I’ll be honest with you. It’s often easy for established sites to build
backlinks without much effort. In fact, we haven’t done outreach for links
in a while, yet our link profile continues to grow at a steady pace. Now, I’d love to say that it’s all because
of high-quality content, but the truth is that our brand has built an audience,
credibility, and trust over time. But what if you have a brand new website or if people
don’t really know who you are in your industry? Well, today I’m going to show you how to build backlinks to a brand new website in a systematized way. Stay tuned. [music] What’s up SEOs? Sam Oh here with Ahrefs, the SEO tool that
helps you grow your search traffic, research your competitors and dominate your niche. Today, I want to talk about which links you
should focus on creating first and how to progressively get better links as you build
your brand and credibility. Let’s get to it. So assuming you’re starting with zero links
pointing at your site, the first thing I’d focus on is building links
to your home page. There are 3 strategies that I find work really well. The first method is to build citations and create
social media accounts to boost trust signals. Citations are online mentions of your business
and they’re most commonly used in local SEO. So if you’re a local business, you’d basically
find business directories and add your business name, address, and phone number, which are collectively
known as NAP. In a 2018 study by Moz, they found that citation
signals help websites rank in both the map pack and organic search. And these are usually nofollowed links, so the purpose of these links isn’t to building website or page level authority. But it’s to somewhat legitimize that you
do have a real business. A great way to find these opportunities is
to search in Google for something like “your city” and “your job.” From here, copy down a few domains from local
competitors, ignoring anything like directories. Next, we’re going to use Ahrefs’ Link
Intersect tool, which will show you who’s linking to one or more of your target URLs. So I’m just pasting the homepage URLs of
my plumbing competitors here. And as a final step, I’ll set the mode to
URL since we want to see who’s linked to just their homepages since that’s where
the link will generally point to. Let’s run the search. Generally speaking, the more intersections
there are from the referring domain, the higher the probability of it being a place to create a citation. To analyze the link, click on the number,
and then click on the link. And as you can see, the company’s name,
address, phone number, and a link to their website are all there. So I’d go and add my site to this directory too. Now, whether your website targets visitors
locally or globally, it’s also worth creating social accounts with a link back to your site. But don’t bother signing up for every network out there. Instead, focus on the primary ones in your niche
whether that be Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and/or LinkedIn. Even if you don’t plan to use the social network
immediately, it might be worth creating the account so you can also claim your business name. The second thing you’ll want to do is build
authority links to your homepage. To do this, I like using Help a Reporter Out,
also known as HARO. HARO is a company that connects journalists
to sources and sources to journalists. Just sign up for an account as a “source,”
and you’ll get emails with a list of queries from journalists at various publications. And these aren’t just your run of the mill publications. There are journalists from places like Forbes,
The New York Times, Huffington Post and more. Responding to queries quickly and concisely
can land you mentions and links to both your homepage and/or social profiles. A few places I’ve been featured because
of HARO are Inc Magazine, Reader’s Digest, and CIO to name a few. This, in my opinion, is the easiest place to get
authority links that can boost trust and rankings, especially since you’ll be judged on your knowledge more than your current online visibility. The third place that I think is absolutely
awesome for homepage links are Podcasts. Podcasts are hot and there are a ton of them
in almost every industry. Best of all, podcasters are always on the
lookout for interesting guests that can provide value to their audience. And for almost every podcast I’ve seen,
they’ll provide a link to the guest’s homepage as well as other resources that come up
throughout the interview. To find podcast opportunities, just search in Google
for something like “[your niche] podcasts.” And the results should almost always be list
posts with popular podcasts in your industry. So let’s go to this awesome page on the
12 best SEO podcasts. Scrolling down, you’ll see podcasts like
Authority Hacker and Search Engine Nerds. So let’s click through to one. And as you can see, they’re featuring numerous
guests in the SEO space, so this might be a good podcast to pitch. To expand your list even further, go to one
of the podcast episodes. Scrolling down, you’ll see links to her
websites like express writers and content hacker. So I’ll copy one of the domains and put
into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer. And since we know that podcasts generally
link to homepages, I’ll set the search to URL mode and run the search. Next, I’ll go to the backlinks report, where
we can see all pages linking to the homepage. To filter our results, I’ll type “podcast,” in
the include search box. Then I’ll set the search filters to only look for that
word in the titles and URLs of the referring pages. And it looks like I could contact other sites
like ProBlogger, CoSchedule, and Shane Barker, to potentially be a guest on their shows. Not only are podcasts a great source for links, but they continue to send us new customers
every month. Doing these three activities are a great way to
build high quality homepage links as well as to boost trust signals. Now, let’s move onto some page-level link building
strategies because links to your homepage alone won’t be enough to build sustainable
and growing traffic. One of my favorite strategies is resource
page link building. This is where you get backlinks from web pages
that curate and link out to useful industry resources. And the sole purpose of their existence is
to link out to other relevant pages, making them easy links to get. Now, what I love about this strategy is that
you can branch out to pages on broader topics. So let’s say you had a blog post on crossfit exercises. With a lot of link building tactics, you’d probably
have to find a page where they mention something super-relevant, like crossfit. But with resource page link building, you
can try and get links on pages that cover broader topics like fitness, weight loss, and exercise. So just go to Google and search for something like inurl:resources.html intitle:fitness Now, just visit the pages, make sure they’re actually
resource pages and link out to external resources, and pitch your content appropriately. Now, rather than rehashing what I’ve already
said, I highly recommend watching our video on resource page link building where you’ll
learn how to execute this step-by-step. Another link building strategy that I highly
recommend is the Skyscraper Technique. This strategy is simple. You find a page that has a lot of links, improve
on that topic, and then reach out to those that are linking to the original page and
ask them to link to you. A great way to find Skyscraper opportunities
is to use Ahrefs’ Content Explorer, which is a searchable database with over a billion
pages of content complete with social and SEO metrics. So let’s say that I want to create a post
on Instagram marketing. I’ll type that in the search bar and I’ll also
change the search mode to a Title search. Now, a requirement of the Skyscraper Technique
is to find pages that have a lot of links. So let’s set a filter to show only pages
that have at least 50 referring domains. And you’ll see that these articles have gained
a ton of links, and you can look at the content to see if you can
improve on. After you’ve created your superior page,
click on Details, then click Backlinks, and reach out to the linking pages to try and
get your resource mentioned. Now, this is just a very low-level view of how you can find and execute Skyscraper styled link building, so I highly recommend watching our full tutorial
on doing it at scale. And even though I showed you in somewhat of
a sequential order of how I think backlinks ought to be built, it doesn’t mean that you can’t do Skyscraper outreach while doing things like HARO or Podcasts. But I do want to encourage you to build
somewhat of a balanced link profile where things like your homepage shouldn’t be ignored. So I hope this tutorial was helpful and if
you enjoyed it, make sure to like, share and subscribe for more actionable SEO and
marketing tutorials. And again, I highly recommend watching some
of our link building tutorials so that you can execute these strategies with ease. So keep grinding away and I’ll see you in
the next tutorial.
