1. Check the backlinks of your direct competitors
Since link building helps your site rank higher, we can assume that sites higher in the SERPs have a lot of good backlinks.
The same goes for your competitors who rank higher than you.
And if there are a lot of authoritative sites linking to it, wouldn’t it be nice if they linked to you too?
Of course I would.
Find these sites and you can start building links too, right?
Not too fast.
Step 1: Find out your true competitors
First, you need to know what sites are your online competitors. After all, you don’t want to waste your time trying to beat sites that aren’t even stealing your customers.
Here’s how to identify a direct competitor:
Their site serves the same purpose as yours and targets the same audience. It ranks for the same keywords you want to rank for. Your business operates in the same area as yours. They have a higher rank than you.
To start looking for your competitors, open WebCEO’s Dangerous Competitors Tool.
Screenshot from WebCEO, March 2024
Click the Settings button and visit these tabs:
Keywords: enter your ranking keywords there.
Competitors: if you already know some of your competitors, add their URLs.
Search engines: add the search engines you want to rank for. Local business owners will also want to select locations to narrow down the results.
Click Save and the tool will generate a table of sites that belong to your potential competitors. Visit these sites to make sure they are really your competitors.
Step 2: Check your backlinks
It’s time for the next step: checking your backlinks Competitor Backlink Spy.
Screenshot from WebCEO, March 2024
Open Settings and enter your competitors’ URLs in the Competitors tab. Press Save and the tool will list all your competitors’ backlinks, specifically the pages that link to your competitors.
And now all you have to do is to find promising domains among these link pages. Visit these sites and find the ones that are likely to backlink your site as well, once you’ve created link-worthy content and made your case to these sites.
By the way, your competitors can also be your backlink donors. Feel free to link to their sites too!
2. Essential websites for link building
Before other sites start linking to yours, you can build a few powerful backlinks yourself. There are websites for this exact purpose:
Carefully choose sites that are relevant to your niche and create listings for your business there. You now have multiple authorized sites on your backlink profile.
Also, other website owners can find you there too. Exposure to others is the first step to getting even more backlinks.
And if your site is already well-known, you can try to create a Wikipedia page for it. Although Wikipedia links are non-trackable, the website itself has significant authority and may share some of it with you.
3. Run a blog and write articles on relevant topics
To get backlinks, you want to have link-worthy content on your website – the more, the better. Write about many different, but related, topics about your niche and your business. For example:
Your products. Industry news. Interesting case studies. Recent events in your company. Interviews with customers and partners.
The options are limitless. And the more you know about your work, the more you can share with your visitors. Curious writers attract curious readers. Go crazy with your pen!
And when you create your content, there are a few other things you can do to help it get more backlinks:
Optimize it for keywords. The higher your content appears in search, the more likely users will find it and link to their own content if they need to. use WebCEO Keyword Research Tool to find search queries that your target audience uses most often.
List your sources, with links. If you refer to other sources for your content, listing them will make you seem more credible, especially if those sources are also good. And users love to link to credible sites.
Link to other pages on your site. Help your visitors find all the content they might need. Navigation and footer bars are essential as they have links to your home page, FAQs, contact information pages and more. However, blog articles on related topics should also link to each other, in case users need more details.
Screenshot from WebCEO, March 2024
4. Write guest articles
Good old guest blog! The tried and tested method of building links. Write an article for another site and include a link to yours – what could be easier?
Of course, there is a catch. First you need to take two important steps:
Find relevant sites whose backlinks would be of great help to you; Convince them to accept a guest post.
You know how to find backlink donors: with Competitor Backlink Spy. Local bloggers, newspapers and magazines will not be able to hide from you.
What about the second step? Your best bet here is email communication.
Pick a promising site whose contact information is available and send them an email like this:
Hi Susan!
My name is John Doe and I write for {Example Blog}. Nice too meet you! I’ve been following your blog for a while and have found your recent series of posts on networking very helpful.
