brand building by niching down

Authority Link Building: How to Become the Source AI and Search Engines Cite First

Links help build topical and brand authority, reinforcing contextual relevance and semantic associations across the web, which helps search engines better understand the relevance of your product or content to specific topics.

Authority link building is no longer a "nice-to-have" deliverable for many in-house and agency SEO specialists - it's actually the new baseline to positioning your content and product in AI Overviews, Perplexity citations, and other LLM-driven answers.

Link building campaigns must therefore prioritize authority signals as a prerequisite when looking for potential link opportunities alongside "backlink relevance" - as having both metrics for links will significantly impact your brand's ability to show up for traditional organic search results, AI Overviews, and AI Mode. 

Here are a couple of tactics you can try to help build authority backlinks to your site.

Niching Down 

Choosing topics, product features, or subject matter in your industry where you want to be known for is one of the effective ways to build your site's both brand and topical authority - as it will be easy to be recognizable if you zero in your effforts and activities on few core themes that matters most to your business (think "specialist" than generalist).

Increase and improve your site's content library by publishing pages that cover topics exhaustively, addressing all relevant sub-queries, and semantically connecting them through internal linking - ultimately building your site's overall brand authority and helping you surface more in AIO and LLM's citations. 

Having robust content assets in place on your site will also positively impact your link building outreach efforts - as you can use them to develop your credilibity as an author when pitching content for other trusted publications (especially when editors would first want to see the caliber of your content to qualify you as their contributors). 

It also assists in your site's natural link acquisition process as you'll get more editorial links from publishers referencing your content work in their future articles - especially when you show up for informational or question-based queries in Google's SERPs (even when it is surfacing AI Overviews). 

Standard best practices of content-based link acquisition when niching down:

  • When distributing content on other publications, target secondary keywords, FAQs, and customer queries that are only topically relevant to your site to improve and retain focus within the topical clusters you're building on.
  • Become regular contributors for targeted authority blogs and publications instead of aiming for several one-time guest posts (as being a frequent writer will help continuously send brand signals to your site, particularly when the entities you're penetrating are perfectly aligned with your site's topic clusters). 
  • If you're establishing topical authority for new sites, focus on one to two core content themes by covering every topic, query, or question your target audience may be looking for in your content.

And with hidden opportunities that exist in AI Overview citations, smaller sites with strong topical authority can surface on a particular subtopic or piece of content that has a unique perspective - making it more important to get deep coverage in your niche being picked by AIO algorithms.

Back in 2013 to 2017, my go-to strategy for building my personal brand (and our company's branding for that matter) is solely focusing on publishing content assets about link building and content marketing - which up to this date, has been significant to the growth of our link building agency in terms of generating leads every month.

brand building by niching down

The best thing with this strategic content development is you'll be known for being one of the first authors who write for emerging topics and trends in the industry - which are often overlooked by big publishers that cover a wider variety of topics. 

Data Studies

Providing unique insights in your content assets will become a key advantage for brands aiming to level up their authority - as information gain where new, original, and helpful information a content provides beyond what's already known - gets rewarded with better search rankings by Google.

Here are content types that naturally deliver and can increase the information gain score in your content: 

  • Proprietary data and original research (e.g., industry studies, customer insights, or survey findings)
  • Unique methodologies or frameworks that solve specific problems in your niche
  • Detailed case studies that highlight real-world applications, outcomes, and lessons learned 
  • Expert roundups or original interviews that make the content rich 
  • Comprehensive how-to guides that target untapped topics (and that go beyond basics and offer nuanced solutions)
  • Comparative analyses that highlight gaps or differences in tools, strategies, or platforms. 

Ahrefs has been consistently producing data studies for the past few years, which has helped them automate their natural link acquisition process. 

data studies ahrefs

This type of linkable asset tends to attract authority publishers who want to reference data studies to support their claims. 

data studies getting links
Don't have internal data? You can conduct customer surveys to gather original insights using simple polls or feedback forms through tools like Jotform or Google Forms.  

Multi-Sourced Citations

Getting links from established entities, names, and publications that can distribute authority through links can help stack up your site's overall branding and reputation - increasing your brand's visibility on AI Overviews and AI Mode.

Target co-citations from publications already citing trusted entities in your niche, given that, as you get mentioned in the same places as niche authorities in your industry, Google will start to associate your brand with similar levels of expertise and topical relevance. 

You can use Ahrefs' Link Intersect or any similar link building tools to find listicle pages or any content piece with sections that compare products, providers, or tools that already link to multiple competitors.

earn links through social media presence

Assess the content from a publisher's perspective and identify angles that align with your brand, such as a unique value proposition and strengths in your product features, stories, or use cases that make your product or service stand out. 

Use your brand's point of view (POV) when reaching out to these publishers and suggesting your brand as a great addition to their lists. 

Brand Messaging

Monitoring how your brand is perceived within the LLM's atmosphere can provide you with insights into positioning your brand messaging, which can help refine your link building campaigns to focus on strengthening your brand message. 

Identify sources currently defining your brand in LLMs by assessing certain elements to help you refine your LLM citation strategy - here are a few questions to help you out: 

  • Which brands or experts are most frequently referenced in your niche? 
  • What tone, phrasing, or terminology do LLMs use when referring to your brand or competitors?
  • Which value propositions, features, or differentiators are being emphasized?
  • Are there inconsistencies, outdated facts, or misalignments in how your brand is portrayed?

Ask LLMs questions directly to show you precisely what they pull from their training data about your brand. 

brand monitoring prompt

Check if the descriptions are accurate. If you find any discrepancies, you can fix them by updating the actual source information on your website, such as your About Us page and any FAQ pages. You can also revisit your citation listings and profile websites like Yelp, Google Business Profile, and Trustpilot. 

Enhance your brand messaging by ensuring consistency across all platforms. 

Use Ahrefs' Brand Radar to discover third-party sites with strong AI overview visibility and consider strategies to partner with them to increase co-citation opportunities. 

Reverse Link Reclamation

Link decay naturally happens for websites that have been existent for years because of many reasons that even the actual editor who initially gave the link that was lost may not be fully aware of - instances such as site redesign, content pruning or accidental link breaks during CMS updates can actually lose some of these high-quality backlinks.

That's why it's always essential to conduct backlink monitoring not only for recently built backlinks, but also for lost links that still hold brand value.

Especially with how LLMs surface citations, unlinked brand mentions with positive sentiments across the web are critical trust signals in influencing how often your brand appears for conversational bottom-of-the-funnel queries in AI-generated results. 

You can use Ahrefs' Lost links report to spot any backlink drop-off to your site and assess whether they can be recovered by re-engaging the original referring website or simply requesting the reclaiming of mentions that were previously removed. 

ahrefs lost links report

Certification Programs

Certification programs are another asset that companies can leverage to improve and scale their site's linkability - especially when it is aligned with the main product or service's positioning and actually helps drive more conversions to the business.

Just think of Ahrefs Certification and SEMRush Academy - both of which have individual courses beneath them that get a ton of links, along with branding opportunities from users who showcase their "certification" as badges on LinkedIn, blogs, or portfolios.

semrush academy certification

It could also help naturally earn mentions from learning directories and industry roundups that include "Best Courses [Industry]" and often link out to reputable certifications. 

Branded Micro Exact Match Domains

This is one of the oldest tricks in the link building book, but it still works effectively, especially when the exact match domain has a distinct brand identity apart from the business it's giving brand value to. 

