15 Backlinking Strategies That Work in 2024

15 Backlinking Strategies That Work in 2024

Ivan Escott

Ivan Escott

Partnerships Manager at Respona

15 Backlinking Strategies That Work in 2024

Effective backlinking strategies come and go.

But some stay.

In this article, we will talk about the step-by-step processes for building organic backlinks with 16 of the most effective backlinking strategies in 2024.

None of the “blog comment” and PBN fluff – only real strategies, proven to work by link builders all across the business world.

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First things first, link building is only effective if you have some link-worthy content to promote – aka link magnets.

These are your blog posts and other types of informational content – think an ultimate guide, listicle, how-to, and so on.

They will slowly generate links for you organically.

As long as your content is actually helpful, people will read and even start linking to it.

However, this is just one of the benefits that link magnets provide for you:

  • Link magnets cover keyword gaps, bringing in organic traffic from search
  • Valuable content enables you to dive deeper into other link building strategies and expands your range of prospects; for example, a blog post on a new keyword lets you find hundreds of new link prospects by extracting the valuable backlink profile of competing content
  • Providing value to readers helps establish thought leadership and better relationships with your audience, increasing recurring visitors, boosting conversions, and strengthening your overall content marketing straegy

Besides quality content, another type of link magnet is free tool pages, like Moz’s free version of their DA checker:

moz free da checker
Image source: Moz

Link insertion is one of the older and more commonly used strategies on this list.

The concept is simple: you pick an article, then find other articles that mention your target keyword.

Then, reach out to them with your link pitch.

The trick here is to find non-competing content – meaning that the target keyword of your prospect’s content should be different than yours.

To find these opportunities, you can leverage a couple of advanced search operators.

Inurl:blog intext:”your keyword” -intitle:”your” -intitle:”keyword”

link insertion google prospecting

“Inurl:blog” tells Google to only pull blog posts.

“Intext:”your keyword”” only pulls pages that mention your keyword in the title.

“-Intitle:”your” -intitle:”keyword”” only returns pages that DON’T mention your keyword in the title.

The reason why we recommend separating your keyphrase (if your keyword consists of multiple words) is that this will help weed out pages that don’t necessarily have your keyphrase in the same word order.

This is probably the easiest link building strategy out there.

You take competing content, extract its backlinks, and reach out to the people linking to them.

A strong incentive is vital when pitching your link.

One that works most of the time is an indirect, high quality link back – either from a third site, or an upcoming guest post.

More on that later – let’s focus on competitor backlinks prospecting for now.

First, pick a page you’ll be building backlinks to. Let’s do “content distribution” as an example.

Next, Google search your target keyword.

finding competing content

Pick any competitor URL (or each, one-by-one), and paste it into the SEO or backlink analysis tool of your choice.

Ours is Semrush:

extracting competitor backlinks

And export their backlinks to get ready for outreach.

This is our favorite backlink building strategy because our niche has no shortage of competitors, and they usually have quite a few backlinks, so we can get hundreds of prospects in mere minutes.

Guest Posting

Everyone knows guest posting.

Indeed, it’s still a solid backlinking strategy.

But we like it for a different reason – it’s also a great strategy for getting people their quality links back.

For example, when building links, we don’t provide reciprocal backlinks from our own site.

Instead, we write regular guest posts for other relevant resources, and offer our prospects links from those sites instead.

This way, all of our exchanges are indirect, and so the links aren’t devalued by Google.

To find websites that accept guest posts simply type:

[your keyword] Intitle:”write for us”

finding write for us pages

This will pull all websites related to your keyword that have a “write for us” page.

Alternatively, if you’re already doing link building through other strategies, you can leverage existing connections and pitch them a guest post regardless of whether they have this page.

If your pitch is strong enough, chances are they will accept it.

A good way to go about this is to look at your prospect’s keyword gap and come up with a couple of topics around keywords they aren’t currently ranking for (but their competitors are):

identifying keyword gaps

Listicles

Listicle posts (or top X articles) are typically filled with affiliate links.

Meaning this backlinking strategy can be a lucrative way of building up your affiliate network while boosting your search engine optimization strategy at the same time.

The downside to the strategy is the fact that if you don’t have an affiliate network to offer your prospect, you may have a hard time securing a spot on their list without any kind of monetary investment.

