- In this video I'm going
to show you 19 link building techniques that will help you
land tons of new high quality backlinks so you can increase
your rankings and traffic. In fact, I've used these exact
techniques you're about to learn to grow organic search
traffic by 93%, 100%, and even 254%. I'm Nathan Gotch the founder of Gotch SEO, which is where entrepreneurs
come to learn how to get more free traffic from search engines. And today, I'm going to show
you my go to link building techniques that will help you land amazing backlinks in any niche. Any make sure you watch until the end, because we'll be sharing some
proven outreach templates you can swipe and use for yourself. Let's jump in. (energetic instrumental music) So the first thing that you
need to do is focus on trying to grow your website
authority without getting any new backlinks. Now, I know that this may
sound counterintuitive, but there are many actions
you can take to grow your websites authority without
needing any more backlinks. But before I show you
what methods you can use, you need to first understand
why we're even putting in effort to acquire backlinks
in the first place. So the main objectives of
acquiring backlinks are to A, increase your individual
keyword rankings, B, increase your organic search traffic, and C, to increase your
overall website authority. And one other perk of
acquiring quality backlinks is it can help you get relevant
qualified referral traffic. But point C, which is grow
your overall website authority is the most important
objective of link building in my opinion. Because when your website
is more authoritative, it becomes easier to rank. That means you won't need
as many backlinks to rank. And you can see proof of this
when a website like Forbes, publishes a new article and
ranks on the second or first page Google, without any backlinks at all. This is the power of website authority. And since you don't need
as many backlinks to rank, you will actually reduce your
overall SEO cost overtime, because link building is one
of the most capital and time intensive parts of a SEO campaign. So with that said, I want
to show you some techniques you can use, to grow your
websites authority without needing any new backlinks. So the first method is
to fix redirect chains. A redirect chain occurs when a redirect is redirecting to a redirect. And the problem with this
is that page B is acting as a buffer between page A
and the final destination which is page C. This technical issue is robbing page C of it's potential authority. So to fix this, you need to 301 redirect page A to page C. And by fixing a redirect chain, you'll send authority and link equity directly
to the page that you want. And this is far more
effective than making the link equity pass through a buffer. Now here's how you can
find redirect chains using Screaming Frog SEO Spider. Open up Screaming Frog. Enter your domain and start the analysis. Then click on "Reports" in the navigation, and select "Redirect & Canonical Chains". The second method to grow
your website authority is to fix 302 redirects. Now there is some debate on
whether or not PageRank passes through 302 redirects. And for many years, SEO's
including myself have always stated that you should
change 302's to 301's. This is still my stance. However, here's what Gary
whose last name I won't try to pronounce recently said, "30x redirects don't
lose PageRank anymore". Now is Gary telling the truth? Probably, but I still don't
think it's worth the risk. Because out of the 100's of SEO's audits, my team and I have conducted. I've only seen a few websites
using 302's for their actual purpose, which is a temporary redirect. That means that in most cases, 302's are nothing more than accidental. So with that said, it's my personal preference
to change 302's to 301's if they aren't being used
for the actual purpose. Now to find 302 redirects,
just open up Screaming Frog and click on the "Response Codes" tab. Click on the "Filter Dropdown". And select "Redirection 3XX". The third method you should use to grow your website
authority is to leverage pages that have existing authority. This is particularly effective
when you publish a new page you want to rank in google. That's because these internal links will send equity to the new page. Which will give it a nice
authority boost out of the gate. So here's the process, I personally use. Open up Ahrefs. Enter your domain. And click on "Best Buy links" under pages. Then start going down the
list adding internal links to these pages where it makes sense. I also recommend tracking
what anchor text you used and the day you added the internal link. That way you can back track
and quantify your actions. As far as anchor text, you should mainly use exact match or partial match for your internal links. And I also recommend auditing your existing internal link anchor text, because many websites do not
use internal links effectively. And my personal favorite way
to audit internal anchors, to no surprise is to use
Screaming Frog SEO Spider. All you need to do is click
on "End links" at the bottom and you'll be able to see
all the internal linking information including the
firn URL's and anchor text. Go through and optimize
these for better performance. Once again, track your changes. The fourth method to grow
your website authority is to reclaim lost link equity
by fixing 404 errors. You can either use Google