Recently, we've launched our own microsite to help us gain more visibility for our main coffee shop franchising brand

exact match domain coffee franchise PH

This new entity can help expand the business in so many ways, such as:

  • Naturally builds relationships with other publishers that we can also pursue for the main business. 
  • Establishes as another effective lead generation as it can appear in AI Overviews, and ranks well for traditional search listings using its own content development, branding, and strong technical SEO - as EMDs still gets favor by search engines - this has been tested by James Norquay from Prosperity Media and has been their go-to strategy for years. 
  • Provides more content creation insights into what "use cases" haven't been published for, based on search data for keywords the webpages are currently ranking for.
  • Improves the main business' visibility by creating its own listicle or roundup for product or service providers, highlighting the primary products/services' POV at the top of the list. 

exact match domain AI Overview

The result of this strategy has been quite interesting, both in terms of its own brand visibility and in helping our main business surface higher on AI Overviews and LLMs. 

exact match domain showing up in LLM

Editorial Review by Expertise

Inviting guest authors to write for your blog has been a standard practice for years, and it's still one of the best ways to develop new relationships with other content contributors while getting expertly crafted content that will help gain more visibility and leads for your website. 

However, for many blogs, the editorial review has been overlooked for the reason that they're more interested in the volume of these articles than having to qualify content from few authors who can bring strong EEAT to content - accepting more average guest authors and having only one editor who will handle all the editorial reviews for submitted articles. 

One of the key strategies to maintain accuracy, authenticity, and establish strong EEAT signals is to have multiple editors with technical expertise assigned to review articles in specific categories. 

editorial review by expertise

Aside from benefiting from better assessment in technical expertise, having a designated expert editor to review articles will have more advantages than one generic editor:  

  • Assess the potential "information gain" by seeing unique perspectives, insights, and ideas that the content could provide in adding something new to the existing body of knowledge.
  • Spot technical or nuanced errors that a generalist might overlook, leading to higher subject-matter accuracy.
  • Validate the use of reliable, authoritative sources, and suggest more impactful sources that are more aligned with the topic, if needed.
  • Suggest improvements for better content structure and depth, even during the process of outlining the content.

Having expert editors will also help combat fake EEAT-author bios, which Google has been cracking down on recently in its ongoing effort to validate real expertise. 

Don't have multiple expert editors? You can ask other influential authors within your networks if they can peer-review your content.

Founder Stories

One of the best ways to exemplify the brand's expertise and authority is by telling authentic stories of the founder or leadership team who actually built the company and made it successful - given that stories serve as living proof of experience demonstrating what the brand truly stands for and how they earned its place in their target niche.

Founder stories and leadership narratives often showcase real-world challenges, strategic pivots, and lessons learned that go beyond surface-level (hype) marketing and allow both the audience and search engines to recognize the brand as a trusted voice in the industry. 

Journalists often pick up these types of stories, given they are constantly looking for narratives that evoke emotion or ones that showcase breakthrough moments, as they are more relatable and have a high shareability component ("virality effect for the right audience). 

For instance, Louis Smith, founder of Rebel Aromas, has been gaining brand visibility for his company lately after they landed a front-page feature on Entrepreneur (DR91 link). 

founder stories example digital pr campaign

dr91 link entrepreneur

And from that actual feature that brings their company to a whole new level of exposure, including being invited to appear as a cast member on a Channel 4 television show in the UK.

Digital PR campaigns can integrate well with other online brand marketing initiatives, such as increasing positive brand sentiments on social media, which helps build brand mindshare, as well as securing more company features in traditional media outlets (e.g., newspapers, magazines, and TV).

Homepage Links

The recent study by SiegeMedia, led by Ross Hudgens, has yielded new insights and shifts in improving conversion potential and branding efforts on the homepage, as the study reveals that homepage traffic increases by 10.7% from AI Overviews and LLMs.

overall search traffic siegemedia case study

This leads us to consider more online marketing efforts, including improved link development campaigns that target the homepage. 

Here are a couple of homepage link building tactics aside from the traditional link building strategies that you're already aware of:

  • Create a data-backed "State of the Industry" Report that you can feature on your homepage and serve as a citable element for other authoritative publishers and journalists to link to you as a reference to their own content. 
  • Create a media kit or "Press Room" section that hosts your brand's media assets and press information, allowing journalists to reference either directly from your homepage or a specific author or personality page. 
  • Curate a public-facing' brand timeline" or milestones journey of your company that you can use as a value asset in press releases and founder stories. 
  • Include "impact" or "social responsibility" initiatives that showcase your brand's advocacy or sustainability efforts, which you can also promote to local news and NGOs that often link back to these types of initiatives. 

Want to build backlinks that actually move the needle for brand visibility and authority? We design high-impact link building campaigns to achieve higher visibility in both traditional search and AI-powered results. 

See our link building services, and we'll help you become the source, not just the search result. 


social media link building sparktoro

Social Media Link Building: How to Integrate Social Reach to Earn Backlinks

Links that drive brand visibility are becoming more valuable these days, as they can help impact the business objectives of gaining customer trust and increasing demand for products/services — which actually goes beyond what SEO specialists build links for  - to help websites rank for traditional search results. 

And there's one undisputed marketing channel that can best amplify the visibility of the product or content: social media

Integrating social media with link building efforts can take your campaign's digital marketing campaign to the next level - in so many ways, such as:

  • Increases branded and navigational searches - amplified content will increase curiosity among social media users, leading them to actual traditional searches for the brand, product, or content.
  • Captures bigger real estate SERPs for many commercial keywords, which display both organic search results and results from social media.
  • Defends the brand position against competitors as there will be more eyeballs on search and social media - creating a strong brand mindshare for target customers.
  • Builds more topical context for users about what your brand truly represents through social media signals - making it easier for search engines to better understand the relevance of your brand to certain topics.
  • Generates new customers from strengthening social media presence and from turning organic search visitors into social media followers (and vice versa).
  • Improves pages' search performance as there will be increasing branded searches for the website (which is considered a strong ranking signal these days).

There are a couple of strategies to truly integrate social media and link building, making it possible for any business to thrive in both channels of SEO and social media. 

Here are proven strategies for social media link building: 

Influencer Marketing

Leveraging the power of key influencers in your industry is a strategic approach to associate your brand with well-established personalities who have a substantial social following and can help amplify the reach of your existing and future content assets.

The best part of Influencer marketing is that it can greatly assist the promotion side of content, which can become an alternative to standard link building outreach (the process of reaching out to webmasters and publishers to editorially include content in their existing or future articles).

Links from influencer marketing are within the social media ecosystem (i.e., backlinks on social media networks like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc.) instead of the direct website backlinks we're all accustomed to in SEO.

Social media backlinks may not be a ranking signal, but can indirectly improve the webpage's position in Google's SERPs through user engagement signals (shares, comments, and link clicks) -  which also serve as secondary indicators of content relevance and popularity. 

Start by looking for social influencers using different methods:

  • Simple search on relevant accounts on social platforms (i.e., quick keyword search on TikTok - "coffee [location]".
  • Automate discovery through tools like Buzzsumo and Sparktoro.
  • Check accounts with substantial social following sharing similar content pieces or other related content of competitors.  

social media link building sparktoro

Think of ways where you can add value to influencers - here are some tactics you can try:

  • Brand deals and partnerships where you incentivize their efforts to promote your product or content.
  • Additional exposure to grow their social following and increase networks for potential business opportunities.  
  • Exclusive access to premium content or tools, either by giving it early before launch or lifetime access.
  • Custom co-branded content to enhance their existing content assets and help others serve audiences with other learning styles (i.e., interactive image content).
  • Affiliate or referral incentives by offering a custom referral code to reward them for purchases they help your brand generate.
  • Credibility through association by inviting them as guests for podcasts or webinars, especially if you have larger leverage for resources (i.e., email lists, networks, etc).

