Link building: Preliminary research and analysis

April 23, 2017

To secure good quality backlinks you need to do some research, planning and a little upfront strategising:

Look for search opportunities in your niche – What high yield and long tail search terms do you think your existing pages, if keyword optimised, could potentially rank for? Get to know your niche in order to get the most out of any link building opportunities. Use keyword research to find the biggest search volume opportunities that you have a realistic shot at ranking for. After all rank potential plus high search volume equals the potential to capture real clicks.
Find your most linkable content assets – What content really helps users solve problems and so is a potential resource link for other publishers to point their readers to? To get linked to you first must have content that is worthy of having traffic driven to it. Try appealing to audience interests, problems and questions.
Resources can include such things as infographics built in-house, blog posts, videos and case studies are great resources as well. Plot out long-term goals and future content plans to get pages ready for link partners.
Hunt for link prospects – Which publishers will find your content useful for their readers? Compile a list of targets.
Compare yourself to your competition – How are they occupying the ranking positions for the keywords you want to target? How is their content different to yours? Where are they getting backlinks from and how are they promoting the destination pages that are ranking for the keywords you are targeting? Study your competitors for more ideas on where to focus efforts.

Key Takeaways:

While other sites aren’t going to link to your conversion pages, they’ll link to pages offering targeted interest and from there follow internal links to your conversion pages.
Finding websites willing to link to you is a key goal in link-building strategy.
Link building stratagem entails becoming familiar with your competitor’s tactics and strategies and learning from them.

“If you want your link-building efforts to have maximum impact, you need to build your strategy around the opportunities available within your niche.”