How to Boost the Value of Your Link Building Strategy

You might have been told that link building is one of the most valuable digital marketing strategies you can pursue. To some extent, this is true, but there's no guarantee that you're going to see the best possible results when you start a link building campaign on your own.

In fact, many business owners and marketers end up disappointed by their link building strategy because they don't see the powerful ROI that the strategy is capable of.

Fortunately, there are several steps you can take to boost the value of your link building strategy and finally see the results you always wanted.

Why link building?

The main reason why link building is so valuable is that it improves your website's visibility and accessibility in many different ways. Building a link increases the chances that your brand will be recognized on an external source. It serves as a direct conduit for referral traffic. It also increases your domain authority, thereby increasing your rankings in search engines and increasing your organic traffic.

Improving your link building strategy should increase all of these effects, dramatically increasing the amount of total traffic headed to your website.

Your Link Building Audit

The first step of any link building overhaul is going to be a link building audit: an analysis of all your current link building efforts and how they're working for your brand. Using a backlink checker, you can quickly generate a list of every link pointing to your website and scope out things like:

● Number of links. How many links are pointed to your website currently? Generally speaking, more links are better, but you'll also need to think about the quality of those links.

● Link sources. Where are those links coming from? The higher the domain authority of a referring source, the more valuable the link will be. By contrast, some of the lowest authority sites and websites with questionable content may end up hurting your campaign more than helping.

● Current DA. What is your website's current domain authority? What are the page authority levels of your various pages? How have these values changed over time and in response to the new links you're building?

● Anchor text. What kind of anchor text do you have for each of your links? Ideally, you'll have something relevant but not so packed with keywords that it's suspicious.

● Patterns and frequency. How frequently are you building links? And are you following any specific patterns? Relying on the same sources over and over when building links too quickly can both sabotage your campaign.

How to Improve the Value of Your Link Building Strategy

After your audit, you should have a few ideas for improving your strategy in the future. You might even have some bad links to weed out of your backlink profile. In any case, these tips should be able to help you improve the value of your link building strategy:

● Work with better publishers. The best thing you can do is work with better publishers. Higher quality publishers will help you publish better content and will lend a higher domain authority to your referring domains. Gradually work your way up that ladder and make sure you're creating pitches that fit the tone and audience of each new publisher.

● Diversify your link sources. Depending on your goals, it's usually much more valuable to get links from new sources than it is to get new links from the same sources you've been using. That means you're going to be responsible for a lot of outreach. Try to get featured in a diverse array of different publishers to maximize the value of your campaign.

● Work with a new link building agency. If you're not super familiar with link building, or if you don't have the internal talent to handle it, consider working with a link building agency. If you're already working with an agency and you're not satisfied with their results, consider working with a new agency.

● Master your written content. Content is at the heart of every link building campaign. You'll be using it on your own website as a kind of anchor for all your external links; exceptionally written content should naturally attract some links of its own as well. You also need to master the guest posts you write for external publishers, maximizing your chances of getting published and helping to persuade new readers.

● Use new mediums. Written content isn't the only content you should be producing. Videos, podcasts, and even still images can all be valuable for circulating your links and bringing more attention to your brand.

● Step up your publishing frequency. Building links too frequently can be a problem at the start of your campaign, but as you develop more of a reputation, you can comfortably step up your rate of publishing.

● Keep experimenting and improving. Finally, don’t stop experimenting and improving. There will always be new tactics to test and new angles to try.

With better links in place, your site will be much better supported, and you'll likely see a bigger and better stream of traffic. This is an upgrade that requires months, not hours, so try not to get too impatient if it takes a while to see results from your efforts. 

(Disclaimer - Brand Desk Content)