How to Get Backlinks in 2024?

Backlinks this, inbound link profile that – what’s the big deal? 

The deal is that in 2024, high-quality links from relevant resources remain one of the strongest search engine ranking factors.

In this ultimate guide, we’ll teach you:

• What are backlinks and how exactly do they work
• White-hat ways of building up your backlink profile
• The answers to the most common questions surrounding link building

Let’s get right into it.

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What are Backlinks?

First things first, a backlink is a hyperlink from one website to another, usually underlined and highlighted in blue or purple. 

The process of link building is typically carried out through email outreach. 

It goes back to the very inception of Google’s algorithm.

At its core, lies something that’s known as PageRank. In essence, it’s a value that a page gets assigned, depending on the quality and quantity of inbound links.

The higher the score, the more likely the page is likely to show up high in search results. 

“But what about the countless link spam updates that Google has been rolling out?” – you will ask. 

While it is true that all black-hat link building techniques have faded of obscurity and completely de-valued by Google, relevant links from actual, informative websites within your niche still pass on PageRank, only emphasizing the importance of the entire link building process.

These black-hat link building techniques include:

• Excessive reciprocal link exchanges
• PBN links
• Social bookmarking, low quality resource page and directory links
• Guest posts with over-optimized link anchor texts (exact-match keywords in the anchors)
• Automated link building like using bots to spam comments or using an automated link building service
• Paid links that are not marked with the “rel=sponsored” tag
• And more

These links are to be avoided at all costs. While on a small scale, link schemes can’t hurt you (all that will happen is all these links will be ignored by the ranking algorithm), participating in them excessively will get Google’s attention and may even lead to a penalty, severely reducing your rankings or even preventing your website from showing up in search result pages altogether. 

Below, we will teach you 6 effective, white-hat ways of how to get backlinks to your website.

For now, let’s take a closer look at the benefits that link building brings to the table, when executed correctly. 

Why Do You Need a Strong Backlink Profile?

Regardless of your niche, if you haven’t been on the market for a decade, it can be difficult to outrank your competition.

So, in order to keep your head above water, you need every advantage you can get.

A strong backlink profile may just be that advantage – it will also make it harder for other competitors to outrank you until they generate a similar quantity (and quality) of inbound links.

PageRank

We have already mentioned PageRank.

But how do you know how much PageRank your pages have? Unfortunately, there is no way. 

A long time ago, there was this thing called the PageRank toolbar. It looked something like this:

Google has taken it down. Why? 

Because people would obsess over the PageRank metric and spam objectively bad links everywhere. 

However, even though the exact PageRank value of your pages is impossible to know, there is a way to estimate it, which leads us to the next section. 

Domain Authority/Domain Rating

Domain Authority and Domain Rating are metrics developed my Moz and Ahrefs in an attempt to recreate the PageRank toolbar – just on the scale of entire domains rather than individual pages.

They work almost identically – both metrics take into account both the quantity and quality of your inbound links.

A higher DR/DA score is directly associated with higher rankings on SERPs, as evidenced by a study by Backlinko:

To put it bluntly: more quality links = higher DR/DA = higher rankings.

Referral Traffic

The traffic that links pass on is called referral traffic. 

Its advantage over organic traffic is that it can actually be more targeted, seeing as people are following links from another relevant resource, hence they are already interested in what you have to say.

This can have one of the following outcomes:

• The person may become your follower on social media 
• They may subscribe to your newsletter
• They may convert to a paying customer 

The biggest SEO metric that every website owner tracks is organic traffic, but the value of referral traffic that comes to you through links can not be underestimated. 

Before diving headfirst into link building, run a backlink audit to asses the situation. 

Now, let’s move on to the next section.

What Do You Need To Start Building Backlinks?

Link building can be an extremely time and resource-intensive process. 

So, before diving headfirst into it, you need to understand what you need to actually get any value out of your efforts.

Quality Content

The first thing you need is content. Not just home and product/service page content – blog content. 

It’s extremely uncommon to acquire home and product page links from other people – unless you’re getting featured on listicle posts.

Besides just being something to build backlinks to, great content will help you cover a wide variety of relevant keywords, educate your audience, give them a reason to stay on your website, and keep coming back.

In fact, most searches on social media are informational, so if you haven’t invested into a robust blog yet, you’re missing out on an enormous chunk of web traffic.

Time

Unlike some other aspects of SEO (such as on-page and technical) that can be done over the course of a week, link building can take months to fully take into effect.

In addition, to keep growing, you need a steady stream of backlinks. 

Not to mention the effort that goes into preparing and launching your email outreach campaigns. 

Even with the best email automation tools (such as Respona), you will need at least a few hours to launch a single campaign with roughly a hundred opportunities.

The average reply rate for link building emails is only 10%, and you need to be ready that half of them may be negative. 

That leaves you with only a ~5% success rate on average. 

