How you can use content marketing for link building (3 key tips), create timeless content to add lasting value to your blog. Invest time in guest blogging for other sites in your niche. Publish relevant infographics to create shareable links. Content marketing is still an effective way to gain links and increase your SEO.
Here are 11 content-based link building tactics that you can use depending on your budget. When you earn links, other websites link to yours without you asking them to. Content Marketing World is part of Informa PLC's Informa Connect division. Practically everyone understands the importance of “doing content marketing”, but many, even those with documented content marketing strategies, don't know how to align the types of content they create with the desired content marketing objectives.
For example, some of the best content for attracting and encouraging qualified leads, such as webinars, underperforms when it comes to link building. On the contrary, publishing new data and research is a great way to create a strong link profile. Infographics are one of the most popular types of link building content. More than half (53%) of SEO experts create fundamental infographics and 61% of them consider them to be an efficient way of obtaining backlinks.
In our outreach initiatives, we've tried it with data, videos, infographics (with embedded code) and many other things. It worked well, but when we tested data and statistics on the infographics and got in touch to share the infographics with our personalized description for each website, the response and success rate exceeded all of our previous results and expectations. As soon as Jubaer began distributing these infographics as “guest graphics,” the ROI of the content increased dramatically and garnered hundreds of backlinks from dozens of different domains. One of his infographics has received almost 1000 backlinks from more than 300 referring domains.
Once you've created your infographic, you need to decide how to distribute it. If you want to create custom graphics, like Jabaer, coldly contact key influencers. Offer to have your infographic published and write a short guest post for them to publish. Alternatively, if you have a lot of followers, post the infographic on your website and promote it on social media.
If your content is highly relevant to other influencers, you'll likely get it shared a number of times, “likes” and backlinks generated. In any case, the quality of the data and the relevance of the topic play an important role in how effectively your infographic generates backlinks. To build a high-quality link network, you need to start with something worth linking to. That means creating great fundamental content, content that is so rich that you can reuse it and use it to attract customers throughout your sales process and encourage a variety of actions.
White papers are among the best types of fundamental content. These robust resources provide your audience with an in-depth examination of the issues that really matter to them. They offer a powerful mix of content that increases your credibility and solves customer problems. Forty-two percent of the SEO experts who responded have created white papers and 60% of them consider them to be the ideal content for obtaining links.
However, as with infographics, content quality is key. Our best way to create a high-link profile for our websites is to simply create great and unique content. Our sites are B2B and informative, so our in-house publishers publish a wealth of content to help our readers succeed in their businesses, articles that cover unique information that deserve to be shared. Good content is the most natural way to gain links.
Fortunately, white papers and e-books are some of those valuable contents that practically sell themselves. If you really realize an important need that your audience is facing, people will be happy to share and link to your white paper. In our survey, the absolute leaders in terms of popular link building methods were social media techniques, such as including links in social media profiles and sharing original content. If you want to create links through social media techniques, investing in a white paper as a key asset is a good starting point.
Last month, my Twitter account talked a lot about the Content Marketing Institute's new report on benchmarks, budgets and trends, and with good reason. According to our survey, when it comes to building links, there's nothing better than disclosing new industry data and research in your niche. It's okay to make promotions to inform people about your content, but if you can only get links by offering people money or other big incentives, you're probably doing it wrong. One of the best ways to get links is to publish original research.
That's not that hard to do. Discover a question that people have in your industry, and then do something to answer that question with data. Part of the reason that data and research work so well as fundamental content is because they are versatile. You can reuse your original research on all other types of content, including the other four listed in this post.
Do you have a ton of statistics and percentages to share? Turn them into an infographic. Have you gained new knowledge that will change the rules of the game? Publish a white paper. Do you have ideas that could solve several pain points? Create a video series. Until we finished collecting the survey data, I didn't realize that webinars are outliers in link building.
In fact, webinars ended up being a relatively inefficient type of content for obtaining backlinks, and only 56% of respondents found success with them. However, if we stop to think about the way most marketers use webinars, the low link creation rate makes a little more sense. Most companies use webinars to develop intermediate relationships with consumers. This format usually provides additional information, addresses some of your persistent weaknesses, or addresses them in a more dynamic Q&A format.
What marketers don't usually do with webinars is actively create their link profile. However, that doesn't mean you can't use webinars to create links, you just need to be creative. For example, include leading industry influencers in your webinars. These voices can earn you more credibility and backlinks and, in the long run, boost your brand.
However, the key to doing it (creating links, outreach) the right way is not to worry about the number of places where you publish, but about the quality of the place where you publish. In any given market space, you might have 10 to 30 sites worth publishing on. So think more about that, than about masses and masses from different domains. Videos are another popular type of content when it comes to completing your link profile.
Fifty-nine percent of SEO experts claim to have used video content for link building, and two-thirds of them consider it efficient. Of course, the Internet is so flooded with video content these days that it can be difficult to get noticed. You have to get inside the heads of your audience members and create content with a full understanding of what motivates them, frustrates them, and makes them laugh. Then, you need to put in the time, effort, and budget to make your videos work well.
After optimizing your content for YouTube and getting some views, I recommend that you also natively host your best video content on your landing pages. You can then use link tracking software to find people who have linked to your YouTube videos and send them a friendly request to change their links to your landing pages. What types of content should you focus on if you want to create your link profile? According to our survey of SEO professionals, the most efficient types of content are original research, infographics and videos. The common thread that I see in all of these types of content is their potential to go viral.
All of these formats have the capacity to provide valuable, easily digestible and eminently shareable information. Generally speaking, the more high-quality websites link to you, the more likely you are to rank well in search results. An unlinked brand mention is when a website mentions you or your company without actually including a link to you. They are generally used when site owners want to link to another website, but don't want to involve any type of approval.
A great way to create high-quality links is to become a source for reporters, journalists and bloggers. This directly affects SEOs, as you must ensure that the link building techniques you choose are mainly focused on that quality. If your only goal is to get a link to your content on a site like Quora, standing out might not be your priority. That said, a unique infographic that contains practical conclusions can still be an attractive asset for publishers and a fantastic way to get links from both publishers and top-tier bloggers.
Many of them will be created for a variety of reasons, such as a journalist covering a news story and linking to a source, or a blogger who likes his new coffee machine so much that he links it to the retailer that sold it to him. Link building is when you get other websites or blogs to link to your website to improve your search engine rankings. It's easy to overlook these opportunities when you're targeting the most important publications, but local links are often much easier to get and, at the same time, retain a high level of authority and relevance for a company. Even if Mueller doesn't include links to your content, he may share it with his 55,800 followers on Twitter, which in turn can lead one of his followers to share it with his own audience or link to your content.
At the time, Google was much more advanced than most search engines, but it was still open to manipulation because it wasn't very good at differentiating between a high-quality link and a low-quality one. Not to mention that, in the long run, you increase the likelihood that you'll get links that you didn't request. People often crop images from your infographic for their own blog, which means you'll get tons of links. .
