How to Get Backlinks

When determining the position of a webpage in its search results, Google analyses over 200 factors including domain age, on-page metadata, and how much time visitors spend interacting with the site as a whole. However, not all ranking signals have equal importance inside Google’s algorithm, optimising for some specific ranking factors will yield faster results than others. One thing that is commonly agreed amongst SEO professionals is that backlinks (or backlinks) are among the most important factors in ranking a page highly on Google.

A backlink is a link to your website from an external website (also known as a referring domain). Think of it as a citation, when a website with no known affiliation to your site links to your content, that’s an indication that you’ve provided a good informative piece of content. Google then sees this citation and rewards your website.

Now, while this is a simplification for sure, it’s fair to say that: the more backlinks you have from referring domains the higher your page will appear in search results. This is the guiding principle of link building, which is the process of actively generating new links to a webpage to boost its performance on Google.

How to Get Backlinks?

Now that we understand what is link building in SEO and why it’s important for driving organic traffic to pages, let’s take a look at some basic methods of generating new backlinks.

Link building services

The quickest and easiest way to get links at scale is to outsource your link building to a qualified agency. Atomic has spent years cultivating a global network of affiliate sites in every industry niche. Let us do the hard work for you, with your permission we’ll reach out to our partner sites which best suit your business profile and then turbocharge your pages with authoritative links.

Analyse your competitor’s backlinks

A great place to start a link building campaign is by taking a look at your competitor’s websites. Using tools such as Ahrefs backlink checker, you can see which referring domains are linking to your competitor’s webpages. From there, you reach out directly to the website and ask them if they will link to your website or feature your business in a dedicated post of its own.

Ask companies you work with to link to you

Does your business stock products from suppliers? If so, great! Most manufacturer’s websites, especially for smaller brands, contain a page on ‘where to find our products’ which generally lists all the places you can purchase their goods. This is low-hanging fruit, simply reach out to the supplier and ask them to include your site on the page, it’s extremely unlikely they’ll say no.

If your business doesn’t work with suppliers, worry not! We have another tip for you. Try and make a list of each local business that you work closely with. Chances are those websites will have a ‘testimonials’ or ‘our customers’ page that they use to build confidence in their brand. Check their websites and if they have a testimonials page, offer to write them a review in exchange for a backlink.

Unlinked brand mentions

Quite often your brand name will be featured in an article on an external site and the author will forget to link to your site. When you find an instance of this happening, reach out to the author of the post and ask them to link to your website. Usually, they’ll be more than happy to, especially if your brand features heavily in the post.

If you’d like to search for any unlinked brand mentions, one method is to use google. Google offers advanced searching options that you can use to filter results. Start your search query with ‘intext: {enter your brand name}’ this tells Google to only return pages that mention your brand in the text. You can also use the ‘-{url}’ filter to remove certain URLs, such as your social media accounts.

Here is an example of how it would look for websites mentioning atomic minus our own site:

Once Google has returned a list of websites mentioning your brand, check the page to see if they’re linking to you. If they’re not, reach out and ask them to add your link!

How many backlinks do I need to outrank the competition?

This isn’t an exact science, the answer largely depends on the number of backlinks your competitor has and the quality of yours and their backlinks. And that’s assuming that both sites have no on-page SEO errors, are both optimised for the target keyword, and have similar domain ratings – which is rarely the case.

However, it is possible to outrank a competing page which has more backlinks than yours if your page has better quality links. Here are the top indicators of a link’s quality and authoritativeness:

• Site relevancy: is the referring site operating in the same niche as your business? If so, that link is more valuable to Google as it indicates your site has industry expertise.
• Do-follow links: Links come in 2 major forms do-follow and no-follow. Do-follow links tell the search engine to give the site you’re linking to an SEO boost. No-follow links do the opposite. Focus on generating do-follow links during all link building campaigns. (Take a look at our post on ‘what is a nofollow link’ to learn more.)
• Domain rating of the referring site: receiving a link from a website that has a tonne of existing backlinks is much more valuable than a link from a website with only a handful of backlinks. Prioritise generating links from more powerful sites when applicable.
• The anchor text of your backlinks: anchor text is the text which becomes highlighted when you insert a link into it. Anchor text which includes the keyword your targeting will help you to rank faster than anchor text which just mentions your brand or random text.

Conclusion

Link building is a vital part of SEO and is essential if you want to get your page to the top of Google, especially in more competitive searches. Unfortunately, link building isn’t something which just happens passively. To generate backlinks you will need to have a strategy which targets sites that will provide you with an authoritative backlink. You will also need an outreach team to contact referring domains and write content for them if requested.

Building links to your website can be a time-consuming process if you’d prefer to focus on other things, such as running your business, consider outsourcing your link building to Atomic. We will analyse your site and your competitor’s site to create a thorough plan on which actions need to be taken to outrank them. From there we’ll reach out to our partner sites in your niche and begin generating your website authoritative links at scale.