

You’ve given them third-party validation, which motivates them to share it on their blog, social media, or press page and add a backlink to their “As Featured In” or “Awards' section. 

Position your directory to target a particular segment of vendors. Instead of competing with G2 or Capterra, you can:

• Curate a trusted resource list for a narrow vertical
• Highlight complementary services or tools your audience uses 
• Feature local or niche-based providers

For instance, Cyrus Shepard recently launched his agency directory featuring SEO and digital marketing agencies he trusts to deliver results.

What makes this asset powerful isn’t just the curated list, it’s the implicit endorsement. Being included in a list curated by a trusted industry voice like Cyrus carries authority, credibility, and immediate shareability.

» Need quick wins for your SEO campaign? Try these easy link building strategies that are simple to execute but still effective.

Build a Learning Center

Creating a learning center is one of the most effective long-term, linkable asset investments you can make, benefiting far beyond just SEO. By publishing a structured hub of educational and evergreen content, you establish your website as a go-to source of information in your niche, where visitors would go directly to your learning center to digest more of your content.

 

In many ways, your learning center becomes a solid linkable asset that generates continuous backlinks, given that: 

• The content is informational, evergreen, and high-utility
• It can rank for question-based informational queries, such as “What is [industry term]”, “How to [solve problem]”, or “Why use [solution]”.
• Writers, editors, and publishers frequently cite these pages when they need to explain terms, link to definitions, or reference how-to guides.

By investing resources in a learning center, you compound your benefits into more passive link earning, from which you can maximize and reinforce link equity across your landing pages through internal linking. 

Another way learning centers can help your website beyond just SEO is that they reduce the support load by acting as a self-service help desk (think FAQs, tutorials, and troubleshooting guides). This way, it supports your sales team by educating and attracting the right types of customers. 

» Running complex outreach campaigns? Learn how to manage advanced link building campaigns with better systems, tools, and team workflows.

Align Link Building Efforts to Business Objectives 

The best link building campaigns are the ones that support the broader business goals behind those rankings. Your link building efforts should be directly tied to what matters most to the business.

In the recent 2025 Link Building Survey by Citation Labs and BuzzStream, more SEOs are shifting their focus from raw link volume to strategic alignment (building links to pages that serve a specific purpose in the customer journey) - a link building approach I've been an advocate for years.

When your link building becomes a business growth lever, it supports your broader objectives, such as:

• Your reporting improves (you can measure business impact, not just link count).
• Your content prioritization becomes clearer (what to promote, what pages to get most inbound links)
• Your internal buy-in strengthens, especially when discussing link building campaigns with sales, product, brand teams, CMOs, and other key internal stakeholders.
• You retain agency/client relationships as you're driving more meaningful results. 

Have an end in mind when executing your link building campaigns, incorporating important pages for the business, which include:

• Revenue-generating product and category pages
• Resource hubs that boost topical authority
• Long-form content that powers discovery and brand awareness. 

I've covered this on how tools like Link Launch can make your link building investment more justifiable. Check out this guide on our best link building tools for SEO. 

Remember that the best links are the ones that move both rankings and revenue. 

One Mention to Many

Showing up in many product listicles can help you earn compounding, passive backlinks from other product listicles within your niche, often without doing outreach.

 

Aim to have your brand included in many product and content listicles by manually pushing direct link requests. Given that publishers who build these lists often use existing listicles as their search base, if your brand or content consistently appears in trusted lists (your roundup, others' listicles, directories), future creators are more likely to assume you're trusted because others have already cited you.

It puts your brand, product, or content in front of more eyes, creating a network effect where your backlink inclusion becomes self-sustaining. That's where the real backlink compounding happens. 

Scalable Reverse Engineering. 

Reverse engineering competitors and even your own brand is an old link-building tactic, but few implement it systematically at scale and take full advantage of it.

By tracking brand mentions using Ahrefs' Alerts, Google Alerts, or Mentions, you strike while the page is fresh.

Pitches sent just a few days after a page gets published (or indexed) have a much higher success rate than cold pitches sent weeks or months later (similar to how reactive digital PR campaigns work - you react immediately on breaking stories to take advantage of the hype/virality effect).

Given that the content is still top of mind for the author or editor, it is also easier to edit (especially before it's widely shared) and actively monitored (since writers often review early feedback on the content) - this window gives you a key advantage. 

Instead of pitching something out of context, you're offering a small, relevant addition to a just-published piece. So, whether it's a quick request to add a link to your own brand (link reclamation) or a subtle suggestion of an alternative to a competitor, editors are far more receptive when the content is fresh. 

Another advantage of scaling reverse engineering is that you can turn mentions into relationships. 

When someone mentions your brand (linked or not), it's an opportunity to build long-term relationships. By appreciating their kindness, you position yourself as helpful and more human, and when scaled, it could lead to more contextual backlinks and future content collaborations.

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» Looking for links that actually improve rankings? Explore our link building services designed to achieve your organic growth. 

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by Venchito Tampon

Value-Driven Link Building Outreach [Unique Angles You Can Use]

Link building outreach comprises most of the work we do in our link building agency. We still find it effective in landing link opportunities that our clients' competitors can't easily replicate. 

However, the resources, efforts, and time it takes for outreach accounts to grow and produce backlinks for clients are the bottleneck that most SEO specialists and agencies find challenging to overcome.

Links should be a byproduct of helping people achieve their goals: visibility, rankings, and promotion of their offers. It means helping people. The offer, approach, and objective may change, but the primary purpose of link building remains the same: adding value.

As the typical "guest post" pitch no longer works, it's time to find new angles and innovative ways to increase the value of your link building outreach campaigns. 

Value-Driven Link Building Outreach Tips

In this guide, I'll show you unique outreach angles we've tested that are way more effective than requesting straight-up links. 

1. Brevity in Initial Pitch 

The first email in link building outreach sets the tone. One of the most effective tactics is keeping initial messages short. There are a few advantages to this.

 

Long, overly detailed pitches create fiction and mental fatigue for busy publishers. Asking too much of the reader too early increases their resistance towards your pitch. When you open your pitch with a long email, you assume the recipient is willing to invest time in something they haven't asked for (reality: most won't). 

