Given that links are one of the biggest indicators of quality for search engines, it is no wonder that link building continues to be an essential part of most SaaS digital marketing strategies.
Earning good links, however, can be tough. The winning edge in link building is to understand your target audience and know where to focus your efforts. Among the most effective ways to lead more people to your pages and get those quality links is through content.
Statistic-rich content is highly linkable. In fact, bloggers and journalists often rely on qualified statistics to strengthen and boost the credibility of their copy. Whether it’s original research or content that reveals new industry-relevant findings, whenever someone cites the data on your statistics page, they link to you.
Choosing a Link-Building Strategy
Link building is one of the most crucial parts of a business’ off-site SEO efforts. There is a variety of tactics that SaaS companies can mix and match to grow their rankings. Some of the most effective white-hat link building strategies can be categorized into four groups – attracting organic quality backlinks, outreaching for do-follow links, mirroring competitors’ backlink profiles, and stealing competitors’ quality backlinks.
Attracting organic quality backlinks to your content is a great strategy that can build natural links while enhancing your content marketing strategy. Tactics to consider here include providing valuable industry knowledge and creating outstanding visual content.
Getting Started With Link Building Content
Link building and content marketing work best when paired together. In essence, content marketing is set to create and distribute unique and valuable content, while link building aims to get others to endorse it by linking to it.
As seen by Google and other search engines, the links in your content can be either natural (organic) or unnatural. Unnatural links – such as paid links and automatically generated links – can get your site punished in Google’s ratings and should be avoided.
Having natural, high-quality links is what matters most in successful link building. These links are formed organically with the purpose of adding genuine value to content and user experience.
Ultimately, the more valuable your content is, the more likely you are to get other sites in your industry to link back to you.
When creating content for link-building purposes and conversions, make sure it’s interesting, shareable, and helpful. More to that, because 53% of all site traffic comes from organic search, don’t forget that the link-worthy pages you’ve produced should also be discoverable on the web.
Identifying Link-Building Prospects
If you’ve chosen a link-building strategy, you probably also have an idea of who your ideal prospects are.
One of the best places to find link prospects is Google. Traditional methods like Google Search can be extremely beneficial for uncovering link opportunities, as well as learning more about your business landscape.
Looking for potential websites and blogs to link to you with manual search, however, can be very time-consuming. Luckily, there are plenty of excellent link-prospecting tools that can help you if you’re having a hard time scaling prospects.
Attracting Links With Statistics
In simplest terms, in order for your content to be a valuable source of information that people can cite or link to, it needs to be data-rich and well-supported with facts.
One of the top link-building tips for naturally attracting links is to incorporate pages specifically designed to get links into your content marketing strategy. A great example of this is displaying and keeping up-to-date relevant statistics for your industry.
Fact is, creating statistic-rich pages that stand out can be a challenge. Whenever possible, use your own data and turn it into content, and include any other stats already available, that might be of interest to your audience.
When including data for link-building purposes, remember that users generally don’t consume statistics lists the same way they would a regular blog post. The reality is that most of them will scan the page looking for curated information that they can use to support the claims in their own pieces. All this makes it crucial to organize your pages and make them easy to digest. Consider grouping your statistics, as well as adding jump links in the introduction section.
Outreach for Link Building Content
Links are still Google’s go-to ranking signal, and there is no better way to build high-quality, natural links than outreach.
Head to our blog for more ideas on building powerful links and making the outreach process more efficient.
