A good backlinking strategy needn’t be expensive. You might have recently been approached by an SEO firm offering to boost your backlinks – for a cost.
The reality is, you can boost your link profile in 2022 and get some great backlinks without spending a penny. We’re going to look at a few free backlinking strategies.
While some SEO services can be worthwhile and can deliver the results you might be looking for – be careful and shop around. There’s a reason why some of those Fiverr gigs only cost $5.
Relying on cheap backlinking services could be risking the future of your business – many of them rely on spammy techniques that could see your ranking penalized or even get your site delisted from SERP.
It’s important that you try and follow a natural, organic backlinking strategy that doesn’t try to do too much, too soon. You might be eager to get results, but suddenly getting 10,000 links overnight isn’t going to look right to search engines.
Try and grow your backlinks naturally over the course of a few weeks or months. Here are some of the best ways to do it:
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#1. Reclaim some links
You might find that there are people out there talking (positively) about you and your business but they haven’t included a link. Try doing a search on your business name (e.g. “webmastershall” – with quotes) and business address (“webmastershall.com” – with quotes) and you could find people on blogs, social media, or other sites mentioning your brand without any anchors or links back to your site. It’s a simple mistake, but it’s one you could fix and use to your advantage.
It’s a simple mistake, but it’s one you could fix and use to your advantage.
Get in touch with them and thank them for their comments. Interact, and make them feel valued. Follow this up with a simple and polite request to add a link to your business in the place they’ve mentioned you. Most of them should be happy to do this – and you get a great, contextual backlink for free.
You may use tools like Google Alerts, Ahrefs Mention, SEO SpyGlass from SEOPowerSuite.
#2. Syndicate your content
It’s all very well writing great content, but simply posting it on your site and leaving it might not be making the most of it. There are a number of syndication networks that’ll be happy to publish existing blog posts to help spread the word.
Obviously, you’ll need to write compelling, interesting content – but you should hopefully be doing that already. The great thing about this type of link is that some of the sites are automatic and will just syndicate your posts at the click of a button. You don’t really have to do much more work and you can let your content do the talking for you.
These syndication networks provide a link back to where the post was originally published (your site). This doesn’t only give you some good link juice, but you might also get some interested visitors from people who saw your content and wanted to see more.
#3. Use website review sites
There are a number of review sites that rely on a community of people to visit and offer feedback on new websites. They will share your link quickly and easily as it’s one of the foundations of their business model. Add your site to a review site and you’ll get all that link juice for free.
Not only that, but you might actually get more traffic to your site from reviewers and other users. You could also get some actionable, relevant advice on how to improve your website from people who know what they’re talking about, for free.
#4. Write testimonials
Writing testimonials can be a great way to get backlinks from other online businesses. You might even find you can get a link from some reasonably authoritative sources with this method.
If you’ve got something positive to say about a product or service you’ve used, send them a well-written, compelling testimonial. Obviously, businesses love to share this sort of review so they’ll be happy to do so – and often with a link back to your site.
You might even find your review included in other promotional material like emails or newsletters.
When writing a review or testimonial, you should obviously keep things positive – but also write something relevant and practical that could address particular concerns of potential customers.
#5. Try and get some .edu resource links
University links can be some of the best around for improving your backlink profile. They’ve got tons of authority and could help give your site the boost it needs. Getting links on .edu sites isn’t always as difficult as you might think. Especially if you’ve got a site or content that might be relevant to them.
Edu links only really work if you’ve got something legitimate to offer the educational industry or students – but you can think outside of the box and stretch this further than you might think.
Try doing a search like for .edu sites with your keyword(s) and “resources”. Send them a polite email with what you’ve got to offer. Hopefully, this could get you included on their resource links – giving you some nice link juice.
#6. Submit your site to blog aggregators
If you haven’t heard of blog aggregators – they’re basically directories that list blogs in different niches or industries. Getting a link from these is simple – you don’t have to jump through any hoops like with some other backlinking methods.
Simply add your site and let the aggregator do the work for you.
#7. Make sure you’ve got tons of internal links
Many people spend most of their backlinking efforts trying to get external links. While this is probably the most important aspect – don’t ignore internal backlinks. Most search engine algorithms look for a natural linking profile that includes a good number of internal backlinks, so don’t skimp on them.
The great thing about improving your internal linking is that it’s so easy to do. Try to capitalize on any opportunity you can to link to other content on your site. If you’ve got similar blog posts to the one you’ve just written – link to it.
Make sure all of your pages have headers and footers with links to the most important parts of your site. Have a sitemap with links to everything. Keep linking internally!
Hopefully, these 7 tips could help you improve your backlinks without spending a penny in 2022. Try some of them today.
