Competitive spaces are competitive for a reason.
Money. mullah money
This works in two ways:
A lot of money to be made, with a lot of demand and lucrative payouts, but… Plus, a lot of money that your competitors have to spend money to outdo and beat you.
They can spend it on hard costs, like having CPCs take care of the roof.
Or in soft costs like smart operators who are brash and ambitious – they produce more and better marketing assets to create a competitive moat to keep you out.
Very good content is an example. But then the other is the links.
Here’s why most brands fail at link building and how to build high-quality links month after month after month.
Mistake 1: Thinking you don’t need to proactively build links
For sure. I guess if you’re in a low to no competition space, like niche pet food sites or something, you might not need to build links for small, long tail keywords.
But guess what? There’s a reason there’s “no competition” (read: there’s also bottom money or not).
Take any big, competitive, juicy and profitable space like finance.
I took a list of 1,000 popular finance keywords and grouped them based on the following Ahrefs data:
Keyword difficulty range. Referring domains per page (for top SERP).
What you will see is true for other similar spaces. There is a bell curve.
While some keywords aren’t too difficult, and others are incredibly difficult, most fall somewhere in the middle.
This means, on average, you’re looking at a keyword difficulty range of ~30-60 with ~50-200 referring domains per page.
Let me say it again:
~50-200 referring domains (or backlinks). per page
So if you can’t reliably build/attract/acquire 50-200 external links for every single article or page you want to rank for, you will never in a million years compete in a profitable space.
In competitive spaces, you need quality and quantity to succeed.
Take a big, juicy business keyword like “how to make a website”. Check out this SERP:
The lowest DR on this page is 76, while four of them are over 90.
The lowest number of referring domains on each page is 56, while the average is “a few hundred” or more.
So, as you would expect always compete with these brands? These DR ranks? Or the number of referring domains to which one page on your site?
The answer? you don’t
Not unless you can scale both the quality and quantity of links. One against the other is not good enough.
Not in a red ocean bloodbath like this.
Mistake 2: Leaving links at random (compared to successful systematization)
Medium and small marketers believe that links will magically appear on their doorstep.
If you build it, they will come. They say.
Ah, to be so young and naive again. Maybe if you’re HubSpot, Coca-Cola, or American Express, that might be true.
But for all other mere mortals?
It won’t happen.
Let’s take another lucrative example, the business keyword “best project management software.”
Ahrefs estimates that you’ll need ~273 links just to compete for the first page.
now These are just estimates.
Many other factors, such as the quality of those links or your domain rating or topic authority, etc., make you need more (or less).
But the point is solid.
Think ~273 links will just magically appear on your very commercial product comparison page?
Ha! Great opportunity.
So instead of blatantly trying to buy links like a fool, you need to find out what other potential link partners might want or need in return.
This usually comes down to three things…
Money: Consider a content site that needs advertisers.
Content/Activities: Consider a brand that needs creative assets.
visibility: Think of an influencer that your audience needs.
In other words, what are your own assets or core competencies that you can leverage to help someone else first.
Before asking to return the favor.
Then you will get links. Lots and lots of them. Consistently.
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Mistake 3: Using the wrong link building tactics for the wrong types of links
Okay, so you know you need to build links at this point.
They won’t just magically appear, unfortunately.
But here’s the problem:
Most marketers still try to apply the wrong link tactics at the wrong time. Which limits their success, wastes resources and, once again, keeps them poor.
Cold outreach is a perfect example. In most industries, outside of the unsophisticated and broken, cold diffusion usually only works at the lowest DR (read: smallest) sites.
How about high DR (read: big) sites? You need warm tactics, a foot in the door, a referral or something they need.
Where people go wrong is doing the wrong tactic at the wrong time.
They attempt cold outreach on large sites while wasting precious time looking for warm leads on small sites.
Instead, you should think of link building tactics or strategies as a sliding scale.
Take the small DR or DA sites on the left, with the larger DR or DA sites on the right.
In between, within the ranges, there are generally different strategies you can use.
