5 Most Effective Link-Building Strategies to utilize in 2024

Backlinks are essential in building the online visibility of any website. It’s through your linking strategies that you can generate more inbound traffic and gain a prominent position at the top of Google’s SERPs. However, in a fiercely competitive online environment, becoming a leader in your industry is easier said than done. 

In a 13-month SEMrush study, the SEO leader found that 92.3% of all top-100 ranking domains on Google featured at least one backlink, while 55.1% of sites without at least one backlink never reached the search engine’s first page, 

This makes backlinks extremely useful if you’re looking to build the authority of your website and generate a greater level of prominence in its search engine results page (SERP) performance. 

But how can you leverage a link-building strategy that grows your exposure online? Let’s take a look at the five most effective strategies to utilize in 2024: 

Assessing the Importance of Backlinks

Before we look at how to optimise your backlinks online, let’s explore why link-building is such an essential part of SEO. 

The reason link-building is so important is that it’s a core component of how Google has consistently stood out from other search engines in delivering the best search results for users over and over again. 

While the likes of Yahoo! and Alta Vista dominated the early search engine landscape, they delivered results solely on the content offered by a webpage. 

In a bid to deliver more value, Google implemented its iconic PageRank Algorithm that considered the volume of links leading to pages as well as its content. 

Today, PageRank has become a key method of determining page quality and backlinks have formed the backbone of Google’s impressive market dominance in the 21st Century. 

Google’s processes have been constantly evolving, too. In the wake of the search engine’s Penguin update, Google now carries a strong emphasis on link quality as well as quantity, meaning that building links with high-reputation domains is becoming more important than ever. 

It’s for this reason that effective link-building must nurture a healthy volume of links from high-reputation domains as an essential consideration. How can this be done? Let’s look at five key approaches to utilize when building links to your website: 

• Optimise Competitor Backlinks

If the aim of the game is to build top-quality backlinks to your website, then the challenge lies in identifying and optimizing the right links to build.

This can be a tricky process, because the internet is littered with pages of varying degrees of quality, and identifying the right opportunities can be difficult in practice. 

One effective way of discovering fresh backlink opportunities is by analyzing the link-building approaches of your reputable rivals. If your competitors have strong SERP performance, it could be worth looking at the links they’ve built and whether you can utilize them too. 

One strong resource for discovering competitor backlinks is Ahrefs’ Site Explorer tool. By running a rival website in the tool and selecting ‘Backlinks’ on the left-hand table, it’s possible to gain a comprehensive list of websites linking to the domain. 

What’s more is that results can be filtered by dofollow links and listed in order of domain rating (DR). This helps you to identify the best quality links to check whether you can build backlinks to the same site. 

Always double-check how the link is structured, and whether it’s contextual or a site review, and then structure an outreach pitch to the host website to see whether you can also build some high-value links. 

Use the context of the link as an opportunity to craft your pitch. Is the host website linking because it’s created a review of the company? If so, pitch how your business is better and why they should write a review about your brand too. If they’re linking via a guest post, suggest lending your expertise with your own guest post. 

• Qualitative Guest Posting

Guest posting remains as strong as ever in 2024, but it’s imperative that you maintain a strategy that focuses on highly relevant, reputable, and high-authority content that’s well-aligned with your industry and target audience. 

You should always seek to establish yourself as an industry thought leader within your guest posting content, and should see the opportunity to publish copy on external sites as a chance to build value among new audiences. 

But where should you start with your strategy? Take a look at websites that are closely linked to your niche with a similar target audience and a domain rating or domain authority (DR/DA) of over 50. These sites can be a great location for your work, and by pitching to its editors ideas and usable content, you may be capable of building new relationships with valuable players in your industry. 

Understanding which content to create is entirely up to you, but if you’re lost for ideas, take a look at the most popular articles and blog posts among your rivals. Although SEO-focused content can come in many forms, and well-keyworded original ideas have plenty of merit, it’s possible to use the skyscraper technique to see the content ideas your rivals are using and make it better. 