To really start seeing results, you need hundreds, if not thousands of quality backlinks.

If you do the math, you’ll quickly realize that there’s virtually no end to link building, so be prepared. 

Dedicated Team Members

Because of the sheer volume of work that link building entails, it needs to be a full-time job for at least one team member in your company to be realized to its full potential.

As a solopreneur, you can try to take in on your own, but expect it to take a huge chunk of your day. 

You can either hire a trusted agency, an in-house link builder or outsource the process to freelancers.

We recommend the second option, as that enables you to have complete control over your entire link building process, ensuring only the best strategies are being employed.

This brings us to the next section – how to actually get backlinks. 

Anchor Text Strategy/Listicle Post Mentions

For most of these strategies, we’re going to be using Respona, as it’s primary purpose is link building outreach.

The first one one this list is the anchor text strategy, merged with getting list post mentions, since the process of finding both these types of opportunities is very simple.

We’ll walk through the entire campaign creation process- from prospecting to personalization once – for all the following strategies, we’ll only be focusing on the prospecting, since preparing the outreach sequence, finding contact information, and personalization steps remain more or less the same across the board.

Finding Prospects

For prospecting, Respona comes with a built-in search engine that can pull results either from Google or Bing. 

The goal of the anchor text strategy is to find non-competing articles that mention our target keyword somewhere in the content, but not the title. 

The listicle (top 10) post mentions is all about securing a place for your product in relevant top X articles within your niche.

We can actually run several queries at the same time in Respona’s search engine, so we’ll run searches for both these strategies at once.

These are two of the easiest ways to get backlinks as these strategies are nowhere near as complicated as broken link building and much more easily scalable.

As our link-building target, we’ll take our guide on link building outreach. 

Respona supports all of Google’s and Bing’s advanced search operators. We have used them to get extremely targeted results:

• Inurl:blog to only pull results that are part of a blog
• Intext: to only pull results that mention our target keyword in the content (link building outreach)
• Intitle: to only pull results that mention our target keyword in the title (link building tools)
• -intext: and -intitle: to exclude results that mention our target keyword in the title or the content (to remove any competing link building outreach guides and filter out list posts that already mention Respona) 

Upon clicking “Continue”, you can also set additional SEO backlinks metrics to make sure you only get high-quality opportunities. 

By default, Respona comes integrated with Moz, but if you have an Ahrefs or Semrush account, you may choose to connect them as well to use their backlink analytics. 

After clicking “Run automation”, it will run for a few minutes, and automatically pull all relevant results directly into your Respona campaign.

From there on, you can move on to the next step. 

Preparing Your Outreach Sequence

The outreach sequence is the actual emails that you’ll be sending to your prospects.

Respona’s sequence builder features everything you need to craft a successful pitch:

• Automatic follow-ups with custom time delays
• Variables like @first_name that automatically populate for each contact in your campaign
• The option to add an unsubscribe link to your emails
• A built-in reply chance estimator and spam word checker

Here is the template we’ve used for the anchor text strategy:

And this is one for listicle outreach:

Feel free to use these templates for inspiration but don’t copy and paste them directly into your campaigns to avoid spamming.

As for the follow-ups, we recommend only using one or two (spaced out over 3-5 business days) to avoid getting on your prospects’ nerves.

Once your sequence is ready, it’s time to find your prospects’ actual contact emails. 

Finding Contacts

Respona makes finding contacts as easy as telling the tool the job titles and seniority levels of people that work at your target companies. 

In our case, we’ll choose the first algorithm mode (first looks for the writer of your target article and then moves on to other people within the companies).

Then, enter in every position related to content and SEO, at all seniority levels:

• Content marketing
• Partnerships
• Brand
• SEO
• Writer

In the advanced options, let’s enable the tool to assign company generic emails like [email protected] to increase our success rate in case no personal emails are found for our criteria. 

Then, run the actual automation. 

Depending on the size of your campaign, it can take from a few minutes to a couple of hours.

All of it is done in the cloud, so while you’re waiting, you can close your campaign and start another one.

Once it’s done, you can check its results, or even run additional manual searches by domain, name, or job title. 

When all contacts are ready, it’s time to personalize your pitches. 

Personalization

Just filling in the variables and hitting “send” isn’t enough. You need some manual personalization to make your pitches stand out.

But don’t worry – Respona can help you with that as well.

It actually comes with an integrated AI that scrapes your prospects’ articles for important points that you can simply copy and paste into your pitches.

This will give off the impression that you have actually spent the time to get familiar with the content of the people that you’re reaching out to, increasing your chances of getting a reply.

When all emails are personalized, all that’s left is to run the final pre-launched checks and start your campaign!

Reverse Skyscraper Technique

If you’ve heard the phrase “skyscraper technique” before, you already know where this is going.

The reverse version takes on a similar formula: you’re still going to be finding competing content, extracting its backlinks, and reaching out to the people linking to it, trying to get them to link to you instead.