For a couple of weeks, we've tested an influencer marketing campaign (and are still continuing it) for our coffee brand. We chose TikTok influencers with more than 10K+ followers (also known in the social media marketing realm as "micro-influencers").

influencer marketing social media link building

Our best approach is to offer straight-off freebies and brand deals, immediately rewarding the influencers. 

Given that once they benefit from the influencer marketing campaign, it would be much easier for us to collaborate with them for co-marketing efforts in the future, which can affect both our social media accounts and website's SEO.

earn links through social media presence

You can take the conversations further for more co-marketing opportunities that will result in backlinks for your website, by:

  • Asking influencers to take surveys that you can turn into linkable assets like industry reports, then leveraging influencers' collaboration to promote the actual content, helping it earn natural links from industry publishers and content creators.
  • Using their interesting customer stories as social proof, which you can leverage as testimonials or case studies when pitching to media, bloggers, podcast hosts, and other digital PR campaigns. 
  • Prioritizing influencers who run their blogs or are contributors to niche publications where they can link to your website through product reviews, new product launches, or event recaps (all digital PR efforts).
  • Creating co-branded downloadable resources where both parties can co-promote and host the resource on their websites.

With more influencer partnerships, you will start seeing results, including your brand showing up in social media searches for industry-related terms.

rank on tiktok search social media

Target "Conversation Drivers"

Targeting the audience with the major voice in sharing insights, personal opinions, knowledge, and experience will increase the likelihood of amplifying your content - given the audience's credibility and reach. 

Immerse yourself in the industry and observe who actively shares content on social media platforms.

Sparktoro can provide insights into the top social networks where your target users usually hang out.

The tool also features specific subreddits where industry searchers are subscribed. 

sparktoro subreddits

Here are a couple of factors to help you identify the most vocal audience:

  • Which group of people asks the most questions?
  • Who tends to share and comment more often on posts shared in your industry? 
  • Which individuals or communities are quick to engage with controversial takes?
  • Which professionals (especially for technical industries) are often cited or tagged in social conversations within your vertical?
  • Where are industry conversations happening outside the mainstream - on speaking events, Notion templates, or newsletters? 

Identify the conversation drivers in your space—those whose endorsement and engagement can lead to secondary amplification of your content. Their audience could potentially be influencers, content creators, and publishers, and any sources where you're likely to get links for your website).

Create content that speaks to and aligns well with these conversational starters—either relate it to their line of work (e.g., financial advisors sharing the best investment advice) or to their societal purpose or mission (e.g., mental health advocates promoting wellness content).

Turn UGC into Customer Stories

User-generated content (UGC) is a rich source of authentic content that can be repurposed into full customer stories. It's also one of the social proofs that can showcase your brand's authenticity and expertise. 

And it is much easier for you to generate UGC types of content effortlessly from customers organically sharing native content if you have an established brand authority. 

Reach out to actual customers who have shared positive feedback, product experiences, or use-case snapshots - and turn them into customer stories. 

Go beyond the usual product/service testimonials and ask questions to uncover pain points before finding solutions, and how your product/service has gotten them results. 

customer stories social media link building

customer stories earning backlinks

Now, here are ways customer stories can help acquire backlinks for your brand:

  • Solicit links directly from customers, especially for B2B companies where customers are actual businesses - often willing to link to their customer story page from their own site and even share it across their social media channels.
  • Leverage as proof of success in outreach emails - adding credibility to your pitch when reaching out to publishers, bloggers, and journalists.
  • Use as linkable assets where stories may include data, results, or any transformation journey that can potentially be picked up by industry publications as references or examples. 
  • Use as examples for roundups, interviews, and sections for guest posts that publishers may want to link to or feature. 

Social-Driven Digital PR

One effective way to leverage social media for link development is to get media coverage for your product, brand, or content. You can take advantage of the organic sharing that usually happens within the social ecosystem ("virality effect").

Instead of going straight-up to link requests, you can create content assets with the intent to go viral to reach as many target audiences as possible ("mindshare").

These will make it easy for you to naturally get inbound requests for digital PR opportunities - many of which would open more link opportunities. 

Speaker Bios and Event Mentions

Publishing high-utility educational social media content consistently would help establish your personal brand as you showcase your expertise - allowing you to get speaking opportunities at webinars, conferences, or panels. 

And these branded gigs often comes with a pre-event promotional page, or speaker bio hosted on the organizer's website - usually linking to the speaker's company website or about page. 

speaking gigs earning backlinks

News Coverage

Brand stories that showcase the who, what, why, and how of the organization you're working for are common digital PR themes journalists want to cover in their write-ups. 

You can also read our strategies on HARO link building and digital PR tips

Podcast Features 

One digital PR opportunity that strengthens brand authority is being a guest on podcasts. This increases visibility to your personal brand as a thought leader and to the brand you're representing.

social driven digital PR podcast

And with your appearance comes a homepage link to your website from show notes published on the hosting website. 

shownotes backlinks podcast

Social Reach as Outreach Leverage 

There are probably hundreds of thousands of outreach pitches sent out every week. We received dozens of requests, from link insertion to guest posts and straight-up link begging - and I'm sure many publishers experience the same thing.

This makes outreach campaigns more difficult, as editors and site owners are more selective about pitches that add the greatest value - beyond just content. 

One thing you can leverage for outreach is your brand's existing social media assets (the number of followers, engagement, and reach across the different social profiles you own).

It makes your outreach campaigns stand out among thousands of pitches, as you're helping your link prospect get more visibility (which most brands and authors are looking for these days). 


If you need help implementing a social media-driven link building strategy, our team can support you with tailored outreach and content amplification.


best links ahrefs link building for startups

Link Building for Startups: Earn Visibility in AI-First Search

There is a clear competitive advantage in doing link building for startups - as it not only helps search engines discover, index, and rank new pages on websites, it also optimize these startups for large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews - of which they rely heavily on sourcing information from publications.

For the 600+ startups Glen and his team track at Gaps, more than half have gained search traffic in the past year, which clearly indicates how promising SEO for startups can be - if done correctly. 

With the double growth of AI Overviews since Google's March Core Update, building links for visibility, not just rankings, will find an increasing demand for services—especially for startups who want to compete for bigger arenas in search. 

ai overview growth

Here are a couple of ways to start maximizing link building for startups. 

Secure Budget Buy-In for Link Building

Link building plan succeeds by having substantial resources, including securing a budget for efforts that lead to actual link placements (e.g, linkable asset creation, external content distribution, outreach, etc..). 

Convince internal stakeholders and management by showing them the impact and value of links for a startup's branding and reputation, not just SEO. As having data to support your claims increases the likelihood of effectively persuading these decision-makers and decision influencers to invest in link building - as they will see the integration of link building with the overall SEO campaign and even with the site's online brand reputation. 

For funded companies, especially those backed by venture capitalists, learning the right timing to invest in startup SEO helps position it as a growth channel instead of a risky investment in its early stages. 

As most early startups may not see growth from search for 12 to 18 months, having a more realistic approach in link building (as a core part of your SEO presentations) will assist in managing the right expectations on its ROI.

link building for startups projected SEO plan

Generally, it is best to invest in link building during Series A startups, as not only do you already have a solid footing on financials at this stage, but your startup is also naturally generating brand awareness and potentially earning brand mentions and links—which you can leverage to acquire more authoritative and relevant links in the future. 

