I’ll be honest with you.
It’s often easy for established sites to buildbacklinks without much effort.
In fact, we haven’t done outreach for linksin a while, yet our link profile continues to grow at a steady pace.
Now, I’d love to say that it’s all becauseof 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 peopledon’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 thathelps you grow your search traffic, research your competitors and dominate your niche.
Today, I want to talk about which links youshould focus on creating first and how to progressively get better links as you buildyour brand and credibility.
Let’s get to it.
So assuming you’re starting with zero linkspointing 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 businessand they’re most commonly used in local SEO.
So if you’re a local business, you’d basicallyfind 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 citationsignals 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 youdo have a real business.
A great way to find these opportunities isto search in Google for something like “your city” and “your job.
” From here, copy down a few domains from localcompetitors, ignoring anything like directories.
Next, we’re going to use Ahrefs’ LinkIntersect tool, which will show you who’s linking to one or more of your target URLs.
So I’m just pasting the homepage URLs ofmy plumbing competitors here.
And as a final step, I’ll set the mode toURL since we want to see who’s linked to just their homepages since that’s wherethe link will generally point to.
Let’s run the search.
Generally speaking, the more intersectionsthere 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 visitorslocally 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 nichewhether that be Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and/or LinkedIn.
Even if you don’t plan to use the social networkimmediately, it might be worth creating the account so you can also claim your business name.
The second thing you’ll want to do is buildauthority links to your homepage.
To do this, I like using Help a Reporter Out, also known as HARO.
HARO is a company that connects journaliststo 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 conciselycan land you mentions and links to both your homepage and/or social profiles.
A few places I’ve been featured becauseof 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 absolutelyawesome for homepage links are Podcasts.
Podcasts are hot and there are a ton of themin almost every industry.
Best of all, podcasters are always on thelookout 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 Googlefor something like “[your niche] podcasts.
” And the results should almost always be listposts with popular podcasts in your industry.
So let’s go to this awesome page on the12 best SEO podcasts.
Scrolling down, you’ll see podcasts likeAuthority Hacker and Search Engine Nerds.
So let’s click through to one.
And as you can see, they’re featuring numerousguests in the SEO space, so this might be a good podcast to pitch.
To expand your list even further, go to oneof the podcast episodes.
Scrolling down, you’ll see links to herwebsites like express writers and content hacker.
So I’ll copy one of the domains and putinto Ahrefs’ Site Explorer.
And since we know that podcasts generallylink to homepages, I’ll set the search to URL mode and run the search.
Next, I’ll go to the backlinks report, wherewe 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 thatword in the titles and URLs of the referring pages.
And it looks like I could contact other siteslike 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 customersevery month.
Doing these three activities are a great way tobuild high quality homepage links as well as to boost trust signals.
Now, let’s move onto some page-level link buildingstrategies because links to your homepage alone won’t be enough to build sustainableand growing traffic.
One of my favorite strategies is resourcepage link building.
This is where you get backlinks from web pagesthat curate and link out to useful industry resources.
And the sole purpose of their existence isto link out to other relevant pages, making them easy links to get.
Now, what I love about this strategy is thatyou 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, youcan 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 actuallyresource pages and link out to external resources, and pitch your content appropriately.
Now, rather than rehashing what I’ve alreadysaid, I highly recommend watching our video on resource page link building where you’lllearn how to execute this step-by-step.
Another link building strategy that I highlyrecommend is the Skyscraper Technique.
This strategy is simple.
You find a page that has a lot of links, improveon that topic, and then reach out to those that are linking to the original page andask them to link to you.
A great way to find Skyscraper opportunitiesis to use Ahrefs’ Content Explorer, which is a searchable database with over a billionpages of content complete with social and SEO metrics.
So let’s say that I want to create a poston 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 Techniqueis to find pages that have a lot of links.
So let’s set a filter to show only pagesthat have at least 50 referring domains.
And you’ll see that these articles have gaineda ton of links, and you can look at the content to see if you canimprove on.
After you’ve created your superior page, click on Details, then click Backlinks, and reach out to the linking pages to try andget 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 tutorialon doing it at scale.
And even though I showed you in somewhat ofa 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 ifyou enjoyed it, make sure to like, share and subscribe for more actionable SEO andmarketing tutorials.
And again, I highly recommend watching someof 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.
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