Instead, keep your opening message tight and to the point.

Why brevity works in outreach:

• Leverage skimming: Content publishers or those in editorial roles scan emails fast, so short messages are easier to process this way.
• Increase response rate: A clear, focused ask is more likely to get a reply.
• Maximizes outreach time: You avoid spending too much effort on unresponsive contacts.

Brevity in link-building outreach is efficient, as it tests interest first. If they reply, you can then follow up with more detailed or tailored information. 

In value-driven outreach, earning attention comes before earning a link. 

2. Educate Publishers

Truly helpful content on the web educates. It is also why people link to pages in the first place: they find something useful that solves their problems or addresses their concerns.

In link building outreach, the same mindset can be applied to help people get more visibility.

One of the best types of linkers is legit brands and business owners. Google sees their websites as credible and more likely to be searched by its target users (branded and non-branded searches). As such, getting links from their business sites has higher link value compared to niche bloggers who don't have their built-in brand power. 

In value-driven link outreach, education becomes your edge. Instead of requesting straight-up links, you can explain how reworking their current content that's been declining in traffic can be optimized for search and recover their traffic. 

The plain reason is that most legit small brands aren't really knowledgeable about SEO. So sharing what you offer with them helps them gain more visibility and potential inquiries from ranking commercial keywords. 

Use simple, non-technical explanations. Frame your "content improvements" angle as a favor to them, adding value to the conversations. 

By actually giving them a reason to link, which is grounded in practical SEO benefit, you shift from a random stranger asking for a backlink to a helpful expert improving their content. 

3. Content Refresh and Upgrade

Outreach is more effective when your offer improves what already exists. 

Many websites have old blog posts, how-to guides, or listicles that still rank, but haven't been updated in months or years (which could position these pages higher in Google's SERPs once re-optimized). That's where content refresh outreach comes in.

Instead of pitching your link as just another resource, position it as a content upgrade (something that helps improve the page's quality, depth, and accuracy). 

The outreach angle you're pursuing for this is the fresh update, that search engines reward and have been using as a ranking factor for years, to rank websites producing new, helpful content for their audience.

A few content refreshes or upgrades you can offer:

• New stats or data to replace outdated ones. It is also a good way to link to your larger data-driven content if it's thematically relevant. 
• Missing section that covers a recent development. By getting immersed in the industry, you'll get updated with what's happening (more on this later).
• Visual (chart, infographic, flowchart) to enrich the reader's experience
• Deep guide that supports or extends an existing point. 

Do the work for them. Rewrite the content with internal links to their site's other relevant pages (helping them get more visits on other content pieces). 

» Want to take your outreach beyond templates? Explore advanced link building strategies in SEO that focus on relevance, value, and long-term results.

4. Be Updated with Industry Happenings 

Immersion (as Jason Acidre coined it) is a strong factor differentiating your email outreach pitches from others.

Given that most SEO specialists and publishers will try to persuade blogs with generic topics. It would be an advantage if you knew the industry well and showed them what they're missing in the content. It adds more value to their audience and helps them differentiate their brand in the industry.

 

Create a swipe file of the best content publishers in your space. You can automate getting the latest trends, tips, and news by subscribing to their newsletters.

Here are a couple of ways to stay informed in your industry (even if you're not a subject matter expert):

• Be your own brand ambassador. Use your own experience if you're pitching for your brand. Get insights from customers' questions, sales feedback, and product updates (you know your business better than anyone else).
• Talk to people who know the space. If you're doing link building outreach for clients (or other teams), interview in-house experts, or sit in on internal training onboarding calls (just do whatever you can to get a real look at what's happening). 
• Use actual information sources. Follow niche communities, LinkedIn creators, or industry Slack groups. 

Once immersed in the industry, you can bring the knowledge into outreach. 

The best thing about this approach is that when you reach out to publishers, most website owners won't spot content gaps unless they're fully involved in the topic. 

This way, you can have so many outreach angles, including:

• Suggest updates to old posts that mention outdated tools or methods (share what tools have been highly reviewed in the industry).
• Recommended new angles based on emerging trends (rework their content)
• Offer data-backed resources based on recent studies. 

Be like a consultant when pitching publishers, especially for new sites in the industry. You can help them by exploring new approaches to their content library.

5. Product Comparison Add-on

For eCommerce link building campaigns, this is one of the most high-impact link building outreach angles.

Given that getting links from posts that attract people who are actively searching, comparing, and making purchase decisions (i.e., Top X tools/products), especially those that rank well on Google's SERPs.

This outreach angle works because most round-up-style articles don't stay static. Publishers often (or want to) update them regularly, as they have the SEO benefit of driving consistent search traffic via rankings.

Help them with:

• Filling a gap in their current product listicle content.
• Adding new angles (e.g., best for beginners, best eco-friendly option)
• Reflects an emerging trend (e.g., AI features, sustainability, portability)

If your product has a unique POV, getting link placements from straight-up link requests would be easier. Provide more context on your product's unique value, which is suitable enough to be included in the list. 

Create a list of product listicles. You can start by reverse engineering pages linked to your competitors' products (avoid the ones linked to big retailers or brands, as their websites naturally get links in the first place).

Find product list pages that are:

• Already ranking on page 1 or 2 for "best product" or "top product".
• Recently updated (check the date) or actively maintained (see "Last Updated").
• Missing your product or similar alternatives that your product improves on. 

When doing link outreach using this angle, make your pitch stand out by:

• Positioning your product clearly (i.e. we're the best for XYZ feature").
• Frame it to benefit their content (i.e.," including us helps cover a broader segment of your readers").
• Make it easy for them to include your product (provide a quick smmary or suggested blurb they can copy and paste). 

It's unlikely that your product beats others on everything. So, frame your angle to be best on a specific product feature or target customers. This would make specific relevance helpful to publishers trying to serve different audience segments. 

» Looking for tools to streamline your outreach? Check out the best link building tools for SEO to scale and manage your campaigns efficiently.

6. Reverse Outreach 

Outreach isn't enough to land more quality link placements. Especially if you're in a narrow niche, with limited publishers you can reach out to. 

The best way is actually to create link opportunities yourself. That's where reverse outreach comes in. 