For bootstrapped startups, investing in link building (and SEO) is a matter of the business owner's perception and confidence in the direct and indirect impact of organic search marketing. 

And this is what I've seen with more risk-taking startup founders. 

For instance, SEO became my go-to marketing channel to drive consistent leads for my coffee franchising company in its early years, primarily for these reasons:

Think Infinite Game 

What separates successful link-building campaigns from those that aren't mainly comes down to the mindset involved in acquiring links.

Many search marketers still rely on short-term link building tactics (e.g., parasite SEO) that Google continuously fights against with its constant updates (e.g., site reputation abuse)—and we'll be seeing more of these as they improve search results in the future. 

Thinking long-term sustainability and impact helps you stay longer in SEO and reap its rewards. It also helps you strategize your link building campaigns to compound more and better results (think leverage and the 80/20 rule). 

Use link building strategies that will have a solid impact on your site's branding and reputation, months and years after you start the campaign—for instance, targeting links from sources where you want to associate your brand with, as they tackle similar audiences or ones that Google sees as authoritative in your industry. 

This will also help search engines better understand the relevance of your content to specific topics - where your startup will more likely secure higher search visibility as your webpages surface higher on AI Overviews.  

google ai overviews visibility coffee franchise

As a link building consultant and strategist, thinking long-term game is one of my upfront recommendations for clients as they embark on a link building campaign with our agency. Not only does it help manage expectations and retain them longer with us, it also allows us to prepare the website for long-term branding benefits (which won't easily happen with short-term link building projects). 

Target Reverse Linkerati

With their intent for resource linking, linkerati becomes the target of many outreach-led link building campaigns. 

Given that the campaign's success is almost guaranteed with a predictable number of link placements, sending a higher volume of outreach emails was not an issue until these linkers (publishers, webmasters, journalists, and anyone with the capability to edit contextual placement on a given website or publication) started restricting their editors' external linking to other sites' content pieces.

This makes outreach campaigns for newer or less-established sites like startups far more difficult. 

So instead of sending outreach emails in pursuit of linkerati, you can actually take the reverse approach - wherein you create content pieces that other brands, content creators, and publishers would want to get a link from/be included in the list - "reverse linkerati". 

You let them come to you when they request links or make efforts so that you can link to their content assets. This mindset makes it far easier to negotiate other content partnership efforts - i.e., link exchange, which benefits you the most as you can choose your preferred anchor text and relevant linking page.

Set Link Metrics From Best Links

Many link building agencies and in-house SEO teams use the standard approach to setting link metrics —Ahrefs DR—so anything under a certain number (e.g., below DR30) isn't a link opportunity worth pursuing.

The problem with a DR-based metric is that you might miss many more brand-relevant websites, not just industry-relevant ones, for your startup. These websites may have lower DR, as links are still catching up on their link profiles, but the good part is that they pass stronger link equity and authority signals to your site than those with higher DR publications. 

One of the best approaches to setting quality link metrics is to look at your competitors' best links—the ones trusted not only by link numbers alone but also within your sphere, gaining popularity given their brand reputation and authority. 

You can approach setting link metrics based on competitors' best links in two ways:

Set criteria for link sources by handpicking the best links.

This may seem laborious to some, but it is often the best approach to setting the right link metrics for your link building campaign, especially if you want to build the proper foundation of quality links right at the start for your new business. 

Enter a competitors' domain in Ahrefs' Site Explorer to see their backlinks. Repeat this process for each competitor's domain and export the link reports.

Invest a few hours daily in manually checking each linking page and making corresponding notes as to why it is either a good or bad link to pursue. Look beyond Ahrefs' DR and see what makes the website or linking page a good opportunity.

A couple of things you may consider when checking if it's a best link or not:

  • Link placement
  • Topically relevant pages (note the specific industries of the linking page/content).
  • Internal or external pages that show the site's credibility (About Us, Team, social media profiles, etc).
  • Good UX and well-designed pages

From here, you can brainstorm with your team (or set it yourself) a good list of link metrics that will be the basis for qualifying future link opportunities for your campaign.

Filter sites based on "best links".

This is the more straightforward approach to setting link metrics. You basically use Ahrefs's "Best Links" feature to show you the linking pages that fit the default numbers. 

You may also customize the "Best Links" feature, i.e., set the minimum domain traffic at 1K.

best links ahrefs link building for startups

Rank Easily by Targeting Emerging 'Research' Keywords 

Publishing linkable assets that rank for informational queries and get cited by other publishers in their writing stage has become a fundamental and standard link building strategy for many brands nowadays.

The massive benefit of earning links without doing outreach is so compelling that SEO specialists are finding ways to improve the process and make it scalable for many industries.

But what if your site lacks the authority it takes to rank within the top positions or at least earn its visibility so that future publishers can see it? 

That's where startups have to ideate from a different angle. Instead of competing for  "statistics" and other informational queries that have high competition to contest for the top spots in traditional search, you can find new and emerging keywords in your industry that are way less competitive. 

Look for ones with a growing search volume but high research intent, which other publishers will likely search for additional references to include in their content. 

You can use Ahrefs' Keyword Explorer to enter a broad or specific industry term. Then, filter by "First Seen" feature (which indicates the time Ahrefs has crawled for that search term) and click either 3, 6, or 12 months. 

ahrefs first seen keywords link building for startups

Publish content assets that target an emerging informational query and earn their way to the top of Google's SERPs with few internal links from other relevant pages. 

Unique Selling Proposition for links

Learning how to position your startup in a competitive market, which is the case in most software-as-a-service (SaaS) today, is crucial to gaining early quick wins in your inbound marketing campaign.

When you have a strong, unique selling proposition (USP), you will not only differentiate yourself from other competing brands but also give search engines and users a more contextual understanding of your product's topical relevance to specific topics.

Build links to strengthen semantic relationships between your product and specific pain points and problems your audiences are looking for.

Strategically ask, earn, or build links from pages that have:

  • High-value mentions of audience-specific pain points
  • Contextually relevant mentions 
  • Mentions alongside related entities
  • Mentions within authoritative and topically relevant content
  • Mentions that reinforce existing entity relationships

Get more backlinks from linking sources with strong semantic relationships to topics you want your brand to associate with.

Relationship Building

With fewer linkeratis linking to other publishers, strategies that don't rely on massive outreach to earn links become a core strength in link building.

Having a set of relationships established online will turn out to be one of your biggest advantages in acquiring hard-to-replicate links for your startup.

It's also a significant leverage to penetrate publications that require highly specialized topics for guest blogging, in which relationships with editors who know the quality of your content assets make it easier for them to accept you as one of their co-authors or contributors.

There are also other ways beyond straight asking for a favor, wherein you can leverage relationships to get more relevant links for your startup:

  • Co-author content for topics that require multiple perspectives, diverse experiences, and new levels of experiences, in which you can tap other influencers you know have a proven track record to co-write a comprehensive content piece on your blog.
  • Request for contacts from industry publications you may not be aware of but are topically relevant to your site's content theme - and with a given intro in emails, you'll expect to have an initial trust built in the first interactions - which increases the likelihood for content distribution
  • Get more recurring links from branded sites and continously get the benefit of recurring links - as it's no longer about getting hundreds of links from completely irrelevant sources, but about earning multiple links from the same referring domain that are way more powerful to pass link authority - especially if those referring domains are strongly tied to your startup's target content themes.

