Today, we’re going to talk about one-way link building – in other terms, your website’s off-page SEO
This blog post is for you if you’re an SEO professional looking to refine your link-building strategies and improve your site’s authority Or a business owner trying to rank their website.
At Pulling Off Strategies, we use all kinds of backlinks, from one-way links to reciprocal links, to scale our client websites.
Nonetheless, in this blog post, we will focus on one-way link building, its benefits, and 7 best strategies for one-way backlinks.
What is One Way Link Building?
One way link building is the process of getting other websites to link to yours without you linking back to them.
If you’re linking back to a site (that already gave you a backlink), then that is considered reciprocal link building. However, reciprocal links have a bad rep that when you do them at scale, Google notices these link exchanges and doesn’t value your backlinks.
That is the reason why one-way links are the go-to off-page SEO strategy for high-quality backlinks.
Even though, Google said links are not the top ranking factor for SEO, but when you analyze most of the keywords on Google, the story is different.
Most of the popular SEO people and resources seem to believe link building is effective for SEO and still brings results for websites.
However the value of your link building efforts are majorly dependent on how you’re building those links to your product or service (aka, relevant & quality) and what is your existing competition in your space.
Benefits of One-Way Link Building
For search engines, inbound links carry value, and each time you acquire a relevant link to your site, it is counted as a vote of confidence.
Thus in terms of quality backlinks the more you’re able to get, the better.
Remember that, not all backlinks and, even in fact, not all one-way backlinks are counted as equal. Nonetheless, when you consistently build high-quality one-way links, they come with benefits like
- Improving Domain Authority (DA): Domain Authority is a term introduced by Moz. This metric represents a website’s link profile. Usually, the more high-quality backlinks you have pointing to your site, the higher your DA score, which helps you appear as an authority for the topic in Google’s eyes.
- Helps in Keyword Rankings: Backlinks let search engines know the content of your page is valuable and relevant. Thus, strategically building these links to your content can help you rank for its keywords.
- Boosts Your Brand Value: What if you landed a backlink from Forbes or TechCrunch? That’s instant credibility. These links from authoritative publications can be used in your marketing materials, on your homepage, or in sales pitches to enhance your brand value
- Building Relations: To improve your link popularity for your website, you have to go out here and talk, and obviously, this means you have to communicate in the process to earn those links. This constant communication with websites, either for links or any other opportunities, is excellent way for building relations in the niche.
While link building, people often think of it as number game. However, links are about quality rather than quantity for SEO.
Often it is true that building few high-quality links is better than building tons of links from low-quality, irrelevant, and spammy websites. Not to forget, that high-quality one-way links to your website always come with the above mentioned benefits.
7 Best Strategies For Quality One-Way Link Building
There are multiple link schemes for acquiring or earning one-way links, but usually, most websites follow only a few, and that is more than enough.
The thing with link building is, it is often a operation-heavy process and usually requires proven strategies to invest your time and efforts. Otherwise you will be wasting your both time and money in link building techniques that doesn’t work.
Therefore as an agency, according to our experience, these are the 7 best strategies for you to build one-way links:
1) Guest Posts
Guest posts happen when you publish content on someone else’s website in-exchange for a backlink. Sometimes, they are free or paid.
Guest posting is often the most common link building strategy for websites, and most websites use guest posting because it works when it comes to ranking on search engines.
Here is how we generate one way links through guest posts for our clients:
- Method 1: First, we use Google to search for this term ‘[write for us] + [your keyword].’ Then, we go through the list of websites from SERPs, sort out the websites that are accepting guest posts, and pitch them our blog ideas
- Method 2: We will insert multiple competitor URLs in the Aherfs backlink checker tool to analyze the websites linking to our competitors. From there on, we will sort those websites, look for the webmaster’s email, and contact each website by doing cold outreach at scale.
Often, guest posts take time to build because you have to come up with a topic idea that aligns with other website’s content and need to write content in a particular way to fit the guest posting site writing guidelines.
2) Niche Edits
Niche edits are types of one-way links in which you insert a link of your website in someone else’s content.
Unlike guest posts, you don’t have to write content, instead, you can choose an existing article into which you can insert your link.
Niche edits can be done at scale, however, you need a budget to pay for webmasters and other bloggers to insert your link in their content.