To find these opportunities, you may use any of the following search string formats:

intitle:”top” intitle:”[keyword]” -“[your company name]” -[your company domain]

intitle:”best” intitle:”[keyword]” -“[your company name]” -[your company domain]

intitle:”the only” intitle:”[keyword]” -“[your company name]” -[your company domain]

intitle:”Most popular” intitle:”[keyword]”-“[your company name]” -[your company domain]

intitle:”[keyword]” intitle:”ranked” -“[your company name]” -[your company domain]

intitle:”[keyword]” intitle:”reviewed” -“[your company name]” -[your company domain]

intitle:”[keyword]” intitle:”compared” -“[your company name]” -[your company domain]

intitle:”top” intitle:”[keyword]” -“[your company name]” -[your company domain]

The minus sign before your company name and domain excludes any results that already mention your company or are published on your domain.

listicle google prospecting

Resource Pages

Similar to listicles, resource pages (also known as link roundups) make for quality link building opportunities.

Unlike listicles, however, resource pages aren’t usually published to promote affiliate products (or attract new affiliates).

Take this resource page by Neil Patel, for example – the perfect place to pitch our link building glossary.

resource page example

Finding these is easy – just slot in your keyword into any of the following search strings and pick your prospects:

intitle:”[Target keyword1]” AND (intitle:”best” OR intitle:”top” OR intitle:”great” OR intitle:”useful” OR intitle:”helpful”) AND intitle:”resources”

intitle:”[Target keyword1]” AND (intitle:”best” OR intitle:”top” OR intitle:”useful” OR intitle:”helpful”) AND intitle:”links”

intitle:”[Target keyword1]” AND (intitle:”best” OR intitle:”top” OR intitle:”useful” OR intitle:”helpful”) AND (intitle:”websites” OR intitle:”sites” OR intitle:”blogs”)

finding resource pages in google

Content Syndication

Content syndication is just the fancy way of saying “publishing your content on other platforms”.

For most websites, these platforms usually mean their YouTube channel and social media platforms.

But there are actually many websites eager to publish someone else’s content – along with a relevant backlink to the original resource.

Usually, syndicated blog content mentions phrases like these just under the title:

  • “Originally published on”
  • “Originally appeared on”
  • “Republished with permission”

Just like this post by Single Grain:

syndicated content example

To find these, use the following search string (you can experiment with the exact wording of the syndication phrase):

inurl:blog intext:”originally published on” [your niche]

finding syndication opportunities in google

Unlinked Mentions

Unlinked mentions are online mentions of your brand that are… unlinked.

Like this one:

unlinked mention example

These are easy backlink pickings since the person is already talking about you, just need a little bit of an extra incentive to turn it into a proper backlink.

To effectively track unlinked mentions, you’ll need either a brand monitoring tool:

tracking brand mentions in brand24
Image source: Brand24

Or a backlink analytics software with the functionality to filter out unlinked mentions (like Ahrefs):

tracking unlinked mentions in ahrefs

Alternatively, you can set up a Google Alert to notify you whenever someone mentions you online.

Competitor Mentions

The competitor mentions backlinking strategy is more suited for product or service-based websites (not just personal or entirely informational blogs).

As you have already guessed, it involved finding pages that mentioned your competitor and pitching your website to be either put next to it as an alternative, or completely replace your competitor.

There are two ways to find these – the long, and the short one.

The long one is by Googling (with search operators, of course).

Search string would look like this:

inurl:blog -site:competitor.com intext:”competitor”

finding competitor mentions manually

The quick way would be to use backlink monitoring software to quickly arrange all of your competitors into a list – just make sure to set the anchor text filter to your competitor’s name.

finding competitor mentions with semrush

Links get lost, broken, moved, or removed all the time.

Reclamation is a backlinking strategy aimed at negating that process.

While not as scalable as some other strategies, it’s very easy to carry out – just run your website through any backlink monitoring or SEO tool, setting it to Lost links only.

tracking lost links in semrush

Then, reach out to the site owners asking to add your link back.

Broken link building is another backlinking strategy that isn’t always easy to scale.

The success rate more than makes up for that.

In essence, you’ll be finding broken links, reahing out to the site owner, and offering them to replace the broken link with your resource.

