Guide to the Correct Method of Building Links for Your SEO Campaign

The correct method of building links for your SEO campaign involves a strategic blend of digital PR, competitor analysis, and creating linkable content. Focus on earning high-quality, relevant backlinks rather than bulk quantities, ensuring your links come from trusted platforms with actual organic traffic.

1. Start with Competitor Analysis

Instead of guessing where to get links, let your successful competitors do the heavy lifting.

• Use tools like Ahrefs Site Explorer or Semrush to identify the exact websites linking to your direct competitors’ best-performing pages.
• Filter for Domain Authority (DA), Page Authority, and contextually relevant “DoFollow” links to compile a targeted, high-value outreach list.

2. Create Linkable Assets (The Skyscraper Method)

Publishing generic blog posts rarely earns natural backlinks. To earn links naturally, your content must offer undeniable value.

• Create comprehensive resources, original data studies, custom infographics, or free tools that journalists and bloggers in your niche will want to cite.
• Find platforms that have already linked to similar, older content in your niche and pitch your updated, superior version as a valuable resource.

3. Leverage Digital PR and Expert Commentary

Google heavily rewards links from high-trust media outlets and industry publications.

• Build relationships with journalists and editors by providing proactive expert quotes through platforms like HARO (Help a Reporter Out).
• Participate in relevant industry podcasts and online publications, which often result in branded links and valuable citations in show notes.

4. Secure Foundational Local & Industry Citations

If you serve a specific physical region, foundational local directory links act as important trust signals.

• Ensure you are listed on major, trusted platforms like Google Business Profile, Yelp, Apple Maps, and well-known industry-specific directories.
• Avoid low-quality, spammy, or generic directories, as Google easily penalizes manipulative linking practices.

5. Optimize Internal Linking

External backlinks are only half the battle; distributing that “link juice” across your own site is just as important.

• Use a hub-and-spoke (or pillar-and-cluster) content model to connect your pages.
• Point internal links judiciously from your high-authority pages to other highly relevant pages that need a small push in search rankings.

A link building campaign is a planned effort to acquire high-quality backlinks (or inbound links) from external websites pointing to strategic pages of your own site.

Main objectives:

• Improve your site’s domain authority in Google’s eyes
• Strengthen SEO rankings for key pages
• Increase visibility for strategic queries
• Build your online reputation within your niche

It can support a product launch, reinforce editorial content, or boost internal linking around transactional pages.

1. Perform a Link Building Audit First

Start by analysing your current SEO link profile:

• Low-quality links,
• Over-optimised or poorly distributed anchors,
• Lack of diverse referring domains.

2. Define Your SEO Objectives

Every link building campaign should align with a clear SEO strategy:

• Which web pages should be pushed in Google results?
• Which strategic keywords are you targeting?
• What level of domain authority are you aiming for compared to competitors?

3. Choose the Right Types of Links

Selecting the right types of external links is strategic:

• Partner websites, niche blogs, trusted media outlets,
• Optimised, branded, or neutral anchor texts,
• A balanced mix of DoFollow and NoFollow links.

4. Schedule Publication Over Time

Acquiring quality backlinks depends on:

• A natural publishing rhythm,
• An SEO editorial calendar aligned with seasonality,
• Coordination with your SEO content campaigns.

Best Link Building Strategies

There are many different link building tactics and strategies out there. Some of them can be very effective, while others no longer work these days and will most likely just waste your time.

Read Also: 10 Secrets to Hiring the Right SEO Company

Here’s what works really well today, according to our observations:

• Replicating your competitor’s backlinks

If someone is linking to your competitor, there’s a good chance that they might be open to linking to you too.

A good way to kick off this strategy is to study who links to the actual homepages of your competitor’s websites. These people are mentioning the business as a whole and not some specific webpage, which you might not have on your own website.

• Targeted link outreach

So let’s say you’ve done your keyword research and a very specific page that you need to rank well in Google for a certain keyword. And you need to build links to that very specific page.

Well, the best place to start is to pull up the top-ranking pages for your desired keyword and research where they got their links from.

Just put your keyword into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer and scroll down to the “SERP Overview” widget. You’ll see the top-ranking pages along with how many backlinks (and linking domains) they have.

• Creating linkable assets

In SEO, we use the terms ”linkable asset” or ”link bait” to refer to content that is strategically crafted to attract links. Such linkable assets can take on many different forms:

• Industry surveys
• Studies and research
• Online tools and calculators
• Awards and rankings
• How-to guides and tutorials
• Definitions and coined terms
• Infographics, GIFographics, and “Map-o-graphics”

• Guest posting

This link building tactic is actually frowned upon by some SEO professionals. Mainly because some people tend to overdo it to the point of being spammy.

And yet guest blogging is one of the most popular ways how SEOs build links these days

A somewhat lesser-known guest posting tactic is to find an underperforming article on the blog you want to write for and offer them to rewrite it from scratch. If you can persuade them that you can greatly improve that article and it will end up ranking higher in Google and bringing them more search traffic, I’m sure they’ll have a hard time resisting your pitch.

Link Building Tools

While it is technically possible to build links with just a bit of brain power and a Gmail account, there are a number of link building tools that will help make the process of acquiring links much faster and easier.

Here are some free ones:

• Ahrefs’ Free Backlink Checker – Shows top 100 links pointing at any website or URL.
• Google Alerts – Notifies you whenever a specific word or phrase was mentioned on a newly published page. Which is a great way to source relevant link prospects.

And here are some premium ones:

• Ahrefs’ Site Explorer – Shows you all links of any website or URL with an option to sort and filter them by many important SEO metrics.
• Ahrefs’ Content Explorer – A unique link prospecting tool, which helps you find thousands of relevant websites for link requests and guest posting. Also helps to discover linkable assets on any topic from all around the web.
• Ahrefs Alerts – Similar to Google Alerts but has more flexibility with SEO-related filters.
• Pitchbox/BuzzStream/GMass – Email outreach tools. There are many other tools that let you send personalized emails at scale, but these ones seem to be the most popular among SEOs.
• Hunter.io/Voila Norbert – The so-called “email lookup services,” which help you find contact details of websites at scale.

Finally

Link building is a pillar of organic SEO. When carefully managed, it becomes a powerful lever to boost SEO visibility, improve rankings in Google search results, and strengthen your authority.