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Building links is one of the most effective ways to improve your off-page SEO efforts.
Even the best content in the world needs a push with backlinks in order to rank better, and more quickly. However, link building can be extremely tedious and expensive, especially if you’ve never done it before.
In the world of B2B, link building does not have to be all that painful.
In fact, since there are countless other SEOs and link builders doing the same for their businesses, you can build links pretty effortlessly and it won’t cost an arm and a leg.
Here are the best B2B link building strategies for 2023 and beyond.
TL;DR: B2B Link Building
Guest Posting:
- Age-old method of writing for another site and linking back to your own.
- Ensure relevance and personalize pitches.
- Can be time-consuming and may come with costs.
Broken Link Building:
- Replace competitors' broken links with your content.
- Use tools like Ahrefs to identify these links.
- Effective but limited in scale.
Link Exchanges:
- Exchange links with other businesses.
- Avoid direct (reciprocal) exchanges; opt for A-B-C exchanges for a natural link profile.
HARO (Help a Reporter Out):
- Journalists seek insights; provide valuable input and get quoted with a backlink.
- Quick response is key, and outcome can be unpredictable.
Participating in Roundup Posts:
- Join in expert roundups by journalists.
- Engage through various platforms like HARO, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Creating Your Own Roundup Posts:
- Compile opinions from experts in a post.
- Builds relationships and opens doors for backlink opportunities.
Researching Brand Mentions:
- Monitor mentions of your brand without a link.
- Use tools like Mention.com for real-time tracking and outreach.
Conclusion:
- Effective link building isn't cheap, and quality is crucial.
Use a mix of these strategies for best results or consider professional help of a B2B link building agency like Blue Things for streamlined processes.
Guest posting
One of the oldest tricks in the marketing book, guest posting is a common link building strategy.
It’s pretty simple - you pitch a good website to write a guest post for them and in that guest post, you include links to your target pages that you want to build links to.
It has been mentioned time and time again that guest posting is against Google’s guidelines, but most SEOs and top B2B link building agencies will tell you that it couldn’t be further from the truth.
If you write high-quality content for your target audience, pitch relevant, high-quality websites, and link to the right pages, guest posting can be an extremely effective way to build links for B2B.
There are some ground rules though.
First, make sure to only pitch websites that are relevant to your business and industry.
Getting a link from a shoe store website won’t mean much if you’re doing B2B SaaS link building.
Two, personalize your pitches once you’ve found the right person to reach out to.
This is usually someone with the title of Head of Content, Managing Editor, Head of Marketing, or similar.
It’s actually not too difficult to find websites to pitch guest posts to.
All you have to do is use your industry keyword (such as “SaaS”) and combine it with the words “write for us” and search in Google to find relevant sites for high-quality backlinks.
Make sure to choose a website with a good domain rating (DR), domain authority (DA), and organic traffic.
But most importantly, the link and website should be relevant to your business.
One of the biggest pros of guest posting as a tactic is that you can scale it infinitely as long as you have enough people in your team to run the entire process.
Also, you can include links to other businesses (partners) in your guest posts to get multiple links in return.
As for the downsides of using guest blogging to boost your backlink profile, there are several.
First, it takes time.
Once you submit a pitch to an editor, it can literally take months for a post to get published. The editors can take a long time to accept, review and publish your guest blog posts so you never know when your inbound links will come through.
The second issue is the cost.
To run a guest post program, you need to pay a writer to create relevant content and a person who does the outreach, at the very minimum. If you factor in a proofreader and an SEO expert, the cost of a single link from guest blogging increases significantly.
Having said all of that, guest blogging is an extremely effective tactic to get high-quality links, even in 2023.
However, do not use it in isolation if you expect both quality and lots of links from your B2B link building strategy.
Broken link building
Here’s a successful link building strategy that is alive and well and will continue being lucrative as long as there are websites to get links from.
It’s pretty simple in nature - there are a bunch of websites out there with broken links pointing to your competition.
All you have to do is find those broken links and offer the editor of the website to replace the broken link with one of yours.
The broken link building strategy works because no website wants to have broken links in their blog posts.
In fact, the websites you’ll pitch probably have no idea they even have any broken links at all.
You offer them a solution with your valuable content and in return for the favor, you get a nice, quality backlink to your website.
To find out which of your competitors’ links you can steal because they are broken, you can use a tool such as Ahrefs.
In fact, they have an entire write-up on their website on how their tool can help you with this link building tactic.
With broken link building the same principle applies as with pitching guest posts.
Make sure you find the right person to reach out to, such as an editor. With their contact info in hand, send them a personalized email, explaining that a link is broken and why yours is the ideal replacement.
Broken link building is a pretty effective tactic, but bear in mind that there are only so many broken links in the world you can replace, so don’t rely on this approach alone for your B2B marketing strategy.
High-level overview of the process:
- Identify broken links on a website: Use a tool such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Moz to scan a website and find broken links. These link building tools will provide a list of 404 errors on the website, along with the URLs of the broken links.
- Reach out to the website owner: Once you have identified the broken links, reach out to the website owner and let them know about the broken links. Provide them with the URL of the broken links and suggest relevant content on your website that could replace the broken links.
- Create high-quality content: Ensure that the content you are suggesting to replace the broken links is high-quality and relevant to the topic at hand. This will increase the chances of the website owner accepting your suggestion.
- Follow up: Follow up with the website owner after a few days to see if they have implemented your suggestion. If they have, great! If not, try to understand the reason why and see if there is anything you can do to help.
- Track your progress: Keep track of the broken links you have found, the websites you have contacted, and the status of your suggestions. This will help you understand what is working and what isn't, and allow you to optimize your broken link building strategy.
Link exchanges
Just like you, there are countless other businesses that need links to fuel their SEO growth strategy and increase their domain authority.
