Building a strong link profile is crucial for any successful B2B marketing strategy, despite what some may say. However, many businesses find the process of creating and executing a backlink strategy to be quite overwhelming.
A robust link profile can be incredibly valuable. We attribute a significant portion of our organic growth to our backlink strategy. In fact, we used to have a dedicated team member solely focused on writing guest posts (eight per week, believe it or not!). That’s how strongly we believe in its effectiveness.
There are numerous ways to acquire backlinks, each requiring varying levels of effort. In this article, I’ve categorized these tactics into three groups based on the amount of work involved:
- Outreach (minimal work)
- Submission (some light work)
- Exchange (heaviest amount of work)
I suggest using a combination of tactics from all three categories. As with many things in life, the backlinks that demand the most effort tend to be the most authoritative and yield the most significant positive impact on your organic search rankings.
Let’s delve into the specific tactics. Here are ten B2B link building strategies you can start implementing today to enhance your backlink profile:
Outreach-Based Backlinks
Offer a Scholarship
This is a fantastic way to support students while also earning high-quality backlinks. Google recognizes .edu and .gov URLs as trustworthy and generally highly authoritative, as not just anyone can obtain a .edu or .gov backlink. This is actually a common thing that a lot of businesses do.
Simply create a scholarship page on your website and include an application form (we used Google Forms for this). We then hired a data miner from Upwork to gather contact information for individuals in the Financial Aid office, as well as the Marketing/Computer Science program, at over 180 universities. For your scholarship, focus on reaching out to departments related to your company’s field.
This method allows you to earn links swiftly, typically within a few hours. All it takes is creating a dedicated page, designing a form, and sending out a series of emails to your list of contacts!
Here’s an example of our scholarship page. As you can see below, we’ve already secured 22 links from authoritative sites, and we’re continuously gaining more every week!
Wikipedia Links
Wikipedia is a valuable resource for obtaining high-authority links to relevant blog posts. Start by conducting a Google search using relevant keywords. Analyze the top-ranking Wikipedia page for any missing information that you may have covered or addressed in a previous blog post.
If you’re new to editing Wikipedia pages, here’s a great guide to get you started. While there’s no guarantee that all links will be accepted, as long as your citation provides value to the page, it stands a good chance of remaining published!
It’s important to note that Wikipedia links are nofollow. However, Google likely still considers them valuable. They can drive substantial referral traffic and potentially lead to additional backlinks.
Icon Packs
If your company employs a designer (in-house or freelance), consider having them create custom icon packs for your brand. Numerous websites allow you to upload icon packs for download. Simply ensure that you request users to link back to your website somewhere on the page where they utilize the icons. While not everyone will comply, this tactic requires minimal upfront effort (especially if you already have custom icons). Therefore, it’s worthwhile even if only half of those who download the icons link back to your site.
Before uploading any icons, confirm that they are original and that your company possesses the rights to them. This helpful article from Shopify on 12 trusted places to download icon packs provides a list of icon websites – most of which allow you to upload your own creations!
Link Reclamation
Link reclamation involves pursuing uncredited brand mentions, either in text or image format, and requesting a backlink to your site. It doesn’t require excessive effort but does involve outreach and data mining.
There are several ways to approach this, depending on your available time. This This Ahref’s blog post offers a detailed explanation. However, you can perform a quick Google search using a format similar to this:
“Brand/Company Name” -ownsite.com -twitter.com -facebook.com -google.com
For example:
This search query will generate results for websites mentioning your company, allowing you to manually identify which ones are linking back to you and which ones are not. This task can be easily outsourced to an Upwork freelancer, and you can typically find someone to mine these websites (for brand mentions and contact information) for around $8 per hour.
Alternatively, you can set up Google Alerts or another mention monitoring tool to receive email notifications whenever your brand or company name is mentioned online. This enables you to stay informed about any brand mentions that lack backlinks to your website.
The Google Alerts dashboard is user-friendly and appears as follows:
Affiliate Link Building
The last tactic in the “Outreach” category shares similarities with Brian Dean’s “skyscraper technique. However, we prefer a slightly different approach than Dean’s method.
After publishing a piece of content, we conduct a quick search for the article’s primary keyword on BuzzStream, aiming to identify 25 (if possible) articles on the same topic. BuzzStream highlights the authors, allowing you to add them to a “project” instantly. For instance, let’s say we’re using this tactic for an article about link building. We would create a link building project in BuzzStream and add authors who have recently written about the subject.
We can refine our search by filtering articles published within the past month, domain authority, location, categories, and more.
