I’ll be honest with you.
It’s often easy for established sites to build backlinks without much effort.
In fact, we haven’t done outreach for links in a while, yet our link profile continues
to grow at a steady pace.
Now, I’d love to say that it’s all because of high-quality content, but the truth is
that our brand has built an audience, credibility, and trust over time.
But what if you have a brand new website or if people don’t really know who you are in your industry?
Well, today I’m going to show you how to build backlinks
to a brand new website in a systematized way.
Stay tuned.
[music]
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.
Today, I want to talk about which links you should focus on creating first and how to
progressively get better links as you build your brand and credibility.
Let’s get to it.
So assuming you’re starting with zero links pointing at your site,
the first thing I’d focus on is building links to your home page.
There are 3 strategies that I find work really well.
The first method is to build citations and create social media accounts to boost trust signals.
Citations are online mentions of your business and they’re most commonly used in local SEO.
So if you’re a local business, you’d basically find business directories and add your business name,
address, and phone number, which are collectively known as NAP.
In a 2018 study by Moz, they found that citation signals help websites rank
in both the map pack and organic search.
And these are usually nofollowed links,
so the purpose of these links isn’t to building website or page level authority.
But it’s to somewhat legitimize that you do have a real business.
A great way to find these opportunities is to search in Google for something like
“your city” and “your job.”
From here, copy down a few domains from local competitors, ignoring anything like directories.
Next, we’re going to use Ahrefs’ Link Intersect tool, which will show you who’s
linking to one or more of your target URLs.
So I’m just pasting the homepage URLs of my plumbing competitors here.
And as a final step, I’ll set the mode to URL since we want to see who’s linked
to just their homepages since that’s where the link will generally point to.
Let’s run the search.
Generally speaking, the more intersections there are from the referring domain, the higher
the probability of it being a place to create a citation.
To analyze the link, click on the number, and then click on the link.
And as you can see, the company’s name, address, phone number,
and a link to their website are all there.
So I’d go and add my site to this directory too.
Now, whether your website targets visitors locally or globally, it’s also worth creating
social accounts with a link back to your site.
But don’t bother signing up for every network out there.
Instead, focus on the primary ones in your niche whether that be Twitter, Facebook, Instagram,
Pinterest and/or LinkedIn.
Even if you don’t plan to use the social network immediately, it might be worth creating the account
so you can also claim your business name.
The second thing you’ll want to do is build authority links to your homepage.
To do this, I like using Help a Reporter Out, also known as HARO.
HARO is a company that connects journalists to sources and sources to journalists.
Just sign up for an account as a “source,” and you’ll get emails with a list of queries
from journalists at various publications.
And these aren’t just your run of the mill publications.
There are journalists from places like Forbes, The New York Times, Huffington Post and more.
Responding to queries quickly and concisely can land you mentions and links to both your
homepage and/or social profiles.
A few places I’ve been featured because of HARO are Inc Magazine, Reader’s Digest,
and CIO to name a few.
This, in my opinion, is the easiest place to get authority links that can boost trust and rankings,
especially since you’ll be judged on your knowledge more than your current online visibility.
The third place that I think is absolutely awesome for homepage links are Podcasts.
Podcasts are hot and there are a ton of them in almost every industry.
Best of all, podcasters are always on the lookout for interesting guests
that can provide value to their audience.
And for almost every podcast I’ve seen, they’ll provide a link to the guest’s homepage
as well as other resources that come up throughout the interview.
To find podcast opportunities, just search in Google for something like “[your niche] podcasts.”
And the results should almost always be list posts with popular podcasts in your industry.
So let’s go to this awesome page on the 12 best SEO podcasts.
Scrolling down, you’ll see podcasts like Authority Hacker and Search Engine Nerds.
So let’s click through to one.
And as you can see, they’re featuring numerous guests in the SEO space,
so this might be a good podcast to pitch.
To expand your list even further, go to one of the podcast episodes.
Scrolling down, you’ll see links to her websites like express writers and content hacker.
So I’ll copy one of the domains and put into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer.
And since we know that podcasts generally link to homepages,
I’ll set the search to URL mode and run the search.
Next, I’ll go to the backlinks report, where we can see all pages linking to the homepage.
To filter our results, I’ll type “podcast,” in the include search box.
Then I’ll set the search filters to only look for that word in the titles and URLs of the referring pages.
And it looks like I could contact other sites like ProBlogger, CoSchedule, and Shane Barker,
to potentially be a guest on their shows.
Not only are podcasts a great source for links,
but they continue to send us new customers every month.
Doing these three activities are a great way to build high quality homepage links
as well as to boost trust signals.
Now, let’s move onto some page-level link building strategies because links to your homepage alone
won’t be enough to build sustainable and growing traffic.
One of my favorite strategies is resource page link building.
This is where you get backlinks from web pages that curate and link out to useful industry resources.
And the sole purpose of their existence is to link out to other relevant pages,
making them easy links to get.
Now, what I love about this strategy is that you can branch out to pages on broader topics.
So let’s say you had a blog post on crossfit exercises.
With a lot of link building tactics, you’d probably have to find a page where they mention something
super-relevant, like crossfit.
But with resource page link building, you can try and get links on pages that cover
broader topics like fitness, weight loss, and exercise.
So just go to Google and search for something like
inurl:resources.html intitle:fitness
Now, just visit the pages, make sure they’re actually resource pages and link out to external resources,
and pitch your content appropriately.
Now, rather than rehashing what I’ve already said, I highly recommend watching our video
on resource page link building where you’ll learn how to execute this step-by-step.
Another link building strategy that I highly recommend is the Skyscraper Technique.
This strategy is simple.
You find a page that has a lot of links, improve on that topic, and then reach out to those
that are linking to the original page and ask them to link to you.
A great way to find Skyscraper opportunities is to use Ahrefs’ Content Explorer,
which is a searchable database with over a billion pages of content complete with social and SEO metrics.
So let’s say that I want to create a post on Instagram marketing.
I’ll type that in the search bar and I’ll also change the search mode to a Title search.
Now, a requirement of the Skyscraper Technique is to find pages that have a lot of links.
So let’s set a filter to show only pages that have at least 50 referring domains.
And you’ll see that these articles have gained a ton of links,
and you can look at the content to see if you can improve on.
After you’ve created your superior page, click on Details, then click Backlinks,
and reach out to the linking pages to try and get your resource mentioned.
Now, this is just a very low-level view of how you can find and execute Skyscraper styled link building,
so I highly recommend watching our full tutorial on doing it at scale.
And even though I showed you in somewhat of a sequential order
of how I think backlinks ought to be built,
it doesn’t mean that you can’t do Skyscraper outreach while doing things like HARO or Podcasts.
But I do want to encourage you to build somewhat of a balanced link profile
where things like your homepage shouldn’t be ignored.
So I hope this tutorial was helpful and if you enjoyed it, make sure to like, share
and subscribe for more actionable SEO and marketing tutorials.
And again, I highly recommend watching some of our link building tutorials so that you can
execute these strategies with ease.
So keep grinding away and I’ll see you in the next tutorial.