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Link Building in 2025: Our Step-by-Step Process & Strategy

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Boni Satani

October 17, 2024
Link Building in 2024: Our Step-by-Step Process

Tired of watching your competitors soar to the top of SERPs while your website struggles to gain traction? Link building is an essential aspect of SEO strategy. It helps you drive organic traffic from search engines and improve your website’s domain authority. The higher your website authority, the better your website’s search rankings.

However, building links isn’t easy! It requires several skills such as communication, research, and analysis. And, not everyone has them.

But, worry not – In this blog, we’ll share our proven, step-by-step link-building process to help you dominate SERPs in 2024!

Here’s what we’ve covered ahead:

So, let’s dive in!

What is Link Building in SEO?

Link building is the process of acquiring high-quality links from other relevant websites to your website. These links (or backlinks) act as endorsements, signaling to search engines that your content is valuable and authoritative.

There are several link-building techniques like guest posting, digital PR, HARO, broken links, sponsored posts, and creating linkable assets.

Backlinks are like votes of confidence from other websites, signaling to search engines that your content is valuable and trustworthy. Here’s how link building helps with SEO:

1. Improves Rankings and Visibility

Search engines use backlinks as a key factor in determining a website’s authority and relevance. The more high-quality backlinks your website has, the more likely it is to rank higher in SERPs. 

This increased visibility means more potential customers can find your website and learn about your products or services.

2. Builds Domain Authority and Credibility

Backlinks from reputable websites signal to search engines that your site is a reliable source of information. This increased authority can lead to improved rankings for all your pages, not just the ones with the most backlinks.

The higher your domain authority, the more trustworthy and credible your website appears to search engines. This can be especially beneficial for smaller businesses that may not have the same brand recognition as larger corporations.

3. Drives Targeted Traffic and Generates Leads/Sales

Backlinks from relevant websites can drive targeted traffic to your site, increasing your chances of generating leads and sales. When people click on a link to your website from another relevant site, they are more likely to be interested in your content or products. This targeted traffic can lead to higher conversion rates and increased revenue.

Pro tip: Look out for well-established, niche-specific websites to build backlinks as it can help you reach this targeted audience.

4. Enhances Online Reputation and Brand Awareness

Backlinks from well-known websites can help improve your brand’s visibility and reputation. When people see your website linked by reputable sources, they are more likely to trust and respect your brand. This increased brand recognition can lead to increased customer loyalty and referrals.

5. Supports SEO & Overall Marketing Efforts

Backlinks complement your overall SEO strategy, making your website more attractive to search engines and users alike. For example, high-quality backlinks can help improve your website’s click-through rate (CTR), which is a factor that search engines consider when ranking websites.

Additionally, backlinks can help you build a diverse traffic acquisition channel. This improves your website’s resilience to search engine algorithm updates because your website is not overly reliant on any single source of backlinks.

Discover here – “7 Best Link Building Companies in 2024”.

Since building backlinks is an extensive process, many agencies resort to spammy tactics, which lead to wasted money & effort. We meticulously analyze search intent, conduct backlink gap analysis, calculate ROI, and target high-quality prospects to deliver results that exceed expectations.

In the steps below, you will learn our four-step link-building process. This data-driven process has been refined over the years and has helped our clients achieve exceptional results.

  • Step 1: Search Intent Analysis
  • Step 2: Backlink Gap Analysis
  • Step 3: Calculate the Link Building ROI
  • Step 4: Prospecting and Outreaching

Step 1: Search Intent Analysis

The first and foremost step of the link-building process is to review the search intent of your keyword.

The search intent analysis is a process of identifying the intent of the keyword – whether it is informational, navigational, transactional, or commercial.

It’s important to identify the intent of the keyword you are targeting and ensure that it is satisfied by the content of your page.

If the content does not satisfy the intent, all your link-building efforts will go to waste since Google will never rank your content despite the best of the backlinks. Let’s understand the process of analyzing the search intent with a few examples:

  • Let’s say you want to rank for the keyword “Best Accounting Software”

We’ll search for this keyword on Ahrefs or Google, and Analyze the SERP. Please find below the screenshot of the SERP for “Best Accounting Software”.

search intent analysis for best accounting software

As we can see from the screenshot, all the pages ranking are informational pages except for two results.

This indicates Google prioritizes informational content (i.e. a listicle article that recommends “best accounting software”) to rank in the SERP.

  • Let’s take another keyword – “Invoice Generator”

We searched the keyword in Ahrefs and here’s what the SERP looks like:

search intent analysis for invoice generator

As we can observe in the above screenshot, all the pages are related to the invoice generator tool. Hence, to rank for this keyword, it’s important to have an invoice generator tool.

Summary:

  • Analyze the search intent of the target keyword and check if the content satisfies the intent.
  • If the intent isn’t satisfied, rework on the content.
  • If the intent is satisfied, move to step 2.

Step 2: Backlink Gap Analysis

The second step is Backlink Gap Analysis.

The Backlink Gap Analysis is the process of identifying the number of backlinks your page needs to outrank your competitors in SERP. The goal is to uncover the count and the type of backlinks you will need to acquire to improve your site’s authority and search engine rankings.

