The Role of Content Marketing in Successful Link Building

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Content marketing and link building go hand in hand. By creating high-quality, useful content and promoting it, you can earn valuable backlinks and increase your site’s authority and rankings. Here’s an overview of how content marketing enables effective link building.

Generating Linkable Assets

One of the main goals of any link building strategy is to produce assets that other sites will want to link to. This is where content marketing comes in. By developing content assets like articles, ebooks, infographics, videos, etc. you give websites a reason to link back to you.

The key is creating content that offers value to your target audience. Unique research, practical ‘how-to’ advice, data-driven studies, and entertaining content tend to attract the most links. Think about what content would interest and benefit your audience, and potential sites that may want to reference your content.

Promoting Your Best Assets

Once you’ve created link-worthy content, you need to actively promote it to earn links. An effective content distribution strategy is vital for link building success.

Publish content on your site and highlight your new resources. Feature prominent calls-to-action to your best content to encourage others to reference it.
Distribute your content through social media, email marketing, PPC ads, retargeting campaigns, etc. Raise awareness through multiple channels.
Reach out to relevant websites and journalists to pitch your content for backlinks. Identify sites that could benefit from your research and data.
Get your content in front of influencers and authority figures in your industry and encourage them to share and link to your resources.
Submit articles to online publications, link roundups, forums, and directories. Participate in relevant LinkedIn Groups and Reddit subs.

The wider you can distribute your content and get it in front of your target audience, the more link building opportunities will arise.

Monitoring Link Building Opportunities

Keep track of all website mentions, social shares, press coverage, and other signs your content is gaining traction. You can use Google Alerts, Mention.com, BuzzSumo, and other monitoring tools.

This allows you to identify new linking opportunities, like relevant blogs and websites discussing your content. Reach out and offer them a link to the original piece. The easier you make it for others to link to you, the more links you’ll earn.

Using Content Hubs

Creating ‘content hubs’ is an effective way to consolidate your best assets and attract links. For example, compile all your most popular guides and tools into a single resource centre.

You can also aggregate top content by topic into hubs focused on specific subjects, like ‘Content Marketing Tactics’ or ‘Advanced SEO Strategies’. These hubs function like on-site link building machines, allowing every page to link to all the others.

Clear calls-to-action pointing site visitors to your content hubs make it easy for people to reference multiple pages and assets. The more internal linking and aggregation you have on your site, the stronger your ability to earn backlinks.

Optimising Assets for Link Building

It’s also important to directly optimise your content for link building purposes. This includes:

Including natural linking opportunities in your content, like relevant statistics, quotes, or examples that support why readers may want to link to it.
Making sure pages have clear, unique titles and meta descriptions that make them enticing to link to.
Including your target keywords where appropriate, so your content ranks well and appears more authoritative.
Published linked-to assets on domains with high authority and trust, which pass more equity through backlinks.

Creating Linkable News

Link building isn’t just about creating one-off assets – you want assets that continue delivering value over time. That’s why a content marketing strategy focused on news, trends, and real-time updates is so powerful.

Publishing blog content and resources tied to the latest developments and news stories in your industry gives websites an ongoing reason to link back to your coverage. Don’t just report the news – provide analysis and insights websites want to reference.

You can also use tools like Google Trends, BuzzSumo, and social media feeds to find trending topics and linkworthy news angles before your competitors.

Conversion Optimisation Enhances Link Equity

Remember that link building and conversions go together. The more people who read, share, download, and engage with your content, the more authoritative and linkworthy it becomes.

That’s why conversion optimisation best practices like clear CTAs, landing page design, email capture forms, etc. bolster your content marketing and link building results.

Optimising your content for conversions means more readers, shares, links, and lower bounce rates. All of these signal to Google that your content provides value, enhancing your link equity.

Patience and Persistence Pay Off

Link building requires creativity and patience. At select link building services London, it can take months of promotion for content to gain traction. But over time, your expanding library of quality content will continue attracting more and more links.

Keep producing new, fresh content, while promoting your evergreen, most linkworthy assets. As you fill your site with valuable information, the link opportunities will steadily grow.

With a smart content marketing approach, you can build authority and organic links at scale. Just stay persistent and keep giving sites a reason to link back to you!