You may be surprised but there are no unique websites.

Especially for search engine algorithms. Your site is competing with thousands of other websites in the same industry, the same niche, and that offer the same services. Simply creating a well-designed website with a smart copy isn’t enough for online marketing success. 

Instead, you need an active investment in search engine optimization (SEO), an online marketing strategy that improves your website’s relevancy and credibility. Apart from content optimization, using a responsive design, and keyword targeting, there’s one SEO technique that is indispensable for improving your site’s organic reach: link building. 

Why? Because Google’s algorithm considers inbound links from relevant and authoritative websites as a key ranking factor. Not to mention backlinks improve your overall web presence and help drive more traffic to your pages.

Even so, 94% of ALL the content on the internet has no external links. And for the remaining 6%, link building is an effective (and expensive) strategy for better rankings. 

Read this blog post to learn six budget-friendly and actionable link building strategies that you can leverage right away no matter your niche.

These Link Building Strategies Will Improve Your Site’s Ranking For Free

1. Start with guest posting 

Guest posting, including blogs, increases direct sales by a whopping 75%. Apart from a boost to your sales funnel, inviting guest posts is a great way to build on-site credibility and get it noticed by people and the algorithm alike. 

Guest posting can involve expert authors from your industry or niche writing about an informational subject, such as How-To’s, short guides, product-specific articles, or even simple reviews of your products and services. 

Apart from providing an enormous amount of value to your audience, it also drives in large volumes of organic traffic, which can result in multiple lead conversions for your brand. 

According to Adsy, guest posts ensure an 80% increase in organic and referral-based traffic. 

On the “rankings” side of things, your website stands a chance to rank higher for both the post’s topic and queries for your products and services, thanks to the link building opportunities guest posts offer. 

For a deeper understanding and advanced guest posting tactics, consider learning the ABC of guest blogging tactics. You can find here a lot of valuable information on this topic.

While guest-posting, make sure to keep these points in mind:

1. Create genuinely valuable content, not lazily-written pieces  
2. Email a short and clear pitch to the website owners, explaining the topic you wish to take up and how it will provide value to their audience

When reaching out to guest bloggers and experts, remember the E-A-T criterion:

2. Interact with high-authority domains/websites 

Scoring a backlink with high-authority, high-ranking, and popular domains and websites translates into an equally bigger boost to your site’s relevancy. 

Domain authority is built over time, owing to audience-related factors such as trust demographics, and popularity of content. 

Thus, a website that drives an enormous amount of traffic has viral, shareable content, and is relevant for various search queries is a great example of a website with a very high E-A-T score and Domain Authority (DA). 

For small businesses, pitching for an inbound link may seem intimidating, but targeting the right websites with the right user base can be your shot at link building success in 2022. 

Try link swapping, which first involves your website building on its own DA, before asking for link exchanges.

Once you improve your site’s Domain Authority and credibility, reaching out to high-authority sites for link swaps can be a great way for inbound linking. 

Tip: Overt link swapping is against Google’s rules, but smartly asking for a link-for-link or a post-for-post system is a good way to start.

3. List your site in directories 

Amongst the most actionable link building strategies for local businesses, listing your site in local business directories is at the top of the list. Small businesses can greatly benefit from the wide yet dominantly local reach business directories offer. 

Start by simply listing relevant details about your company, contact details, location of in-person stores, and products and services. 

• Find a list of local directories that you can list your site in 
• Narrow this list to those that cater mainly to your target audience, target geographical location, niche, etc. 
• Send in a request to the directory containing a backlink for your site

Here are the five types of popular directories that are used for successful directory-based link building:

1. General directories 
2. Business listings 
3. Paid directories 
4. Niche-specific directories
5. Local directories 

4. Build relationships with publishers and then ask

Creating strong relationships with high DA publishers is an expert-backed link building strategy.

Interact regularly with the content on your target websites. Work on establishing a rapport with them. Tweet and share their stuff. Make your name familiar to them.

And by this, we don’t mean spamming “Very nice work!” or “Great writing!” on their blog posts and social media. Putting in effort and adding value to your comments (and their post) can get you noticed and trusted quickly.

Your target website will be more willing to add a backlink to your site if they know you’re a genuine supporter.

5. Incentivize for a backlink

Building links closely ties in with the value you provide to your target sites. A plain cold email that grumpily asks for a backlink is probably…not the best link building strategy.

Some of the most successful sites make sure to link their marketing efforts with inbound link building. For example, both small businesses and e-commerce businesses can provide member privileges, giveaways and sneak peeks of their products and services, in return for a backlink, especially if it’s on a high-authority website. 

The trick here is to incentivize a backlink to your site as much as possible. The more value you provide to your target website for giving a backlink to your website, the more successful your link building efforts will be.

6. Gather testimonials and reviews

Remember the E-A-T score? Here’s one way you can improve domain authority, site relevance, credibility, authority, and expertise, all in one go.

Gather testimonials and reviews. Websites packed with genuine reviews from customers rank much, much higher as they measure up to the algorithm’s criterion for trustworthiness. 

In fact, websites with honest reviews are more likely to be trusted by first-time users as well. 

Gather reviews, quantify them, and present them in an interactive and engaging format to drive natural backlinks to your website. 

Conclusion

Inbound marketing and link building are proving to be the most promising way to improve rankings and relevancy on search engines. 

Apart from these link building tactics, working on social media efforts, setting up regular press releases and reviews, as well as creating a value-focused content strategy can help your brand take off in 2022. That’s what ReVerb’s expert SEO team can help you with. Contact us to get professional link building support!

Author Bio

Ashley Kemper is an Assistant Editor at Commerce Mentors. She has 5+ years of experience in writing about Marketing, SEO, and Technology. She also helps with the end-to-end execution of content strategy. When not writing, Ashley spends most of her time reading and cooking. As a sports enthusiast, she spends her weekends running and watching badminton tournaments.