Reverse outreach is a link building strategy where publishers initiate contact with you, not the other way around. 

 

By ranking for keywords at the stage where they're writing their content or looking for references to add to their page, you would be found among the top-ranking pages in Google's SERPs. 

The upside with reverse outreach is that you can control the value exchange, where you can:

• Choose quality link prospects you only want to work with.
• Have low resistance to link placement (leverage their desire for linking or content collaboration)
• Reduce outreach fatigue as you invest more in assets that do the prospecting for you.
• Scalable and sustainable (as it ranks and gets more visibility, the content can attract more passive link opportunities). 

Create content that other people would cite as their resources, including:

• Original data or studies 
• Free tools or templates
• In-depth evergreen guides
• "Write for us" or "Partner with us" pages

Another tip is to track publishers who recently linked to your linkable assets. Build relationships with them and offer other content opportunities, like collaborating on content, as both parties will certainly benefit from exposure. 

» Need assets worth linking to? Learn how to create linkable assets that add real value and attract links naturally.

7. Stats-Driven Outreach

Data is one of the best reasons to update content, as it strengthens the page's credibility, makes it more current, and improves its chances of ranking higher in search results.

Stats add value to link building outreach, given that it or it has:

• Content freshness: Offering stats helps them refresh content without doing the research themselves.
• Fills missing context: You help them turn vague claims into precise, backed-up insights by inserting real numbers.
• Authoritativeness (E-E-A-T approach): When they cite credible sources or original data, it makes the publisher's page more authoritative. 
• Do the work for them: Make it easy by writing the actual update or paragraph they can copy-paste with zero edits (offer that help upfront). 

Don't have stats? You can curate stats using public government data and third-party data sources. 

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» Looking to get featured on real blogs? Check out our blogger outreach services that connect your brand with trusted publishers in your niche.

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by Venchito Tampon

Link Metrics in SEO You Probably Don't Use Often

Vetting the right link opportunities and earning links from domains that truly matter starts with tracking the right link metrics. These metrics are actually what separate a successful campaign from a mediocre one.

If you purely rely on DR, which the majority of SEO agencies and in-house SEO teams use, you won't capture the full picture. A backlink from a high-DR site with zero traffic and irrelevant content often adds little value. Conversely, a link from a topically relevant website with focused content and real organic traffic, even if it has substantially lower DR, can move the needle in rankings and traffic. 

Why Ahrefs’ DR Alone Is Not a Reliable Metric for Outreach?

In the early years of SEO, many SEO specialists (including me) relied on Google's PageRank. This algorithm, developed by Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, was one of the original algorithms used to rank web pages. It assigned a numerical value to each page based on the quantity and quality of backlinks, with the idea that a page is important if many other important pages link to it. 

However, there was a time when PageRank stopped being publicly updated, so the SEO industry shifted to alternatives. Around 2010, Moz's Domain Authority (DA) became the popular benchmark. It provided a single number to estimate a site's authority, which was easy to report and track.

Today, the industry standard has shifted again. Ahrefs' Domain Rating (DR) is now the most commonly used metric by SEO specialists and trusted agencies. DR measures the strength of a site's backlink profile on a scale from 0 to 100, based on the quantity and quality of referring domains.

To balance it out, using Ahrefs' DR for outreach still has its advantages, and that's why most SEO agencies use it:

• It creates a fundamental level of domain reputation (e.g., aiming for DR25 or DR30+ links)
• It's visible at a glance with the Ahrefs toolbar (makes it easy to prospect for multiple link opportunities manually) 
• It simplifies most performance tracking and team reporting (especially when working with in-house enterprise SEO teams).

Setting DR-based targets for link prospects is still the best approach. The only issue is relying on them alone while ignoring more accurate indicators of link value.

Here's why that's risky:

• DR reflects domain-wide strength, not page-level value. 
• Google evaluates links based on context, relevance, and placement (factors not captured by DR alone)
• High-DR doesn't guarantee SEO impact (most of which, overused high-DR domains often have minimal effect).

We take metrics further as one of the best UK link building agencies. 

When reviewing our list of link prospects, here are the link building tips and link metrics we consider (and you probably don't use often): 

1. Check the Keywords They Get Traffic From

As you consider Ahrefs' DR of the website, review what keywords it ranks for. Use tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush to pull its top pages and top organic keywords. Both will show you whether the site attracts meaningful traffic from search terms relevant to your industry.

 

For example, if a marketing blog ranks for terms like "CRM tools for small business" or "email automation strategies, it's a strong signal that the site has topical authority (or at least has indexed pages with relevant topics). 

However, if the top keywords are completely unrelated (or I may say, "spammy"), such as "online betting", or "essay writing services" (which by the way, I still see up to this date with some websites), that indicates the site is eiter overly commercialized, or part of a link scheme.

Checking keyword traffic can help you avoid websites that inflate traffic through unrelated or clickbait content (which is very easy to do). A site may appear active in terms of traffic and content publishing rate, but if its visibility is tied to irrelevant topics, the link carries little SEO value. 

» Wondering how your competitors earn their links? Learn how to run an advanced competitor backlink analysis and find link opportunities they’re missing.

2. Contextual Relevance

Contextual relevance measures how well the linking page aligns with your topic, language, and intent content. 

It's not enough for a site to have a high Ahrefs DR or strong traffic. If the content surrounding your link is off-topic, generic, or inconsistent with your industry, the link will have limited SEO value. 

Here's what we look for in contextual relevance: 

• Topical alignment: The linking page should cover a subject related to your content. For instance, if your page concerns project management tools, the link should come from a page discussing productivity, software, or workflow, not cooking tips or lifestyle hacks.
• Anchor text fit: The preferred anchor text should be natural and relevant to your target keyword (avoid forced placements or off-topic phrases).
• Surrounding content: The paragraph around the link should support and explain the linked page's topic. 
• Minimal link dilution: Pages with fewer outbound links and a focused message provide stronger signals than link-heavy, general-purpose content. 

The impact of contextually relevant links on your site compounds and benefits more than visibility. It helps Google better understand your website through contextual understanding of pages that link to your webpages. 

» Want to go beyond basic outreach? Explore advanced link building strategies in SEO to earn high-quality links that actually move rankings.

