Wondering what organic links are and how to get them?
Here’s a beginner’s guide to help you get started.
Inside, you’ll find a simple answer to what organic links are, five benefits you need to know when it comes to organic links, and the process for getting high-quality organic links, fast.
We’ve got a lot to cover so we better get started.
Key Takeaways:
- Organic links are backlinks earned naturally because another website genuinely finds your content valuable or worth referencing.
- High-quality organic links help improve rankings, referral traffic, domain authority, and overall search visibility.
- Organic link building still relies heavily on promotion, outreach, and building visibility around your content.
- Listicle placements and contextual mentions can also improve AI visibility because answer engines often pull recommendations from trusted pages already ranking on Google.
- The best organic links usually come from relevant, authoritative pages with real traffic and strong topical relevance.
Link building cheat sheet
What is an Organic Link?
Organic links, also known as natural links, are dofollow and nofollow links that are given from a web page to another web page without a specific link building partnership between the two websites.
In other words, organic links are those links that are given to a website because the website owner who gives the link thinks that the resource is valuable and includes high-quality content.
These types of links are essential for every website, regardless of its niche. It could be a website providing SEO services, a fashion blog, a tech blog, or even a website that researches spy apps.
Natural backlinks are the type of links that you should definitely be focusing on, given the fact that their meaning lies in high quality content.
Also, no matter how many search engine algorithm updates Google does, organic links always score high.
To put it simply, you create content that’s worth sharing and people will want to link back to it without trying to trick the PageRank or any other ranking factor by Google.
No identical and mechanical anchor texts, no black and grey hat link building strategies (AKA low-quality links, unnatural links, bad links or toxic backlinks) in sight!
Just well-made and thought-through content that deserves to be linked.
Let’s use one of our very own blog posts to show you how acquiring organic links might look.
Let’s have a look at this blog post we posted a few months ago:
As you can see from the title of the post, this one gives readers a number of ways that will help those interested in content marketing to get their blog noticed and boost their traffic.
We can easily assume that the post most likely includes tips and tricks that will be extremely useful for professional bloggers, publishers, marketers, and many other professionals out there.
We could say that the first step is to start by putting valuable and useful content out there.
We need to highlight that, as a piece of content gets organic visibility, i.e. ranks for more keywords in high positions, it has more chances of getting linked by other websites.
Consequently, as the piece acquires more links, it gets more organic visibility.
Ultimately, such a piece of content will work like a flywheel that brings in more links and more visibility, since there’s a high correlation between the number of links that are passively acquired and the level the organic visibility/rankings of a page.
The Ahrefs Overview you can see right below, informs us of the referring domains and backlinks from other domains to our blog post.
We notice that we’ve got a considerable amount of backlinks from a large number of referring domains.
The graphic below shows us the increase in organic links for this specific blog post:
Additionally, here we can see the increase in organic keywords for our high link velocity blog post:
It’s obvious that there’s a correlation between the number of acquired links and the number of organic keywords (and, consequently the number of organic traffic) that the post generates.
What you need to keep in mind when publishing your content is that organic traffic and consequently, organic links might not come from day one.
However, depending on your link building strategy and whether you do any outreach for promoting your content or not, you’ll have high chances of seeing the numbers go up.
Moving on.
What Are the Benefits of Organic Links?
We’ve already described what organic links are and what it means to get inbound links organically.
In this section we’re taking a look at five different benefits that organic links acquisition can bring to your business.
Let’s get into the first benefit.
Benefit #1: Improve AI Visibility
This is probably the biggest thing that changed recently.
Organic links used to mostly be about rankings and traffic. Now they also affect whether your brand shows up in AI-generated answers.
Because when tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Google AI Overviews recommend products, they usually pull those recommendations from pages already ranking well on Google.
Especially listicles.
If a “best SEO tools” article already ranks highly and your product gets mentioned there naturally, there’s a good chance AI systems start picking up that mention too.
So one placement now does a lot more than just pass link juice.
It can:
- Help your page rank better organically
- Send highly targeted traffic from people already researching solutions
- Get your brand mentioned inside AI-generated recommendations
Benefit #2: Increase your website’s authority
The first, and one of the most important, things the acquisition of natural links can do to your business is that it can positively affect your website’s domain authority (DA).
Put another way, having a piece that performs great in terms of being linkable, thus making people want to link back to it to enhance their content or support the validity of their arguments, can increase your website’s overall traffic and rankings.
The fact that a website may have some pages that perform better than others organically can lead to improving the website’s DA as a whole.
After all, on most websites, it’s only a handful of pages that bring in most of the links and traffic.
Let’s have a look at an example by online design tool, Visme.
More specifically, here’s the ‘best pages by incoming links’ report on Ahrefs.
We notice that there are some specific landing pages and blog pages that basically attract the most links in Visme’s website.
Consequently, Visme’s overall authority grows.
We therefore understand that aiming for great content would probably mean that you should create linkable, informative content, like tutorials on how to do this or that, as well as blog posts that feature templates or infographics, and so on and so forth.
After all, you only need some pages that’ll increase the number of backlinks you’re getting, thus increasing your site’s authority as a whole.
Let’s get to the next one.
Benefit #3: Acquire referral traffic
Another great benefit organic links can get for your website is that they can help you acquire referral traffic.
Getting organic links from websites and webpages that have a lot of traffic on their own can lead to increasing your referral traffic through that page.
Even though getting referral traffic from a referring website isn’t easy, given that a referring page should have a lot of traffic to pass on traffic to other pages, something like that can definitely happen.