search console or Screaming Frog SEO Spider to find 404 errors. For Google search console,
just go to the crawl section, click on "Crawl Errors"
and select "Not found". To find 404's in Screaming Frog, just click on "Response Codes". Click the "Filter" dropdown and select "Climb Error 4XX". Then what you need to do is
copy all of the 404 errors, open up Ahrefs. Click "More" in the navigation. Click "Batch Analysis". Enter your URL's and start the analysis. If you find 404 pages
with existing backlinks, you should 301 redirect them to a relevant page on your site or
to the home page if a relevant page doesn't exist. The fifth method for growing
your website authority, is to consolidate similar pages. One of the biggest SEO content
mistakes is creating multiple assets around very
similar keyword phrases. This is what leads to
keyword cannibalization and generally makes your SEO campaign harder than it needs to be. And that's when the Cake
Technique comes into play. In short, the cake technique
is the process of consolidating similar content assets
into a single mother asset. Going through this process
has a wide aray of benefits. Such as number 1, Increased word count. Consolidating assets, will naturally increase your word count. Which is often correlated to
better rankings in Google. Number two, deeper content. Spreading your knowledge
across multiple post, usually produces thin content. Consolidating assets will
produce the opposite affect. Number three, it eliminates
keyword cannibalization issues. Keyword cannibalization which
is when two or more pages target very similar keywords. Forces Google to choose,
which one is best. So instead of taking a risk,
you can just consolidate these assets to eliminate that
possibility altogether. Number four, it consolidates authority. You'll be 301 redirecting
your other assets, which means your mother asset will inherit all existing backlinks. That will turn your mother asset into an authoritative powerhouse. Number five, it makes content
promotion much easier. It's easier to acquire
backlinks to and to promote a single content asset. Plus people are more likely
to link to a super valuable and in depth resource
then a fin content asset. So here are the steps to
execute in the Cake Technique. First, identify content
assets that are targeting the same or closely related keywords. Second, decide what content
asset is going to be your "Mother" asset. Third, map out how you're
going to combine these content assets into a single piece of content. Fourth, consolidate the content. Fifth, 301 redirect the supporting assets to your "Mother" asset. And sixth, annotate your
actions in Google analytics to measure the performance
of your new asset. And I've personally used this
exact technique with many clients, and even on Gotch SEO. When I consolidated a few
different assets around the topic of backlinks. I had individual blog posts on What is a High Quality Backlink. How to Build Tier One Backlinks. How to Build Tier Two Backlinks. How to Build Tier Three Backlinks. And even how to earn backlinks. This is borderline
keyword cannibalization, so I decided to consolidate
them into a single asset which is now my backlinks guide. As a result Gotch SEO
floats around number 1 for the term backlinks. And we've grown this pages
organic search traffic by almost 300% since 2016. And now the final method
I want to show you is to build an effective
site architecture. Developing an intelligent
site architecture is the single best way to get the
most bang for your buck when it comes to link building. And my personal favorite
architecture strategy is to use a Reverse Silo. Instead of trying to acquire backlinks to non linkable pages, such as homepage, category
pages, product pages etc. The Reverse Silo is built
to acquire backlinks to content rich pages. Now these maybe blog posts or individual information driven pages. This is a more effective
approach to link acquisition because people are much more
willing to link to a valuable piece of information
than a sales driven page. With that said, the ultimate
goal of the Reverse Silo is to distribute link authority
page rank from your content assets to your sales driven
pages via internal linking. And I believe this content
centric approach is the safest way to grow your website authority. So now that you know what to do to grow your websites authority, let me show you my favorite
method for acquiring backlinks, which is to create linkable assets. I use this simple three step approach for creating these assets. Number one, I find linkable
asset ideas from competitors. Number two, I create something better than what currently exists. Number three, I promote
the linkable asset. Let's start with step one. So the first question is what is a Linkable Asset? A Linkable Asset is designed
to attract backlinks. And the truth is some pages
are simply not link worthy. And some examples include
home pages, category pages, and product pages. Now sure, with some creativity
it's possible to attract links to these types of pages. But in most cases, you'll
need to create linkable assets if you really want to
accelerate your SEO performance. Ensured a linkable asset adds massive value to your industry. It helps you earn
backlinks in the long run. So how do you actually
create a linkable asset? I'm going to walk you through
how I would create a linkable asset for a local business
