Ultimate Guide to Link Building for New Websites

Have you finally decided to try link building for new websites, but you don’t know where to start? Of course, the creation of a high-quality backlink profile requires thorough planning and implementation of the right tools.

Luckily for you, our comprehensive guide is here to help you go through each stage of the link building campaign for new sites. Following our instructions step by step, you’ll grow your backlink profile, increase your search engine rankings, and boost your online authority. Further, we’ll help you avoid common unforgivable mistakes that may ruin all your SEO efforts and even lead to Google’s penalties.

Takeaways:

Planning your link building strategy is a sure way to avoid inappropriate usage of your company’s resources and set clear goals for measuring your success.
Never start obtaining backlinks until you get rid of on-page issues such as broken inner links, low loading speed, etc.
Never opt for black hat link building tactics if you don’t want to lower your site’s rankings or even get Google’s penalties.
The success of your link building campaign involves not only comprehensive planning and the use of the right tools but also further management of your backlinks.

Why You Need a Link Building Plan

If you’re an owner of a new website, starting link building from scratch feels like “entering uncharted waters.” But don’t worry — there are time-tested methods that will help you obtain backlinks from other websites, increasing the rankings of your pages and online authority.

Like anything great, the choice and implementation of link building strategies start with comprehensive planning. A structured roadmap of your backlink profile growth will help you highlight the most important tasks, calculate the time you need to reach your goals, and estimate your efforts. Moreover, planning can help you avoid the following pitfalls:

Obtaining low-quality links: If you don’t conduct initial research, you risk getting the links from sites with low DA or even link farms. In both cases, your website’s rankings will be significantly affected.
Inefficient resource management: When you try to build links randomly, there is always a chance that you may opt for the wrong strategy, use inappropriate tools, and simply take unnecessary actions. All these will lead to inefficient usage of your time and resources.
Unmet expectations: You can’t measure your success if you don’t know what to expect from your actions. Moreover, it’s essential to know exactly how many links you need to build, which is impossible to find out without a competitor analysis.

Imagine that you’ve launched a website and already started successfully implementing an SEO strategy. Now, you want to boost your efforts with efficient link building techniques, and due to a comprehensive plan, you’ll know what to do step-by-step to achieve your goals. Moreover, you may predict possible problems, so you’ll need to spend less time on their solution while growing your backlink profile.

Build Your Foundation for Link Building Success

When you plan link building for new websites, you undoubtedly need to decide how you’re going to implement the most efficient techniques. That’s where you need to think about the tools that can help you meet your goals and ensure smooth website optimization.

Choose the Right Tools for Link Building

Proper software can ensure the success of your link building efforts and comprehensive management of your results. It’s impossible to imagine growing your backlink profile without the following tools:

LinkChecker: This tool simplifies monitoring and analyzing your backlinks to ensure they remain valid and beneficial. LinkChecker provides insights into the quality, relevancy, and status of your links, helping you maintain a healthy backlink profile.

Ahrefs: This is a well-known service in the SEO community due to its all-in-one solutions. With its tools, growing your backlink profile and analyzing competitors is easier than learning ABC. Also, the platform’s crawler is the 2nd most active on the web (just right after Google).

SEMrush: Another great platform with a bundle of robust tools designed to boost your SEO strategy. SEMrush can provide you with valuable information based on a competitor analysis, which you can use to improve your link building campaign.

Google Search Console: Last but not least, Google Search Console allows you to manage and maintain your website’s presence in Google Search results. You can also use it to review all the backlinks on your site.

Define Your Goals and Priorities

With your tools ready, it’s time to set up your expectations for the upcoming link building campaign. First of all, it’s important to define measurable results you expect to achieve from the growth of your backlink profile. Thus, you’ll be able to estimate the progress of your strategy implementation, and if something doesn’t go as planned, you’ll immediately notice it. Remember that your expectations must be measurable and related to important metrics such as website rankings, organic traffic, domain authority, and revenue.

After this, you should decide which pages you’re going to promote with the new backlinks. Although it may be tempting to start with the ones that generate your income (for example, product pages), it’s better to prioritize blog posts. As a rule, this type of content is more likely to attract a person who has just clicked the backlink and entered your site.

Finally, align your link building campaign with your general SEO objectives. Estimate the number of backlinks you need to rank for certain target keywords. Also, create a list of popular websites relevant to your niche and audience. Collaborating with these online resources will undoubtedly help you improve your online authority.