By identifying the number of backlinks required to outrank the competitors, we set the right expectations with our end clients.

This process helps our client understand the budget they may require to outrank their competitors. It also helps them understand the timeline they can expect based on the link-building package they choose.

Additionally, this process also, sometimes helps us discover if the client really needs to build any backlinks at all to rank for a particular keyword.

You might need a tool like Ahrefs to perform a Backlink Gap Analysis.

Here’s a Backlink Gap Analysis Example for the Keyword – “Invoice Generator”. We discovered that the customer needed 15 backlinks to outrank the competitors.

backlink gap analysis for Invoice Generator
(Backlink Gap Analysis of the Keyword – “Invoice Generator”)

Here’s another example of Backlink Gap Analysis for the keyword “accounting software”, where we discovered that our client already had sufficient backlinks compared to their competitors and hence we suggested them to NOT spend money building more backlinks.

backlink gap analysis for accounting software
(Backlink Gap Analysis of the Keyword – “accounting software”)

Summary:

  • Perform Backlink Gap Analysis to identify the approximate number of links you require to compete in SERPs.
  • Sometimes, the backlink gap would be zero, which means you don’t need backlinks to compete in SERP. In that case, you should check the On-Page or Technical SEO of the page/website. However, that could also be because the overall authority of your website is low.
  • If you have found a backlink gap, proceed to step 3.

Important: Just focusing on the ‘number’ of backlinks isn’t always enough as sometimes high DR sites may include low-quality, irrelevant, or spammy content. Hence, we also consider the overall quality of websites we use for building backlinks.

Step 3: Calculate the ROI of Your Link Building Campaigns 

When you have a lot of pages to build links for, calculating the ROI of each campaign can help you pick the best page/keyword to focus on.

For example, if you have 4 target pages/keywords for link building, an ROI Calculation will help you decide which is the best ROI-generating campaign and allocate your budget confidently.

Additionally, the process will also help you understand if it’s worth investing in building backlinks for the page/keyword you are targeting. Oftentimes, we discover negative ROI for a few campaigns, so we suggest our clients to not focus on them and put that money into more ROI-driving campaigns.

Please find below an example of ROI Calculation for a Link-Building Campaign:

Calculate the ROI of Your Link Building Campaigns

As you can see in the above example, the ROI of the campaign – “Self employed accounting software” is over 1000%, while the ROI of other campaigns is negative. Hence, clients should spend all the money on “Self employed accounting software” Campaign.

Step 4: Prospecting and Outreaching

This is the final step of the link-building process which is further divided into 7 sub-steps.

Prospecting and Outreaching

1. Get an Email Account for Outreach

We recommend getting a dedicated email account (yourname@domain.com) for link-building campaigns.

A dedicated domain-based email account can help you build trust among prospects and can consequently improve the response rate.

2. Warm Up the Email Account

It is essential to warm up the email accounts before launching a link-building campaign to get better deliverability.

If you do not warm up the email account, your emails may end up in the spam folder.

A warmup service helps build confidence in the algorithm of email service providers, thereby resulting in better deliverability. We recommend Lemwarm to warm up the email account.

3. Find Prospects/Websites to Pitch

This step is challenging and time-consuming. During this phase, the link builder needs to think about the audience of the targeted page. For instance, who would be the ideal customers who use invoice generators often to send invoices to their clients? You can say business owners who are in the service industry like marketing agencies, IT companies, legal firms, etc.

Once you understand your target audience, it becomes easy to find the websites that are writing about these businesses and their operations.

During this step, you can also analyze the backlinks of your competitors to prepare the list of prospects.

4. Find the Email IDs of the Prospects

By this step, you will have a list of the websites you want to reach out to for link building. At Zestard, we use Hunter to find the contact details of website owners or companies’ marketing personnel. You may use Hunter or similar tools to find the contact details of the prospects.

5. Verify the Email IDs

It’s important to verify the email IDs to keep the bounce rate of the campaigns below 5%. If your campaigns have a high bounce rate, your emails may end up going into spam. We use UseBouncer to verify the email IDs.

6. Prepare Email Scripts and Follow-Up Emails

This step is crucial because you need to use your creativity and communication skills to draft the email script and follow-up emails.

Your email script needs to be well-thought-out and personalized to each prospect. Below is an example of an email script used for outreach.

Prepare Email Scripts and Follow-Up Emails

7. Launch the Campaign

The final step is launching the campaign. You can do it manually or use a tool like Lemlist to launch the campaign. You need to monitor your email inbox for the prospects’ replies. In case, you don’t receive a reply from the prospect, you can schedule a follow-up email.

Conclusion

Link-building is just like preparing any of your favorite food recipes – every link-building agency has a unique way of doing it. At Zestard, our proven methodology has helped countless clients achieve exceptional results.

So if you’re looking for a strategic, data-driven approach, contact us today to learn more about our Organic SEO services today.

You can also check out some of our link-building case studies here:

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Boni Satani

Boni Satani is the Co-Founder & Marketing Head at Zestard Technologies. With over 12 years of experience in SEO, Boni has helped many national and international businesses increase their online visibility and reap high ROI. He frequently blogs for the Search Engine Journal and YourStory. You can find Boni on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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