Earning high-quality backlinks is very crucial for SEO and remains very challenging to get. A link in today’s day and age is more than just a link, it’s a vote of confidence and a recommendation. It can be challenging for all businesses, especially small businesses and startups to get high-quality backlinks. Any digital marketing service provider will tell you that backlinks are crucial for SEO and all businesses should always endeavor to get high-quality backlinks to their website, better and faster than their competition.
Of the 200 known factors for ranking on Google, backlinks are among the top 8, so its importance is indisputable and the same will be reiterated by any white-label digital marketing agency worth its salt. Hence this piece has been put together to enlist the 8 creative and unique ways in which you earn backlinks in 2024 and beyond. Let’s get started!
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1. Reclaim Unlinked Mentions
Among all the tactics and ways out there, this has to be one of the easiest and also the quickest way to earn high-quality backlinks. You just need to use tools like Google Alerts to monitor who is mentioning your brand and where.
For more detailed insights into your mentions, you can try other tools like BuzzSumo, Mention, or Ahrefs Content Explorer. If and when you do so, you will figure out that many times the person mentioning your brand, product or service hasn’t included a link back to your website. Upon discovering such unlinked mentions, you can reach out to the author and request them for proper link attribution.
This tactic works well and results in a win-win for both parties concerned as you obtain links and publishers give their readers a much better experience. This tactic is creative in the sense that it can be used to reclaim links for mentions that are related to your brand.
Such mentions can include the events being organized by you, the names of your employees, research reports, and so on. Other ways of earning backlinks with this method include looking out for interviews with your company’s executives and then requesting a link to their profile page on your website.
2. Get Contextual Links
You may have noticed that some articles feature additional resources, which are recommended either in the text or inside a “Read more” section. Such links are called contextual links and search engines consider them more important than other links elsewhere on the page.
If and when you manage to get featured in the “Read more” sections, it can prove immensely beneficial for boosting your SEO. For getting such links you will need to put in a fair bit of effort to find articles related to the content that you’re promoting. If and when you find such articles, you need to reach out to the author to pitch your idea and impress upon them the importance of your content and why it deserves to be featured.
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3. Update Old Content
Look for articles and research reports that haven’t been updated in a while and check how many backlinks the content piece has. If you find that a lot of publications are referencing that content, then you surely have something substantial to work with.
You can create a fresh piece replete with more relevant data and then you can reach out to people who’ve linked to the old content to let them know about the new updated version.
This strategy is very effective and on most occasions, you will be able to see results in a matter of weeks or days in the form of backlinks and social media shares. Further, the relationships that you build in this way can be leveraged for collaborating on projects that can help you grow your brand and traffic.
4. Build Free Tools
Another great way of earning backlinks and generating new leads is by creating free tools, like calculators or template generators. You can figure out which tools get the most amount of backlinks through basic search engine queries.
Then your goal should be on creating something similar but preferably better in terms of design or customizable options. Look for tools, templates, and generators in your industry and then go about making something better, which can prove to be a very good way of earning links and generating new leads.
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5. Publish Ultimate Guides
Ultimate guides are another great way to get backlinks. As their names imply, they are ultimate guides and they are created to be the most comprehensive resource on a given topic. Everything is covered in the ultimate guide and no one needs to go elsewhere to know more about the subject matter.
Ultimate guides can help you in getting a lot of backlinks because bloggers can reference a concept in your content that they mention on their blogs and content pieces. The ultimate guide can encompass everything, right from beginner issues to advanced topics to fringe cases. Such guides can prove to be an excellent resource for getting traffic and organic links.
6. Utilize Directories
Directories are still as relevant as they used to be some years ago. They remain one of the best ways to improve your local SEO and help prospective consumers in finding your products and services. Directories are a very good idea but you need to be careful of spammy directories as they can prove to be counterproductive to your efforts and end up harming your SEO performance.
You can try to get yourself listed on some of the most popular and extensively used directories of our times like Google My Business, Yelp, and TripAdvisor. Over and above such directories, you should also try to get your business listed in general directories and the ones relevant to your industry and niche.
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7. The Broken Link Building Method
This is one of the most effective link-building strategies of all time and experts of a digital marketing reseller program would surely endorse the same. All you need to do is scour the internet for broken links and notify the website owner when you find them.
This method proves effective if you try to find relevant pages and resource pages that have a lot of outbound links. Make sure that you find pages in your niche because then you will have something valuable to offer to the website or blog owner, in case of a broken link. You can download a Google Chrome extension called Check My Links to look for broken links.
8. Become A Source for Other Publishers
You can use your expertise and unique data to become a source for bloggers. That way, every time you are quoted, you will be able to earn high-domain authority backlinks. That’s not all, if and when you can establish yourself as an authoritative source in your niche, you will be able to increase your brand awareness. And the best part of the entire exercise is that it isn’t exactly rocket science.
All you have to do is subscribe to HARO (Help A Reporter Out) which will connect you with bloggers who are looking for contributors. You will get emails from HARO enlisting queries from writers in your industry. Pick the ones that are relevant to your niche or area of expertise and then respond as quickly as you can. The odds aren’t all that bad either. You can have an article published in under four weeks and around two out of 10 answers get picked up by HARO.
Final Thoughts
There you go. Those were the top 8 creative ways of getting backlinks in 2020 and beyond. If and when you use these tactics with the right kind of tools, you will have a higher chance of success. If you follow some of the ways as enlisted above and still aren’t getting the links that you desire, then you can hire the digital marketing services of an offshore digital marketing agency or a 360-degree digital marketing agency.
