Link building takes a lot of effort – and even more insider knowledge to be used effectively.
That’s precisely why we have compiled our top 15 advanced link building tips – that we all use in-house.
Don’t mind that this complete guide has fever tips than some other ones you may have looked at – you won’t find generic tips such as “use influencer marketing”.
Anyhow, let’s get started!
- Establish Long-Term Partnerships
- Use Guest Posts to Set Up Indirect Exchanges
- “Steal” Competitor Backlinks
- Look for Broken Links
- Book Yourself as a Guest on Podcasts
- Tiered Link Building
- Join Link Building Communities
- Use AI In Your Templates
- ONLY Reach Out to Content Managers and Link Builders
- Send a LinkedIn Connection Request
- Use the Sniper Strategy
- Use Multiple Strategies
- Regularly Check Email Health
- Include Unsubscribe Links
- Focus on Pages Ranking on Page 2
- Use Respona!
- Now Over to You
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Link building cheat sheet
Establish Long-Term Partnerships
Link building relies heavily on cold outreach.
The more emails you send, the more links you’ll build – that much is certain.
However, you’ll build even more if you start looking at each link opportunity as a prospective long-term partner instead of just a one-off collab.
So, instead of wrapping up a link exchange with a “Cheers!”, you might go ahead and pitch a guest post, or offer them another link.
Some will say “Sure!” – and join your partner list.
To keep building relationships, you can share your new upcoming guest posts and other link opportunities with them – and they’ll do the same for you in return.
Link builders tend to stick together, because it’s easier to work together!
Use Guest Posts to Set Up Indirect Exchanges
Guest posts provide a natural avenue for building high quality backlinks from relevant sites.
By incorporating indirect placements for your link-building partners within your guest posts, you’re not only benefiting from the author’s bio link but potentially securing 2-7 additional placements for your partners.
In return, your partners can link back to your site from their content.
This synergy can transform one guest post into a source of up to 10 high quality backlinks.
Even if a website lacks a “Write for Us” page, securing a guest post placement is typically straightforward.
With minimal time investment and the right tools, submitting one guest post weekly—each with a few backlinks—can yield roughly ten links per month.
Though guest posts may take weeks or months to publish, this delay works to your advantage.
Spacing out backlinks naturally makes it less likely that search engines will view your links as part of a pattern of exchanges.
“Steal” Competitor Backlinks
This is, in fact, our favorite link building strategy.
AKA the skyscraper technique.
Why should you spend time prospecting if your competitors already have links to their content – which is awfully similar to yours (but worse)?
After all, that’s what Ahrefs and Semrush are for.
Just look at a competing article, extract its backlinks – and your campaign is good to go.
Downside is – this doesn’t work for every niche; smaller ones will have less links floating around, which means fewer opportunities.
Look for Broken Links
Okay, we know we promised no generic tips but we just really wanted to share an example of the broken link building strategy in action.
Not that long ago, one of our competitors, GroupHigh, went out of business.
At that time, they had a little over 1,000 referring domains – which became up for grabs as soon as GroupHigh’s link became a 404.
Needless to say, that’s an easy thousand of prospects – a lot of which converted into actual backlinks for us.
Book Yourself as a Guest on Podcasts
In addition to link building outreach, we also do podcast outreach – to get one of our founders, Farzad, on relevant podcasts.
Over the last couple of years, we have managed to book over 100 shows – with only around 1,000 pitches.
Read our podcast outreach guide to learn more,
Tiered Link Building
Tiered link building is a strategic, layered approach where links are created in a hierarchical structure.
In this arrangement, tier 1 backlinks direct to your primary website, while tier 2 links point to the pages containing your tier 1 links, and tier 3 links target tier 2, continuing in this pattern.
Tier 1 backlinks are the highest quality, typically editorial links with relevant anchor text from reputable sites.
These should form the foundation of your valuable backlink profile.
Tier 2 and subsequent links aim to enhance the value of top-tier links by passing additional “link juice” through them.
Moreover, tier 2 links can provide extra backlinks for partners linking to you, further reinforcing your collaboration.
And then, a tier 3 link can be from your social media or a message board like Quora.
By layering these tiers, you ensure a more effective flow of link equity to your main site and create new link-building opportunities with partners.
Join Link Building Communities
Link builders often collaborate because it simplifies their work.
If you’re aiming to find long-term partners quickly, consider exploring the numerous online link-building communities available.
These communities can be found across all major social media platforms and even on Slack.
For instance, uSERP’s Link Building HQ is a prominent Slack community solely for real companies. It’s a moderated, invite-only space that fosters collaborative link building.
Joining such a community can give you access to otherwise hard-to-reach backlinks.
An interesting note: our link builder, who authored this piece, managed to secure 38 links in one week by joining about five link building groups.
While these communities may draw a recurring group of people, they are excellent for rapidly expanding your network of partners.
Use AI In Your Templates
If you use the same template over the course of hundreds or even thousands of emails, eventually your engagement rates will drop.
Even if it’s the perfect email template, sending the same text over and over is bound to get you marked as spam.
This is why we’ve recently released AI variables in Respona.
Unlike your regular “first name” or “website title”, our AI icebreaker will generate unique personalizations for every single opportunity in your campaign, on auto-pilot.
Essentially killing two birds with one stone: AI will make each email feel personalized, and keep your open and reply rates in the green.
ONLY Reach Out to Content Managers and Link Builders
Seriously, skip the generic “[email protected]”, and the support channel.