3. Estimated Traffic of the Linking Page (URL-Level)

One of the main limitations of relying on Ahrefs' Domain Rating alone is that it scores the domain as a whole, but not the specific URL giving you the backlink. To better understand the link value (even by estimate), you need to check the estimated monthly traffic of the page that will link to you.

 

Here are a couple of benefits of using page-level traffic:

Identifies high-value pages on low-DR sites. 

A low-DR website might publish one page that ranks exceptionally well, but is often dismissed by traditional link prospecting methods, given its average DR. Tracking URL-level traffic allows you to catch these hidden opportunities.

Rewards outreach to high-traffic pages.

A page-level traffic metric encourages outreaches to target a site's top-performing pages, which is a smarter move for SEO agencies to maximize the value from every link.

Compensates for recently launched or fast-growing sites

One of the overlooked parts of link prospecting is maximizing websites that are new or under-reviewed by Ahrefs, and have low DR, for that matter. But if its pages already rank and are driving organic traffic, those links are more likely to be valuable than DR suggests. 

When vetting link prospects, use Ahrefs or SEMRush to check the traffic of the specific page where the link will go. You can also use Ahrefs' Top Pages report to find high-traffic URLs within the domain. 

» Want to strengthen your existing backlinks? Explore modern approaches to tiered link building that boost link equity without using spammy tactics.

4. Aim to Get Dofollow Links (But Recognize Strategic Exceptions)

Even though Google has stated that nofollow links can be treated as hints (and are actual recommendations to the page/website), you can't rely on your link building campaigns on getting the majority to be no-follow links.

Especially if you're working for an SEO agency where clients are particular about the type of links you get, many SEO specialists don't count nofollow links as part of outreach KPIs. They only pay for do-follow links, as no-follow links are sometimes a by-product of an excellent digital PR campaign or other link building strategies. 

Our best bet to be the default outreach strategy is prioritizing dofollow link placements. 

The only exception is that many high-DR media outlets and authoritative news sites (DR70+) only offer nofollow links unless you pay steep fees. By also considering no-follow links, you get two key advantages:

• Builds relationships with top-tier publishers (intangible benefit, but can't easily measure) that can lead to future dofollow link placements, co-branded content, or digital PR features.
• Gain more branded exposure on high-traffic, trusted websites, where visibility can drive referral traffic, credibility, and long-term authority.

At best, aim for dofollow links by default, but don't ignore strategic nofollow link placements when they offer long-term brand and relationship value. 

5. Link Placement Factors

As a link building consultant, I'm heavy on link placements, which is knowing where a link is actually placed on a page. 

Given that Google gives more weight to links placed in the main content area, especially those that appear early in the content and are contextually relevant, it's one of the top link metrics every SEO specialist must consider. 

Four important link placement factors we consider as a link building company:

• Position within the content: Links placed higher on the page or within the opening paragraphs tend to carry more weight—they are more likely to be crawled, seen, and clicked. 
• Main body vs sidebar or footer: Links embedded in the main body text are far more valuable than those placed in sidebars, footers, author bios, or boilerplate sections. 
• Surrounding content quality: The link should appear in a paragraph discussing the topic of your page (see our tip earlier on contextual relevance).
• Number of other outbound links: If the page has too many outbound links, the value is reduced to each one (fewer, more selective links indicate higher editorial standards). 

Make it a standard practice to inspect where your link appears on the page. A higher likelihood of visibility helps attract more clicks and referral traffic to your destination page. 

6. Outbound Link Profile Health

Outbound link profile health is the quality and relevance of the external links on a webpage, evaluating where a page is linking to, not just how many links it has. 

Check where their external links go ("destination webpages"). 

Assess if the website links to quality, reputable sources or spammy, irrelevant, or suspicious domains (i.e., payday loans, crypto schemes, or thin-affiliated pages). 

Outbound link profile health matters as it affects the credibility of your webpage. When your backlink sites include links to low-trust or manipulative websites, it sends signals that weaken your link's value (even if your own content on the page is strong and credible). 

» Looking for tools to scale your outreach? See our list of the best link building tools for SEO that can help you build better links, faster.

7. Referring Domain Growth Trend

Check how fast or steady the linking website gains referring domains over time. If a site grows naturally, it suggests (probably seeing) that it's producing linkable assets and is seen as a credible source of information (its content assets are getting citations). 

 

It's important to watch out for:

• Steady, upward trend: Indicates consistent publishing, link earning activity, and ongoing visibility in the niche.
• Sudden spike in referring domains Could be a sign of a robust digital PR campaign, aggressive link-building campaigns, or manipulative link-building tactics (see the site's backlink profile for deeper analysis).
• Flat or declining trend: Suggests the site may no longer be active in content publishing, lose its relevance in content, or not attract new organic links. 

Use tools like Ahrefs' Referring Domains graph to review historical link data. Pay attention to the rate of new domain acquisition, patterns that look unnatural (i.e., 200+ new domains in one week, then none the next), and long periods with zero growth. 

Sustainable link growth (or link velocity) signals algorithmic trust and domain health. Given that a website that earns organic links over time is being perceived as a highly credible source of information (vouched for by other niche publishers through their external linking efforts). While one website that grows too fast or stagnates may trigger a spam filter or lose ranking power. 

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» Looking for a trusted SEO partner to build high-quality links that pass the above link metrics? Check out our link building services designed to earn real, white-hat backlinks that drive results.

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by Venchito Tampon

How to Create Conversion-Oriented Linkable Assets [+Examples]

Linkable assets no longer serve as pages "just to earn" links. 

With our experience working with enterprise in-house SEO clients, we've seen the shift in the purpose of creating linkable assets. Beyond just attracting links to increase the site's authority (and improve rankings), they must also help move users through the customer journey and support the site's overall business goals. 

A Shift in Purpose

Before, linkable assets were built with one goal: to get links from other websites. SEO specialists were focused on creating content that would go viral, get picked up by journalists, or be featured in link roundups. Once the links were earned, the job was considered done.

The challenge is that many of these pages had no clear place on the website. They were often tucked away in corners where they wouldn't interfere with other content (which means they add little long-term value). 