From there, we can send out emails – personalized emails for each author are recommended, as this increases the likelihood of earning a backlink. Here’s an example of one of our outreach emails, crafted for a CTA analysis post:
I’ve categorized this tactic under Outreach (although it involves some data mining) because a great starting point is through previously published blog posts. You don’t necessarily need to create new content, but ensure that the post you’re seeking a backlink to is high-quality and valuable to the audience of another website.
Submission-Based Backlinks
Infographics
People generally enjoy sharing infographics (at least well-designed ones). In fact, HubSpot has published three blog posts on creating compelling and shareable infographics.
Infographics provide an excellent opportunity to scale your “guest blogging” efforts while requiring less work than crafting a new guest post for each website you approach.
Here’s how it works: Start by creating a visually appealing and informative infographic. Similar to guest posting, reach out to relevant websites via email, asking if they’d be interested in publishing your infographic, considering your shared target audience. You can even offer to write a brief introductory paragraph to accompany the infographic.
This method is significantly easier than producing original 2,000-word guest posts, and you still acquire a valuable backlink!
P.S. While not strictly infographics, David McSweeney wrote an insightful awesome blog post on utilizing maps for backlink acquisition. I highly recommend giving it a read!
Forum Posting
If you choose to implement this tactic, prioritize providing valuable insights and assistance to the forums you participate in. If your sole objective is self-promotion, you’ll likely encounter some obstacles:
- You’ll develop a negative reputation, and your answers will be downvoted.
- The site moderator may start removing your responses.
Nevertheless, forums remain a viable avenue for expanding your link profile. Begin by answering questions on platforms like Quora, Reddit, Inbound.org (for marketing professionals), Growth Hackers, etc. While it’s unnecessary to plug your content in every response, focus on building a following as a helpful contributor.
If you come across a question that can be answered by one of your recent blog posts, feel free to link to it naturally. Here’s a great example from Neil Patel who seamlessly incorporates a link to their own blog post in a Quora question about building links on the platform. (Linkception!)
Exchange-Based Backlinks
Guest Blogging
In my opinion, guest blogging is the link building tactic with the most significant potential to impact your organic rankings. As previously mentioned, we dedicated an entire team member to focus solely on guest posts.
Similar to forum posting, the primary objective of guest blogging shouldn’t be to insert as many links as possible. Doing so will likely frustrate the editor, who will be forced to remove them while maintaining the post’s flow.
Instead, your goal should be to share novel and innovative insights.
There are various approaches to securing guest posting opportunities, but I’ll outline our method at Directive Consulting. (For a comprehensive overview of our process, refer to our check out this article we published on Moz, where we discuss increasing our response rate from 8% to 34% on blogger outreach emails.)
Initially, we hired a virtual assistant from Upwork to identify two categories of websites: those within our industry of digital marketing (such as Moz, nexus-security, CrazyEgg, Kissmetrics, etc.), as we knew some of our topics would resonate with their audience, and companies that sponsored major B2B conferences (as their blogs are likely read by our target audience). We tasked the VA with gathering the names and email addresses of the managing editors for these websites.
We then utilized Pitchbox to send out a bulk email incorporating these three key elements:
- Background information about our writer and their area of expertise
- Previous websites where we’ve been published
- Topic suggestions for our guest post (categorized as Primary and Focalized)
Components 1 & 2:
Component 3:
This approach proved highly effective for us.
HARO
HARO stands for Help a Reporter Out, and it serves as an excellent platform for diversifying your backlinks across numerous websites. HARO is utilized by both writers and contributors, and becoming a contributor is free. Upon signing up, you’ll receive three daily emails containing various queries from writers seeking contributions for their articles.
Your role is to respond to the query with a concise paragraph. If the writer finds your contribution valuable, they will incorporate it into their post and credit you with a backlink. Ensure your subject line is captivating or directly addresses their question, as writers receive a high volume of responses. You need to stand out. The following format is simple, concise, and has consistently earned us backlinks!
Conference Sponsorships
This final link building tactic is undoubtedly the most expensive. While it doesn’t demand a significant time commitment, it falls under the “exchange” category because it requires a budget allocation.
That being said, sponsoring conferences presents a valuable opportunity to earn backlinks from authoritative websites highly relevant to your industry. In many cases, sponsorships include a complimentary conference pass, potentially serving as a direct lead generation channel (depending on your networking skills).
Determining which conferences to sponsor can be challenging. We prefer to categorize our sponsorship opportunities into three groups: Local, Industry, and Target Audience. Local sponsorships are ideal for enhancing local SEO. Industry conferences are great for raising awareness and identifying potential partners. And target audience conferences place your brand and website directly in front of your ideal clients.
In closing
Link building requires time and effort. While not always the most glamorous task, it can yield substantial rewards for your organic search rankings. However, you won’t witness immediate results. Diligent and consistent implementation of the ten tactics outlined above will lead to sustainable organic growth.
Now go out there and start building those links!