because I believe this concept can be most confusing
for local situations. So let's pretend I'm working
on a local SEO campaign for a St. Louis financial planner. And their primary objective
is to rank for St. Louis financial planner. So the first step of this
process is to create the absolute best page
targeting the keyword phrase St. Louis financial planner. In most cases I would
likely use their homepage, unless they have locations
outside of the state. And after that page is developed. I would then begin the process
of creating a linkable asset. Now the trick to accomplishing
this on the local level is to establish the idea,
that the company is an authority in their niche. And from that perspective,
we can create content that adds value to the
financial planning industry on both the local and national level. So my go to approach is to
analyze competitors and see what's already worked. That way you don't even
have to reinvent the wheel. What you want to do is just go to Google, enter a broad phrase. So in this case, I'll just
search financial planning blogs. Let's start with plannerssearch.org. Copy their URL. Open up Ahrefs and paste the
URL in the site explorer. After the analysis is
complete, click on "Top Pages" under organic search. And the goal is to see what
keywords have attracted the most backlinks because
then we can reach out to these same sources with
our linkable assets. And right away we see if
there's a page wrecking for the keyword phrase, when to retire. And the page has attracted,
12 linking root domains. Now, this is nothing super impressive. But that's a good sign,
because it means there's a lot of room for improvement. So just continue going
through your competitors, and building your list
of linkable asset ideas. Then all you need to do is start creating your first linkable asset. Now the goal should be to
create something that's totally different and 10 X better
than what's currently ranking. I recommend reading my SEO
Content guide to learn more. I'll have a link below the video. After your linkable asset is created, it's time to start reaching out
and trying to get backlinks. Since most of the
methods I'm going to show you require outreach. I'm now going to show you
how to find email addresses and contact information. The first tool you should
use is ViolaNorbert. Just enter the first and
last name and the domain of the person you're trying to reach. In most cases, this tool
will be more than enough. But if it doesn't find
the contact info you need, then I recommend using hunter.io. Which is also super straight forward. Just log in and enter the
domain you're targeting. If you don't find the right emails using both of these tools, you'll need to do a manual check. Look for authors, go to the
contact page, or even check the who is information. And if there isn't a
visible author on the page, you can check the source code. Just right click on the target page and click "View Page Source" and search for author. You should be able to find an author. Now that you know how to find emails, it's also important to
understand how to qualify and prioritize link opportunities. You'll need to go through
this qualification process I'm about to show you, once you've gathered all
your link opportunities. There are four qualifiers you
should use for prioritizing link opportunities. First, how much brand
recognition do you have? How well known is your
company or the person whose producing your content asset? If you're relatively unknown,
then you should focus on the lower hanging fruits. That's because super high
quality opportunities require more relationship development. And that takes time, and if you rush it, you could hurt your chances
of scoring links from popular industry blogs in the future. The second qualifier is relevance. You're number one link
building objective should be to get backlinks on websites
that are relevant to yours. But don't take my word for it. Here's what a formal member of
Google's search quality team Andre Weyher said back in 2010. "Now only this but take PR
for example, getting a link from a high PR page used
to always be valuable. Today it's more the
relevance of the site's theme in regards to yours,
relevance is the new PR". Now this quote is stating
something very obvious. Your link acquisition efforts should begin with the most relevant opportunities. But there's a problem with this approach. Getting 100% exact relevancy for every single link is unrealistic. That's why I developed the
relevancy pyramid framework for prioritizing your link opportunities. And the idea is quite simple. There is a limited supply of 100% relevant link opportunities. However, as you broaden your research, there will be many more
opportunities to go after. So the key is to prioritize
opportunities at the top of the pyramid since there the
most relevant and then work your way down the pyramid towards the less relevant opportunities. All you need to do is just
assign each opportunity a score of one to five. With a score of one
being the most relevant. The third qualifier is authority. The stronger the site,
the better the results. And since Google doesn't
update PageRank anymore for the public, you have to
rely on third party metrics. Now none of these third
party tools are perfect, but they will do the job. I recommend you analyze
opportunities using all available options. And those include Ahrefs,