Anyway, I am writing to you because I have quite a bit of familiarity with the subject matter on your blog and would love to contribute if you happen to be open to new guest authors. I’ve been brainstorming some topics that I think would be a good match for your blog:
{Topic Idea #1} {Topic Idea #2} {Topic Idea #3}
If you have different topics in mind, I will be happy to write them too. I appreciate your time and look forward to working together.
Health!
John Doe
If you don’t get a response, you can try again, with different text indicating that this is not your first attempt.
Be polite and remember that it’s meant to benefit both of you. Good luck!
5. Turn unlinked mentions into links
If you’ve been in business for a while, people are bound to talk about you. In their places too.
This is the easiest way to make backlinks. Someone has already mentioned your company on their site – that’s most of the work already done! All that’s left is to add a link.
Simply contact the person who can edit the page (via email or social media) and ask them to insert your site’s URL in the mention. done and done
Finding unlinked mentions is even easier: just use a tool like WebCEO Buzz Web Monitoring.
Screenshot from WebCEO, March 2024
Just add your brand name to the settings and the tool will find pages with unlinked mentions of it.
6. Provide an excellent user experience
Who would want to link to a page that barely works? Not the people giving backlinks, that’s for sure. Even normal users will run if a page refuses to work or even just offends their eyes.
On the other hand, there are only positives in pages that provide good UX:
User activity that leads to conversions (potentially site-wide). Positive customer reviews. Increased Google ranking. And new backlinks, of course.
Imagine a perfect website of your dreams, or simply remember the best website you’ve ever visited before. Then do the same on your site (or even better, if you can).
What is the recipe for the best user experience?
Useful and high quality content. Being helpful is more important than ever thanks to Google’s Helpful Content update. Your page can be informative and optimized for the best keywords, but if it doesn’t really help your visitors, it’s a big problem.
High quality visuals. Users love engaging images and videos, especially when they not only inform, but also entertain. Make sure your images load correctly! If any of them don’t, find them with WebCEO Technical Audit Tool and replace them.
No site errors. Broken images are just one potential problem that can ruin your site. Scan it for all kinds of errors with the same technical audit tool and fix them as soon as possible.
Screenshot from WebCEO, March 2024
Fast loading speed. A slow loading page is a useless page: if visitors leave, nothing happens. Test your site pages with WebCEO Speed Optimization Tool and follow their tips to make them load faster.
Mobile friendly. Smartphones drive just as much traffic as computers, so your site should be optimized for all screen sizes. Scan your site with the mobile optimization tool and follow their recommendations to be more mobile-friendly.
User accessibility. Make sure your site can be easily used by everyone, regardless of their physical ability. Test your site with a tool like this one EquallyAI’s ARIA to see where you can make improvements.
7. Get rid of harmful backlinks
Next, make sure your backlink profile doesn’t hurt your site. What kind of backlinks can do this?
Purchased backlinks. Spam inbound links. Links from irrelevant sites. Links from unauthorized sites.
If Google detects too many backlinks like this on your profile, it may consider your site unreliable and lower its search ranking. It may even incur a manual action.
You can’t let bad backlinks pile up and get you down.
Scan your backlink profile with WebCEO’s Toxic Pages Tool.
Screenshot from WebCEO, March 2024
By default, it looks for link pages that are obviously spam: those with tons of outbound links and a low trust level. If you want, adjust the tool’s search criteria to your liking in the settings. You can even exclude specific domains from the tool’s search if you trust them.
Screenshot from WebCEO, March 2024
Once you have your list of toxic backlinks, start getting rid of them. Your options are:
Remove backlinks from these pages yourself. Ask someone who can edit these pages to do so. Generate a disallow list on Toxic Pages and submit it Google Disavow.
Screenshot from WebCEO, March 2024
Do you want to see points 8-24?
The full guide is available exclusively to WebCEO users. Register for free now and get your link building guide with 24 different tactics that will see you through 2024 and beyond!
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