Optimize Your Website for Backlinks

Growing the value of backlinks requires a strong on-page SEO foundation to ensure link juice effectively supports your key pages. Follow these steps:

Identify and fix broken links using tools like Google Search Console or Ahrefs and redirect them to relevant, active pages.
Use descriptive anchor text for internal links and prioritize linking to high-value pages such as product pages and the homepage.
Check for broken backlinks leading to your site, if you already have any, and resolve them to retain external link value.
Eliminate duplicate content to improve site clarity and prevent ranking penalties.
Optimize site navigation to ensure smooth user experiences and easy access to critical pages.
Enhance page load speed with tools like PageSpeed Insights for faster performance.
Add schema markup to provide structured data, improving search engine understanding of your site.

By implementing these measures, you can maximize the impact of your backlinks, improve user experience, and enhance your website’s SEO performance.

Research and Prepare

When you start link building from scratch, everything seems to be dark jungles. Luckily, together, we’ll go through them and take the first steps to successfully grow your backlink profile. During the preparation phase of your link building plan, you’ll need to focus on your competitors and dive deeper into the search for opportunities for your online growth.

Identify Your SEO Competitors

You should start improving your new website by analyzing your SEO competitors. These are the websites that compete for your target keywords in organic search. Consider that they are not necessarily your direct business opponents.

Although you can use tools like SEMrush, if you haven’t conducted a similar analysis before, it’ll be a better idea to opt for Ahrefs due to its more friendly UI. Just follow these simple steps:

Open your Ahrefs account and find the Site Explorer tool.
Enter your domain name.
Choose.

Here is the screenshot of a dashboard:

You’ll find online resources that rank in the top 10 for your main keywords. And now, it’s just the right time to have a closer look at their web pages.

Analyze Competitor Backlink Profiles

Link building for new websites requires a lot of time, as you have to not only define your main competitors but also comprehensively analyze their strategies. It’ll help you not only identify and avoid your rival’s mistakes but also discover useful insights and potential link opportunities.

Competitor analysis is an extremely challenging process, but luckily, Ahrefs comes to the rescue again. Follow these simple instructions to define the link building opportunities without any problems:

Enter the SEO competitors from your list in the Link Intersect report. You can find it in the Site Explorer tool.
The platform will provide you with a list that includes your competitors’ referring domains as well as the number of backlinks they have from each site.
Click the number of links to find out more about their anchors, relevancy, etc.

Thus, you can discover a lot of online resources (popular niche sites, local websites, listings, etc.) that may provide you with high-quality links. Reach these sites’ webmasters to obtain some valuable backlinks and increase your rankings.

Further, you can analyze the common features of the online resources that refer to your competitors and use them while looking for new link building opportunities. Try to generalize such important metrics as DA (domain authority), DS (domain strength), organic traffic, and referring domains. The next time you decide to obtain links from a new website, ensure it meets the average criteria for your niche.

If you’re uncertain about the quality of your competitors’ backlinks, it’s essential to approach the process strategically. Instead of risking errors or wasting resources, consider leveraging professional link audit services. By doing so, you can identify and avoid potential pitfalls while ensuring your efforts are focused on high-value opportunities. At Backlinkers, our team specializes in optimizing backlink profiles by securing top-quality links from authoritative and relevant sources, helping you build a robust and effective online presence.

Decide How Many Links of What Type You Need

Now, you should decide how many backlinks you need. For instance, according to Ahrefs, to start ranking in the top 10 for the word “tea,” your site needs to obtain nearly 756 unique links from reputable online sources. Do you still struggle to find out how many backlinks you need? Simply opt for an average number of links obtained by your competitors.

You may even have thousands of backlinks, but your rankings won’t grow. The secret is that you should aim specifically for relevant links from reputable domains. Moreover, the quality of your backlinks is way more important than their quantity. There is no reason to obtain dozens of links from a blog about pets if you run a plumbing business. It’ll be a way better idea to get one relevant backlink from an online source devoted to house maintenance.

At the same time, don’t forget about link diversity. It means that all backlinks in your profile should come from different types of online sources, including blogs, social media platforms, news websites, directories, etc. The more diverse these sources are, the more valuable your backlink profile is in the eyes of search engine algorithms.

Pick the Right Link Building Strategies

With clear goals and professional tools, you’re ready to choose an appropriate strategy. Take into account that you may combine several techniques while link building for new websites. For example, it’s always a good decision to opt for guest posts, collaborate with journalists, and create unique content worth linking to.

On the other hand, you’ll certainly face spammy link building techniques, such as link farming and cloaking. All of them involve exchanging or buying links from other websites (usually, they’re questionable online sources with low authority and organic traffic). Of course, you won’t get any benefits from adding these backlinks to your profile. Moreover, these strategies are also known as “black hat” ones, and Google may lower your rankings or even hide your pages from the target audience for their implementation.