Majestic and Open Site Explorer. Now the fourth qualifier is traffic. If you approach link
acquisition with the intention of driving traffic to your website. It changes your entire mindset. Your goal should be to
get backlinks on websites with real traffic. Now this doesn't mean you'll
get loads of referral traffic, but it's a good standard to have. And since you will never
know the exact traffic data of a site without seeing
their analytics, you'll need to use SEMrush or Ahrefs. Now these are the four
checks you can use to quickly qualify and prioritize opportunities. But if you want to take
it up another notch, you can also vet opportunities
based on the actual quality of their link profile
and their editorial standards. So now that you know how to
find contact information and how to qualify link opportunities. Let me show you how to actually
find these opportunities. So the first way to
promote your linkable asset is to reach out to the websites that have linked to your competitor. The best way to do this is to use Ahrefs. Open up Ahrefs. Click on the keyword "Explorer". Enter your keyword and then scroll down to the competitors section. Then export the link opportunities and qualify and prioritize the list. Then all you have to do is
send a simple outreach email saying that you created
something similar and explain the contents
unique selling proposition. Just articulate why the content
is important, different, or better than what their linking too. I'll have a sample
outreach template in the description below the video. Then you can swipe. Just remember that the
goal of this strategy, isn't to try to persuade
the website to replace your competitors link. The goal is to persuade
them that your resource is a good supplement to the content and that it can add
value to their audience. The next way to promote
your linkable asset is to reach out to people you
link to within the post. All you need to do is open up
your publish content asset, and then install the data
miner browser plugin. After it's installed,
click it and under the public tab. There should be an option
for generic recipe, get all links. If not, just search for
it and then click "Run". Download the CSV and delete
all the unnecessary rows and then you'll have a
nice list of prospects to reach out too. Like I said, I'll have a
template in the description that you can use. The next method is to
pitch your content asset to link roundups. The key to landing links
on roundups is to build a reputation for producing
incredible content. That makes the process much easier. Once you've established that criteria. All you need to do is
prospect for the link roundups in your industry. Just go to Google and enter
link roundup plus your keyword. And I'll share some different
search strings below this video as well. So in this case, I'll use
link roundup plus finance. Then just use the data miner
browser plugin to export the Google results. And like the other methods,
you'll need to qualify the opportunities and
find contact information. I'll have a template for
reaching out to link roundup opportunities in the description. The next step that you
should use to promote your linkable asset is to
look for resource pages. Resource pages are great for two reasons. First, if your resource
is high quality, you can land a link pretty easily. And secondly, many
resource pages are filled with broken links. Which means you can use that as leverage. So here's what you need to
do to find resource pages. Go to Google and enter keyword
intitle' and then resources. In this case, I'll use
finance intitle resources. I'll give you some more
search strings below this video as well. Open up each opportunity and then I highly recommend installing the
check my links plugin, because this will allow
you to find broken links on these pages. And once you've installed
the plugins, run it and see if these pages have any
existing broken links. So in this case, there
are no broken links. So you would just send a
traditional out reach template, to get your content featured
on this research page. On the other hand, if this
page had broken links, you would need to use a
slightly different outreach template and I'll have one below for you. So those are a few of the
methods you can use to promote your linkable asset,
but now I want to show you some of my favorite,
non content dependent link building techniques. The first method which
is often overlooked, is to fix backlinks with redirect chains. In short, you're going
to reach out to websites that have already linked
to you and then ask if they can change the link to your preferred URL. All you need to do is open Ahrefs. Enter your domain and
click on "Backlinks". And then under backlink profile, click on the "Link Type" dropdown and select "With Redirect Chain". Then all you need to do is
reach out to these websites and ask if they can change the URL. The next method is, guest posting. Which is an old school method, but it's still super effective if
you do it the right way. The key is to place your
links within the body of the content as opposed to the author bio. To find these opportunities,
open up Google or any other search engines like
Bing, Yahoo or Duck Duck Go. And enter some simple search
strings like your niche plus write for us. Or your niche plus guest post. You can also find where your
competitors have guest posted, by searching by plus their