Let’s say that somewhere in the following blog post, there’s a non-sponsored link to your own site.
As you can see, the organic traffic of this blog post is massive:
For that reason, to get an organic link for your blog from a page with such high organic keywords, backlinks and organic traffic simply means that your referral traffic will be increased as well.
Thus, it’s evident that a link from this page won’t only be a useful link for our backlink profile in terms of getting link juice from a DR 90 domain, but also because we may be acquiring referral traffic from this page as it does really well in organic search.
In other words, these quality links from sites with high organic traffic are very valuable links that can significantly benefit your site.
Moving on to the next great thing organic links acquisition might do to your website.
Benefit #4: Get higher rankings
Similar to what we’ve just mentioned, organic links can also get your pages higher rankings.
Natural links are the kind of links that can help you increase your ranking and the organic traffic to your website.
In a like manner, organic keywords – which are keywords that are used to attract organic traffic through search engine optimization (SEO) – can also help you rank higher.
To put it simply, the more organic links and organic keywords you have, the more chances you have of getting a place in the first page of results on a Google search.
Let’s have a look at the following example of a blog post that’s about new employee welcome kits:
As we can see, this blog post gets significant organic traffic and ranks for a considerable number of organic keywords.
As the page acquires backlinks from authoritative domains, it gets higher organic rankings for terms that are relevant.
Have a look at the graphic below that shows the page’s increase in organic rankings:
Also, check out the increase in organic keywords from the same period of time:
Since organic keywords are used to bring more organic traffic, we can clearly see that the increase in organic keywords leads to an increase in organic rankings for this specific blog post we’re featuring.
Additionally, there’s a correlation between organic links and organic rankings.
Pretty neat, isn’t it?
Keep reading to find yet another thing natural link building could help your business achieve.
Benefit #5: Reduce the investment for link building
Even though following a white hat link building strategy can be incredibly beneficial for your website’s rankings, organic links might even come when you don’t actively invest in link building for a while.
That’s not to say that there’s no reason to invest in link building.
We’re simply saying that, if for some reason you decide to pause your link building activities for a bit, you should still try to put your time and effort into creating amazing content that will pay off.
No matter how time-consuming you might think content creation is, it’s definitely worth it.
Our example here is a blog post by B2B agency, MINUTTIA, that gives readers access to fourteen templates they can download and use:
As we’ve mentioned a little further up, templates and how-to posts tend to perform really well.
That’s why we can see that a blog post that’s not doing any active link building at the moment still manages to get eleven backlinks from nine different referring domains passively.
We’ve now completed our list of four benefits organic links can bring.
Let’s move on to the next, very exciting section of our guide.
How to Get Organic Links?
Organic links are not as passive as people make them sound.
Yes, the link itself is earned naturally when someone decides your content is worth referencing. But getting enough visibility for that to happen usually takes active promotion.
Great content sitting on page 5 is probably not getting linked to.
The process usually comes down to two things:
- Publishing something genuinely useful
- Getting it in front of relevant websites and publishers
Most of the work is in the promotion side.
Finding relevant websites, identifying good placement opportunities, reaching out to editors, following up, negotiating placements, keeping outreach organized, all of that takes a huge amount of time once you try scaling it consistently.
At Respona, the process is built around handling that entire side for you.
You place an order with your target pages, target queries, anchor text preferences, and niche requirements, then the team handles the prospecting, outreach, follow-ups, relationship building, and placements.
Since it’s pay-per-result, it works whether you need one placement or a much larger link building campaign.
The campaigns feature also makes the placements much more targeted.
You can enter the search queries you care about and find listicles and articles already ranking on Google and already getting cited by AI answer engines.
So instead of chasing random backlinks, you focus on placements that already rank well organically, get targeted traffic, and whow up in AI-generated recommendations so you can too.
Link building cheat sheet
Now Over to You
At the end of the day, organic links still come down to one thing: creating something people genuinely want to reference.
But creating great content alone usually is not enough anymore. You also need promotion, visibility, and strong placements on pages people already trust.
And if you want help building high-quality organic links without handling all the outreach yourself, you can simply place an order and let Respona handle the prospecting, outreach, relationship building, and placements for you.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
What is an organic link?
An organic link is a backlink that another website gives naturally because they genuinely find the content useful, relevant, or worth referencing.
Are organic links important for SEO?
Yes. Organic links are still one of the strongest ranking signals because they help search engines measure authority, trust, and relevance.
Do organic links have to be dofollow?
No. Both dofollow and nofollow links can still have value, especially when they come from authoritative websites with real traffic and visibility.
How long does it take to get organic backlinks?
Usually longer than people expect. Organic backlinks tend to build gradually as content gains rankings, visibility, and exposure over time.
What type of content gets the most organic links?
Guides, original research, statistics, templates, tools, listicles, and genuinely useful resources tend to attract the most natural backlinks.
Can organic links improve AI visibility?
Yes. AI answer engines often pull information and recommendations from trusted pages already ranking on Google, so organic links can indirectly improve AI visibility too.
What is the difference between organic links and paid links?
Organic links are earned naturally without direct payment, while paid links involve compensation or sponsorship agreements between websites.
Do you still need outreach for organic link building?
Absolutely. Even great content usually needs promotion and outreach before it starts attracting backlinks naturally at scale.
Why are listicle placements so effective for organic link building?
Because they usually rank for commercial searches, attract targeted traffic, and increasingly get referenced by AI systems when generating recommendations.
