Backlink-building is huge for SEO. As one of the top-ranking factors in Google's algorithm, building the right backlinks can make or break your online visibility and, in turn, your website's organic traffic.
So how can you strengthen your efforts to build and manage links for long-term success?
Employ a more dynamic backlink management strategy.
What is dynamic backlink management?
Dynamic backlink management means taking a holistic approach to link-building.
Rather than building links only one month at a time, you can operate a strategy that promotes constant growth and prioritizes healthy links over cheap ones. By doing that, you'll keep your SEO strong for the long run.
Here are four tips that can help you be more dynamic with your backlinks.
1. Know how to analyze the authority of domains
To get the best backlinks for your SEO, you need to know how to analyze your prospects.
When analyzing backlinks, trust signals are especially important. Generally speaking, the more trustworthy a website is to Google, the stronger signals their outbound links will give to other websites.
There are a lot of factors that lead to Google trusting a website's authority. The age of a domain, its overall traffic, incoming backlinks, and organic traffic can all impact how Google rates a site.
To gauge the authority of a website, you can use a score like Authority Score on Semrush.
Authority score estimates how much authority a site has in the eyes of Google by considering...
- organic search data
- traffic data
- backlink data
The higher the score, the more trustworthy the site, and the more impact their links will have on your SEO.
2. Analyze your competitors' most linked-to content
You'll also need to nail down a quick flow for investigating the competition in your space.
In SEO, you can infer that what works well for a close competitor could also work well for your website. So, you should find the most linked-to content in your niche and learn from it.
For example, does your competitor have a blog with lots of posts that gain backlinks? Do they have popular region-specific landing pages or landing pages for certain products or services?
Look at their landing pages up and ask yourself...
- What problems does this content solve/address?
- Are there images and videos or interactive elements?
- Is this webpage a resource that you would link to from your site? If so, why?
- Does this page have a friendly tone, or something more serious?
- What are the websites sending links to this content, and why would they link to it?
Repeat this process for as many competitors as you can to get ideas for your website strategy.
3. Automate your outreach, but customize it, too
To be dynamic in your outreach, you'll need to balance automation and personalizing your pitches.
A full link-building workflow can consist of a lot of steps, but you're generally looking something like this:
- Research your niche and find prospective websites that would potentially link to your site.
- Gather contact information for those prospects.
- Craft emails to reach out to each website pitching why it would make sense for them to link to your site.
- Follow up with those that don't get back to you and reply to those that do to work out agreements involving a link to your website.
Each step can take a lot of time if you don't have help, so here are some tools to help you automate your outreach:
- Hunter.io helps you find people's email addresses—up to 50 per month for free.
- Streak is a free Gmail extension that lets you track email opens so you can tell who has opened your emails and who has not.
- Semrush Link Building Tool gathers prospects for you based on your SEO target keywords and lets you automate outreach emails and follow-ups from one place.
Of course, automation will save you time. But don't sacrifice personalization for speed. For every email, you should still check that you have the recipient's name and that your email is actually relevant and courteous to them. No one likes getting emails that feel like spam.
4. Audit your existing link profile to avoid a Google penalty
Auditing an existing link profile to avoid any negative signals from potentially malicious links is crucial in today's SEO environment. Even websites that have been around for a while may have links from spammy websites that could in turn lead to a Google penalty.
What are some common signs that a link could be spammy or toxic? According to our 2020 study on Google Penalties among 830+ websites, these were the top causes of penalization:
- Sponsored or paid links
- Guest posts & press releases
- PBNs (private blog networks) & link networks
- User-generated spam
- Web directories
- Pure spam
If you need to remove your website's association with a malicious backlink, you can either reach out and ask for link removals from the website owners or create a disavow list to disavow your toxic links completely via Google's Disavow Tool.
A disavow list can be submitted to Google and the search engine will automatically disregard your site's connection to those malicious links when it is crawling your site and deciding where to rank your site in search. In turn, you can avoid a costly penalty from Google.
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As digital competition and innovation continue to grow, dynamic backlink management will soon become one of the most important facets of every business's marketing strategy.
So, what are you waiting for? Get started today and see how you can grow your visibility with dynamic backlink management!