Going deeper with this approach involves turning your online relationships into offline, authentic interactions in which both parties will mutually benefit from any co-marketing efforts. 


analyze haro queries - haro link building

HARO Link Building: Strategies and Systems That Actually Work

HARO link building has been a standard practice for many digital PR and SEO specialists in getting contextual links from trusted and authoritative niche publications and news sites. 

I've watched this median platform - HARO, from being one of the early entries in the digital PR realm, to now being a go-to platform for agencies and in-house marketers, even more established after being bought by Featured (another digital PR platform focused on expert commentaries/inputs). 

Here are a couple of benefits when using HARO as an effective branding tool: 

  • Automates the entire process of finding expert input requests relevant to your industry (which would take you a couple of hours doing it otherwise - manually prospecting using X, using better Google advanced operators, and other time-labor digital PR prospecting efforts
  • Builds thought leadership of clients' personas or in-house personalities, which translates to better brand recognition and authority as they represent through their expertise and actual experience.
  • Increases the link gap between your site and your competitors through the quality of backlinks you'll acquire from expert commentaries, as these links aren't easy to replicate by other methods, such as link insertion, guest posting, etc.
  • Strengthens your site's backlink profile, helping your brand compete for more competitive keywords that require a significant volume of links to appear at the top of Google's SERPs.
  • Flows more trust to your site and could help AI further see your brand as an authority figure in your niche, through an author or expert.

How to Use HARO for Scalable Link Building

Start by signing up on HARO to receive emails listing their daily HARO queries sent twice daily (Afternoon and Evening editions).

haro link building

From here, the success of HARO link building campaigns lies in how you set up processes to scale your efforts and resources (which mainly comprise your time and thinking through every answer for a given query).

While it may seem ideal to respond to every HARO pitch, you only get a few quality opportunities per industry - so every detail of the pitch is worth optimizing for.

Here are techniques we've been tested to work in scaling HARO link building campaigns - for in-house enterprise marketers and SEO agencies:

Maintain HARO Inbox Hygiene

Setting up a HARO account is simple, but the real work happens when you organize all emails. Without a system, your inbox quickly becomes a flood of mixed queries, making it harder to spot high-value media opportunities.

Filtering, labeling, and sorting - as I call it "inbox hygiene" is critical to streamlining the entire workflow of answering queries - prioritizing relevant and urgent ones and responding faster before the deadline closes. 

Here are essential Gmail setup tips for HARO link building:

  • Create a dedicated Gmail account for HARO responses to instantly have a focused email and avoid cluttering it with personal or team emails (which are often more time-consuming and eye-overwhelming than actually responding to HARO queries).
  • Add a second Gmail if needed, especially if you're handling multiple clients or in-house personas - best to use Google Workspace for agencies.  
  • Create a professional signature that includes your name, position, company, and a direct link to your website or LinkedIn - this is HARO 101. 
  • Manage multiple Gmail accounts using Chrome profiles to switch easily (only applicable if you set up several HARO link building accounts) 

After setting up your emails dedicated to HARO link building, the next inbox to-do is creating a filtering system. 

Here are our inbox filters and efficiency tips:

  • Use color-coded labels in Gmail to visually prioritize fast-turnaround opportunities - ultimately helping when juggling multiple Gmail accounts.
  • Archive old queries after 48-72 hours to keep your inbox clean.
  • Star urgent queries based on relevance, publication familiarity, or specific preferences.

Analyze HARO Queries

One of the biggest mistakes some digital PR and SEO specialists make is the lack of criteria when responding to HARO inquiries. Many treat every query the same, as long as it is topically relevant to their niche - by default, they think it's worth a good shot for pitching.

But HARO link building goes beyond just niche relevance - it works differently as it relies heavily on the input, the person giving the input (expert), and his/her current background (experience and expertise).

When starting any HARO link-building campaign, check the HARO query to see if it aligns well with the correspondent's expertise, your ability to present and position expertise, and the person's relevance. 

analyze haro queries - haro link building

Given that you don't need to be all-knowing in every realm within a subject matter, but just credible enough to provide insights based on your experience and expertise.

This is where you also need to determine the validity of the opportunity. If a HARO query is too urgent and highly relevant to your expertise, it should be at the top of your list when responding to relevant queries.

Leverage Expert Positioning

Expert positioning is a big part of HARO link building campaigns. It means knowing how to present yourself as the right source for a specific query.

expert positioning haro link building

By establishing expertise immediately in your pitches, you can instantly capture the interest of your target journalists or reporters, making it easier for them to consider your inputs.

The best way to position yourself as an expert is to identify the reporter's needs. Pinpointing these needs and delivering precisely is an obvious effort, yet it will set your HARO emails apart from high-conversion pitches. 

Start expert positioning by reading the entire pitch request requirements and assessing the inputs they are looking for. Are they looking for trend insight, a technical explanation, or a personal experience? With these specifics in mind, you can adjust your HARO pitch template later on, which would significantly dictate the conversion rate of your campaign. 

Here are a couple more tips if you want to integrate more expert positioning in your HARO response pitches. 

  • Anchor your introduction to the expert's actual role (i.e., "I'm the founder of X coffee brand sourcing directly from local farmers", instead of a vague response like "I run a business"). 
  • Match the tone and depth of the query. For instance, a personal finance query needs precise numbers or strategy, while a lifestyle topic needs more relatable, first-hand experience.
  • Avoid overusing accolades, media mentions, or awards, especially if they are unnecessary to the query. Always keep the pitch aligned with the topic.
  • Attribute the input to a real, trusted source (yourself or your client) using actual experience, not recycled insights. 

The key to succeeding in HARO link building is figuring out the breadth and depth of your/your client's expertise early—the wider the scope of knowledge you can provide input for, the more HARO queries you can respond to.

Create Expert-Role Email Templates

Many digital PR and SEO specialists believe templates no longer work. They only dilute pitch quality by being too structured and are often flagged as spammy in someone else's inbox.

In our decade of doing link building outreach and digital PR campaigns, we can guarantee that it's almost impossible to scale link outreach without templates. For HARO, a huge part of the outreach campaign comes down to how easily it is to hyper-personalize pitches with less friction using outreach templates. 

Unlike other outreach-driven link building campaigns, such as guest blogging, link insertions, and blogger outreach, there are only a few placeholders in outreach email templates for inputs, so you can effectively send semi-personalized emails to hundreds or thousands of link prospects. HARO pitching requires high customization to turn a HARO query into a link placement.

Create a standard email template for each role, correspondent, or thought leader you represent. If you're working on three digital PR campaigns, you need three separate email templates for each campaign.

Each correspondent represents the expert—you or your client, whom you'll pitch in on behalf of. 

For instance, if you're corresponding with a coffee machine retailer, you aim to speak on behalf of your client as someone knowledgeable and experienced in the coffee industry. When you filter HARO emails, you will only be looking for expert input requests about brewing methods, machine quality, or maintenance tips.

Use Language That Gets Quoted

Framing your insight like a ready-to-publish quote is one effective way to make your pitch stand out among the hundreds, if not thousands, of emails journalists receive daily. It helps journalists save time sifting through the correct information they need from experts. 

The best way to start is by placing the value at the top of the email. After establishing your expert positioning, give the exact "expert input" they request in their HARO queries. 

A couple of things that will make your writing more enticing for journalists:

  • Use concise, vivid phrasing that sticks. 
  • Sprinkle in lyrical elements when appropriate - adds flavor and brings your voice as an expert.
  • Keep it natural - don't make pitches impressive, but instead must reflect your confidence and personality. 
  • Prepare 2-3 go-to phrases you can reuse, giving your pitches a recognizable edge. Just make sure you tweak them as needed. 
  • Run your pitch through Grammarly - clear writing builds credibility. 

