Have you heard anyone say:
"Know who you're going to get backlinks from before you create your content"?
This is sound advice.
But what happens to your older content?
Should you give up and focus your efforts on building links to only new pages?
The answer is mostly "no."
So today, I'm going to show you how to build backlinks to existing content that would otherwise rot away.
Stay tuned.
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What's up SEOs?
Sam Oh here with Ahrefs, the SEO tool that helps you grow your search traffic,
research your competitors and dominate your niche.
From my experience, the majority of pages that don't rank on a website are due to
a lack of links more than anything else.
So today's tutorial is all about finding opportunities to get more backlinks to existing content.
Let's get to it.
The first thing you should do is look at who's linking to the top 10 ranking pages for your target keyword.
Now, these prospects are relevant because they're already linking to other pages
on the same or a similar topic.
So a free way to find out who's linking to them
is to run a search on Google for your target keyword.
So let's say that I wanted to rank for "best hiking backpacks."
Next, you can copy down the URLs for the top ranking pages
and then paste each one separately into Ahrefs' free backlink checker.
And with the free tool, you'll be able to see the top 100 backlinks pointing at the page.
Now, if you have an Ahrefs' account, then just go to Keywords Explorer, search for your
target keyword, and scroll to the bottom of the page.
Here, you'll see the Top 10 ranking pages as well as the SEO metrics like the number
of backlinks and referring domains pointing to the page.
To analyze each backlink profile, click on the number in the Backlinks column,
make sure you set the filter to "Group similar," which will weed out a lot of duplicate links from places like
sidebars and footers, and then export the results.
Filter for some good link prospects and you can start pitching your content.
Now, while these prospects are the easiest to find, you'll need to come up with a good
value-packed angle for your outreach emails.
Feel free to watch our video on email outreach which should help you start forming angles for your pitches.
But for now, let's move on to the next prospecting tactic, which is to look for similar pages
with links that aren't necessarily ranking in the Top 10.
Google's ranking algorithm is complex.
Just because you have more links, it doesn't mean you'll rank higher than competing pages.
There are other elements that come into play like on-page SEO, quality of content,
and content freshness to name a few.
So instead of looking at just the Top 10 ranking pages, we're going to look at all articles
on the same topic that have links worth pursuing.
To do this, go to Ahrefs' Content Explorer, and search for your target keyword.
Let's go with the "best hiking backpacks" example again.
Finally, I'll set it to a title search.
Now, since we're looking for link prospects, let's set a filter to only show pages that
have at least five referring domains, meaning at least five links from unique websites.
And we now have around 25 pages that all have links,
and best of all, you're going to see pages taking slightly different angles like
"for women" and "for kids," which we could easily add as subsections in our post.
Here's another example of a perfectly good place to look.
This article is on the 12 best hiking backpacks of 2018.
Now, quite often, "best [product name]"-type posts need to be updated at least every year
since new manufacturers are always releasing new products.
And if we look at the traffic history graph, you'll see that this page was getting more
and more traffic until 2019 hit.
And then it just dropped.
Searchers aren't interested in last year's best hiking backpacks anymore.
So they're losing traffic, which could also act as an outreach angle for you.
Rinse and repeat this for any pages that you want to build backlinks to,
and you should be able to expand your list of link prospects.
Another great way to find link prospects is to look at your competitors' newest links
and then pitch those sites for guest posts.
The way guest post prospecting normally works is you find a list of relevant websites
and you pitch them content to post on their site.
And normally, you'll get a link back to your site whether that be within the content or in the author bio.
Now, a problem with this method is that you're often pitching sites that are no longer active.
So the way we can solve this problem is by looking at who has recently linked to your competitors.
And this should be a good sign that the site is still active today.
To do this, go to Ahrefs' Site Explorer and enter the domain of one of your organic search competitors.
Next, go to the New backlinks report.
By default, the date range is set to the past 7 days.
So let's set this to the past 60 days to expand our pool of guest-posting sites.
Now, we just need to set a few more filters.
First, I'll set this to "One link per domain," since we don't need to pitch the same site multiple times.
Next, I'll set the link type to "Dofollow" to find only the value-passing links.
Finally, I'll set this filter to "Blogs," so we can find guest-posting opportunities.
And we now have a list of over 250 unique websites to pitch.
Continue to monitor your competitors' new backlinks reports,
and never run out of new guest-posting opportunities again.
Another great way to build links to existing content is to do resource page link building
Resource pages in the context of SEO, curate and link to the best resources on a specific topic.
And the reason why it's so effective is because that's what these pages were built for.
To literally link to other topically relevant pages.
The great thing about this tactic for existing content
is that you can target pages that are slightly on a broader topic.
For example, if you're trying to build links to an article targeting the query, "how to train for a half marathon,"
you don't need to find pages talking about marathon training like you would normally do
for other link-building strategies.
Instead, start thinking of broad niches related to your topic
like "fitness," "exercise," "endurance training," and so on.
After you have your list, go to Google and search for something like:
inurl:links.html and intitle:your broad niche keyword, so in my case "fitness."
And now, Google will show pages where "links.html" is in the URL, which is a common footprint
for resource pages and where the titles of those pages have the word "fitness" in them.
Visit the pages to make sure they're resource pages you'd want to get mentioned on.
Now, if you're an Ahrefs user, this is the perfect way to use the SEO toolbar,
where you can see both domain and page level metrics to select pages to pitch in a data-driven way.
Just click on the "SERP export" icon, and you should have a nice spreadsheet
to filter your results down further.
Quick sidenote: if you use the Toolbar method, I recommend setting your Google search settings
to show the top 100 results.
This way, you'll have a larger export file you can dig through.
We have a super-thorough tutorial on doing resource page link building at scale,
so I highly recommend watching that.
Now, these are just a few link building strategies that work to build backlinks to your existing content.
But it doesn't mean that every page is worth building links to.
In fact, you may be better off deleting certain pages or consolidating and redirecting them.
So before you start building links to all of your pages, I highly recommend watching
our tutorial on doing a content audit, which includes a free template that will automate
a good portion of the process for you.
Now, if you enjoyed this video, make sure to like, share and subscribe.
And let me know in the comments if you're using any other link building strategies
to create backlinks for your existing content.
So keep grinding away, go and get some links, and I'll see you in the next tutorial.