When it comes to getting a website noticed in Google’s algorithm and other search engine bots, backlinks and back-linking plays a crucial role. In simple terms, they act as votes for your content. There are many known methods for acquiring SEO backlinks, and any SEO Agency or CRO Company would know about this.
We’ve put together this one page whitepaper with all the back-linking tips in one place. It really is this simple in terms of knowledge (implementation though… is another challenge).
Top down, we’ve broken this into 4 stages, with an estimate of their authority score out of 100;
Quick – 2
Free – 5
Sponsored – 50
Newsworthy – 75
Aside from their authority score (see below), each has different benefits, effort and requirements for success. So here it goes– the well-known and tested methods for building backlinks.
This is basically a directory, folio or link submission site. You can consider social media posting, as long as you get a good spread (it isn’t just coming from your page with no click-through). There are tons of free directories, folio or slide-share websites, in nearly every space. They are easy to get on, but that also means they typically have a low authority ranking, 1-10 out of 100. Let’s round this value per link to 5, just so you can see how this ads up in the end.
Check out our portfolio on dribbble as an example:
This one has two options, as there are many creative ways to go about this;
Outreach – Reach out to to relevant websites that have content that could benefit from linking to your website (which can be a very lengthy process). If you got a website that is already ranking page 1 for some keywords, you’re already being hit up by other bloggers looking to post ‘content’ = backlinks on your website. To be successful at this, you need a good email script and a list of sites to hit up. A good success rate is around 10% – 20%, depending on how good and how personalised your email or social media outreach is. Essentially, this is digital cold-calling. The bigger the site, the better the authority ranking is. Let’s put this at a 5 average.
Another option is applicable when you already know people with ranking websites. Build your network of win–win, I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine relationship– putting content on each other’s site periodically is a great strategy. Some people build their own sites simply to rank on keywords (typically easy-to-win ones) that are category-aligned, just to pass through traffic. So while both ideas work, the latter one requires less effort. Let’s give it a 5 score average per link authority here.
Sponsored Backlinks – This is the pay-as-you-go model, i.e. an advertorial. These are websites that allow you to get a backlink if you provide reasonable quality content for their site. The price? It usually varies from around $200-$500 per article and backlink. This isn’t bad, and there are some great authoritative sites out there, well above a score of 50. A good example is SmartCompany, but there are many others who are doing this. You can choose to pay less or more, and there are annual ‘deals’ with no guarantee of the number of articles you get.
Do you have something really newsworthy ? Then you can use news media aggregators and send your press release. Cost varies and there are no guarantee that anyone will pick your press release up off the feed, which is why you have to have a compelling, newsworthy headline and content. For example, in this one we did with Electriq.com, the headline “Your Car Will Run on Water” was a huge hook – It generated globally over 100 magazines and news stories, an enormous amount of backlinks in one week, not to mention follow-up articles and PR stories in the following months. But without a well-crafted newsworthy press release, you’ll just burn money here. Pricing varies per region, but expect to pay between 1k for a country or region (Australia or APAC) and around 10k globally.
At the same level, there are growth-hacking strategies on how to leap frog SEO and get backlinks from other authority sources like government (.gov) and education (.edu) domains too. If you’re in these verticals, you should always be thinking of gaining organic backlinks from these sources.
When building backlinks, you will also need to consider the following as gaining backlinks from a bad or blacklisted website can harm your SEO progress;
There is no hard and fast rule on how many backlinks you need for #1 rankings. But here is the comparison from the options above– you’ve probably worked this out already, but you’ll need about 40 of the 2 score authority backlinks or 20 x 5 score blog backlinks to be as good as the one newsworthy story in a national newspaper at 80-90. So based on your business and content value proposition, you will have to work out where the best effort and investment should be placed. At Andmine, we push to produce around 5-10k worth of back-linking to make real impact in any particular vertical.
For more info on this article or how to develop a detailed SEO / keyword strategy to support back-linking, hit us up on social media or get in touch.