5 Strategies for Building High-Quality Backlinks

Are you looking to level up your organic search in 2024 by incorporating link-building into your SEO strategy? You’re not the only one! Recent online searches show:

• ‘Backlink building’ has increased by 2000% over the last three months
• ‘Link building strategies’ has risen by 267% over the last three months
• ‘How to get quality backlinks’ has seen a 200% uplift over the last three months

If you want to leverage the power of backlinks and stand out from your competitors, you need to know how to gain the highest-quality backlinks possible. What do we mean by high quality? Your backlinks need to be:

• Relevant to your website and niche
• Authoritative
• Trustworthy
• Unique
• Natural

If you are paying for backlinks that are spammy or on irrelevant websites, this could negatively impact your website’s rankings on the SERPs! So, let’s look at 5 strategies you can use to gain high-quality backlinks for your website.

#1 Identify unlinked brand mentions

Our first strategy for building a high-quality backlink profile is, arguably, our easiest one because the hard work has already been done for you! The chances are, that your brand will have been mentioned by other websites already, but your website may not have been linked to. You could expect to find your brand mentioned in:

• Round up articles e.g. ‘The 10 best digital marketing companies of the year’
• Case studies and testimonials
• Publications that have covered your Digital PR campaign but are not linked to your website

You can find unlinked brand mentions by searching on Search Engines such as Google, or you could use backlink tools such as Buzzsumo, Moz or Ahrefs.

Once you’ve identified your unlinked brand mentions, what next? It’s simple, reach out to the publication or business that runs the website and ask if they could include a link to your website! 

When asking for a link:

• Be polite and professional - if they have covered your outreach campaign, thank them before asking for a link to be added
• Ensure you include a link to the page where you’ve found your brand mention so that they don’t have to locate it themselves

If you monitor your brand mentions regularly, you’ll be able to notice any unlinked mentions as soon they come in!
 

#2 Leverage the power of Reactive PR

Another way that you can gain high-quality backlinks is through Reactive PR. You might be wondering, what does Reactive PR involve? By monitoring the news cycle and staying up to date with the latest trends, you have a unique opportunity to provide your expertise to journalists when they need it, gaining both coverage and backlinks. 

An example of successfully leveraging Reactive PR can be seen with Pet Insurance provider Everypaw Pet Insurance, following a viral TikTok trend we collaborated on an idea whereby their in-house vet offered her expert opinion on the trend and spoke out about its dangers. This led to 39 pieces of coverage and 29 backlinks from authoritative and relevant publications:

When using Reactive PR to gain backlinks, be sure to:

• Stand out from the crowd - journalists get hundreds of emails a day, and they can receive just as many responses to requests they put out looking for expert comments. If you want to stand a chance at being mentioned, you need to give insightful, authoritative comments, backed up by data.
• Only jump on trends that are relevant to your niche - As we’ll talk about in strategy #4, one of the most important things about gaining high-quality backlinks is that they’re relevant!
• Build relationships with journalists - if a journalist loves your comments and you’ve been helpful, they are more likely to come back to you if they need another comment on a similar topic. This follows the behavioural principle ‘reciprocity’, whereby people inherently want to help those who have helped them in some way.

#3 Create useful resources

If you want to gain backlinks from other websites, whether they’re media outlets, industry publications or any type of website, you need to be offering something that no other website is able to offer - you won’t be linked to by authoritative, reliable websites for no reason.

This is particularly crucial if you’re running an outreach campaign because you’ll be pitching to publications that receive hundreds of campaigns every day. If yours doesn’t stand out or offer something valuable, you will be overlooked for another campaign.

So, how can you get the attention and, most importantly, backlinks from other websites? Create a detailed, useful resource that has been informed by data. According to the behavioural principle ‘payment for effort’, people are more likely to place higher value on services if they see the amount of effort put into them. By following this logic, publications are more likely to showcase your resources and link to your website over your competitors if they can see you have put in the most amount of effort and detail.

