• 11 Aug 2021

The long game: 4 tips for maintaining a consistent link-building strategy

• by Polly Kirkup

If you know anything at all about SEO, then you’ll already know just how important it is for your site to have a strong backlink profile. If you have a variety of relevant, high-quality sites linking back to your brand, it can have a huge impact on your site’s credibility with search engines, which in turn can improve rankings for key pages. Plus, gaining linking exposure on relevant publications can help to make your brand a respected voice within your industry, as well as getting your name in front of your target audience.

But a strong backlink profile isn’t built overnight — and, even once you’ve achieved one, you’ll need to keep gaining fresh links regularly in order to stay one step ahead of your competitors. That’s why consistency and long-term planning are such crucial aspects of any link-building campaign.

The Outreach team at Glass Digital create and maintain a variety of consistent strategies to secure opportunities and expand backlink profiles. Here, I’ll be sharing just some of the ways that brands can create and maintain a consistent link building strategy that will lead to long-term results.

Find your audience

When building a brand, one of the first big decisions you’ll need to make is finding your target audience, and exactly the same goes for creating a successful outreach campaign. You need to create a list of all the audiences who might be interested in your brand’s product offering or knowledge, and then think strategically about how you will reach them via relevant publications and sites. Then, you can seek out publications and complementary industries that relate to your brand offering.

Highly relevant linking opportunities will bring maximum link equity to your site, and will ensure any exposure is natural and relevant. A niche but well-timed relevant idea can result in links on sites with a high DA, adding a healthy range of domains to your backlink profile.

Choose a figurehead to become an authority in your field

Leveraging your expertise within your industry can be a powerful link-building tool. Journalists and editors are constantly looking to enrich their content with expert opinions and predictions. So, if you have someone on your team who is an authoritative expert and can provide knowledgeable insight and comment, it can help you to secure linking exposure on top sites.

Designating a spokesperson for your brand is a great way to boost your authority and set yourself up as an expert in your industry. Preferably, this should be someone within your company who has a lot of industry knowledge. Their credibility and reputation will only grow over time as they are featured in more and more publications, meaning that this is a great long-term strategy that will reap rewards over time.

A great way to find these industry-specific opportunities is to sign up to a media database. This will give you access to a variety of top publications and sites that you might otherwise struggle to outreach successfully. Here at Glass Digital, our Outreach team have access to a variety of paid industry tools and databases that can help you secure coverage in those hard-to-crack publications.

Top tip: Once your brand spokesperson has built up some authority with linking exposure, be sure to attribute any relevant onsite blogs and content marketing to them. This will help boost the E-A-T (expertise, authority, and trustworthiness) of your content!

Use a variety of tactics

Using a variety of different tactics can help you achieve a diverse range of links and exposure. For example, newsjacking — where you capitalise on the latest breaking news events to get your brand featured on top publications — is a great way to build several links with one piece of content or insight. By hooking on to a newsworthy story, this tactic can gain you coverage in regional and national publications. Other tactics, such as providing bespoke content or insight for blogs and complementary industries, can help get your brand in front of a more niche audience.

Different techniques will provide different benefits, but if you want to create a long-term, future-proof strategy, it is crucial to utilise all of them. Mixing up your tactics in this way will ensure your site always has a steady flow of fresh links.

For example, a successful digital PR idea can often generate around 20 to 30 links in a short period. But, in order for your strategy to deliver consistent results, you’ll need other, smaller campaigns to balance this out and ensure you’re stilling gaining a few links in between. Interviews, editorials, expert commentary, and monitoring brands mentions will keep your link-building ticking over between those big all-star campaigns.

Top tip: Regular ideation sessions are vital! In order to get consistent results, it’s crucial to spend time coming up with new ideas and refreshing your plans throughout your campaign. This will help you leverage the latest trends within your niche, ensuring your links and tactics remain relevant.

Pace your link acquisition rate and scale up gradually

Consistency also applies to the time frame of your strategy, as building too many links, too soon could actually do more harm than good. If your existing backlink profile is quite small to begin with, a sudden influx of new links can look unnatural, particularly if they’re from high DA websites, so it’s better to take your time and maintain a steady pace. If your existing link profile is larger and more varied, then you can afford to be a bit more proactive, as any new links will blend in and appear organic.

The key is to set a link acquisition pace that fits in with your current profile. Then, you can gradually scale up your activity to create the impression that your site is becoming more and more popular organically.

Building a strong backlink profile takes time and careful planning. If you would like some help growing a reputation as an industry leader while working toward a diverse backlink profile, we can offer high-quality link-building services alone or as part of a full SEO campaign. For links we’ve built, take look at our links vault. You can also follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook to be the first to know of future successes. Contact us to discuss what we can do for you. 

Polly Kirkup

Senior Outreach Executive