One of the easiest ways to help out yourself and someone else is to do a quick link exchange. You give a link from your website to someone else and they reciprocate. Easy as pie, right?
Well, not entirely.
Search engines such as Google don’t look favorably upon direct link exchanges and content partnerships.
These happen when website A links to website B and in return, website B links to website A.
A reciprocal link exchange such as this one can actually do more harm than good. You want to avoid them in your link profile as much as possible.
This is why most SEOs and link builders prefer doing A-B-C exchanges.
When website A links to website B, then website B gives a link to website A, but it’s from website C.
That way, everyone is happy and they get their own link, all while staying under Google’s radar.
For what it’s worth, a reciprocal link exchange is not always a bad idea, especially if you’re getting links from authoritative sites.
Just make sure that enough time passes between the exchanges so that Google does not consider it an immediate swap.
This is a common way of building links and most professional SEOs (freelance or in-house) use this approach when exchanging links with blog owners on high-authority sites.
The way to make it work is to either have two websites that you manage (not so common) or have link building partners (more common) that can be the letter C in the ABC link exchange chain.
This is arguably the cheapest and easiest way to build natural links and it’s why many digital opt for it.
If you’re not sure how to do it yourself or which agency to trust with your link exchanges, book a free call with us today! We’ll explain which strategy will work best for your use case and how we can help.
HARO (Help a Reporter Out)
Help a Reporter Out or HARO has been the staple of many a link building campaign for more than a decade now.
This platform is a place for journalists to publish a query, ask a question and expect replies in return. For example, a journalist could ask “What are your top digital marketing predictions for 2023?” and anyone with a HARO account and domain expertise can respond.
Of course, the end game is more than just helping out a journalist in need.
Once insightful answers come in, journalists end up using them and quoting you in their articles, also giving you a link to your website. It’s become a very well-known tactic for building links and it works.
How well it works depends entirely on you.
First of all, you need to make sure you’re sending to the right journalists. This means ticking off the HARO mailing lists specific to your industry and area of expertise.
You can receive up to a few dozen daily emails from HARO, so choose well. Second, you need to be very fast.
From personal experience, answers sent within the first few hours of publishing have a high chance of getting published.
Many HARO queries are anonymous so you have no idea where the answer will get published.
But bear in mind that there are some very high domain rating websites hidden under that “anonymous” tag. Examples include Forbes, American Express, Huffington Post, and others.
Last but not least, bear in mind that HARO link building is very unpredictable.
It can take months before you start getting anything published under your name, and the bulk depends on your quality of answers, relevancy, speed, and ultimately, luck.
This is why HARO should not be your only SEO strategy and it should be used in combination with others mentioned above.
And if you’re too wary to try it on your own, book a call with us and we’ll be happy to start pitching HARO under your own name and brand!
Participating in roundup posts
Journalism is at the core of many link building processes.
Writers (like myself) look for quotes from experts so they can add them to articles. This makes the piece of content much more valuable, actionable, and likely to rank in search engine results.
You should be on a constant lookout for writers who need sources for their next piece of content.
Some ways you can find them include:
- HARO (mentioned above)
- Facebook groups for your industry
- LinkedIn groups
- Your competitors’ backlink analysis (see who mentions your competitors a lot in their pieces)
- Making friends with freelance writers on LinkedIn
These are just some starting points, but make sure to use every chance that you get to voice your opinion on a subject matter where you’re an expert.
It contributes to your overall online visibility and chances are high that will end up as a backlink to your website.
Creating your own roundup posts
Creating a piece of content around a relevant keyword for your business? Want to get some backlinks to it from other B2B companies? While you wait for roundup post opportunities, why not create a roundup post of your own? It’s an excellent addition to your content strategy and a way to climb search engine rankings.
This is a way to get valuable backlinks as the experts you include in your roundup posts are likely to link back to you when you link to them.
And even if they don’t immediately, it’s a superb way to start a connection and get your foot through the door.
To ask experts for their opinions, you can use HARO (slow and tedious, and you’ll get a lot of responses to filter) or specialized communities.
For example, I use a community called SaaS Growth Hacks on Facebook to ask questions to software business founders. Once I publish an article, I link to those authors’ websites and ask them for a backlink in return, or even a guest post.
You can even update and refresh older pieces of content with new expert roundup tips.
This content strategy only improves your online visibility and chances of ranking, but it’s also a superb way to get your content quality to new levels with clever search engine optimization.
Researching your brand mentions
If you've ever googled your own name to see where you stand with your online presence, you’re not alone.
In fact, many business owners and marketers google their brand names every day to see what others say about them. This is not only good for brand building, but it’s also a chance to find unlinked mentions.
For example, you can search for “Coca-Cola” to find websites that mention you but don’t give a link to your website.
These could be authoritative websites that are not providing contextual links to your business, so you need to reach out to them and ask for a link.
The great news is, this link acquisition strategy became easier in recent years with tools such as Mention.com let you monitor brand mentions in real-time.
As soon as someone mentions Coca-Cola, you get a notification and you can reach out to that company.
It’s an effortless way to find link opportunities and doesn’t require a lot of elbow grease.
Those websites are already mentioning you, so in most cases, they will be more than happy to give out a link, especially if you have amazing content and your outreach email is good.
Wrapping up
If you’re looking to build lots of links, you’ll quickly realize that good link building is not cheap.
And cheap link building is not good either.
To increase your chances of getting relevant links to your website, your marketing team needs to employ not one, but all of these B2B link building tactics.
Or you could just get in touch with us.
At Blue Things, we know the value of high-quality, relevant backlinks and we can build them for your B2B business.
Only top-quality websites and natural, white-hat links are guaranteed with us.
Book a free call today to find out how we can help you!