They were isolated. That approach no longer works. 

Let me give you my new definition of linkable assets. 

What are linkable assets?

Linkable assets are pieces of content created to earn backlinks while guiding users through key customer journey stages. They deliver practical value, such as templates, tools, data, checklists, or expert tips, and are built around specific user needs or early-stage problems. More than just informational, they’re structured to lead naturally toward a product, service, or next action.

Conversion-Oriented Linkable Assets

Conversion-oriented linkable assets target link acquisition efforts and assist conversions through the buyer journey.

Here are a couple of tactics you can test and implement for your brand:

1. Tie The Asset to a Problem Your Product Solves

For a linkable asset to drive traffic and conversions, it must address a problem that matters to your target audience and one that your product or service is built to solve. 

When your content doesn't connect to the actual problems your audience faces (or the solutions you offer), it becomes isolated. It may earn a few links, but won't support your broader content strategy and brand authority. 

Topping it off is the kind of traffic you want to attract from ranking with your linkable assets. It must be qualified traffic (people who are more likely to convert).

For instance, I've been heavily publishing franchising guides for my target audience - aspiring entrepreneurs- attracting passive links from other business bloggers and helping move visitors into the buyer journey (of inquiring about our franchise packages).

Start with real friction points. 

Dig into support tickets, customer complaints, sales call transcripts, or onboarding surveys. These are all goldmines for uncovering the exact wording and issues your audience is already struggling with.

Solve one problem, not a category.

One citable element topic you can add to your landing page is content pieces that target one sharp pain point. These pieces are easier to share and connect to a product feature. 

For example, instead of tackling "Remote Work Challenges", you can zero in on one like "missed deadlines due to unclear ownership", a quick section guide on "Why project deadlines slip in remote teams?").

Support claims with contextual proof.

Proofs are better than promises. Instead of just listing stats, show how the problem affects outcomes. Combine data with before-and-after scenarios, customer quotes, or use case breakdowns. One tip here is to use visuals like “problem → solution” timelines or annotated screenshots that can make technical solutions easier to grasp.

Optimize for internal link flow. 

Do smart internal linking to pass link equity to your site's important pages. Link to supporting blog posts for depth (or next steps of resources) and link in from related product or resource pages. 

2. Publish First-Party Data or Insights

Linkable assets that include first-party data stand out. You collect these insights directly from your audience, customers, or internal stakeholders. Given they're original and reliable, they can earn links that are hard to replicate by your competitors.

Most websites repeat the same statistics from popular blogs and reports, but when your asset shares data no one else has, you position your brand as a source instead of a mere distributor of information. This helps you draw attention and potential links from journalists writing industry stories, bloggers looking for original stats, and educators referencing niche topics. 

How first-party data attracts links: 

• Become the original source. Publishing unique data makes your site the primary reference point.
• Get cited in link roundups and other industry reports. Writers constantly search for new stats for listicles, "top trends," or "industry reports" (your original data gives them exactly what they need).
• Attract organic shares without manual outreach. When your insights are genuinely helpful, surprising, or time-sensitive, they provide a reason for people to share them naturally.
• Builds initial trust that earns links—the idea of having "statistics" itself initiates trust, as it is not something you can easily create without putting in enough work. 
• Earn natural links from your brand's network. Customers, partners, and vendors may use your data in their business presentations, decks, and offline resources.
• Automate link building via ranking for stat-based search queries. Make sure you properly optimize your content for target stat keywords. 

3. Identify the Step Before Your Solution

While the first tip of aligning your asset with a problem your product directly solves, another powerful approach is to go one step earlier: 

Create content around the steps before someone needs your product. 

These are research-driven, early-stage actions before they're ready to buy, subscribe, or engage.

Meeting them at the stage makes your content more than link-worthy. It becomes a bridge that connects their current challenge to your solution. 

Why "before-the-solution" linkable assets work:

• It targets top-of-funnel search intent (helps you capture more search traffic).
• It attracts backlinks from educational and industry resources in your space.
• It positions your product as the natural next step 
• It builds trust by adding value and genuinely helping people before selling

In creating linkable assets based on the steps before your solution, you need to understand your audience's decision-making process, not just what they need from you, but what they must go through before they realize your product is the answer. 

Start by asking these questions. 

1. What does someone need to understand, research, or prepare before they can use our product?

Think about the learning curve or awareness stage that your customers go through.

• Are they researching how to fix a specific issue?
• Are they comparing methods, tools, or strategies?
• Do they need to build a case internally before buying?

For instance, if you're doing a cybersecurity SEO campaign, you might identify that buyers first research "how to perform a security audit?" before looking for software, so a great linkable asset: "Step-by-Step Guide to Running Your First Cybersecurity Audit".

2. What issue or blocker do they typically face before they convert?

Identify the friction point that causes hesitation or slows the path to purchase:

• Are they unsure of what solution fits their situation?
• Are they missing resources, clarity, or approval?
• Do they fear making the wrong choice?

A good example of this is analytic tools (link building for SaaS), where you might discover potential buyers struggling to understand what metrics they actually need to track (creating a content asset on “10 Key Marketing Metrics Every Growing Business Should Watch and Why They Matter"). 

3. What content would help them at that point, and naturally lead to our solution?

Create content that meets them at that point with practical help. Shift from analyzing user intent to building a resource that solves their immediate need, without pushing your product too hard.

You earn links this way and create a moment of clarity where the reader thinks it is exactly what they need and sees if your website (brand) offers any solution. 

4. Offer Zero-Friction Tools or Templates

Getting easy and early access to tools or templates people can use without barriers, signups, or complex instructions makes an asset linkable.

These linkable assets work because they deliver instant value, resulting in a resource that solves a specific, clearly defined problem.

 

Why zero-friction tools are solid linkable assets:

• Solves real, immediate tasks (increases the page's usefulness)
• Easy to share or embed (content creators and publishers love linking to practical tools)
• Naturally leads to your product (once users rely on your free resource, they're more open to using your full platform or solution). 