Turn Nofollow to Dofollow, Unlinked to Linked

Providing the right expert input takes a lot of work, so it's vital to ensure that you get the most benefit from your efforts while adding value to journalists.

Track new mentions and links using Ahrefs Alerts,  similar link intelligence tools, or Google Alerts. Set alerts to notify you of any new backlinks to your site. 

If any links are no-follow, you can reach out to the journalist or reporter and politely request link adjustments:

  • For nofollow - ask if they'd consider changing it to dofollow.
  • For unlinked - thank them first for using your expert insight, and ask if they could link to your website. 

By turning soft wins into real backlinks, you maximize the value of every pitch investment in your HARO link-building campaign. 

Do Followups

There are a couple of studies that already show that doing follow-ups helps secure backlinks:

  • Sending follow-ups increases the number of backlinks by 40% (Source: Authority Hacker).
  • Incorporating at least one follow-up email will achieve a 27% reply rate, compared to a 16% reply to those without follow-ups (Source: Woodpecker).

do followups - haro link building

Here's how to do follow-ups effectively:

  • Wait 1 to 2 business days after your initial pitch, giving journalists room to review your submission without appearing pushy.
  • Keep your message short and polite.
  • Include your original quote or reply for context.
  • Track follow-ups using a spreadsheet.
  • Know when to stop. 

Need help running high-impact digital PR campaigns or scaling link acquisition with expert-driven outreach? Explore our link building and digital PR services.


link velocity that is natural ahrefs

Link Velocity in SEO: How Fast Is Too Fast When Building Backlinks?

Backlinks are still undeniably the strongest signals in ranking websites these days- as links no longer just count as votes of confidence, but also as contextual signals that support entity recognition, citation, and even AI-driven indexing. 

In an attempt to outcompete big brands in many industries, most SEO specialists would try to influence their website rankings by aggressively building links at an unnatural pace that doesn't match the site's authority or age, which is not only questionable but highly vulnerable to algorithmic devaluation or manual penalties. 

This is where understanding the concept of link velocity comes in—learning why it matters and how to manage it so that it works for you, not against you. 

What is Link Velocity? 

Link velocity is the speed at which a website gains new backlinks over a specific period (daily, weekly, or monthly), giving data on how fast a site's backlink profile is growing. 

How fast should you be building backlinks? 

You should build backlinks at a natural pace that aligns with your site's authority, age, and content publishing frequency. For new websites, 5 to 10 high-quality backlinks per month is a safe range. Older, more established sites can earn links, especially if supported by fresh content, linkable assets, and a strong brand reputation. 

The Myth of “Faster Is Better”

Getting backlinks at an unusual rate ("fast" but careless) without actual context and control can signal attempts to manipulate rankings. 

Here are some scenarios where faster link building becomes a problem, especially when no real-world context justifies the upward trend or spike. 

Getting Irrelevant and Types of Links That Don't Matter Anymore

Topical relevance is a strong indicator of a link's value. In contrast, acquiring irrelevant links from websites of weaker domain authority can dilute your site's trust profile and confuse search engines about your site's content theme.

Below are the types of links that are considered to be devalued:

  • PBNs, especially multi-category blogs without niche relevance (and which are linking to each other). 
  • Hacked links - inserted random links into other sites' existing content.
  • Forum and comment spam links - irrelevant/spam links in forums as part of signatures
  • Low-quality directories - scalable submission of profiles to spammy directories
  • Irrelevant link exchanges - doing a link exchange from a completely unrelated website

Off-topic and uncontextual backlinks from irrelevant sources add noise to your site's backlink profile and weaken its branding and reputation. 

Unusual Anchor Text Variations

An interesting study by Cyrus Shepard shows that actual text variations in links correlate well with search traffic and that sites with more anchor text variety get better search performance. Conversely, sites with unvaried anchor text links tend to lose search traffic.

link velocity anchor text variations
Internal Linking SEO Study by Zyppy

At one extreme end of the pendulum, savvy SEOs are trying to game the link building system with high variations of anchor texts. While this approach is strategic and with a positive intent to naturalize their sites' backlink profiles, it could spell trouble if the majority of the links are filled with partial, and exact match anchors.

In addition, when links are acquired at unnatural link velocity with over-manipulated anchor texts, search engines may be signaled of any manipulation. The unusual link spikes make strategic anchor text optimization less likely to achieve favorable results in rankings and search traffic.

For better anchor text variety, you can check out our guide on how to optimize anchor texts

Aggressive Link Volume That Doesn’t Match Content Publishing Frequency

Content publishing frequency on your site is often ignored when talking about link velocity, given that the lens is more focused on the external link building efforts than on the quality and volume of content assets published on the website. 

When link volume grows without a clear content-based trigger—e.g., publishing new pages, content updates and upgrades to existing pages, and other internal branding efforts—it may actually signal artificial link building. 

And to think that it is very unusual for any brand to consistently get new links without consistently updating its own content library. 

Safe Link Building Practices to Manage Link Velocity

Here are actionable ways if you want to take safety measures when building backlinks to your site:

Natural Link Acquisition at Scale

The penalty triggers occur more often for sites that heavily involve manual link building methods, such as guest blogging, link insertions, profile creation, etc. 

The reverse—natural link acquisition, where you invest in linkable assets that passively acquire links independently, is the safest link building practice to pursue.

When you get backlinks naturally, your methods highly depend on the quality of helpful content on your site and the strategy to get more eyeballs for these pages, which will increase the chances they'll become more visible to target publishers. 

Publish more linkable assets that naturally attract links from publishers at their writing stage. Given that they will tend to search on Google to find resources they can reference in their content, and naturally link to your page to expound on terms they don't want to define anymore. 

Most natural links from ranking linkable assets for informational queries will form an upward trend for the site's link data for referring domains, not sharp or suspicious spikes. 

link velocity that is natural ahrefs

This pattern reflects a more natural backlink pattern, which you would typically find with most sites that have solid branding and reputation. 

Match Link Building Efforts With Site Authority and Maturity

The best approach in managing link velocity is to anchor it to your site's current level of authority and domain age.

Acquiring hundreds of backlinks in the first month, especially without investing in topical assets to build your site's content library, looks unnatural. However, getting hundreds of links is more acceptable and often expected for established websites with higher domain age, currently ranking for industry keywords, and building foundational SEO work. 

Recognize these maturity signals when deciding the volume of links and anticipating link velocity for your site:

  • Growing library of topically related content. 
  • Increasing organic traffic and brand search volume (caused by the brand's offline marketing efforts and growing interest from ranking information pages). 
  • Number of trusted links from highly authoritative domains (DR60+)
  • Frequent updates on the product or landing pages

Given that search engines evaluate context, not just raw numbers, matching your link velocity to your site's stage of development protects against penalties and sustains long-term rankings. 

Pro Tip: Ramp up your link building efforts for new websites slowly - and as it gains more organic traffic from rankings, you can gradually increase links. 

Use an Anchor Text Cycle Instead of Obsessing Over Ratios

Monitoring anchor text ratios is often a standard approach to managing link velocity and reducing the tendency to get penalized. However, micromanaging percentages can become rigid and resource-intensive, especially if you're managing several web properties or clients' websites. 

A more flexible, straightforward approach is using the anchor text cycle

The main idea is using rotating anchor text types month after month, instead of trying to hit perfect ratios - this reflects how natural link profiles develop their backlink profiles - gradually, unevenly, and are influenced by different content sources. 