The only difference with the reverse skyscraper technique is that instead of writing an entire blog post just for link building purposes at the start of each campaign, you’re going to target content that you have already published.

As an example, let’s take our link building outreach guide as a target again.

Next, let’s find some competing content. We can just google our target keyword, “link building outreach”, and see what comes up.

Now, let’s create a new campaign in Respona and paste these URLs into the Competitor backlinks search mode. 

By default, Respona is integrated with Moz, but you’re also able to connect your Ahrefs or Semrush account to use as a source and save up on Respona credits.

Just like with the keyword search automation, you’re able to input multiple URLs in the search bar.

Similarly, you may also choose additional metric filters to ensure that only high quality backlink prospects are added to your campaign.

Clicking “Run automation” will automatically pull all fitting backlinks into your outreach campaign.

From there on, the campaign creation process will remain the same, with the only difference being the email template. 

Guest Posting

Guest posting is the third most popular link building strategy, even in 2024.

It is the process of writing guest content for other websites, while leaving a link back to your own resource either in the content or your author’s bio.

Guest posts can also be a great way to set up indirect, A-B-C link exchanges.

In such a situation, Site A would be your prospect linking to your website (site B), and site C is your guest post on a third-party resource. 

Securing guest post placements is relatively easy. Most websites that accept guest posts actually have a “write for us” page.

The search mechanism for finding these pages with Respona is similar to that of the anchor text strategy. 

Just type in intitle:”write for us” or “become a contributor”, along with your target keyword. 

Let’s do digital marketing as an example. 

Once again, you may set additional SEO metrics – and after running the automation to completion, its results will be automatically pulled into your campaign.

Let’s talk a little bit more about the template we like to use for guest posting.

In it, we’re using what’s known as the “Content Gap” strategy. We can do with any keyword tracking SEO tool, such as Ahrefs.

Simply navigate to Ahrefs’ Content Gap and paste two of your prospects’ competitors:

Then, look at the keywords that they are ranking for but your prospect isn’t, and pick a couple of relevant key phrases with a low difficulty score but high search volume.

Then, come up with a couple of topics to pitch to your prospects.

And make sure to include a screenshot from Ahrefs showing this window! This will drastically increase your chances of securing a guest post placement, as you’re showing that you actually went through all of the effort to research your prospect’s site and figure out a way to actually help them by closing their keyword gap, and aren’t just pitching random topics for the sake of link building.

Podcasts

Podcasts are more of a digital PR activity, but can be a lucrative of generating backlinks as well, in addition to generating brand awareness and establishing thought leadership.

And the best thing about it? Respona actually comes with a podcast finder of its own.

With its help, you can quickly identify podcasts that other prominent figures within your niche have been on, and reach out to them to book an interview for yourself. 

To use it, simply start another campaign and click over to Podcast search.

Switch it to Episodes and type out the names of other influencers within your niche.

Just like with the other search modes, you can run several queries at the same time. 

Respona’s Podcast search is powered by Listen Notes, so you may also choose to set additional filters by episode duration, publication date, and listen score.

Run the automation and all relevant results will be automatically pulled into your campaign. 

Haven’t suggested yourself for an interview before? Don’t worry, follow this template and you have a pretty solid chance of making a memorable pitch.

Use Your Connections

The biggest downside of link building is the fact that you have to rely on cold email outreach to get placements. 

So, if you can find a way to skip that, you can achieve much greater success in a shorter amount of time.

If you already have an existing network of contacts built up, we would recommend starting your link building there.

If not, a great way to get acquainted with lots of link builders are the countless link building communities that have popped up across different platforms, such as the Link Building HQ by uSERP.

Now Over To You

So, to sum it up, to get backlinks, you need to invest a lot of time into email outreach.

More specifically, prospecting, crafting your outreach sequence, finding contact information, and, of course, personalization.

This is a lot of work.

If you need help, don’t hesitate to start your 7-day free trial with Respona to see how we can speed the entire process for you!

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’s the best way to get backlinks?

The best way to get backlinks is by directly reaching out to bloggers and webmasters with your link pitch. 

How do I ask for backlinks?

The sad reality is that most people won’t link to you for free, even if it’s extremely topically relevant.

So, you need to have a strong value proposition in your email pitch. Such a value proposition can be an indirect link back, for example from a guest post of yours.

Do backlinks help SEO?

Dofollow links pass on PageRank (“link juice”), and PageRank translates into Google search engine rankings, so yes, backlinks still massively help search engine optimization, even in 2024.

Which backlinks are considered good?

A good backlink is one that is relevant, contextual, in-content, from blog post to another blog post.

How long until I start seeing results from my backlink building?

Link building is notoriously slow to kick in – you can expect several months to pass from the moment you acquire some strong links until they start having any impact on your SEO and rankings.