Feb 09 2024
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How To Get High Quality Free Backlinks To Your Site in 2024
Supercharge Your Site SEO Without Paying For Digital Outreach
I’m going to start off this article by stressing that this is going to take some work but the rewards should be worth it. If you are looking for quick, spammy ways of link building, go and find another article. What I am describing is one proven way to build authority driven, high quality free backlinks, that are going to help you to build your brand and scale the SERPS.
This is of course not the only method available but it is one that should work if you do it properly.
Why You Need Links
Ask any SEO professional or ecommerce consultant – you need backlinks to help rank higher in the search engine results pages. The thinking behind this includes:
- More traffic to your site – the more links that are spread around the internet increase your chances of receiving clicks and visits
- Trust and authority increases – the more links from reputable sources you can gain, the more Google and customers recognise this and your credibility increases.
- Higher rankings – Linked to the trust and authority point above, Google rewards you with higher rankings when you are seen to be a site of trustworthiness and authority through links. For example if you had a link from the BBC, it’s a trusted source with a high authority itself so it helps your site.
The Kind Of Links You Do Not Want
You may have ran into the kind of terms of black hat and white hat SEO. These generally indicate link farms or spammy link techniques that try and get around Google’s link guidelines. We do not want to attract any form of black or grey hat links.
For example don’t fall into the trap of going onto Fiverr and paying someone to build you thousands of high quality links. Even if they work in the short term, the longer term consequences will come back to bite you.
This is purely a white hat SEO technique that will stand the test of time.
My Proven Link Building Method
I’ve personally done this and I can vouch for its validity as a link building method. I haven’t read it somewhere and regurgitating it through AI. It works but will take a little bit of time and effort – but the best things in life normally do.
In a nutshell, you are going to create some quality, authority led content to supply to an industry expert to hopefully feature and generate a link back to your site. Does that sound too vague or confusing? We’ll break it down…
Step 1. Be Clear On Your “Why?”
Remember, the ultimate goal here is to gain high quality, authority driven backlinks from reputable sources. It can quite easily become convoluted once you start get going unless you have your clear purpose set out. You want to try and provide the best quality content, in a very easy to manage way for the third party who will host it.
Step 2. What Is Your Unique Offering?
Have the confidence that your experience in your chosen field of work means that you have enough knowledge and experience to produce a valuable piece of content. This piece of content marketing that you are going to produce could be any of these:
- Written blog content
- Infographic
- How to list
- High quality photoshoot
- Case studies
- Guest post
Have you got a brand new product that you want to get out before your competition does? Is there a new service out there that is better than another? Have you got the ultimate list for your chosen niche? Find your golden nugget and stick with it.
Step 3. Make An Outreach Priority List
Aim high – but not too high! The reality is that you’re not likely to get featured if you send your content to the BBC or CNN for example. However we don’t want to aim for the newest, smallest publications out there, as we’re relying on their authority and readership to pass on that benefit to you.
You need a happy medium.
Lets presume we work in the SEO industry. There will be industry led blogs that might benefit from featuring your content. Some examples of leading publications and marketing channels would be:
- Search Engine Land
- Search Engine Journal
- Content Marketing Institute
- Search Engine Roundtable
- The Authority Hacker Podcast
- Voices of Search Podcast with Ben Shapiro
If you can get featured on one of these publications, either as a guest writer or whether they write about your case study, it’s a massive authority boost to your site if they link back to you. Think of it as a recommendation that you know what you’re talking about.
Because these are great sources of truth for SEO professionals, you then get the benefit of personal exposure, potential traffic to your site or even potential work – this is all in addition to those valuable links that will help your site.
Go one step further:
Now that you’ve determined your target sites or platforms, try to interact with key people in advance. Get on Linkedin and track down the people writing the blogs or hosting the podcasts. Tell them you appreciate their work and you would like to offer some content in the future for them to consider. The ultimate goal here is to gain a personal email address and strike a relationship now which will come in beneficial in the outreach stage.
Step 4. Get Creative
Start to create your content. Whether this is written, graphic, photographic or spoken, make it good. Be proud of it. Make sure it’s something that you would appreciate if you received it from someone.
Take that extra bit of care.
- Written content – make sure there’s no grammar or spelling mistakes
- Graphic content – make sure it’s saved as high quality and you’ve not left anything unfinished
- Photographic content – make sure you’ve edited it and not left any rogue blemishes on your image that could have been easily rectified
Step 5. Send It
The outreach stage is key. You’ve done the hard work – don’t spoil it now. Bloggers in particular can be lazy and they will get bombarded with awful content and enquiries. If you’ve managed to cut through the noise of their inbox, you’re half way there but you need to stand out.
Don’t send out a mailshot to every potential partner and hope it will work. Try and personalise your messages and prove your worth to each potential partner. This is where your background research will come in useful from step 3 and hopefully you’ll already have some personal contacts.
If you’re sending imagery, put it into a file sharing link. People are afraid of attachments and they may cause your site to fall into spam filters.
Ultimately encourage your contacts to feature your content; it’s theirs now. All you ask in return is for a link back to your site or a mention on their podcast.
Step 6. Monitor Your Coverage
Sit back and wait. Depending on the content, it could take a few hours, a few days, a few weeks to get featured. It may never get featured but don’t get disheartened. What could you do better next time?
If you do see if featured on one of the top choices on your hitlist, congratulations! You successfully negotiated the world of high quality digital marketing outreach.
However we don’t stop there.
- Send an email to them and thank them for the feature
- Share the feature to your social or professional network. Include a link back to the publication so they feel the benefit of having featured your work
- Search Google for the title and certain keywords from your article. You may be surprised to see a lot of smaller niche related publishers have stolen the same copy from the top target. This is a great way of finding smaller publications to include next time
Step 7. Keep Track Of Your Exposure
Keep a list of which sites and in particular, which contacts you reached out to. This can save you time and effort next time around. If this is going to be an ongoing approach, it can save you emailing the same non-responders in the future. Instead you can look to see if you can find a more up-to-date or relevant contact.
Monitor Your Outreach Campaigns
Hopefully by this stage you have had some exposure from some of the key publishers that you reached out to. In addition to this you may have had the benefit of those influential platforms trickling down to other smaller publications.
Make sure you keep notes of when you began the campaign and whether your traffic has increased or whatever your ‘why‘ that we defined earlier was met.
Conclusion
Getting free high quality backlinks in 2024 is not as easy as it was 10, 5 or even 1 year ago. That being said, this approach outlined above can be a sure fire way to increase your brand exposure and hopefully propel you up the SERPS if you carry it out correctly with some high quality content.
Need Help With Your Content Marketing Outreach?
If this is above your knowledge or you simply don’t have the time to do this, I am happy to discuss how I might be able to help you to produce your own content marketing campaigns.
March 16, 2024 at 4:33 am
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February 29, 2024 at 8:13 am
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