Advanced link building strategies for tech startups

Along with high-quality content and its machine-learning algorithm RankBrain, Google has identified links as one of their top three ranking factors.

With as much as 92% of online interactions starting with a search engine and Google’s dominance with almost 80% of the market, that’s something you can’t ignore.

If you’ve been in the SEO and content business for a while, you probably know the basics of link building. However, what differentiates the novices from the experts is the willingness to dig deeper in search of link building gold. The good news is, that they don’t require a huge amount of resources and mostly work with existing or planned content. That’s perfect for lean startups that pursue low overheads.

If that sounds like you, then here are some advanced link building strategies to get your startup on the map.

Guest posting

Guest posting is the big daddy of link building strategies for a digital marketing campaign.

And, no, guest posting isn’t dead – if you were wondering.

Through guest posting, you can spread your content and brand on other platforms (for free, if you do it right). It’s a great way to directly speak to new audiences and to build connections in your industry. As another brand trusted you to be heard through on their platform, it also builds trust and prestige. Oh, and you can link back to your own blog, scoring some free link juice.

Even better, guest posting also works the other way around. By allowing authoritative guests to post quality content on your blog, they’ll also share it with their followers.

That being said, guest posting can put some extra strain on your marketing efforts. It takes work to research worthy sites to post on, to come up with a topic, pitch it, and then writing content following a new editorial policy. Still, the results will be well worth the effort. The resources on pitching to editors and crafting effective articles provided by guest posting service Luckyposting can help you employ this strategy.

A sister strategy is to develop cobranded content. This is where you and another publication work together on producing content, sharing it out on your respective platforms.

Work with Promoters and Influencers

Despite the scorn they sometimes attract online, the influencer business market has grown huge. $5 – $10 billion dollars huge to be exact.

People just trust word of mouth more than they do a sales copy. Businesses are realizing the value of identifying influencers in their sphere and turning them into brand cheerleaders.

Just imagine if someone with a few hundreds of thousands (or, even millions) of Twitter followers were to Tweet out something positive about your brand? Since it’s already on social media, to how many of their friends would they share? How much more traffic would that generate? How many visitors could you convert into customers?

The potential is huge.

With the power of social media, it’s relatively easy to find potential influencers by looking for trending posts, comments, or Tweets.

B2B Outreach

Search engine rankings are not always a competition. Brands in the same niche can help each other and build on each others’ success.

One common approach is to find trending products in your niche, write a review, and then submit it to the company, asking for it to be featured on their blog. The exact same tactic works equally well for podcasts, video series, or any other consumer content.

It also doesn’t necessarily have to be a review. If you feel that you have a highly valuable piece of content that can contribute to their content and readership, comment on the post or email them with a link to your content.

Start a Backlinking Network

Doing this yourself can be tricky. For one, it can be hard to find websites with high authority that are for sale. Secondly, once you buy a site, it could effectively double your workload.

Of course, a way around this is to try and establish a network of other bloggers in the same niche but aren’t direct competitors. You could all agree to comment, share, and backlink to each other’s content where you supplement each other.

For example, you could have a floor cleaner, carpet cleaner, and surface cleaner blogs working in a general “home cleaning product” network.

How to pull off a backlinking strategy? Research, research, and more research

Any link building strategy should be grounded in proper research. What better source of information than the well-performing content of your actual competitors?

Crawling tools like Screaming Frog can help you find content with a huge amount of link juice. This will help you identify high-performing topics and strategies to create linkable content.

In the SEO biz, knowing what your competitors are up to and developing a nose for sniffing out what works for them is a must.

While we focus on advanced strategies here, it’s important to remember the basics. Any link building strategy will fail without content that’s:

• Valuable
• Topical
• Shareable and commentable