name minus a reductive query, their website.com. After you've built a nice list
of guest posting prospects. You just need to qualify
and prioritize them, find the contact information
and then send them a pitch. I always recommend pitching
three different topics and make sure you do your research
to make sure the topics haven't been written on before. Or if they have been
covered, make sure you're bringing something new to the table. As I mentioned before, you
should try to add links to your content assets within the guest post. Like I did in this @ SEMrush guest post I wrote a few years ago. The next method is help
a reporter out or HARO which isn't a new link
acquisition tactic by any means. But it's super effective if you have the right system in place. The key is to focus on
quality over quantity. Sending 100's of thin responses won't generate great results. That's why you need to
put a lot of thought into your responses and make sure you're responding to relevant opportunities. Here's an example of a HARO
contribution I submitted for customer think. Which has a domain rating of 78. Notice that my response isn't long, but I did take the time
to craft what I believe to be a valuable responsible. The next link building
strategy is relatively untapped and I call it the Merger Technique. But before I jump into the strategy, you first must understand
what a merger actually is. Investopedia defines a merger
as "The combining of two or more companies, generally
by offering the stockholders of one company securities
in the acquiring company in exchange for the
surrender of their stock." Now from a SEO perspective,
when a merger occurs, the old brands website
will get 301 redirected to the acquiring companies website. In short, the merger technique
is the process of 301 redirecting a relevant domain,
with a relevant link profile, to your website. The ultimate objective is to increase your websites authority
because the stronger website makes ranking much easier. This strategy simply imitates
the process of a big brand acquiring another business. And I came up with the name
of this technique because we executed it with one of our clients who acquires data centers
across the United States. So every time they
acquire a new data center, we would 301 redirect
the acquire brand site, the most relevant page on their website. So for example, if they
acquired a Dallas data center. We would redirect that website to their Dallas data center page. And within a year, we increased
their organic search traffic by 256%. Although these results are
awesome, I wanted to make sure it wasn't an isolated event. And that's why I implemented
the same exact strategy, on GOTCH SEO and several
other clients sites. For my site, I took an old
marketing website and 301 redirected it to a landing
page on my website. That redirect pushed the target keyword, to the first page. I then did the same exact
thing for a local website and grew it's organic
search traffic by 425%. If you want an example
outside of my own experiences, then I highly recommend
that you take a look at Neil Patel's link profile. He's acquired a few different
companies and merged them with neilpatel.com. This has absolutely exploded
his organic search traffic. So you get it. 301 redirects work, but
let's wait a second here. Not all 301 redirects work. That's why I didn't call
this 301 redirect strategy. The key is to find extremely
relevant businesses to acquire. These can either be expired
domains or existing businesses. Let's start with expired domains. You can use a tool like
DomCop, Expired Domains.net or Fresh Drop to find and
filter through thousands of expired domains. I have videos
on my channel for all three of these tools so make
sure you check those out. Now finding expired
domains is the easy part, but vetting them is where
you need the most skill. This is incredibly important
and not a step to take likely, because you don't want to
redirect a toxic website to yours. You want to make sure it's of the highest quality imaginable. So here's what you need to look for when vetting expired domains. Number one, the link profile. The domain should have high quality links from relevant websites. Number two, the anchor text. The domain shouldn't have
aggressive anchor text use. Meaning a high usage of
keyword rich anchor texts. The ideal situation is to find domains, that predominantly have
branded anchor text. Number three, the link stickability. Links are important, but
making sure they actually stick is even more important. In general, links within the
body of content, are more likely to stick, but links
and footers such as those you see from web design companies
or site wide blog rollings have a low stickability potential. Another way to ensure
that your links stick, is how you go about actually redirecting the acquired website. If possible, you should try
to redirect individual pages, to the most relevant page on your site. This is far more affective
then a full on site wide redirect to the home page. As far as link stickability
and even effectiveness. Number four, the domain usage history. Use archive.org to see how
the domain has been used throughout it's history. In an ideal situation, the
domain would've only had one owner and hasn't been
used since it's expired. This simple process is
what led me to acquire minternetmarketing.com
which had many inbound marketing relevant links,
such as this one from hubspot. Now the vetting process for
