For your website to have an impact, you need potential customers to know about it. Apart from social media efforts and paid advertisement, organic traffic is your best bet. Here’s where B2B link building comes in.
Building links and mentions of your business on the web helps attract traffic from search engines and the sites that link to you.
In this article, we’ll share the five most useful B2B link-building strategies and explain how to use them for your business.
Why link building is important
B2B link building takes time and effort, but it provides multiple benefits to your website. These include:
- Improved organic ranking. The more backlinks a website has, the more likely it is to show up in the top ten search results, according to research. Backlinks from trustworthy websites build up your SEO and improve your website ranking.
- Brand exposure. Building links on reputable sites exposes your brand to their audience, improving brand awareness.
- Referral traffic. Some of the people who are exposed to your brand when browsing other websites will end up going to your website, and some of them will convert into leads.
- Relationship building. As you work on white hat link building strategies, you’ll also build relationships with other website owners. This can be helpful for further promotion opportunities.
All of these are important benefits for any B2B organization. Next, let’s look at how to take advantage of these benefits.
Best B2B link-building strategies
Behind all B2B link-building strategies, there’s one simple principle. If you want somebody else to mention you, provide value to them. Here are the five proven ways you can use this principle.
1. Guest blogging and listicles
The most straightforward way to build links to your B2B company is to write the article yourself and put a link to your website in it. For any B2B industry, you can find hundreds of websites that accept guest posts — articles written by third-party authors.
Here are a couple of search queries you can use to find websites like these:
- Industry blog + write for us
- Industry blog + contribute
- Industry blog + submission guidelines
You can also gather a list of blogs and media websites about your industry, and email the editor or similar contact asking whether they would accept a piece of content from you. Many companies that are active with content marketing will readily accept quality help.
Once you get the green light from the editor, create a great article for their site. Generally, you can insert a link to your website in the article or the author’s bio.
Another strategy is to target already existing listicles. These articles contain lists of the best products, services or agencies. You can find those listicles, contact the website editor and offer to review and add your company to the list.
2. Broken link building
This strategy can bring a lot more links but requires the use of specialized tools. As some websites stop being supported or pages get removed, any website can amass broken links — links that lead to a nonexistent page. These links are bad for user experience and SEO, so most editors and webmasters would like to get rid of them.
You can find those broken links on other websites in your industry, contact the editor and inform them of this issue. You can then offer to link to a similar page on your website.
Finding broken links manually isn’t viable, so you’ll need a tool like the broken backlink checker by SE Ranking. There are other backlink checkers as well.
3. News media link building
This B2B link building strategy might not bring a big number of links, but it can get you links from authoritative sources. Getting mentions on the likes of Forbes and CNN is great for SEO and brand recognition, but getting in the news is hard.
What you can do to have better odds of building those links is use services that connect experts and journalists. When journalists have questions about an industry, they post them asking for comments. You can reach out, provide your comments and get featured in their news article.
Here are a few services to try:
4. Creating link magnet articles
This strategy can earn you a lot of links but may be challenging to pull off. If you create a valuable piece of content, other authors will link to it on their own without you having to reach out to them. It’s called being a link magnet.
Typically, this takes the form of a large article that lists statistics from your industry, a very detailed guide or original research. The last format is the best for getting links because you provide unique information, but it’s the hardest to do right.
If you analyze an aspect of your industry that hasn’t been looked at or run a survey of your customers, you’re likely to earn a lot of backlinks.
When you create a piece of content like that, you’ll have to promote it first. Optimize it to rank high, or run an email marketing campaign to show the piece to other editors and authors.
5. Finding unlinked brand mentions
If your business already has some brand recognition, you can do some easy B2B link-building by simply looking for unlinked brand mentions. When people write articles that mention your brand and don’t link to it, you can reach out to them and ask to include a link.
Find those unlinked mentions with specialized SEO tools, Google Alerts or by using search operators on your favorite search engine. The goal is to find mentions of your brand that are not on your site or social media, so you can use this search template:
Here’s a search string to try: your brand -yourbrand.com -facebook.com -linkedin.com -x.com.
You can add job boards that you post to the exclusions.
The downside of doing this manually is that you’ll have to comb through all the search results to find mentions without a link.
Summary
B2B link building can improve your ranking on search engines, bring in organic traffic and referral traffic from the sites that link to you, and grow brand awareness in the process. To earn links and mentions, find ways to provide value to the websites that you want to link to you and their readers.