If a rival website has published an article entitled ‘10 ways to boost your SEO’, look for an eleventh way, or try to use a similar topic that offers more actionable insights within its copy. 

Additionally, you should always look to build dofollow links to your pages, either within the content itself or via your author bio as standard. 

Although guest posting can be an extremely time-consuming process, it holds excellent link-building value and all businesses should look to incorporate it into their SEO strategy in some form. For startups and SMEs, it’s certainly worth utilising blogger outreach services to boost efficiency and improve the link-building relationships you create. 

• Discover Long-Tail Keyword Opportunities

Are you conducting enough keyword research? Really? As the internet becomes increasingly competitive, ranking for the right keywords has become more important than ever before. 

So, what is your target audience searching for? Tools like SEMrush, Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, and Ahrefs can work wonders in helping you to discover what your biggest leads are searching for. 

Using Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer can be an excellent keyword discovery tool. Crucially, this can help you to see keywords by their ‘difficulty’ rating. Keyword difficulty refers to how hard the tool thinks it would be for websites to rank in the top 10 search results for the term on Google. 

Discovering the best low-difficulty keywords can be a great way of optimising your content for long-tail keywords and looking at the type of questions being asked on Google that could show answers that your website would rank for. 

This can not only boost your SEO credentials but also serve as excellent content inspiration that could work wonders for building industry relevance and higher traffic volumes. 

• Pounce on Broken Links

The brilliance of broken link-building is that the approach is a mutually beneficial strategy that helps to boost the SEO of your website and the host page. 

This strategy focuses on broken link-building by discovering pages that have lost the links that had originally been operational at the time of publishing. There could be a number of reasons for broken links, but the most common focuses on 404 errors on landing pages. 

When a broken link is discovered on a relevant website, you can swoop in and offer your own website link as a functional alternative. 

This serves as a great way of improving your link-building strategy because you’re helping the host website in spotting an error and immediately offering a replacement link to help improve the page’s performance. 

While there are plenty of tools that can help to identify broken website links, we can look to Ahrefs once again as an excellent resource. In Ahrefs’ Backlink profile menu, we can see that it’s possible to explore a domain’s ‘broken backlinks’. This serves as a live directory of every broken backlink leading to the website. 

As a golden link-building tactic, you can target every relevant and reputable website that’s published a now broken backlink to a competitor website and suggest using one of your pages as an alternative. 

Just be sure to explore broken dofollow links for the best opportunities to grow your SEO from this tactic. 

• Use HARO to Your Advantage

One of the single most effective ways to ramp up your link-building efforts in a time-effective manner in 2024 is to utilize Help a Reporter Out, or HARO, for short. 

HARO is a leading online resource for reporters to enlist the help of industry experts to add their insights to a news story or article being written. It provides the perfect platform for thought leaders to demonstrate value and assert their knowledgeable takeaways on technological innovations, breaking news, or industry events. 

What’s more, is that you get to have someone else write and publish the story. What’s not to like? 

All it takes to utilize HARO (now known as Connectively) is to sign up as a source and monitor the industry-relevant queries that reporters are sharing in your niche. When you see a query that you could add your insight to, respond with a unique perspective, your own data, or guidance for the best chance of having your quote picked up and linked to. 

Although HARO is a popular tool for link-builders, it’s certainly worth registering and offering your views to relevant queries as a part of your outreach strategy. Per words written, you’ll be hard-pushed to find a more efficient way to gain those all-important backlinks to your pages. 

Remember to Keep Your House in Check

As a closing thought, it’s important to remember to never become so consumed in searching for external backlinks that you neglect your own pages as a result. 

Continually monitor your website for broken links and performance issues. If your internal linking structure is lacking, it won’t matter how many backlinks you build because Google’s crawlers won’t know what it’s looking at. 

The best link-building strategy is always ongoing and can be managed over a short period of time each week by auditing pages and making sure everything is in working order. 

By caring for the quality of your own pages, you’ll find it far easier to earn backlinks from the internet’s brightest websites. By keeping these thoughts and strategies in mind, you can make your website go further in 2024.