Although more than half of US businesses have claimed SEO as their top inbound marketing priority, without an SEO consultant, many fail to effectively improve their website’s search presence because they struggle with link building. Link building is one of the three major ranking factors that establish websites’ credibility and authority. Although it’s a necessary process of development, link building can pose a threat to your site if the wrong strategy is implemented. Search engines are accurate in assessing the meaning of content and will assign contextual relevance in the relationships between links as a website accumulates strong contextual backlinks from authority sites with credibility within your niche. This means more traffic from improved search visibility and increased impressions for keyword related queries. In order to ensure that your website acquires the most relevant links, implement a content strategy that incorporates content types that are known to generate more backlinks.
How to Get High-Quality Backlinks in 2021?
Create Epic Content
In order to gain ground in today’s competitive search environment, you have to account for the top ranking factors that give your website the authority and ranking ability to receive traffic. Content and backlinks are the top two aspects that you have direct control over improving and are what will impact your site the most. Create epic, original content to generate establish your company as a top competitor. Position your website to maximize the traffic leads and new clients that quality content brings. Although the word count of an article is not a direct ranking factor, there is a strong correlation to how well your page ranks. An article that goes deep into a specific topic tends to be shared more frequently throughout social media and generates 77.2% more backlinks. The type of content that performs the best is typically long-form, evergreen articles that provide a resource for visitors and clients. The definition of long-form content is arbitrary among marketers. Some might argue that anything over 1000 to 1500 words would fall into that category. Considering the average word count of the average of the top-performing page of 1890 words (Backlinko) to 2416 words (Impact), it’s safe to say the number is climbing. Tim Soulo published a 6000-word article on the ROI of guest posting that covered every aspect of the link building method in terms of its effectiveness for link builders. The article has generated 270 backlinks to date and is a must-read article for those engaged in guest posting. Create a resource that covers all the bases to stand out from the masses. Publishing epic content that people can return to for reference is one way to generate backlinks through the content you publish. This form of content marketing has been trending for years and isn’t slowing down anytime soon.
Publish Infographics
Visual content is proven to be more effective in conveying messages and retaining information than text alone. When a related image is used with instructions, people perform 300% more effectively than the same text instructions without the image. Infographics are the perfect tool for B2B marketing and serve well as link building assets. A well-designed infographic will generate 172% more backlinks than the average article. The secret to using infographics for backlinks is to select a trending topic, preferably one evergreen in nature. For example, if you were a liquor company or owned a bar, you may consider an infographic that detailed the recipe for the different types of shots. Don Bull’s infographic has collected 539 links to date (he also sells it as a poster, which I’m sure has driven some decent sales). The marketability of infographics in an outreach campaign makes them an attractive option for link building. Venngage demonstrated this quality when they were able to increase their traffic by 400% in less than 12 months. In their outreach campaign, they sold business owners on the idea of creating custom infographics for pre-existing blog posts. There’s no doubt that good design is necessary to create a successful campaign. However, the data points are also crucial to providing value to viewers.
Conduct Interviews
Interviewing experts has proven to be an effective form of evergreen content because although the opinions may change over time, the event itself is something that can always be revisited. Interviews provide your site with unique, quality content and give your audience a variety from the typical blog post. The link building aspect of this is amplified because the interviewee will promote their own interview by providing links from their site and social media to share the event with their own audience. Interviews can provide streams of traffic your site would not normally receive since the link provides access to your interviewee’s network.
Guest Posting
Publishing articles on popular sites get your company in front of a larger audience as well as land some quality links from authority sites. When executed correctly, guest posting can be the perfect link building strategy to improve your traffic and search visibility. Adam Enfroy published the perfect example of a successful guest posting strategy. Within 15 days, he was able to publish an article on eight high authority websites. The results from these articles alone generated 247 new backlinks and a 347% increase in traffic to his blog. Guest posting not only presents the opportunity to link to the articles you’ve already published but to link to influencers and give mentions to those who will return the favor. Linking to influencers is a way to get their attention and stand out from the people who are asking for links and mentions. If you can link to an influencer’s website two or three times from high authority domains, they will appreciate the effort and will be more inclined to return the favor. Build relationships with those who are actively publishing articles and linking out to content regularly. This could be with other site owners, authors, and content writers. Everyone could use a helping hand, and when you have a good alliance with someone who will support your content, you acquire more links in less time.
Invite Guest Authors
There’s no substitute for good content. By publishing articles regularly, you can increase your site’s authority and expand your reach for keywords to generate more traffic. This also brings back the fact that when a person publishes an article, they are inclined to link to promote that article by sending links and social shares. Having great authors on your site not only provides you with good content but with more people linking to your site to help you promote that content.
Conduct Surveys
Surveys have emerged as one of the top performers for generating backlinks. Not only can you get a lot of engagement from people taking your survey, but you can also generate data to publish fresh content with original statistics. BuzzFeed is an excellent example of the effectiveness surveys have as link building content. Their survey, “What city should you actually live in?” was published in 2014 and has generated 1061 backlinks to date.
Publish Original Research and Statistics
There are millions of articles published on a daily basis, and many content writers will cite statistics and facts by linking back to the original sources of data. Publishing original statistics can generate a massive amount of backlinks if your findings are relevant and link-worthy. Press releases are an old form of link building Google has long since devalued. In fact, most press releases will only give you a Nofollow link. However, you can use a reputable channel such as PRWeb to get your research in front of thousands of journalists who will cover your story in a heartbeat.