Outreach Link Building

Outreach link building is an integral part of any digital marketing campaign. This is the process of getting in touch with the owners of other sites and asking them for backlinks to your website. Effective outreach is closely related to personalized communication and the ability to establish relationships with prospective websites, leading to obtaining high-quality backlinks.

Further, there may be other situations where you may need to contact other webmasters. For example, imagine there is a website referring to your site, but you’ve already removed the linked page and replaced it with a new one. In this case, there is a broken backlink, which undoubtedly affects your profile. The best way to fix this issue is to opt for an efficient outreach tactic to get in touch with the referring site’s owner and ask them to change the link to a new one.

Example of an outreach letter for replacing a backlink:

Of course, there may be other reasons to opt for outreach link building, including:

Podcast link building;
Guest blogging;
Unlinked mentions;
Obtaining high-quality directory links.

The results of your outreach efforts will vary depending on the sites you’re targeting, the strength of your messages, and your industry particularities. Usually, it takes from a few weeks to several months to see the result of an active outreach campaign, which will lead to increased traffic and successful acquisition of the backlinks.

Link Insertions

Link insertion is also one of the popular link building tactics. It involves adding relevant links to your website to the existing content on another site. Implementing this practice is recommended only if you can find an authoritative and topically relevant online source. The backlinks to your website may improve the reader’s experience, providing them with additional content and interesting information, which they can find on your site.

For example, if you run a plumbing company, you may get in touch with a popular home and garden blog. If one of its articles mentions plumbing as an essential step of a home inspection but lacks extra information and in-depth details, this may be a great opportunity to include a link to your site.

Create Content Worth Linking to

Blog posts provide you with a great possibility of getting natural backlinks from other websites. However, you should create link building assets to attract the references. They include content and features on your site that are extremely valuable and compelling to naturally attract links from other online resources. These assets work like magnets for inbound links, significantly contributing to your website’s online authority and rankings.

But how can you develop valuable, interesting, and unique content? Try to follow these principles:

Create content relevant to your niche and industry.
Ensure your blog posts are both educational and entertaining. Plus, they should include useful information for your readers.
Focus on data-driven content, including infographics, case studies, guides, checklists, and how-tos.

Earn Editorial Links

An editorial link is a natural link that you get without trading, asking for, or paying for it. It’s also known as an earned link. These backlinks are the most valuable, and only a specific type of content can attract them.

For instance, the chance that product pages on an eCommerce website will earn editorial links is close to zero. Nonetheless, a useful customer guide or interesting tool (such as online calculators) can provide you with tons of high-quality links from popular websites. Remember that the more interesting and unique content you create, the higher the chance that others will want to recommend it to their readers.

Get Featured on HARO (Help a Reporter Out)

Using HARO (Help a Reporter Out) is an extremely important link building process that involves attracting links from popular online publications. The platforms like HARO allow you to get in touch with journalists to share your expertise. If a representative of an online magazine is intrigued by your response, they may refer to your website as a source in their article. If you wonder which HARO platform to choose, pay attention to the following options:

Connectively (one of the most popular free services, former HARO)
Muck Rack
Gorkana
Source Bottle (free service)

As soon as you create an account on the HARO platform, you’ll start receiving daily emails with different opportunities across topics like business, lifestyle, etc. Just choose the topic relevant to your online business and personal expertise and offer a journalist valuable insights to get backlinks from an online magazine.

Leverage PR for Organic Links

You can rely on public relations to get high-quality backlinks and improve your online presence. The best ways to leverage PR and get more links include the following:

Ask for backlinks: Whenever you give a public speech, find out whether hosts will publish online content about an event. If it is so, don’t hesitate to ask for references to your website.
Collaborate with charity organizations: This is one of the fastest ways to earn backlinks. Once your business sponsors a charity organization, there is a strong page that’ll link back to your site on the funders page or other content on its website.
Use social media: You can find a lot of new PR opportunities in X (former Twitter). It’s enough to use hashtags like “interview x” (where “x” stands for your occupation) to find interviewers who may be interested in your expertise. If you share valuable insights with them, they’ll be likely to share a link to your websites with their audience.

Monitor and Refine Your Efforts

Link building from scratch is difficult because it requires not only thorough planning but also accurate management. After the launch of your campaign, you need to keep an eye on your backlink profile growth and change your efforts if they don’t provide you with the desired results.