For instance, when building backlinks for a new website, you focus on building exact-match anchors to increase your page's topical relevance in the first month. Though it may seem contradictory, remember that building a single link doesn't automatically penalize your site. Then, in your second month, you can focus mainly on acquiring branded anchors. The cycle continues until you reach a perfectly balanced anchor text profile. 

Rotating anchor texts focus helps distribute your optimization efforts without creating suspicious, over-optimized patterns. 

Distribute Link Equity Across Multiple Pages

Link diversity is a healthy approach to ensuring that your site develops a more natural backlink profile by spreading backlinks across different pages, ones you intentionally want Google to acknowledge as your most important pages. 

Here are two essential ways to do more link diversity for your website:

  • Attract more inbound links to your informational content assets (not just your landing pages) by promoting them to target interested linkers (publishers, bloggers, journalists, etc) - seeing that a well-built online brand typically also gets natural links to its informational pages.
  • Use internal linking to pass link equity to deeper pages or pages you want to rank for. You can use Ahrefs to find top-linked pages and build internal links from them to topically relevant but less internally linked pages. 

Focus on Quality and Brand Association

While "quality over quantity" is standard SEO advice, it's often overlooked in practice for many SEO audits I've conducted for numerous clients' websites. 

Earn and build the types of backlinks that truly reflect your brand's reputation. 

A couple of tips to help you lean on backlink quality even more:

  • During the link prospecting stage, ask yourself, "Would I want my brand mentioned on this site even if SEO didn't exist?".
  • Set a list of link metrics your SEO team or outsourced link building agency will follow to ensure quality for backlinks. 
  • Prioritize providing value to more, but trusted, authoritative domains using different link building strategies and value-driven link outreach angles.
  • Think long-term sustainable link building instead of a one-time off approach to chasing links. 

Resilient Backlink Profile That Scales Safely

Focus on natural link acquisition, anchor text cycle, and aligning your link building efforts with your site's growth stage to create a resilient SEO foundation. There is nothing safer than positioning your link building campaigns as a branding effort instead of another chase to game the system. 

If you're looking for more sustainable link velocity, explore our link building services and see how we can help. 


best saas link building services sharprocket

The 9 Best SaaS Link Building Services in 2025

SaaS is a continuously growing yet increasingly competitive industry. 

Search engine optimization (SEO), one of the top user and revenue growth drivers, has been a channel moving forward to reduce CAC and increase MRR. And in ranking for your head commercial terms, there are definitely other players who've invested in their in-house SEO, strategy, and execution. 

SaaS link building isn't as sexy for many SaaS CMOs and Founders, yet it is extremely critical to ranking your software company for high-value commercial and comparative terms. So, being competitive—I must say "competent"—involves learning to hire the right SaaS link building agency. 

This guide will review the top 8 SaaS link building services and who they serve best (strengths). We'll also share how to choose the best SaaS link building agency to serve your SEO needs. 

1. SharpRocket

best saas link building services sharprocket

Best for: Seed-funded, A+ funded, Public, and Enterprise-level SaaS

Headquartered in: Offices in Manila, Philippines, and London, UK (operating remotely and serving clients globally, including UK)

Strengths: Performance-driven link building with a focus on landing page backlinks to drive immediate rankings and demand generation. 

Recognizable SaaS clients: Credible and Shopify 

With over 10 years of experience, SharpRocket specializes in high-authority SaaS link building services designed to help landing pages rank for commercial intent keywords — the ultimate objective is to drive demo requests, sign-ups, and MQLs.

Founded by link building consultant Venchito Tampon and Joseph Gojo Cruz, SharpRocket is one of the trusted white-label link-building agencies that delivers backlinks through a stringent process—from niche-relevant prospecting to client approval for backlink prospects and value-driven outreach campaigns. 

All campaigns are tailored to the SaaS buyer journey (mostly to BOFU content) and integrated with in-house SEO strategy on keyword clusters, use-case content, and product-led blog creation. 

SharpRocket is incredible in its unique way of communicating with internal SaaS SEO teams and startup founders, ensuring alignment between link building and the brand's core growth metrics. Making this SEO integration ensures every link building engagement is worth their investment. 

With over 15,000 links delivered to clients since 2013, they've helped notable clients  Keypath, ZenBusiness, Credible, and Shopify scale their in-house link building needs and grow search traffic and organic revenue. 

Just check out their client reviews and explore their link building services

2. USerp

userp link building services

Best for: Any SaaS company from Series A to IPO

Headquartered in: Lone Tree, Colorado, USA (serving global clients)

Strengths: Authority link placements, KPI-aligned SEO strategies, and content-first outreach

Recognizable SaaS clients: Monday.com, Active Campaign, Freshworks, and Reply

uSERP specializes in high-authority PR and is strongly concerned with ongoing KPI evaluation and adjustment with clients. Through content-led outreach, their links appear in top-tier publications. 

3. Powered by Search

powered by search link building services

Best for: B2B SaaS 

Headquartered in: Toronto, Canada (operates globally)

Strengths: ICP-driven link building

Recognizable SaaS clients: Fortra, Basecamp, Elastic

After Powered by Search joined forces with Growth Gorilla (who specialize heavily in SaaS link building campaigns), they became one of the link building powerhouses we have today, with most of their clients loving their strategic perspective and outreach-based link campaigns. 

4. Siege Media 

siegemedia link building services

Best for: High-growth startups, and Enterprise SaaS

Headquartered in: Austin, Texas, USA

Strengths: Passive link acquisition through solid linkable assets

Recognizable SaaS clients: Zoom, Zapier, Zendesk

Siege Media blends link acquisition with modern-day content marketing, creating data-driven assets that naturally earn links from authoritative publications, industry journalists, and content creators. 

5. SimpleTiger

simpletiger link building services

Best for: SaaS startups, lean teams, and founder-led software companies

Headquartered in: Sarasota, Florida, USA

Strengths: Streamlined SaaS SEO, lean content + links approach, and fast execution for early-stage growth

Recognizable SaaS clients:  JotForm, Segment, Bitly, Gelato

SimpleTiger offers tactical high-authority link building and digital PR campaigns with data-backed strategy—best for SaaS brands that need fast results without bloated retainers. Its focus on clarity, keyword alignment, and manually built outreach makes it ideal for startups scaling their SEO up to IPO, and it is a good contender for SharpRocket, the best SaaS link building agency.  

6. Skale

Best for: VC-backed SaaS companies

Headquartered in: Fully remote (London, England)

Strengths: Product-led link building and SEO strategy

Recognizable SaaS clients: Test Gorilla, Maze, and Piktochart

Skale delivers link building with a focus on measurable outcomes like demo signups and SQLs, not just rankings. They're known for producing SaaS SEO playbooks that combine link acquisition, technical audits, and performance reporting as a holistic SEO framework. 

7. Dofollow

dofollow link building services

Best for: B2B SaaS

Headquartered in: Wilmington, Delaware, USA (remote team)

Strengths: Relationship-based link building

Recognizable SaaS clients: Pitch, LegalZoom, Vonage

As strange as their brand name is—getting what actual link-building agencies must acquire—Dofollow delivers clean, personalized outreach for link building. From audit and strategy to constant iteration of link-building campaigns, they're a strong choice for B2B SaaS companies. 

8. Digital Olympus

digital olympus link building services

Best for: Mid-to-enterprise SaaS companies prioritizing digital PR

Headquartered in: Wilmington, Delaware (remote global team) 

Strengths: Digital PR for SaaS

Recognizable SaaS clients: Ramp, Credo, Ramp

Digital Olympus specializes in digital PR campaigns for SaaS brands, helping them get featured on major publications and niche-relevant authoritative websites like USA Today, BBC, CNN, and The New York Times. 

