Can you believe that we’re already four months into 2022? Personally, I refuse to.

The Internet has been changing in more ways than it’s possible to describe, with businesses desperately fighting for those sweet #1 placements on search engine results pages.

Certain SEO practices have come and gone, while others have had their significance faded only to be resurrected by numerous algorithm updates.

You built a new site or rebranded your old one, the web development & SEO teams worked together to optimize it for the search engines, and your content strategy is on point. So what is your next step? Backlinking. 

However, it’s hard to find an SEO tactic with more controversies surrounding it than link building. 

Some website owners consider it a waste of time, while others preach just how awesome it is for growth. 

So which is it? Let’s find out.

 

What Is Link Building?

Link building is the process of acquiring inbound links, also known as backlinks. These links point to your website, from other websites.

There are two reasons why people invest in link building so much. 

The first one is, of course, the simple fact that the more links you have pointing to your website, the more people are going to see them, and, of course, click on them, ending up on your resource.

The second reason is that backlinks play a huge role in how your rankings are calculated by the search engines. To put it bluntly, the more inbound links you have to your website, the higher you will show up in search. 

However, that is a gross oversimplification of the whole process. Let me explain exactly how backlinks work.

 

Link Equity And How Backlinks Pass It

Not all backlinks are good for SEO. And while Google penalties for spammy backlink practices are a thing of the past, you still want to keep your backlink profile healthy. 

There is a concept called “link equity”, also referred to as “link juice”. This equity is passed from one website to another through backlinks.

Not all backlinks pass on the same amount of equity, so, naturally, some links are going to be more valuable in terms of SEO than others.

Here are some factors that affect link equity:

 

  • The age of the linking website;
  • The authority of the linking website;
  • The number of backlinks pointing from the same page;
  • The location of the link on the page;
  • The topical of the linked websites.

 

What Makes A Good Link?

There are many different strategies for building backlinks, including even things like blog comments, social mentions, directory listings, and sponsored links. 

However, such links are barely valuable for SEO. 

The absolute best of the backlink best is a very specific type of link. It is an in-content backlink leading from one relevant blog post on a highly authoritative website to another. It can also take you to a relevant online podcast or even a video if you want to rank it. 

So, for example, it would make perfect sense to link from this article to another post on the top link-building strategies. On the other hand, a link to a post on how to check your tire pressure would be irrelevant, if not spammy.

However, securing such backlinks is not easy. This leads us to the next section. 

 

How To Get Backlinks In 2022?

As I already mentioned, there are many different link building strategies. However, if you’re only after the good links, you will have to conduct a lot of email outreach.

In essence, link building outreach is simply you messaging other website owners/editors/content managers, and asking them to link to your website.

Of course, people are usually reluctant about doing something for someone for free, so it is extremely important to make it worth their while. In fact, the value proposition in your email pitch is arguably the most important part of the whole message.

Bloggers get link building messages all the time, so the only thing they really care about is what’s in it for them.

There are many things you can offer them in exchange for a link:

 

  • An indirect link back for them (from another site);
  • Free access to your tool, if you have one;
  • Social shares;
  • If your site is good, offering them to post a guest post on it;
  • Money.

 

Although we highly discourage you to ever pay money for backlinks. Not only is it against Google’s guidelines, but the links you will be getting are going to be of low quality. This is because sites that ask for “editorial fees” rarely care about the links’ relevance, making the whole thing less desirable for everybody that’s being linked to.

The average reply rate for link building campaigns is only 10%. And the success rate is even lower, since some of those replies are going to be negative. 

So, if you want to build links at scale, your campaigns would have to include hundreds of prospects.

But then, you can’t send out hundreds of emails from one address on a daily basis – that’s the fastest way to get flagged as spam. 

So, you would need to run your outreach from several different email addresses. On top of that, you would have to worry about your domain reputation, authentication, and a million other things that are necessary for successful email outreach.

In addition, just the process of finding link building prospects, their contact information, and then writing your pitches can take an enormous amount of time. 

You can do it on your own, but if you also have other management responsibilities, it is not very reasonable to expect huge results.

There are a few ways how you can speed up the process:

 

  • Hire an in-house link builder;
  • Seek help from a link building/SEO agency;
  • Make use of certain tools designed to help with link building.

 

Once again, you CAN do it alone, but since link building is such a huge time sink, it’s a great idea to seek some help.

I have been an in-house link builder for a little over a year, and the following three strategies have helped me secure around 20 high-quality links every single week.

 

Top 3 Link Building Strategies For 2022 (Templates Included)

 

I’ll start with the most straightforward link building strategy that is very easy to learn for newcomers.

Anchor Text Strategy

 

The idea behind this link building tactic is very simple. First, you choose an article that you’re going to be building links to. Then, you will be looking for non-competing blog posts that mention your target keyword somewhere in their bodies.

Then, you find their contact information and reach out to them. Here is a template example that you can grab and use in your own campaigns (just make sure to personalize it!): 

 

Subject: Some love for @organization’s [Topic] article

 

“Hey @first_name,

Happy @day_of_week! Just finished reading through your post, @url_title and I had to share some thoughts on it. 

I noticed you had mentioned “[Anchor/Targeted Keyword]” in the article, but didn’t go into further detail or link to another resource. 

We actually just published a great article that I think could help give some insight to your readers:

[url]

I’d be happy to return the favor and link back to one of your pieces from our blog while sharing your post across our socials.

Regardless, love the content. Keep it up!

Cheers,”

The downside to the anchor text strategy is that it can take a long time to find prospects manually. However, the usually high response rates make up for that.

 

Competitor Backlinks

The competitor backlinks strategy allows you to find lots of link building prospects much faster than the anchor text one.

As you may have guessed by the name, in this strategy, you will be reaching out to people that are linking to your competitors’ content.

To find prospects, you will need to use backlink monitoring software, such as Ahrefs. Pick a blog post, export their backlinks, and reach out to the linking websites.

Depending on how saturated your niche is, you may be able to find hundreds of high-quality prospects within just a few minutes.

Template:

Subject: Can I include @organization in my guest post?

“Hi, @first_name!

I’m Vlad, the outreach manager from Respona. How is your @day_of_week

 going?

I’m currently writing a guest post for Bulk.ly (DR 69) on video marketing tips and looking to include a link to one of your articles. 

I’m wondering whether you have a relevant post you recommend? Happy to share the draft if you’d like to take a look at the content.

In return, I was thinking maybe you could mention our own article on types of links? You’re linking to Yoast’s article on internal linking from one of your pieces and I think it’d complement the content nicely.

Looking forward to hearing from you,”

 

Guest Posting 

You’re probably already familiar with the concept of guest posting.

Most websites accept guest posts even if they don’t have a straight-up “Write for us” page. You may simply pick the websites you like and pitch them, look for write for us pages, or simply pitch guest posts to your other prospects at the end of a successful link exchange.

To make your pitch more valuable, you can analyze their content through Ahrefs’ content gap functionality, and propose topics that cover keywords that their competitors are ranking for but they are not.

 

Wrapping Up

So yes, link building does still work for SEO in 2022. Hopefully, this article helped point you in the right direction to get started with it!

 

Author’s Bio:

Managing brand partnerships at Respona, Vlad Orlov is a passionate writer and link builder. Having started writing articles at the age of 13, their once past-time hobby developed into a central piece of their professional life.