Track Backlinks with the Right Tools

Getting quality links should undoubtedly be your main priority during the whole link building campaign. The best way to ensure you’re getting relevant backlinks that will contribute to your website’s growth is to use the proper tools.

For example, you may opt for Linkcheker.pro. This platform allows you to see the link’s status, index, robots meta tags, etc. It allows you to deal with a variety of tasks:

Easily detect broken links and take action to replace them.
Analyze the upcoming backlinks and estimate their value.
Ensure the safety of your current backlink profile.

Here is how it looks on the site:

Remember that numerous poor-quality links can significantly damage your site’s authority in the eyes of search engine algorithms. The same problem occurs if these backlinks use inappropriate anchors, which deceive the users into clicking on them. Luckily, Linkchecker.pro allows you to control anchor texts, ensuring they are all relevant to the pages to which your backlinks lead.

Also, thanks to an innovative alert system, the platform will notify you via email or Telegram about any changes in your backlink profile. Due to this, you can spot low-quality links ASAP, removing them to avoid Google’s penalties.

Finally, Linkchecker.pro can boast an eye-catching UI, which allows you to monitor all aspects of your link building campaign. The smart design displays your backlink statistics, the performance of every link builder in your team, and overall project expenses. Thanks to it, managing your backlinks feels like a rest during the holiday season.

Identify and Disavow Harmful Links

Link building for new websites makes no sense if your profile is full of harmful backlinks. According to Google, the sites that use bad links are likely to get penalties, resulting in a significant drop in organic traffic and search engine rankings. Moreover, they may not appear in results at all.

If you’re lucky enough to avoid these penalties, you still should remember that broken link building is nothing more than a waste of your money and time. Thus, you should avoid at all costs the following type of backlinks:

Link exchange: Links that you get from a website in exchange for linking to it, too.
Automated links: Automated software or services are used to generate large volumes of low-quality backlinks for your website.
PBNs (private blog networks): Links obtained from the network of sites created just to link to each other to manipulate organic search visibility.
Hidden links: Although search engines can see these backlinks, an average user can’t spot them with the naked eye. As a rule, they look like white text on a white background.
Low-quality directories: Links from spammy directories.
Paid links: Paying money or offering services in exchange for links.

A healthy backlink profile is undoubtedly one of the most important aspects of successful search engine optimization. The use of whitehat link building techniques and regular analysis of the obtained links is the key to preventing your website from getting penalized by Google.

Evaluate ROI and Adjust Strategies

The best way to evaluate your link building efforts is to perform a backlink ROI calculation. Thus, you can clearly see whether there is a need to change something in your current strategy.

First, you need to start with cost estimation. Identify all resources spent on link acquisition, outreach, and content creation for your website. After that, review the results of your link building campaign. Pay attention to the following metrics:

Conversion rates: Evaluate the effectiveness of the links that lead from the promoted page to your products and services.
Domain authority: Measure the growth of your website’s authority and rankings.
Organic traffic: Find out how your new backlinks influence the growth of your website visitors.

Afterward, use the following formula: ROI = (Return – Investment) / Investment x 100. For example, if you’ve spent $2,000 on your link building strategy and your efforts have brought you $2,500, the ROI will be 20%.

ROI that ranges from 5 to 7% is considered to be a good return. And when it exceeds 10%, it’s undoubtedly a strong return.

However, if your ROI is lower even than 5%, it’s an obvious sign for you to review and change your approach. Maybe you should opt for other link building opportunities and optimize the use of your resources.

Explore Opportunities with Linkless Mentions

Finally, you should always keep looking for new opportunities to promote your online business. And that’s where you should pay separate attention to linkless mentions of your brand. There are several types of these references:

Direct brand mentions: In this case, a website directly uses your brand name in its content.
Product or service mentions: Here, a site may be referring to your specific products or services.
Slogans: If your business has an iconic slogan like Apple’s “Think Different,” someone may also use it without mentioning your official website.
Company personalities: You may discover articles referring to your organization’s CEO or specialists.
Events: If you throw exciting online and offline events related to your business niche, there is a strong chance that the websites related to your industry will write about them.

The good news is that you can use Ahrefs and its Content Explorer to find linkless mentions of your online business. If you do it, reach the site’s owner and politely ask them to add a backlink to your site’s proper page.

Get Started Today

Does link building still look like an impossible challenge for you? Get reliable assistance from Backlinkers!

Our team of professional link builders will help you comprehensively analyze the competitors and come up with a custom strategy focused on the solution of your main problems. Due to our expertise, custom tools, and responsible approach, you won’t simply obtain high-quality links but also significantly increase your rankings, traffic flow, and revenue.