Their authentic relationship link building approach to digital PR makes blending this marketing discipline and SEO a strong flavor to the mix for SaaS companies.

9. Minuttia

minuttia link building services

Best for: Enterprise B2B SaaS

Headquartered in: Tallinn, Estonia

Strengths: Content-driven link acquisition

Recognizable SaaS clients: NordVPN, Toggl, Service Titan 

Minnuttia combines data-backed content strategy with link building to help SaaS brands adapt to ever-changing search markets. Utilizing their content operations and deep keyword mapping makes them a good choice for scaling B2B software visibility.  

How to Choose The Best SaaS Link Building Services? 

Vetting a SaaS link building agency involves researching, reviewing, and considering standards beyond surface-level considerations. Ultimately, you want a partner who understands SaaS sales cycles, product-led growth, technical buyers, and how a SaaS link building campaign can help improve target pages' rankings and drive visibility and pipeline—this makes SEO investment worthwhile. 

Below are actionable tips to help you evaluate SaaS link building agencies before signing a contract. 

Check if they understand SaaS buyer intent.

The best SaaS link-building agencies truly understand buyer intent at different stages of the SaaS funnel, as this is where they align the types of backlinks they acquire for their SaaS clients. 

Nowadays, you'll find many of these agencies that point their backlinks to TOFU pages, trying to rank for informational queries. These generally have higher search volume as users are looking and researching about their problems ("problem-aware"), but the intent isn't to sign up for any online software.

Pro Tip: Consider SaaS link building agencies that prioritize getting backlinks to MOFU and BOFU pages to rank for lower search volume, but high conversion intent queries, as the qualified traffic here actually converts into users. 

Read reviews on G2, Clutch, and Capterra

Reading verified reviews from clients gives you real insights into their experiences, helping filter serious, client-proven agencies who deliver from those that only look good on their websites. 

Most SaaS users and potential customers consider web-based products and trust G2 and Capterra to compare software. And they are also helpful for checking B2B service providers—SEO and link-building agencies.

Through the platforms, you can look for client reviews of the agency mentioning results for SaaS clients, including increased demo signups, improved keyword rankings, and topically relevant backlinks within the client's vertical.

Those review platforms are also suitable for seeing reviews about the agency's communication and transparency—how agencies update their clients on the campaign's progress, and whether they are flexible for any valid change in the actual SEO strategy.

Additionally, you want to see red flags from actual client reviews—repeated issues like missed deadlines, recycled backlink placements, vague reporting, or any not-value-for-money comments. 

Ask for SaaS-specific link samples.

Get the types of links that matter to your SaaS. Many agencies will brag about their links coming from high-DR blogs, but many of these links are either irrelevant or don't have any organic traffic, all worthless links, if you may. 

It is best to truly assess their credibility by asking for backlink samples—the best agencies will provide them when you inquire about their services or share them exactly during your initial meeting with their SEO strategists. 

Without link samples, ignore agencies that fluff their way to getting you as their clients.

With SaaS-specific link examples, look for the following:

  • Contextual placements - a standard should be for many links - be strict to only getting backlinks within the page's content.
  • Types of pages where links will come from - will they secure links from product-led content (e.g., How X solves Y articles, "Top X tools for [Use Case]", "Best Alternatives to [Competitors]"). The referring source matters as it dictates the topical relevance of the link and how much branding and link equity power you can obtain from the referring domain.

The types of links an agency acquires determine the real value of its work. 

Confirm KPIs and Reporting Cadence

Clear metrics are what you need to measure the success and value of every link you'll pay for.

Ask SaaS link-building agencies about what they report, how often they report, and what results they track—they will send you these as part of monthly reports. 

Request for regular updates—it could be monthly reports showing live links and placements, bi-weekly updates for approval, and possibly live dashboards (or just a spreadsheet) for real-time tracking. These are all different for every agency and depend significantly on how they do their link building operations. 

Pro Tip: Find SaaS link building agencies that allow you to approve the list of sites before outreach. You want to ensure all links match specific criteria (niche relevance, quality metrics) and maintain control over where your brand appears (or which domains your brand associates with).

Remember that once links are placed, they can't be undone unless the agency requests link removal or a change of target page. 

Test With a Short Pilot

This has become a standard initial effort from SaaS companies when outsourcing link building agencies, as they want to test the waters before seriously investing big budgets on links. 

Based on my 12 years in the SEO industry, I noticed the most underlying reasons why SaaS companies prefer to do a trial run (usually 2 to 3 months of work) when hiring link building agencies - here are some of the reasons:

  • Two to three months is a viable time to see the type and impact of their links to the website (assuming you've built the necessary SEO foundation- technical SEO, on-page SEO, etc, so you can maximize the value of every inbound link).
  • Early assessment of transparency, communication, and professionalism within the first months - how they handle updates, how frequently their link-building reports are, and how quickly they respond to questions. 
  • Check if the agency truly understands the SaaS's target users, product, and brand positioning, and if all the links they will build truly align with their brand's ICP. 

In essence, a trustworthy SaaS link-building agency doesn't need a 6-month lock-in to prove value. A short pilot run of a link-building plan will show the agency's effectiveness with its process and actual deliverables, determining whether your SaaS is confident in its ability to scale up the volume of backlinks. 

FUQs (Frequently Unasked Questions)

There are a lot of questions that are often overlooked but are essential for SaaS companies to know when investing in link building. Here are some frequently unasked questions about SaaS link building services: 

Do backlinks help reduce CAC in SaaS?

Yes. Backlinks help improve a website's organic rankings, driving free, long-term traffic to your product pages and blog content. This lowers your reliance on paid ads and actually reduces your cost per acquisition (CAC) over time.

What kind of backlinks help PLG models?

Backlinks that point to and pass link equity to use-case pages, onboarding tutorials, or integration guides can support product-led growth (PLG). Those mentioned pages attract users who are already searching for solutions and are more likely to push them straight into the product experience.

Can backlinks help my SaaS get listed on G2 or Capterra rankings?

Indirectly, yes. Higher organic traffic from backlinks can help drive more user sign-ups and reviews. And with more verified users, your chances of being listed or ranked higher on G2 and Capterra will improve.

How do backlinks support product-led SEO?

In many ways, but in particular, backlinks help the site's topical authority around the product's core use cases. And when it ranks for queries related to features or integrations, you attract users from search who are more likely to activate and engage with the product.


create linkable assets fourth step of link building plan

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. 

link building plan understand link history

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. 

link gap analysis part of link building plan

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. 

identify potential link partners 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. 

set campaign objectives link building goals

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.

identify potential link partners ahrefs content explorer

Target Active Authors 

identify potential link partners search for top 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

create linkable assets fourth step of link building plan

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. 

monitor your backlinks six step of link building plan

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. 


how to get backlinks show up in listicles

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]"). 

how to get backlinks target pages for backlinks

 

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. 

how to get backlinks co-authoring

 

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. 

how to get backlinks real world citations

 

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.

how to get backlinks AI deepen research

 

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.

how to get backlinks exclusive directories

 

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.

zyppy list directory

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.

how to get backlinks learning center

 

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.

how to get backlinks show up in listicles

 

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.


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


link building outreach brevity

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.

link building outreach brevity

 

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.

link building outreach industry updates

 

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. 

link building outreach reverse strategy

 

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. 


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


link metrics referring domains growth

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.

link metrics page traffic

 

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.

link metrics estimated traffic of URL page

 

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). 

link metrics referring domains growth

 

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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