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Although no one knows exactly what factors search engines use to return entries in their SERPs (search engine results pages), we know that backlinks are incredibly important. Backlinks are any form of a link from another website that points to your website (or web pages).

Whilst there has been plenty of research to suggest there is a positive correlation between the number of backlinks and high-ranking pages, it’s a seriously tough cookie to crack. The main issues businesses face are time, money, and effort.

Many people don’t have enough time to write guest posts and reach out to other sites, and certainly not enough to regularly churn out lots of fresh and unique content.

It’s true that creating relevant and high-quality content can get you high-quality links. However, there are other strategies you can use to get ahead in this game. Don’t let an inability to create content stop you from earning links.

Here are 3 of the best ways to build backlinks without writing any content.

1. Broken Link Building

Broken links lower the value of a website. As a user, there’s nothing more frustrating than clicking on a link, only to find it doesn’t exist or it’s broken. However, broken links can serve a great purpose as a way to build backlinks without writing content.

How? Well, you can run any website you want through a broken link checker, then get in touch with the site owner to let them know. How does that help you? It’s simple. Ask them to replace the broken link with one of yours in return of your favour.

While it may seem a little sneaky, broken link building is an incredibly effective way of acquiring links. You don’t have to rely on writing content and you can pick and choose which websites you want linking to you. This offers a lot of control, allowing you to filter out sites with low authority or high spam scores.

Benefits of broken link building

• By reaching out to website owners and pointing out their broken links, you’re actually doing them a favour. Not only are you outlining an issue, but you’re also giving them an opportunity to make their user experience better, which is often greatly appreciated by them.
• Instead of webmasters having to fix their broken links and contact the existing links’ website owners, you’re offering a quick get out for them by giving them a relevant and working article to link to. It’s a great way of expanding your content reach too as you can include blog posts, articles, infographics, and videos.

How does broken link building work?

Before doing anything, you’ll want to consider your desired keyword to start finding relevant websites you can target. Once you have this in mind, you can use a tool to identify broken links:

1. Run your keyword through a Google search, looking for links, blogs, and useful sites
2. Select the top 20 results from your search filters
3. Move your chosen links into ahrefs to locate any broken outgoing links
4. Check domain authority, page authority, backlink profile, and spam score to identify your final list of websites
5. Reach out to webmasters, site owners, and editors by email to notify them of their broken links, as well as suggesting your own content to link to

2. Curate Infographics

72% of marketers report that visual content is more effective than text-based marketing. The beauty of using infographics to build backlinks is that you don’t have to create your own infographic content if you’re not able to.

There are plenty of websites you can use to hire designers to create infographics for you, or you may want to consider signing up for WordPress hosting so you can make use of WordPress’s infographic plugins. Alternatively, if you don’t want to spend a load of money on fresh infographics, you can curate them from elsewhere.

Ideally, the best way to build backlinks is by offering your audience a mix of content; written content, videos, and infographics.

Benefits of curating infographics

• Infographics are shareable. This means you can generate high-quality authority links to your website. Not only are you able to increase your brand visibility, but you’re also able to boost your SEO whilst standing out from the crowd
• The majority of existing infographics will display their embed code, making it easier than ever to share relevant infographics on your website (and vice versa).

There are a lot of opportunities out there for sharing infographics made by marketing teams who don’t know how to share them with the correct audience. You can be the middle man, helping them promote their infographics, while building up your link profile, and increasing your website’s authority.

How does curating infographics work?

I recommend finding around 5 relevant and high-value infographics to start with by following this simple process:

1. Use Google Images to locate relevant infographics, searching for your keyword, e.g. “how to boost SEO” with the addition of “+ infographics”.
2. Look through your search results and choose an infographic you would like to curate
3. Use a screen capture tool to snip the sections of the infographic you want (always remember to link to the original infographic) or copy and paste the embed code to your CMS

3. Reclaim Brand Mentions

Often when people research how to build backlinks, there’s plenty of information for new businesses, or for businesses who haven’t yet built much of a portfolio. However, there’s rarely relevant information for successful and established businesses.

If your business has been around for a while it probably already has many positive brand mentions across the internet. However, many of them won’t contain a backlink to your website. That’s where the issue lies. This method relies on turning that around.

Benefits of Brand Mentions

• It’s easy to find and monitor brand mentions using a social listening tool, most of which offer free trials.
• There is little effort required to reclaim brand mentions because you’ve done the hard work already. Having your brand mentioned on another website is the difficult part, so all that’s left is for you to reach out in order to claim the link
• Brand mention reclaiming is cheap. In fact, you can do it without any paid tools at all… just a few simple and smart search queries

How does reclaiming brand mentions work?

Although there are tools out there that you can pay for, we recommend using a free trial at first or making use of Google. The best free method is to use advanced search operators like the ones below to find link acquisition opportunities:

1. In order to find mentions of your brand name, type the following into Google’s search engine: “Brand Name” -site:yoursite.com -press -release -site:facebook.com -site:twitter.com
2. To find mentions of your brand’s previous announcements – Google makes regular announcements, as do other companies – use the following: “brand name” “announced” -site:yourwebsite.com -press -release
3. Once you have a list of targets, reach out to those sites via email. We recommend you make your emails personalised and friendly. Mention where you found your brand mention, that you appreciate it, and that you’d like a link back to your website so readers could find more information

Conclusion

Google’s algorithm keeps us all on our toes, and earning high-quality backlinks without writing content is not something most site owners consider. However, there are certainly ways in which you can build authoritative backlinks without writing fresh content.

But, although you’ll see success with these methods, we recommend striking a balance between creating fresh content, reusing existing content, creating infographics and keeping up with brand mentions.

We doubt content will be stepping down off its throne any time soon. However, link building is just as important to promoting your brand, generating leads, increasing revenue and, ultimately, building a stronger brand.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash