How to Get Backlinks: 15 Best Strategies in 2023

Credibility has a crucial role in marketing. It's better to have another person endorse you than to try to sell your reputation. Many search engine algorithms use backlinks, which are linkages from one website to another, to determine rankings. By linking to your website, another website owner is saying that your page is valuable and that your domain is an expert on the subject of the post. This acts as a vote of confidence.

Understanding how to obtain backlinks is crucial to search engine optimization (SEO) since it raises the SERP ranking of your website and generates a consistent flow of visitors. In reality, there are probably thousands, if not millions, of websites that are quite identical to yours. How do search engines decide which results to display on page one?

Due to this, ecommerce SEO is extremely beneficial to retailers in a market where sponsored advertisements are becoming more costly.

Studies reveal a strong correlation between a website's backlink and organic traffic. Additionally, link building is an enduring strategy: For the next five years, the vast majority of SEO professionals predict that Google will continue to employ backlinks as a ranking factor.

Therefore, learning how to get links for your website is essential.

How to get backlinks: 15 ways

Now that you are aware of how crucial backlinks are, how can you acquire them?

1. Be a resource for journalists

Sources for stories are something that journalists are constantly seeking.

Find journalists who cover subjects related to your website. There's a good possibility you'll be featured and receive a backlink if they're writing about anything related to your areas of expertise. Owners of e-commerce beauty businesses could, for instance, desire to engage with journalists who write for magazines like Grazia or Cosmopolitan that their target market reads. Locate the journalist most likely to want your knowledge on each publications About Us page.

Get on the journalist's radar after you have your list. Join their social media channels and get in touch to offer to contribute your knowledge. They probably receive hundreds of direct messages every day, so keep it brief and to the point. Tell them what you do, what makes you different, and how your advice will benefit their readers.

What's best? Logos from well-known periodicals may significantly increase trust/social proof on your ecommerce website. The “featured in” logo wall provides new website visitors with trust in the legitimacy of your items, which may boost sales page conversions by up to 34%.

While backlinks from The New York Times may appear to be out of reach right now, start with smaller, local media and work your way up to major news sites.

2. Use HARO or hire a HARO agency

Help a Reporter Out (HARO) services make it easier for website owners to connect with journalists who write for authoritative websites. Register as a source to receive alerts when journalists are looking for contributions that match your area of expertise.

HARO is the most well-known platform of its sort. As a result, journalists may be inundated with responses, making it difficult for your outreach email to stand out. Diversify your link-building strategy by using platforms that are comparable but less congested, such as:

• Help a B2B Writer
• SourceBottle
• Terkel
• Qwoted

By responding to journalist inquiries, SEO Consultant Blake Smith witnessed a 327% increase in organic search impressions year over year using this link-building strategy.

A rise in search impressions was seen by Blake Smith as a result of his backlink strategy.

3. Publish original research or data

If your website doesn't include material that other websites would like to connect to, getting backlinks is virtually difficult. Therefore, according to 40.7% of SEO experts, content marketing yields the best outcomes for passive link building.

Typical content marketing initiatives produce white papers, case studies, and blog articles. Utilize your content software to create research papers using confidential information. This will result in additional get backlinks because journalists won't be able to access your brand-produced study elsewhere.

Create and distribute surveys, then evaluate the results and inform your audience of them. It also doesn't have to be a lengthy report. Ask five to ten questions, then compile the answers into a brief report. The high effect, minimal effort!

Katherine Boyarsky, Co-founder of CXD Studio

Using this strategy, Breeze‘s director of communications, Mike Brown, released 16 data-driven reports in a single year.

To get the media and reputable websites to highlight the findings and connect to meetbreeze.com, Mike says he produces unique research reports, whether they come from surveys or publicly accessible data sources. “It's a cheap approach to get a tonne of high-quality backlinks and significantly raise the domain rating of your site.”

The content approach has been successful. “As of now, this has produced 133 unique backlinks for the modest survey cost of $1,350—$10 per backlink,” Mike claims about Breeze's study on remote employment.

Create an infographic that condenses the original data you gathered to earn bonus brownie points. To appeal to visual learners, website owners frequently incorporate infographics into their pages while providing a connection to the original resource, in this case, your website.

4. Create statistic roundup pages

In terms of statistics, you don't need to spend money on data production. Create a statistical roundup by gathering all of the already available data from different sources.

Journalists and writers frequently look for information to bolster their stories. Create a roundup page that gathers external information from independent sources to make their job easier. There's a good possibility the author won't link to the source, but your roundup page instead.

To find this data:

• Investigate data aggregator websites such as Statista or Foursquare.
• Consult industry periodicals like The Business of Fashion or eMarketer.
• Look up words like “new study reveals + [topic]” in Google News.

According to Holly Lawton, Sales and Marketing Head at Pearl Scan, “This method works exceptionally well since journalists are likely to connect back to data as a point of reference, and they constantly require current data.”

There isn't much work needed aside from creating the page itself, as long as you can send an initial outreach blast of your statistics page to pertinent journalists and then make sure that your page ranks highly.

5. Publish free tools

Gaining backlinks to your website will be simpler the more compelling the argument is for linking to it. Among the most compelling arguments are the free tools. Other website owners are fulfilling their objectives by connecting to your tools: and giving their readers value, even if it means sending them away. That contains:

• Templates
• Calculators
• Maps
• Checklists

Even though creating and maintaining free tools can be expensive (both in terms of time spent creating them and money spent on them), they can speed up your link-building efforts and provide a solution to the issue of how to generate backlinks, which can help new websites rank rapidly.

We'll look at a few illustrations of free tools and their backlink profiles now:

• Jones Road’s “What’s your shade?” quiz: 30+ websites, including Byrdie and Katie Couric Media, have contributed more than 50 backlinks.
• CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer: Almost 8,000 websites, including HuffPost, eBay, USA Today, and Inc., have provided 35,000 backlinks.
• Bankrate’s mortgage calculator: 330,000 websites, including Wikipedia, Investopedia, and The New York Times, have provided 57,000 backlinks to this page.

The backlink profile of CoSchedule's Headline Analyzer is outstanding.

6. Find unlinked mentions and ask for a backlink

There's a strong possibility that if your website has been there for a time, people have already heard of your company. Contact them and request that they convert that remark into a hyperlink.

To find unlinked brand mentions:

• Create a Google Alert for your brand name
• Search your brand name in Google News
• Use a premium brand mentions tool like BrandWatch or Mention

Find the website owner's contact details after you've located them. To convert the unlinked mention into a backlink, use the following template:

This list may be extensive depending on how well-established your brand is. Give the most authoritative domains top priority. On your website, they'll have the most SEO influence.

A low-effort, high-success backlink development approach is claimed to be unlinked mentions. You don't need to persuade a website owner to mention you; all that's needed is for them to convert a line of current content into a link.

Include an anchor text with an exact match that refers to your homepage when you ask for these backlinks. You increase the likelihood that your website will appear at the top of a search for your brand name and this anchor text in a search engine like Google.

7. Repair broken links

Links are changed, pages are destroyed, and material is substituted. Several factors might cause a backlink that was once stable to become broken. Keep up the link-building work you've been doing.

Find out whether links leading to your website are broken by using an SEO tool like Ahrefs. For everyone,

• Redirect the broken link to the next-best fully functioning page. Redirect the broken link to /category/t-shirts if /category/tees no longer exist but have 100 backlinks pointing to it to prevent users from being sent to a 404 error page.

• Ask the website owner to edit the link. Describe how it will help their readers. The user experience will suffer if you direct users to a faulty website.

For an attorney-client, Aaron Anderson, LinkPitch‘s link-building strategist, used the following broken-link-building strategy: “We found some pages in legal dictionaries that were broken, so we recreated the pages of those definitions and then did outreach to all the sites linking to the broken pages,” he says.

“The outcomes were extremely fantastic. Even without creating any links to important or lucrative sites, the site's organic traffic increased noticeably. Even if those pages had nothing to do with his field of expertise, it made sense for him to be able to define legal words because he was an attorney.

Point to a different page on your domain or an external website while you update broken links on your website. These subtle user experience elements have an impact on search engine rankings.

8. See who’s linking to your competitors

Looking for fresh opportunities for backlinks? You need only look at your rivals because many of them have already done the legwork for you. Links from websites that are closely connected to your topic are more likely to have a favorable impact on organic results, according to 72% of SEOs.

A website owner may choose to replace a competitor's link with yours if you produce something superior to what they have done, whether it be a better product, a free tool, or a piece of content.

Use a tool for SEO, such as Ahrefs, Moz, or Semrush, to enter the domain of your rival. Examine each backlink profile to see which often linked-to pages you can strengthen.

Put that into action, shall we? Consider that your rival's blog article on “how to manufacture your candles” has a few hyperlinks pointing towards it. nonetheless, it is just 1,000 words. You have a chance to compete for this backlink if your content team has the knowledge to elaborate on their blog article and provide readers with even more value.

Use this template to produce a superior piece of content and contact the website that is linked to your rival's inferior version:

9. Utilize your business network

Check your professional network to determine if there are any logical methods that your connections may link back to your website. Links do, after all, show relationships.

Pay close attention to the individuals in your network who:

• Social media influencers with substantial followings
• In your field, write for respectable and well-known websites
• working for educational establishments (and can secure a coveted .edu link)

Please send an email to every individual on your list and ask for a backlink in exchange for anything, such as a guest post, a free tool that would benefit their audience or a reciprocal backlink.

We're all having trouble with rankings and updates, so by presenting a chance for cooperation, you're not just creating the possibility of a long-term partnership; you're also providing a benefit that your partners can take advantage of. Estrella Alvarado, a Brafton SEO expert

Daniel Foley, a freelance SEO consultant, continues, “You should connect with and engage your audience in addition to building relationships with other specialists in your sector. This tactic won't provide results right away, but you can get started right away by introducing yourself by email, interacting with others on social media, and leaving sincere comments on other people's content.

Due to their close relationship, shared respect, and awe of your work, individuals in your network are extremely likely to link to your material.

10. Analyze existing referral traffic

Domain authority is provided by backlinks, but link building to your website has advantages beyond SEO. Through backlinks, you may get higher-quality traffic—users who genuinely care about your content or are more likely to convert.

Discover these link-building chances by using Google Analytics to examine current referral traffic. Do sponsored reviews, directories, or corporate news releases generally bring in the most visitors? Expand on what is effective.

Use Google Analytics segments to identify where your greatest converting consumers come from if you're conducting SEO for an ecommerce site. For instance, focus on influencer marketing as a backlink strategy that improves conversions and rankings if backlinks from influencers' blogs convert 20% better than those on newspapers like Vogue.

The top converting visitors from referring websites are shown in the Google Analytics referral source category.

11. Pitch inclusion on a resource page

Resource pages are published by website owners to increase subject relevancy and enhance user experience. For this reason, it is preferable to use a resource page to fulfill user intent than to forego the touchpoint entirely.

You must approach link development with an account-based relationship in an era where no one offers free links anymore. Regardless of the size of your business, your cold outreach should focus more on giving than getting. Spend some time learning what editors and publishers are searching for.

Alex Birkett, Co-founder of Omniscient Digital

Utilize resource pages to promote your goods, services, or free tools. For the best chance at obtaining a backlink, explain why their readers would find the information useful.

To help you get started, here is a short template:

12. Have your products reviewed

You have one advantage over non-ecommerce websites when developing backlinks for an online store: you may deliver merchandise to authors.

Reaching out to bloggers and offering them a free sample of your product is one of the most well-liked strategies for obtaining backlinks and generating high-quality traffic for your website. If you combine these written recommendations with an additional incentive, you will inevitably get links back to your website (such as an affiliate commission).

Through product reviews, Avec Drinks was able to gain backlinks from Food & Wine, a reputable source in its field.

Learn about the size distribution of the blogs in your topic. To get on the writers' radar, spend some time getting to know them and participating in their most recent postings. Once you've established a connection with the writers, introduce them to your offering.

Make a few simple adjustments to the outreach email template below before using it.

13. Join communities

Because everyone in communities shares the same passion, communities are hidden havens for link builders.

Search Facebook Groups, Slack channels, or Reddit forums for groups in your niche. Engage in social interaction by striking up discussions and giving feedback to others. Since more people are aware of your material, a rise in brand recognition frequently coincides with an increase in backlinks.

According to Jakub Rudnik, Head of Content at Scribe, “the biggest attitude change I've experienced with link building has been shifting away from cold outreach and towards link building and digital marketing forums.” “I spend around two hours every morning building links, which is more than my full-time link builders at previous firms generated in a week.

Because “these folks are online and actively looking to develop their links,” Jakub adopts this strategy. No more waiting for an email response or attempting to determine who the appropriate contact at a firm is. I can frequently establish a connection and create a backlink in a matter of minutes.

In our first two months of operation, I was able to develop 150+ do-follow referring domains for our brand-new blog, primarily by utilizing communities.

Through communities, Jakub Rudnik of Scribe created backlinks from 173 referring domains.

14. Be a podcast guest

With an estimated 424.4 million listeners globally, podcasts have seen an explosion in popularity in recent years. Profit from the craze by appearing as a guest on another podcast. It's customary to provide a link to the website of a podcast guest in the show notes.

I think that making an appearance on podcasts can help you promote your business and gain a new link. Despite your temptation, relevance to your problem is more important since engagement is what you seek above all else.

Martin Lassen, Founder and CEO of Grammarhow

The nicest thing about this link-building method is that it allows you to gain several links from a single audio appearance. Numerous podcasters republish their episodes on streaming platforms like Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts, where they also provide the show notes with your URL.

When companies sponsor the Diary of a CEO podcast, they receive backlinks from Spotify, including BlueJeans, Huel, and Crafted.

Choose sponsorship if you have more money than time. According to research, a 30-second podcast advertisement costs $18 to reach 1,000 listeners, while a 60-second shoutout costs $25. Include a backlink to your website in the agreement.

15. Don’t forget about internal links

Not all links your website should develop are backlinks from other websites. Internal links that lead from one page on your website to another inform search engines about the content and keywords that should be ranked for that page. It can also swiftly rank fresh websites.

Do a site: search for the subject you're writing about to uncover possibilities for internal linking. Locate a natural instance of that term and provide a link to your new article there.

For instance, it is possible to create internal links from previously published, already indexed material that points to this article:

Internal links are crucial to a blog's effective functioning, according to Gerrid Smith, Joy Organics ecommerce growth specialist.

“You are allowed to utilize your anchor texts, and they are driving link juice in your direction. A solid internal linking structure on your website may make it easier for visitors to browse it, improving their overall experience”.

Grow your backlink profile today

One of the most crucial components of any website's long-term SEO strategy is link development. You can only do so much to convince search engines that your store, content, and goods are excellent. You require the support of others. Backlinks provide just that purpose.

Each week, set a target and invest a few hours in link development. You'll get more domain authority as time goes on, rank for more keywords, and generate an increasing amount of daily organic traffic.