For example, break down the following DR/DA intervals:
Less than 30: These will come naturally if you are doing your job properly. So don’t bother actively pursuing.
~30-60: Here’s your cold spotlight, where smaller, less experienced webmasters and site owners will naturally respond and link.
~60-90: The bored, knowledgeable people who run these sites have a higher level and have seen all your cold outreach templates before, so prioritize giving them creative assets or content or trading collaborations to scratch each other.
More than 90 years: At the top of the top, you need personal relationships, a strong network or a large budget for content syndications, sponsorships or donations, and more.
Is this perfect? Are these universal rules? No.
But they are mostly accurate for most places in the most competitive spaces. Most of the time.
Mistake 4: Scattergun Link Building vs Duplicating 2-3 Scalables
Marketers ruin everything.
Grab list posts like this one. Always a classic. You never go out of style.
Until marketers everywhere ruin the format by churning out giant list posts that are literally useless.
The “1,093,394,560 link building tactics” posts are the worst.
Because not only are they wrong, they actually give you a false sense of belief.
No, you don’t need a few thousand different link building tactics. You don’t even need a dozen.
You only need ~2-3 legit ones to get started.
And then you have to double up as often as humanly possible.
Take Candor, which struck gold during the pandemic with its hiring freeze database (that was OG-layoffs.fyi)…
Which was then picked up by major media outlets, such as VentureBeat:
Now, step into those shoes.
You have literally hit a link building gold mine with proprietary data + linkable assets.
Should you now switch gears for some classic 404 and broken outreach emails?
Of course not!
Go back to the well and keep churning out new and related proprietary data + linkable assets, as fast as possible, until you drop to the keyboard.
This is how you earn in link building.
No chasing shiny things that are overdone or clichéd or worn out or commoditized.
Mistake 5: Prioritizing the wrong pages at the wrong times
Is true.
Big brands are ranking for more and more things in categories they seemingly have no business ranking in, with fewer and fewer links required.
It’s right? No.
But is this the real world we all live in and compete in? Yes.
We can complain and point fingers. Or we can double.
Big brands don’t need to link to low-competition pages often because their topical authority + content quality and internal links often help them crush smaller competitors.
Despite this…
The other thing that big brands understand is how to become a big brand. Meaning: How to prioritize link building strategies by link goals i pages of your site.
For example:
Home page: Brand building! A rising tide lifts all boats, so brand recognition should consistently be a priority for the rest of time.
Commercial pages/products/services: Hardly anyone (without) links to these “naturally” (see point 2 above). So you have to be creative and help others see the value or get creative and make them scratch their backs so you can scratch theirs.
Pillar pages: Focus on the most competitive query on a focused, spoken content website, usually with some commercial intent, and then spread the love with internal linking to secondary pages.
Now, what don’t you see up there? Links to long-tail pages, usually of the TOFU type.
Because?
Resource allocation. Big brands focus on these three categories above, and if done right, can build topical authority and use internal linking to naturally rank the longer tail, less commercial stuff.
Are you a new or small site? Then yes, you have to start somewhere. This probably means links to long tail stuff.
But professionals go beyond this point as soon as possible.
They add all the points we’ve made here and focus on both high-quantity and high-quality link building strategies to these key pages to scale in a fraction of the time the hobbyists do.
This is your challenge.
This is why link building is hard. But also why it’s so worth it if done right.
And that’s what separates the pros from the amateurs who routinely make these same five mistakes.
Start building links like the pros
Link building is often misunderstood.
At one end of the spectrum, people think it’s illegal. Don’t worry, it isn’t.
However, on the other hand, they simply think they don’t need it. It’s not true either.
The truth, like most things in life, is actually somewhere in the middle.
This nuance is what separates the professionals from everyone else. That’s why they can constantly grow small places into big ones, time after time, as the song says.
They understand how to leverage the right tactics, at the right time, from the right places, to get the right types of links, on the right pages on their site.
There are no tricks or gimmicks or silver bullets or hoping, wishing and praying that things will work out, which is what fans do.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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