You’ll get an autoreply and nothing else.
Also, don’t bother reaching out to founders with a link pitch – unless you’re running a sniper outreach campaign with a customized video.
Even if you do get a response, it’ll be something like “I forwarded your message to our PR team, if they’re interested they’ll reach back out to you.”
They won’t.
Which is why you should always target employees actually interested in what you have to say – not just anyone in the company that you found.
Send a LinkedIn Connection Request
On average, link building emails have a 50-70% open rate, and a ~10% reply rate.
It’s not terrible, but if you do the math, it’ll take you quite a few emails to hit your 10 link/week mark – especially if you consider that half of your replies will be negative.
Sending a LinkedIn connection request might seem like a tiny detail, but can make a world of a difference for your outreach efforts.
Even if your prospect didn’t click on your email, they more than likely saw a notification or noticed it in their inbox.
Connecting on socials puts a face to your outreach, and creates an additional touchpoint.
This greatly increases your chances of getting a reply – just be mindful of LinkedIn’s 50 connection/week limit and reserve it for the “gold” opportunities.
Unless you pay for Premium, of course.
Use the Sniper Strategy
The sniper backlink strategy is a little bit more involved than your standard link pitch.
In our company, we used a similar strategy for sales outreach and adapted it for top-tier link building.
It goes like this:
- We find a relevant listicle we want to be featured on
- Find a high-level decision maker in that company, such as the Editor-in-Chief, Content Manager, or even the founder if it’s a smaller company
- Record a quick 30-60 second video explaining what they’ll get for featuring us
- Make sure in our email the incentive comes BEFORE the ask
- Send the email manually
Our link builder sends 30 of these every single week, and at least 2-3 convert into listicle placements for our tool.
Not bad at all, if you consider we only target DR 70+ websites with this approach.
Use Multiple Strategies
Our team uses a combination of link acquisition strategies:
- Guest posting
- Link insertion
- Skyscraper technique
- Sniper outreach
- And some ongoing collaborations with regular partners
It’s simple – if you want more links, you need to use multiple strategies.
And the only way to find out which ones work best for you is to try them all.
Regularly Check Email Health
Email health is often overlooked in favor of quantity.
It’s a huge mistake.
Unless you want your email domain reputation to be ruined, you want to keep your daily email volume relatively low (30-40 sent items).
Yes, that is not a lot – which is why you should use multiple sender emails to scale up.
For better deliverability, we recommend setting up a subdomain, such as outreach.respona.com.
As opposed to using a separate domain for outreach, a subdomain maintains a close relationship to your main domain, which helps with deliverability.
Another step rookie link builders overlook is email warmup.
This means starting your campaigns at a low daily email limit (10-15), and gradually increasing it over the course over a month or two to 50 max.
Never use a freshly-created email without warming it up first – you’ll end up in spam, guaranteed.
Include Unsubscribe Links
GDPR. Ever heard of it?
If you have, you already know that an unsubscribe link is a requirement in some parts of the world – not just a convenience.
And where it’s not required, it’s still a nice touch that lets your prospects easily opt out from further communications – and helps you avoid spam complaints.
So, there is zero reason not to include it in your email sequence.
Focus on Pages Ranking on Page 2
When you just start out building links, it’s fine to take whatever links you can get.
But once you start getting some traction with your blog, you’ll need to be a little more strategic – especially if you have limited resources.
So, if you have some pages ranking on page 2, you should focus on getting links to those first.
When a page jumps from page 2 to 1 in rankings, the difference in traffic is much bigger than when you get to #7 from #8, or even if you get the first spot after ranking on #2 for ages.
Use Respona!
Last but not least, link building can not be effective without a strong toolset to support your team.
Respona was developed specifically for link builders and automates every step of getting backlinks: from prospecting and finding emails to personalizing your emails with AI and helping you manage all of your inboxes.
New to link building?
Start our free link building video course now:
Now Over to You
So, in conclusion, a solid link building strategy involves using multiple advanced link building tactics, keeping your emails healthy and setting up a regular partner network.
Need help building high quality links?
Don’t hesitate to start your 14-day free trial with Respona to see how we can help.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
What is the most effective advanced link-building strategy?
The effectiveness of a link-building strategy often depends on the specific niche and goals, but many experts find tiered link building and the skyscraper link building technique particularly powerful.
These strategies leverage existing link wrothy content and amplify link juice, creating a robust backlink profile.
How can I maintain my email engagement rates for link building outreach?
To keep engagement rates high, personalize your outreach emails using AI variables and vary your templates regularly to avoid being marked as spam.
Tailor your pitches specifically to content managers and link builders who are more likely to respond positively.
How do I handle negative responses in link building outreach?
Negative responses are a natural part of SEO link building, and it’s essential to handle them professionally.
Use them as feedback to refine your approach, adjusting your pitch where necessary, and remember to focus on building genuine relationships rather than only aiming for immediate link exchanges.
Why should I focus on pages ranking on page 2, and how does it help?
Pages on page 2 of search results are often just a few quality backlinks away from reaching page 1, which can significantly increase both organic and referral traffic.
By targeting your link-building efforts here, you maximize the return on investment by capitalizing on pages that are nearly visible on the highly competitive first page of search results.
Can unstructured link exchanges harm my website’s SEO?
Yes, unorganized or unnatural link exchanges can harm your SEO by appearing manipulative to search engines. It’s crucial to build links organically and diversify your strategies to ensure that backlinks appear natural and relevant, avoiding potential penalties.