Examples of resources you could produce include:

• Surveys or reports
• Infographics with top tips
• Brainteasers, quizzes, puzzles, games - Did you know…the behavioural principle ‘gamification’ follows the idea that people love to play games and will go to great lengths to play them even if they only win points?
• Free tools

Want to see a useful tool in action? We have created a SERP simulator tool to help businesses ensure their meta titles and descriptions are optimised for SEO:

#4 Gain backlinks from relevant, authoritative pages

Reactive PR and useful resources are both fantastic ways to secure coverage and gain vital backlinks, however, this only works if the publications you’re getting links from are relevant, high-quality and trustworthy.

What do we mean by this? Firstly, if you’re gaining backlinks through an outreach campaign, the publication you’re gaining coverage from should be relevant to your business. For example, if you are a charity that has released an infographic about increasing donations, getting coverage in a gardening magazine isn’t relevant to your website or your company as a whole. This has several implications:

• Backlinks essentially act as a vote of confidence in your website (or a specific page). If the website linking to your page is completely irrelevant, the backlink won’t necessarily be viewed by Search Engines in the same light as websites with much higher relevance, for example, a charity magazine.
• As much as gaining backlinks is important, Digital PR campaigns can also increase brand awareness so it’s important to ensure your campaigns are being seen by your target audience - in this example, your target audience isn’t people who love gardening.
• It’s also worth pointing out that if your outreach campaign is completely irrelevant to the publications you’re targeting, you’re unlikely to gain coverage or backlinks in the first place.

Alongside being relevant, your target websites need to be authoritative and trustworthy. As we’ve mentioned, backlinks indicate that your page is relevant, can be trusted and, ultimately, worth displaying to users. Therefore, the more reliable and authoritative the websites linking to your pages are, the more powerful the backlinks.

How can you tell whether a website is trustworthy, relevant and authoritative? Use Majestic SEO, which gives every website a Trust Flow score and Citation Flow score. TF measures how trustworthy a page is based on the quality of its backlink profile, while CF measures how influential a page is based on the backlink profile. The higher the scores, the more relevant, powerful and reliable a website is deemed to be:

Want to learn more about the importance of targeting relevant publications, and how to increase your own website’s Trust Flow and Citation Flow? Take a look at our recent blog about how to build trust through Digital PR campaigns.

#5 Complete a competitor backlink analysis

Our last strategy for building high-quality backlinks is to take inspiration from your competitors. We all know that understanding what your competition is doing, and how they’re doing is vital in every aspect of your business, and it’s no different when it comes to building your backlink profile. 
How can a competitor analysis provide insight?

• Highlights which publications your competitors have gained backlinks from so that you can target them
• It can provide insight into how they’ve gained their backlinks, for example through paid-for guest posts or by full-scale Digital PR campaigns
• If your competitors have a poor backlink profile, it can show you which websites to avoid

Digging deeper into your competitors may give you inspiration for your next outreach campaign, help build your next press list, or give you confidence in your own backlink profile, depending on what you find!

The biggest question is, how can you find out what your competitor’s backlink profile looks like? Once again, Majestic SEO can support you with your competitor analysis:

When using Majestic SEO to conduct a competitor analysis, we suggest that you:

• Type in your competitor’s URL (and make sure you set it to ‘Root Domain’)
• On the left-hand side of the page, click on ‘backlinks’
• This will bring up the backlink profile for the URL you’ve chosen. You can then export this data and analyse it in any way that you wish
• When analysing it, pay attention to the publication, Trust Flow and Citation Flow
• You may choose to add notes as you’re analysing the backlinks that you can refer back to later, such as which links are particularly useful or how they’ve gained a particular link

Key Takeaways

By gaining high-quality backlinks for your website, you are proving to Search Engines and users that your pages are relevant, authoritative and trustworthy. As a result, your pages may be more likely to rank well on the SERPs and be seen by more potential customers. To gain the highest-quality backlinks possible, you need to:

• Analyse your competitor’s backlink profile to identify backlink opportunities
• Ensure you’re targeting high-quality, reliable websites and publications
• Create useful, engaging resources that add value, such as tools or infographics
• Look at your existing unlinked brand mentions and reach out to reclaim backlinks
• Reach out to relevant journalists looking for expert comments 

Do you want to unleash the power of outreach and link-building? Our Digital PR experts are here to support your business with leveraging backlinks to improve organic rankings and brand awareness, as part of your wider SEO strategy. Get in touch with us today to find out more about how we can help your website level up its backlink game!