Here are a couple of formats of zero-friction tools or templates:

• Editable templates - Google Sheets, Notion, or Canva files that users can customize (e.g., 30-Day Social Media Planner Template)
• Checklists and worksheets - step-by-step guides, printable PDFs, or fillable forms (e.g., Product Launch Readiness Checklist)
• Mini tools and calculators - quick-use tools that help estimate or compare something (e.g., Email List Cost Calculator)
• Scripts and prompts - ready-to-use messages for outreach, sales, or communication (e.g., 5 Sales Email Templates That Get Replies)
• One pager and visual frameworks - simple visuals like flowcharts or decision-trees (e.g. Marketing Funnel Fix-it Flowchart)

You can optimize pages to include these zero-friction tools and rank for problem-solving queries, increasing your chances of earning more passive links through high rankings. 

5. Apply Unique Expertise to Sales Pages

Use your team's specialized knowledge (research, process insights, etc.) directly on your product or sales pages. This will transform your standard transactional content into link-worthy referential material that adds value beyond the sale (and publishers will link to it, even if it is commercial in nature).

What to include based on your expertise:

• Proprietary scoring or rating systems
• Common mistakes your product helps prevent
• Internal benchmarks or quality thresholds
• Use-case scenarios from support or onboarding logs
• In-house tips, techniques, or shortcuts
• Chronology or iteration history of product development
• Decision-making frameworks used by your team
• Internal testing protocols or standards
• Product-specific troubleshooting insights
• Expert-recommended usage routines or best practices

One good example, if you're doing eCommerce SEO, is publishing a best practice angle: 

“Our in-house ergonomics team recommends adjusting the chair height so your elbows form a 90-degree angle while typing. This position reduces shoulder tension and improves long-term posture. That’s why our chair includes a guided adjustment checklist under the seat.”

This example draws from expert-recommended usage routines, which address a common user challenge - a value-add to your product page, reinforcing your brand authority. 

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Need help with your link building campaigns? See our link building services and let's have a free strategy call. 

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by Venchito Tampon

Modern-Day Tiered Link Building: Link Stacking (and Smarter Alternatives)

Traditional tiered link building no longer works. Creating backlinks to levels of linking pages to your website was once a way to improve site rankings through layered authority. 

In the past, SEOs built links not just to their website but also to the pages that linked to them, referring to Tier 2 and Tier 3 links, in which the goal was to increase the power of Tier 1 backlinks and pass that strength down the chain. 

How search engines like Google perceive and recognize backlinks today has evolved.

Why Traditional Tiered Link Building Doesn't Work? 

While it's a systematic approach to link building, traditional tiered link building no longer works for many reasons. 

1. Link Decay and 404 Errors Break the Chain

Backlinks are not permanent, as the web is constantly changing. Pages get updated, deleted, or moved, particularly during this time when the rate of content publishing has accelerated. This means that your Tier 1 backlinks (the ones linking directly to your site) can eventually disappear. When that happens, the entire link chain breaks.

If you've invested time or money building Tier 2 links to boost a Tier 1 page, and that Tier 1 page goes offline (returns a 404 error or gets redirected), all the value from those Tier 2 links is lost. Google can't crawl through a broken link to reach your site. As a result, the link equity stops flowing.

The challenge with this scenario is that it becomes worse over time. As websites restructure or remove content, the likelihood of link decay increases. Even high-authority sites can remove pages without notice. So, if your entire strategy depends on supporting a Tier 1 page that's no longer active, you risk highly of your backlink profile. 

2. Direct Links Pass More Value

In today's SEO landscape, Google gives more weight to backlinks that point directly to your website, especially when those links come from authoritative, relevant sources.

When a site links to your page, Google views that link as a clear signal of trust, relevance, and endorsement. It's direct, easy to crawl, and tied to content that users can immediately access. These links carry more ranking power and help improve your site's visibility in a more predictable way. 

Conversely, indirect links (those that are buried in a tiered structure (Tier 2 to Tier 1 to your site), lose their strength as they pass through multiple layers. Every jump from one page to another dilutes the potential link equity. If the Tier 1 page isn't indexed, lacks authority, or is poorly optimized, even a strong Tier 2 link won't help you. The benefit of layered link building stops before it reaches you. 

A direct backlink embedded in meaningful content will outperform a tiered link structure built on low-value pages. 

3. Contextual Relevance Matters More Than Structure

Google focuses heavily on contextual relevance. With hundreds of backlinks we build every single day with our link building agency, we've observed quite well how powerful relevant backlinks are to the website. 

A backlink placed within content that matches your topics or industry will pass more value than one that's technical "part of a tiered system." 

Google is better at understanding what content is about, so it expects backlinks to come from content that's thematically aligned with the target page. For instance, if your site is about dental software, a link from a healthcare IT blog will be more valuable than one from a fitness receipt site (even if both pages technically point to your content).

Traditional tiered link building fails here because it often prioritizes link quantity over contextual quality. The end result is a chain of weak signals instead of a strong, relevant recommendation.

4. Harder to Track ROI and Value

When the strategy involves creating multiple layers of backlinks (Tier 2 to Tier 1 to your site), it becomes challenging to identify which links are actually making a difference. 

Let's say you build 10 tier 2 links to a blog post (Tier 1) that links to your site. Your rankings slightly improved, but where did the lift come from? Was it the Tier 1 link itself? Did one of the Tier 2 links influence it? Was it due to another backlink if Google found it elsewhere? There are no clear, direct signals to measure. 

The more layers involved, the harder it is to isolate what's working, making it extremely difficult to assess the return on investment on link building. 

You need to know where your gains are coming from so you can focus on what works and eliminate what doesn't. Tiered link-building strategies blur the bigger picture and create too many unknowns. 

Link Stacking: Modern-Day Tiered Link Building (and Smarter Alternatives)

While traditional tiered link building is outdated, the core idea of strengthening your most valuable backlinks is essential for link development; we call it "link stacking". 

What is Link Stacking? 

Link stacking is the strategic practice of amplifying the value of your strongest backlinks and replicating them more often by increasing their visibility, authority, and contextual relevance, without relying too much on artificial link structures. 

Link Stacking Strategies That Work

Here are proven link-stacking strategies that work in 2025. 

1. Identify and Replicate High-Impact Backlinks

The best way to start is to know which backlinks are worth amplifying and replicating. Run a backlink audit using link intelligence tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush, and MajesticSEO (see our hand-picked link building tools for SEO). 