The easiest way to do this is to first find dead pages on a competing website (conveniently done through Semrush’s Indexed Pages > Broken Pages report):

finding broken pages in semrush

Then extract any backlinks still pointing to that page (if you can provide them with a fitting constitute for the broken link).

For example, the second page on this list has over 600 domains still pointing to it:

extracting broken links from semrush

In some cases (like this one), it may be worth investing the time into writing a content piece just to run a broken link building straegy campaign with hundreds of prospects, if you don’t already have something relevant to plug the broken links.

Guestographics

Infographics make for amazing link magnets.

Infographics also make for great syndication opportunities – but with a much larger pool of prospects.

A shiny new infographic is an excellent addition to any blog post, so there are few reasons why someone would turn down a guestographic pitch (especially if it includes an extra incentive).

And prospecting for this backlink strategy is easy as well – just look for relevant blog posts using this search string:

intitle:“[Target keyword1]” inurl:blog

finding guestographic opportunities

Just make sure to check each prospect in case they already have an infographic in the content.

article that already has an infographic
Image source: PRnews.io

HARO

HARO stands for Help A Reporter Out.

haro homepage
Image source: HARO

It’s a platform for journalists seeking expert opinions to feature in upcoming, high quality content.

haro journalist pitches

It’s free to sign up, and sends you lists of opportunities three times, every single day.

Answer these as soon as possible for a feature along with a high quality backlink link to your website.

haro journalist pitch expanded

Partnerships, Groups, and Communities

Reliance on cold outreach is the biggest disadvantage of link building.

Skipping this step can increase your productivity by a long shot.

This is why you should try and turn every link collaboration into a long-term collaboration.

For example, you can regularly send each other new guest posts you’re working on to include your links.

This is also why link building communities like the Link Building HQ exist.

link building HQ page
Image source: uSERP

These consist of almost exclusively link building and SEO specialists from all kinds of niches, and can make finding new link building partners that much easier and build links with much less effort.

With that being said, these groups rarely have more than a couple of hundred people, so eventually you’ll run out of new people to contact – so cold outreach is not fully out of the picture.

At least, not yet.

Use Respona

Speaking of cold outreach, Respona was built specifically for link building.

In fact, it has a campaign template for every single one of the backlinking strategies discussed in this article.

All you have to do is choose your template, fill out the necessary fields, and let the tool do its magic.

respona link building campaign templates

Respona will automatically configure Google or backlinks searches based on your inputs, and even pre-configure your email sequence (which you can, of course, change).

It will also seek out relevant email addresses to contact on auto-pilot, and even help personalize your link building pitches with AI-powered variables that automatically generate unique personalizations for each opportunity in your campaign..

contact finder & ai personalization settings

Now Over to You

So, there you have it – 15 of the top performing backlinking strategies for 2024 and beyond.

Need help?

Don’t hesitate to register for your 14-day free trial with Respona. No credit card required.

Link building cheat sheet

Link building cheat sheet

Gain access to the 3-step strategy we use to earn over 86 high-quality backlinks each month.

Download for free

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

What is a backlinking strategy?

A backlinking strategy is a plan to acquire links pointing to your website from other reputable sites, which helps improve search engine ranking and drive targeted traffic.

Natural backlinks are crucial for SEO because they signal to search engines that your content is valuable and trustworthy, leading to better visibility and higher rankings in search results.

To obtain high quality backlinks, create valuable and shareable content, reach out to industry bloggers, and engage in guest blogging or collaborations with relevant websites.

Don’t bother with direct exchanges or spamming comments – those are bad backlinks that can and will hurt your seo.

Not all backlinks are beneficial; low-quality or spammy links can harm your website’s rankings. Focus on acquiring SEO backlinks from reputable, authoritative websites with high Domain Rating in your niche.

Additionally, dofollow backlinks have much more value than nofollow ones.

How do I measure the effectiveness of my backlinking strategy?

You can measure the effectiveness of your backlinking strategy by tracking metrics such as the number and quality of backlinks, improvements in search engine rankings, and increased organic traffic to your website.

Ivan Escott

Article by

Ivan Escott

Ivan is the partnerships manager at Respona, the all-in-one PR and link building tool that combines personalization with productivity. Along with creating content, he looks for unique ways to build meaningful relationships with other bloggers.

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