At PullingOffStrategies, here’s how we do it
- Take 2-3 competitors and insert their URLs in the Aherfs ‘Link Intersect Tool‘.
- In this tool, you can get a list of websites that are linking to more than one of your competitors. This indicates that these websites are open for linking and niche edits.
- The next step is to find the author or individual responsible for the content on the target website.
- Then, you can either connect with them on social media or pitch a cold email asking for niche edits.
- Usually, websites aren’t going to give you free niche edits. However, you can pay for these links upfront and offer a reciprocal link or three-way link exchange if you can
While doing niche edits, it’s important to realize that your content/website should be relevant to the website to whom you’re reaching out.
Obviously, these one-way backlinks can be built at scale, unlike Guest Posts, because you’re saving time by not writing any articles.
3) Use Platforms Connectively (Formerly HARO)
Connectively (HARO) is a platform where journalists can connect with sources who can respond to their queries and add value to their research.
Usually, these journalists are looking for expert tips and quotes that they can use in their content, and in exchange for your tips, they reward you with a backlink.
There are multiple such platforms like HARO. Usually, there are the steps we follow for this:
- Sign up as a source on HARO.
- Monitor queries daily (yes, daily!)
- Respond to the relevant journalist’s queries
- Craft professional responses that adds real value and is actually helpful for journalists
- Wait for the backlinks
Using HARO, we’ve landed links on Forbes and Entrepreneur. It’s all because we provided value and we were quick to respond. This strategy is great for earning one-way links that ooze brand authority.
4) Publish Statistical Blog Posts
Statistical blog posts are those lengthy and well-researched stat articles related to your industry.
Usually, this is how we create these blog posts for our clients:-
- Collect unique data through paid surveys or research
- Sort that data into stats and make it visually appealing so that it is easily digestible by readers
- Promote these blog posts through social media or email them to journalists
- Usually, when the unique stats listed in the article grabs attention, people will start linking to them
At PullingOffStrategies, we published a statistical blog post for one of our clients who later successfully got links from sites like Entrepreneur, Nasdaq, Mashable, and multiple other websites with high Domain Authority (DA).
5) Crafting PR Content
At Pulling Off Strategies, we serve a handful of dedicated clients who only want digital PR. Our PR process is usually different from traditional PR.
For PR content, we focus on coming up with topic ideas that journalists like to link without much hazing.
Here are our usual steps we take to launch a PR campaign:
- Coming up with a topic idea based on relevant trends
- Writing an article that is relevant to our client, seasonal, and absolute link-worthy (Like Expert quotes or Product ranking articles)
- Once the article is published on the website, we will go ahead and sort out a list of relevant journalist
- Pitching relevant journalists about our PR content and waiting for their replies
Recently, we helped this SaaS client get mentions from magazines like Entrepreneur and The Huff Post by doing digital PR
6) Adding a New Tool to Your Website
Do you remember when Neil Patel bought UberSuggest. Soon people started linking to his website for this free tool.
Any business can employ this similar strategy. You just have to research your niche and create a free tool that people love.
These days, you can create free tools using custom codes from ChatGPT and paste them into your website.
At PullingOffStrategies, we helped this one client launch a new tool. By optimizing their pages with content and backlinks, we were able to generate 25k+ monthly visitors to their website.
7) NAP Submissions for Local SEO
NAP is short for Name, Address, and Phone number.
NAP submissions are nothing but links from online business directories where you provide details like Name, Address, and Phone number, and along with that, you’re able to get link back to your site.
For local SEO rankings, consistent NAP information across the web is important.
So, if you have a local business and want to leverage backlinks to rank, then NAP submissions are your best choice.
All you have to do is ensure your NAP info is accurate and consistent on your website and all the online business directories.
In this case, you have to make sure that the directories you choose are relevant and the best part is most NAP submissions don’t need outreach or any considerable investment to do it at scale.
Wrap Up
The seven best strategies outlined above form a complete picture for building valuable one way links.
The advantages of each method are unique, whether it’s the relationship building aspect of guest posting or the authority brand mentions through HARO responses.
At PullingOffStrategies, we run link-building campaigns on daily basis for our clients based on each client’s requirements, goals, and current website status.
Therefore if you looking to grow your website visibility and rank for your keywords using backlinks, please book a call where we will share the exact strategy on how we can help you with link building.