See backlinks from authority domains, driving real referral traffic and pointing to the most important pages (or your blog content, acquiring search traffic via ranking for informational queries). 

Replicate these high-impact backlinks that have been driving significant value to your site (as doing more of them can help improve more of the metrics you're looking at—referral traffic, rankings, brand visibility, etc.). 

Study the content that earned the highest-impact links. Is it a how-to guide, a case study, a list of tools, a data-driven piece of content, or a citable element on a landing page? 

Once you've identified the format and topic that attracted backlinks, create more content using the same structure and angle but more focused on new subtopics, updated trends, or related industry keywords.

For instance, if a list of "Top CRM Tools for 2025" earned strong backlinks, follow up with "Best CRM Tools for Startups"—these are pieces of content tailored to your target persona and aligned with the user's buyer journey. 

2. Do Smart Internal Linking 

The authority on the page where you get the most links doesn't have to stay confined to that page. You can use smart internal linking to direct some of that value to other important pages on your site.

Revisit your blog posts with the highest number of referring domains, resource pages with backlinks from authority sites, and landing pages that earned natural citations or mentions. 

Add contextual internal links to the most important product/service pages, newer blog posts that need ranking support, and categories (or hub pages) that build topical depth. 

You can add sections such as "related sources" at the bottom, embedded videos or downloadable tools, and internal navigation to deeper subtopics. Doing so increases the number of pages per visit, improves your site's crawlability, and efficiently spreads SEO value across your content ecosystem.

3. Distribute Content Targeting Keyword Variations of Your Core Topic

One way to scale your link stacking strategy is to create and distribute content that targets keyword variations related to your primary topics. Instead of repeating the same angle or keyword focus, this approach allows you to cover more ground and reinforce your site's authority on a subject.

 

Google rewards topical depth, so as you consistently publish and earn links for content around a central theme, you start building your site's topical authority (off-page). 

Identify keyword variations with potential. Start by researching related keyword opportunities using Ahrefs or SEMRush to discover:

• Long-tail keywords tied to your core topic
• Variations with decent search volume and manageable competition
• Subtopics that address specific segments, pain points, or use cases

For instance, if your primary keyword is "project management tools," variations might include "project management tools for remote teams" or "free tools for agile project workflows." 

Do value-driven outreach. 

Instead of simply soliciting backlinks, take a smarter route of offering to publish content on their site that targets keyword variations of your shared niche. The upside is that it's geared towards the value it could bring to the table, benefiting your target publisher. 

Mid-level publishers need more search traffic and quality content that ranks for new long-tail keywords optimized for underserved but high-potential queries. 

You provide all that by offering content that targets specific keyword variations, ones with clear search intent and volume that may not be covered yet. 

By positioning your outreach strategy that adds value to prospective publishers to rank for high-intent keyword variants, you increase the likelihood of higher responses and link placements that directly improve your site's ability to rank for your primary keyword (as distributed content is topically relevant to what you're trying to rank for).

4. Turn High-Performing Content Into Multi-Format Linkable Assets

When a piece of content earns strong backlinks, it clearly signals that it holds value for both users and publishers. You can multiply its link potential by turning it into various formats that attract different types of audiences, learners, and content creators.

Repurposing content pieces is a strategic link-stacking move to get more backlinks from more platforms using content that's already proven to work. 

A few formats you can consider:

• Infographics - visual summaries of stats or steps from your post
• PDF guide or downloadable - useful for resource pages or B2B listicles
• Slide decks - add more visual depth
• Short-form video - condense the content into explainer or how-to videos (which you can also upload to YouTube and earn organic social traffic).

By turning high-performing content into multi-format assets, you also increase the surface area of discovery through LLM's AI models. The more accessible and multi-platform your content is, the higher the chance it gets referenced in AI-generated answers, included in citation stacks from AI tools, and more often suggested by Google's AI Overviews. 

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Schedule a free strategy call if you're looking for the best link building agency in the UK. 

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by Venchito Tampon

How Much Does Link Building Cost in the UK in 2025?

How Much Does Link Building Cost in the UK in 2025?

Link building pricing UK can range from £150 to over £950 per link, depending on the quality of the link, the authority of the referring domain, and the difficulty of your niche. A typical campaign budget runs between £500 and £15,000 per month. Lower budgets tend to focus on small placements, while higher budgets support larger-scale outreach, better-quality domains, and more supporting content.

What Determines the Cost of Link Building?

The cost of link building is not fixed. It depends on three major factors: 

• The number of links you want to build
• The quality of each link
• The difficulty of your industry or niche

Understanding these factors helps you plan your link building budget wisely, whether you're managing SEO in-house, working with an agency, or pitching a link building campaign to decision-makers. 

Below, I break down how each of these elements affects link building pricing in 2025. 

The Number of Links You Want to Build

The more backlinks you want to build, the more budget you'll need to allocate. Each link is acquired using resources, including time for content creation, outreach, and link prospecting, as well as budget and capabilities to write internal and external content assets to get the links.

Whether you're running a small business campaign or a full-scale SEO operation, link volume is a direct cost multiplier. 

For internal teams, securing higher volumes of links often means getting additional budget approval from senior leadership (either the Head of SEO or even directly the company's CEO), especially if monthly SEO costs are expected to grow significantly. 

For SEO agencies, higher link volumes often unlock better operational efficiency: 

Bulk Discounts 

Many link building agencies offer bulk discounts to clients who order a high volume of links. As the number of links increases, the cost per link often decreases, a typical strategy agencies use to encourage long-term partnerships and retain clients. 

It's a win-win scenario: clients gain better pricing, while agencies benefit from predictable workloads and revenue, making scaling link acquisition more cost-effective over time. 

Streamlined Teams

When clients commit to larger link building campaigns, agencies can allocate full teams to the project, including dedicated outreach specialists, link builders, and content writers. With a good workforce focused on a single campaign, tasks are completed faster, quality is more consistent, and communication becomes more efficient. 

So, instead of juggling multiple small projects, the team follows a single strategy with clear goals, leading to faster turnaround times, smoother coordination, and fewer delays. This structure allows for a more streamlined workflow and helps agencies deliver better backlinks at scale. 