an existing inactive business is nearly identical. The only difference is how
you find these companies. For example, Brian Dean
from backlinko just acquired John Cooper's blog Point Blank SEO. This is a perfect example
of a proper merger, because Point Blank SEO is
hyper relevant to backlinko and it has an incredible link profile. You need to dig through
your industry and create a list of blogs or companies
that aren't updating their website or maybe seem to
not be doing too well. Just use simple search
queries in Google like list of topic blogs, or
city niche companies. You'll need to do a lot
of manual analysis to see how active these blogs are. And one thing you can do
is use the check my links plugin to see if any of
the blogs are dead when you're going through these list. Once you've identified some targets and vetted their websites. All you need to do, is reach out engage their interest in acquisition. The next link building method
is a slight iteration of the merger technique and
I call it the White Hat Alternative to PBNs. PBNs are still a very popular great out link building method. But using them comes
with substantial risk. That's why I developed this technique. In short, you're going to
extract the links away from the expired domains and
send them directly to your website, instead of having
to build a risky PBN or even having to 301 redirect a website. So with that said, here's
what you need to do to execute this strategy. Number one, find an expired domain with a relevant high-quality link profile. Number two, scrape its backlinks. Number three, qualify and
prioritize the link opportunities. Number four, reach out and
let the linkers know they are linking to a dead
resource and pitch a relevant content asset of yours that
they can link to instead. Now to improve your success
rate, you should suggest two to three quality
resources including yours. If you're willing to put in more effort, you could also recreate
the original content which would substantially
increase your success rate. Now this is obvious, but
the content must be better than the original. And it needs to be
relevant to your website. Now if you take this route,
all you need to do is reach out and let the linker know about the new revised piece of content. The next method is to
leverage list of top blogs. I mentioned looking through
a list of top blogs to find merger opportunities,
but these list are also generally great link building
opportunities as well. You just need to reach
out and see if you can get on these list. It's as simple as that. Now obviously the pre
requisite you'll need to have, is a quality blog. That means you need to
be honest with yourself and compare your blog with
those that are actually on that list. If you feel that you're
producing similar or better caliber work, then you should
reach out to these lists. Now to find them, you can
just put your competitor into Ahrefs and click on "Backlinks". Then just search top
blogs in the search bar. You can also prospect in
Google using search strings such as top or best niche blogs. I'll have a template you
can use below this video. The next method is to land
links on expert roundups. Expert roundups are definitely
over played at this point, but there still an easy way to score backlinks on relevant blogs. Now I've become a lot more
selective about the ones I personally participate in, but if you're just starting out. You should take every
opportunity you can get to get a quality backlink. One method you can use
which is something I learned from a friend and fellow SEO Garret Dane, is to reach out to expert roundups that have already been published. This is a super easy way
to score backlinks because these types of content
assets are always seeking more expert insights. Now the easiest way to
find expert roundups is to run your competitor through Ahrefs, click on "Backlinks" and
search expert roundup in the search bar. You can also use Google to
find more expert roundup opportunities by using simple
search strings like niche plus expert roundup. The next link building
technique requires your company to have a figure head or a known expert. That's because you can
score easy backlinks through interviews and podcasts. All you need to do is spend
30 to 60 minutes of your time to score a high quality
backlink and to get exposure for your brand. It's a win win. Now you can find these
opportunities using general search queries like niche
plus interview width or you can find opportunities
by searching for interviews that your
competitors have done by doing interview plus competitor
name minus their domain. Just reach out and pitch
yourself for the interview. Now one thing to keep in
mind is that you can land interviews on marketing
or business podcast, just by having unique result to share. The good news is you
don't have to be guru. For example, you can be a
HVAC company with an awesome gross story and land some great
backlinks from interviews. Alright guys, so I hope this
helped you learn a thing or two about the various
link building techniques that I used at this point
and all you need to do now is just take action on
what you've learned. And if you got value, please like and share this
video because it could help many others. Thank you so much for watching and leave a comment below if you have any questions whatsoever because I respond to every single one. I'll see you in the next video.
