4 Tips for Effective B2B Link Building
B2B link building is one of the best and most effective SEO practices. The aim of B2B link building is to have influential sites linking to your website. The search engine algorithms “see” these links to your pages. If you focus on quality and relevance, your website will be rewarded and appear higher in search rankings.Google used to value quantity over anything else when it came to backlinks. The sites with the most backlinks were considered the most relevant. With websites starting to abuse that link-building strategy and placing spammy links with zero quality, something had to change.The most significant transformation came in 2012 when Google introduced the Penguin update to its search rankings algorithm. From that point, it was clear that the goal of link building was to focus on quality and relevancy over quantity.Since Penguin, Google introduced several other updates, improving the algorithm, but the direction is still the same. Businesses have to optimize their backlink profiles for quality and relevance.In this article, you’ll learn four tips to follow to boost your B2B link-building efforts and stay ahead of the competition.
Create linkable assets
Linkable assets are pieces of content created to attract links from quality sites. Examples include infographics, studies and research, games, calculators, interactive videos, quizzes, and surveys.Expert round-up articles are great linkable assets, too. An expert round-up article consists of authority opinions on a given subject or answers to a specific question. An Ahrefs poll found that a whopping 43.9% of respondents use this type of content to generate backlinks. “How To Stand Out Online: 45 Experts Share Their Top Tips” is an example of a round-up article:
Once an expert round-up has been published, the guests often share the post on their social media, mentioning your brand and placing the link to your round-up article. That increases your blog content’s reach, and, therefore, your chances other sites will link to the site content.
Whether it’s a study, an infographic, or an expert round-up you create, just make sure your linkable assets are high-quality, accurate, and updated. That’s the only way these pieces of content can actually generate links from authority websites.
Also, you want to position yourself as an expert beforehand to give credibility to your linkable assets. So, if you’re just starting out in your content marketing, don’t expect to build links with the first piece of content you create. You’ll need to be consistent in creating and publishing relevant resources in your niche first before you can generate juicy backlinks. People don’t like to link to sites they don’t know, after all.
For example, the HubSpot team has been writing comprehensive blog posts on digital marketing for the longest time. So, when it created a marketing report below based on data from 1,500 marketers in 2021, the report attracted many links from other sites.Once you’ve established your authority and expertise in your niche, authority websites are more likely to link to your linkable assets.
Now how do you come up with content these websites will link to in the first place?
Ask yourself, what do these sites want? Do they link to things that provide solutions to problems? Or to things that offer unique opinions on specific topics? Just do a quick Google search of your niche, check out relevant blog posts and their links, and you’ll find your answers. Once you have an idea of what websites want, you can incorporate “linking triggers” into your content.
Find and replace broken links
This link-building strategy involves searching for broken links on websites related to your industry and offering the site owners to link to your relevant blog content on the same topic instead. In other words, you provide value to the website’s owner by pointing out a dead backlink. In exchange, your article’s link gets added.Nobody wants to direct their users to 404 pages. A dead backlink leads to a poor user experience. And that’s why this strategy is so effective.The most popular way to search for broken article links is by using the free Ahrefs tool. Ahrefs Site Explorer generates a broken backlinks report. The report shows referring pages linking 404 pages of a target website and their anchor and surrounding text. Just type in the domain name in the search bar and click search:You’ll see a list of broken links and their corresponding topics on the target website.So, let’s assume that, from that list, you’ve found a page that you want to replace with your own page.If you’re lucky, you’ll already have something on your site to offer for the broken link. If not, you will have to write quality, relevant content and pitch it to the web page owner. Either way, you want to make sure the page you pitch to the website administrator is of the same quality as the page that site originally linked to or better. That’s why it would also be good to see what the page with the broken link used to look like so you can imitate it or improve on it.The good news is that you can do that thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Wayback Machine archives information on the World Wide Web. Many researchers use the tool to preserve digital artifacts.Building high-quality backlinks on well-known websites with high organic traffic will benefit your business. Don’t be put off if a site says it isn’t willing to link back to you. Just move on to the next site with a broken link. With perseverance, you’re bound to land those juicy inbound links.
Write engaging guest posts
Many B2B marketers consider guest blogging the foremost opportunity to increase referral traffic. An engaging guest post published on a blog with thousands of readers attracts a new, relevant target audience to your website.To find B2B guest posting opportunities, you need to find websites looking for guest bloggers who are happy to include your link.Focus on websites related to your niche that have significant engagement rates. For this, just check out their website and even social media to see if their posts have plenty of Facebook shares, Instagram likes, and LinkedIn comments. Use Moz’s Link Explorer to check the website’s domain authority, too. The higher the domain authority, the better. The tool also gives you information like search engine ranking score, number of backlinks, and the average number of visitors.Once you identify some suitable websites, use an email finder to get the editor’s email address and send your pitch. You want to personalize the pitch, so it doesn’t sound like you’re sending bulk emails to multiple sites. Be sure to mention some good guest posts you’ve written before. Here’s a pitch template to guide you:As with any publication, check your grammar and follow the publisher’s rules when writing the content. You must respect guest blog guidelines; otherwise, the website could reject your content. The rules usually include keeping the number of links you add to a minimum and avoiding being overly promotional of your brand or partners.Most blog posts include an author’s bio. That is your chance to introduce yourself to your target audience. Write who you are and what you do. Here’s an example from a Cience guest post:An author bio is also a way to get valuable backlinks to your portfolio.As B2B blog owners and editors are usually busy, don’t forget to follow up on your request after guest post submission.
Leverage social media
Social media can help your link-building efforts. It’s a great promotional vehicle, after all. With its over four billion users, you can promote your website content to as many people as possible. These people are bound to include website administrators who may link to your content.Does that mean that, for effective B2B link building, all you need to do is promote your content on social media? Not really. You want to make sure the site content you promote is high-quality. You also want to make sure your social posts have snappy copy and excellent visuals.The goal is to get as many social shares, comments, and likes for your promotional post. The more social shares, comments, and likes, the greater the chance the content you promote will be noticed by websites with considerable authority in your niche. These websites may then link to your site content.
In Closing
B2B link building can yield excellent results for your company. Valuable backlinks support your search engine optimization efforts and help you drive more traffic to your website, among other benefits.So, follow these strategies to boost your B2B link-building efforts. Create linkable assets. Also, find and replace broken links. Don’t forget to write engaging guest posts and leverage social media.As a final tip, you’ll need a long-term mindset for your B2B link building marketing strategy to work. You need to focus on relationship-building. You will also have to make constant pitches and may even face rejections.But with persistence, you’ll reap the fruits of all your labor. Happy link building!