2022 Link Building Strategies That Work
It is March of 2022 and the whole world is changing in more ways than it’s possible to describe with words.
From full-scale military invasions to SEO, there are few things that remain the same as they were just a few months ago.
This article is dedicated to one of the few things that has remained virtually unchanged for over a dozen years. You read the title, so you already know that we’re going to be talking about link building.
High-quality backlinks are still a huge ranking factor to take seriously. Without a solid backlink profile, you will struggle to outrank your competitors and secure those sweet top spots in search engine results pages.
Today, I will be sharing with you my personal three favorite link building strategies that I have been using for clients and personal projects alike.
Anchor Text Strategy
The anchor text link building strategy is probably the most straightforward and easy to learn for people unfamiliar with the concept of building backlinks.
It is also one of the most effective strategies; the average open/reply rate is fairly high.
The concept behind it is extremely simple. First, you select an article that you’re going to be building links for. Then, you will need to find your link building prospects: other articles that cover a touching topic and mention your target anchor text somewhere in the text.
Important note: Your prospect articles need to be non-competing, meaning they should only briefly mention your topic and anchor text. They should be centered around a different topic that is close to yours topically.
Let’s imagine that I was to build links to this very article. The ideal prospects for it would be articles about SEO that briefly mention link building.
There are a couple of ways to find these prospects. You can make use of certain link building tools, or you can do it the old-fashioned way, manually.
Google has various advanced search operators available to make finding opportunities much easier.
The three most useful ones for this are:
- inurl:blog (only returns pages that are part of a bog);
- intitle: (returns pages that mention your keyword/phrase in the title)
- intext: (returns pages that mention your keyword/phrase in the body of the article)
A Google search for an anchor text link building campaign for an article like this one would look like this:
Inurl:blog intitle:”seo” intext:”link building” – intitle:”link building”
This query tells the search engine to only return blog articles about SEO that mention link building somewhere in the body but not the title.
For more results, you can play around and experiment with your target keywords.
Here’s also an email template you can grab and use for your anchor text campaigns:
Subject: Some love for [organization]’s article
“Hey, @first_name
Happy @day_of_week!
Just finished reading through your post on @url_title. It was such a good read, I had to share some thoughts.
First of all, great job!
Secondly, you had mentioned skyscraper (10x) content in the article but didn’t go too much into further detail.
We actually just released a guide that would provide a little something extra for the readers who wanted to learn more about the skyscraper technique.
Care to take a look? It’s right here: https://respona.com/blog/skyscraper-technique/
As a huge “thank you”, I’d be happy to provide a social share, indirect link, access to our tool – whatever your heart desires 🙂
Regardless, I’ll definitely be a frequent reader, keep up the stellar content!
Thanks,
[signature]”
Competitor Backlinks
The competitor backlinks strategy is my personal favorite since with it, you’re able to generate hundreds of link building prospects within just a few minutes, depending on how saturated your niche is.
The process is very simple: First you choose an article to build links to, then you find competing content and reach out to the people linking to your competitors’ articles.
To reveal your competitors’ backlink profiles, you will need access to backlink monitoring software, such as Semrush and Ahrefs.
The template formula that I found works pretty well looks something like this:
Subject: [organization] + Respona = Collaboration?
“Hi, @first_name!
I’m Vlad, the outreach manager from Respona. How is your @day_of_week
going?
I’m reaching out to you because I noticed that you linked to Copyblogger’s Copywriting 101 from your post on @url_title.
We actually just released our own article on email copywriting. I think it could also be a good fit for your post and help expand the topic a little bit.
I’d be more than happy to include a link of yours in one of my upcoming guest posts, or get you access to one of our tools, Visme.
Looking forward to hearing from you,
[signature]”
Guest Posting
Personally, I don’t do any separate outreach for guest posting and it’s really not necessary if you’re already doing link building outreach for other strategies.
At the end of each successful exchange, you can simply pitch a guest post to your prospects. Most websites accept guest posts anyway, so you shouldn’t have any issues securing opportunities.
To make your pitch stand out, you can take advantage of Ahrefs’ content gap functionality and check which keywords your prospect’s competitors are ranking for but they aren’t.
Then, offer them a topic that covers that keyword – this way, you will both show that you have taken the time to research your prospect, and provide pretty good value by helping them close that keyword gap.
Also, it would be great if you could provide high quality content with reliable statistics, insert an infographic or explainer videos, and of course, an SEO-friendly article.
To get more than a single link from your guest posts, it is also a wise idea to include links to your partners in your posts – they will return the favor for you in a similar fashion.
Use All These Strategies At Once!
To maximize the effectiveness of your link building, it’s best to run a few campaigns at the same time, from separate email inboxes.
So, combine these three strategies into your link building mix, and you should start seeing the results in no time.
