5 Link Building Strategies for Professional Services Businesses

Link building is an excellent way to boost your search engine rankings. In fact, 63% of local SEO experts believe that link building has a massive impact on search engine rankings.

Source

However, the process of establishing a link-building strategy and then reaching out to people for getting backlinks can be pretty daunting. There are numerous tactics, and some require more work than others.

While low-quality, spammy techniques can work, they shouldn’t play a part in the backlink strategy of a business looking for long-term organic success. In simpler words, the more high-quality (relevant and from reputable websites) backlinks are, the more likely you are to rank well in search results.

This blog post will show you five effective link-building tactics that you can put to work today.

Guest Blogging 

This is one of the oldest and most effective link-building strategies used by marketers worldwide. Here’s how it works: 

• Find a website in your niche you want to guest blog for
• Look for the owner’s contact details and reach out to them
• Brainstorm a few article ideas according to their blog and send those along with the outreach mail 
• Write the article on the accepted topic and include the link to your website or blog post
• Once done, send the article and follow up with the blogger until it’s published. 

However, the goal of guest blogging is not to include as many links as possible. This will only upset the website owner as they will have to go through each link and delete the ones not relevant to the post.

But, how do you find good guest post prospects? After all, you don’t want to get your article published on a website that’s not relevant to your niche and has little-to-no authority.

Do a simple Google search and use terms like: 

• [your topic] “write for us” 
• [your topic] “become a contributor”
• [your topic] “guest post”

This will show you pages, which site owners created to attract guest bloggers.

When you publish guest blogs on selected, quality websites, you’ll reap the benefits of higher search rankings, increased traffic, and qualified leads.

Broken Link Building

If you’re too busy to write a guest post from scratch, broken link building is the best strategy. Broken links are previously existing backlinks that are lost or broken. Nobody wants such links on their website as they lead to poor user experience and also devalue your website’s SEO efforts. 

This strategy involves three steps:

• Find a broken link (404 not found) on a website in your niche
• Build something similar to the dead content
• Ask the person linking to the dead resource to instead link to your working content

But, now the question is—how to find the broken links in the first place? 

Here are a few hacks: 

• Find the dead pages on the top-performing websites in your niche. You can use Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, which has tons of backlinks in its database, including many broken ones. Or, use their Broken Link Checker tool.

• Tools like Google Analytics and Xenu Link Sleuth are excellent for tracking website performance and finding broken links. 

Once you find the relevant broken links, find the contact details for the website you’re reaching to, send them an email letting them know there’s a broken link on their site, and suggest your working link as a replacement for the dead link.

Unlinked Mentions

Sometimes, websites will mention you or your business without linking to your website or content. These are known as unlinked mentions.

These links are much easier to get than others. Plus, the writer or website owner is already familiar with the brand but, for some reason, didn’t link back to the source. This gives you a perfect excuse to contact the website owner and ask them to give a link back to your website.

But, how can you find relevant unlinked mentions? Here are some tips: 

• Use Content Explorer by Ahrefs. It is like a mini search engine powered by a database of a billion pages, which you can use to find your brand mentions. 

• A simple Google search is another way to find brand mentions. However, it’s harder to extract them, especially if you get thousands or millions of search results. 
  
  A quick hack: Use Google’s inbuilt filter to set a certain date range. For example, if you filter the search to show results only from the past 24 hours, Google will show you not more than 4 to 5 pages. 

• Using a brand monitoring tool will show you a real-time feed containing all your brand mentions on websites, social media, and other platforms.

Content Repurposing and Syndication

You always write a blog while keeping the audience and intent in mind. However, these can change over time.

This is where content repurposing comes in.

Content repurposing is the process of using your previous blogs and revitalizing them to add more value to your audience. It allows you to reach people you missed the first time around. Furthermore, it saves you time as you don’t have to create something from scratch. 

Suppose you have worked hard to create an engaging blog. But now, you want to share it with a broader audience. Repurposing it into a different content format, such as an infographic or a video, can be your best bet. This way, you can also share your content on various infographic or video-sharing websites. 

Let’s see how SEMrush used this tactic to earn more backlinks: 

SEMrush created a comprehensive PDF guide—The Ultimate Guide for Content Marketers—to guide readers on all things content marketing. Seeing its popularity, they repurposed the guide into an online course. The course has been an enormous success, with 8000+ registrations and a 10% completion rate.

Content repurposing isn’t the only strategy to get easy, high-quality links. You can also syndicate your content to one or more third-party websites.

Content syndication means that when you publish a blog post, other third-party websites republish the exact content with a link back to the source. 

For example, James Clear published a blog post about lessons on success and deliberate practice. After some time, he published the same article on Lifehacker and saw a massive jump in his following. 

Syndicating your content not only brings you more eyeballs but also: 

• Makes your original copy work harder for your SEO 
• Allows you to use your content multiple times
• Helps you to create an edge over your competitors, depending on the type of websites you republish your content on. 

To start, search for websites that syndicate content. If you’re a big website, you want to look for a partner that matches your traffic. Syndicating content on lesser-performing websites won’t do you any good. 

Some best practices for content syndication: 

• Always add a nofollow tag. 
• Make sure the rel=canonical tag for the original version of the content is added. 
• Publish the content on your website first and make sure it is indexed before you syndicate it.

Skyscraper Technique

The Skyscraper Technique is a link-building strategy created by Brian Dean of Backlinko. It is a three-step process that involves creating engaging content and earning quality editorial links at scale. 

Here’s how it works:

1. Research Popular Content

The goal here is to find the informational content that you can improve upon. Start by finding popular trends, topics, and well-performing content that has earned a lot of links. Then, build a list of potential distribution partners who would find your content piece interesting. 

Social media platforms, such as Twitter, and online forums, like Reddit and Quora, are a great way to discover popular topics. 

Tools like BuzzSumo make it easy to find trending topics and content. It identifies content with the highest social shares—the one you want to create your skyscraper piece from.

2. Create Better Content

Next, create a better content piece on the topic you have chosen. The good thing is that you don’t have to start from scratch—you already have a list of ideas. You just need to use them to create something unique that people would love to link to.

To create better content than your competition, follow these tips: 

• Check the information accuracy of the competitor’s content piece. Are there any discrepancies? Is the data up-to-date? Make sure you correct the mistakes made by the previous author and include the latest research studies to make the content more precise and valuable.

• If there’s anything you would like to add to the ideas, go for a long-form content piece. You can add a case study and create an in-depth guide to deliver more value and authority.
  
  However, remember that a long-form topic isn’t just about writing more words but creating an advanced content piece that will compete with a beginner-level post. 

• Content design is as important as the written text. So, make sure your content is visually attractive. You can add a range of visuals, such as infographics, videos, GIFs, and so on, to make your content stand out. A poorly designed piece of content leaves a bad impression on your audience, no matter how good it reads.

3. Promote Your Content

Once your content piece is ready, share it with the world. You can’t expect to land links if your audience doesn’t know about it. So, take the time to promote your asset. Share it on your social channels, email list, or internally with your employees. 

Also, reach out to your targeted influencers and brands who publish and share related content. Make sure you send them a clear outreach message with a sample copy or a link to your piece.

Summing up

Link building is a necessary part of your services business marketing strategy. A strong link profile is one of the most crucial factors in ranking in search engine results. Remember, Google doesn’t care much about how many links point to your website but rather about the experience you provide to your users and the quality of your backlinks.

So your real challenge isn’t building links but earning high-quality, trusted, and organic links. Follow the above fool-proof link-building strategies, and you’ll be on your way to building a successful service business website that Google will love.