Link Metrics That Determine Quality

Better links cost more, given that they are hard to earn and carry more SEO value. These links come from legitimate websites with real credibility, organic traffic, and authority. 

Compare a low-quality link that costs £15 from a pure link directory (that offers zero SEO impact to your site) to a topically relevant editorial link that costs you £150  but passes more link juice, trust, and authority to your site. 

Here are the key factors that influence link quality and pricing:

1. Topical Relevance

A link from a high-quality website in your niche sends a stronger signal to Google than a general site. For instance, if you're doing link building for SaaS, you should aim for links from tech or software publications, not lifestyle blogs. Another example is a UK-based legal firm that can benefit more from links on law-focused UK domains than international news outlets with no legal content (unless it's a digital PR campaign).

2. Organic Traffic

A website's organic traffic is a good measurement of link quality; as you can see, it gets traffic from search, which means it ranks for some of its pages. Check the site's organic ranking keywords to see what phrases it ranks well for its web pages.

Some sites with high DR scores may have very low organic traffic, as they only rely on manipulative SEO tactics. So pay attention to these DR70+ sites with 50 monthly visitors; they are not worth your link investment.

3. Advanced Link Metrics

Our link building agency works with enterprise brands, and we often do more than just basic link vetting. 

Here are extra signals that helped us reveal deeper link quality.

Metric Category	What to Look For
Backlink Profile	Natural follow:nofollow ratio and backlinks from a wide range of referring domains.
IP & Subnet Diversity	Links should come from varied IPs—not clustered in one network (a sign of PBNs).
Traffic Source Geography	Sites with traffic from your target country (e.g., UK for UK-based businesses).
Content History	Consistent publication of original, valuable content—not just guest posts or link inserts.
Network Graph	Links to and from other reputable sites, not just commercial or affiliate-heavy pages.

4. Site Credibility Checks

Run a quick test to see the trustworthiness of a website. Few assessment checks:

• Does the website have an About page?
• Are the site owners or authors listed?
• Is there an editorial team or company behind the brand?
• Are there signs of user engagement (e.g., comments, social shares)?
• Does the content reflect real expertise?

You want to get links from websites that send search engines trust signals. These signals show that a site is real and credible and not part of a manipulative link scheme.

Industry-Specific Factors

The difficulty of your industry adds to the factors in link building pricing. Some niches find it harder to secure placements due to legal, editorial, or reputational constraints, which drives up the cost of link building.

Examples of these difficult niches:

• Finance and banking - regulated industry, most publishers enforce strict guidelines, and reject commercial links
• CBD & cannabis - legal status varies by country; many mainstream sites avoid these topics entirely. 
• Gambling & iGaming - high legal and advertising restrictions, limited publisher pool, and risk of spam classification 
• Legal - fewer relevant and authoritative legal blogs. Many require high editorial standards
• Crypto & Blockchain - considered volatile or scam-prone by many publishers, and fewer credible link sources 

In these industries, the likelihood of acquiring backlinks organically is lower, and it's about overcoming editorial hurdles, compliance concerns, and reputation risks. 

You will need writers who understand the subject matter and can create content that meets legal and editorial standards. In finance or healthcare, for instance, outreach pitches go through multiple layers of review.

 

Beyond Link Value: Other Associated Benefits of Link Building

When calculating the ROI of link building, it's easy to focus on a single number: the monetary value of one link based on traffic or rankings. While that metric is useful, it doesn't capture the full impact of a successful link building campaign. 

Backlinks influence more than just keyword positions. They touch multiple areas of digital marketing, supporting brand growth, trust, traffic, and future SEO efforts. If you ignore these associated benefits, you could undervalue the real return on your link building investment. 

Here are some ways link building adds value beyond just direct SEO metrics. 

Brand Visibility and Authority

Links from reputable websites expose your brand to new audiences in your target market. For instance, when your brand is mentioned in a high-traffic industry publication or media outlet, it puts your name in front of readers who may not have discovered you otherwise.

Even if these readers don't click the link, the brand impression sticks, and over time, the repeated exposure through multiple mentions helps position the business as a trusted voice in your space. 

Referral Traffic That Converts

Some links can help bring actual users. When a backlink appears on a contextually relevant blog post (e.g., product comparisons, expert lists, tutorials), users are more likely to click the link and more likely to convert into actual customers. 

Conversion-focused link building happens when one strategic link brings sustained referral traffic for months or years. 

Faster Indexation and Improved Crawlability

Backlinks act as discovery pathways for search engines. When your pages are linked from established domains, Google can find and crawl your content faster. This is helpful mainly for newly launched websites, large eCommerce brands with new product pages, and blogs publishing frequent content updates. 

The result is that your content appears in search results quicker, giving you a faster return on your content publishing efforts. 

Trust Signals and Social Proof

Being featured on credible sites can help increase your website's trustworthiness for search engines and users. When potential customers see your brand mentioned in known industry publications and media coverage sites, it acts as social proof.

You can repurpose these mentions in your own brand assets: 

• Add publisher logos to your homepage or press kit ("As Seen On").
• Mention features in your email campaigns or Ads.
• Use links in pitches to partners, clients, or investors (and to more link prospects to increase chances of more links). 

Builds Up Overall Domain Authority 

The value of a backlink continues to support your overall domain authority, helping future content rank faster, even if that content never earns its own backlinks. 

By domain authority in its own merit, the compounding effect helps you publish content that ranks with minimal promotion and compete on more competitive keywords over time.

Strategic POV From Competitors

Link building helps strategically differentiate your brand from others in your space. Building strong backlink relationships gives you a distinct edge in building thought leadership, expanding influence in key online communities, and relationships with publishers that may lead to future PR or partnerships. 

SharpRocket: Link Building Agency of Choice

SharpRocket offers UK businesses a strategic, data-driven approach to link building with a clear focus: quality over quantity. We help enterprise brands, eCommerce, and SaaS secure links from our content-driven link building campaigns.

If you're ready to invest in link building that supports your brand for the long haul, we're ready to help. Learn more about our link building services and book your free strategy call. 

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by Venchito Tampon