8 Easy-to-Implement Tactics to Discover Untapped Link Opportunities

The concept behind this strategy is to align your company with complementary businesses that offer different products or services to the same target market or niche.

Of course, you don’t want to work with a company that is competing with you. Instead, you want to find ones that add value to the customer or client by helping them see more of what they need or are looking for in one place.

For example, if you are a wedding photographer, there are a whole slew of complementary products and services that are involved in not only the wedding preparation but also the day of the momentous event.

Why not visit local wedding venues, limousine services, bridal shops, or florists and talk to them about working together to expose your photography services to their customers and their products or services to yours?

Some business owners have resource sections on their sites that link to other websites that offer value to their visitors.

This is a win-win proposition for all the companies involved as well as the potential customers.  

Leaving business cards or flyers is another way to work collaboratively with complementary businesses as it adds to word-of-mouth advertising that will serve as an enhancement to the website link.

Many businesses are already involved in some sort of charity work or community outreach activities. It is their way of giving back and is even more prevalent during holiday times.

Why not capitalize on what your company is already doing and get a link back to your site that will give you an increase in conversions and search engine rankings?

There is nothing unethical about such a practice. As a business, you are already donating either money, time, or equipment to causes that you care about for philanthropic or humanitarian reasons.

Most local or charitable events will have either a website, web page or online invitation where they will list and link to the event sponsors.

Some of the larger events might even dedicate an entire page or section of a page to those companies that donate money, equipment, or office space. In addition to a link to your site, they might also include a short description of your company.

If you are unsure of how to approach a charity or organization about sponsoring an event, you can use a sponsorship template that will help you create an organized proposal including images, videos, and successes of your previous sponsorships.

Businesses can offer scholarships for local community organizations, colleges, and even high schools. The amount will vary depending upon the size of your company and the money you have in your budget.

This not only builds brand recognition for your business, but it will also give you a link to your site as most schools and organizations will have pages on their website that list and link to the sites offering these scholarships.

Many companies will choose a cause they care about, such as natural disaster relief. You can also approach other companies in your area about collaborating to select a charity or charities where you will donate the proceeds.

Ask the other companies that participate to put a page on their site describing the fundraiser with links to participating companies (This can be a good way to get good edu and gov backlinks, if the fundraiser draws enough attention). Do the same on your website.

Write a press release about it and include links. There are many ways to publicize, share, and promote a fundraiser that will provide links to your site.

Broken links can be damaging for any website owner, and often, the site owner might not even be aware that they have them.

Your first step should be to find broken links on websites in your niche. You can use a tool like LinkMiner, a free Chrome extension, to locate them.

Why not kill two birds with one stone by letting a site owner in your niche know that they have a broken link on their site?

You can then offer them a high-quality link to replace it. That link, of course, will need to be to a piece of relevant and helpful information on your site.

There are times when many different referring domains are using one broken link. So that one broken link you found could land you many new backlinks to your site.

With the Ahrefs Site Explorer, you can pop in that broken link you found and see all the referring domains and backlinks that point to that same page.

You can then approach the site owners in a similar way as the above mentioned broken links strategy.

Google has made it very clear that guest blogging just for the sake of link building is unacceptable and dangerous.

This doesn’t mean that you should abandon guest blogging. It just means that you should approach guest blogging from a different perspective. How?

• Find others in your niche who have an influence on the Internet and the social web.
• Reach out to the influencer and offer to publish something they write for your site, provided they publish a short post mentioning and linking to the post on your site. It could be a blog post, a newsletter blurb, or even a contribution to a white paper.
• What’s in it for them? You have to make sure it is worth the while of any influencer you approach. If there is no benefit for them, why would they? You should know how you will be promoting their content before you contact them.
• Give them more incentives and more reasons to write content for you such as Facebook posts, Twitter posts, and emails.

This is a manual rather than an automated process. It is not cheating and is a method of building links that is entirely acceptable to Google.

Creating content that is highly relevant and very helpful to your target market is not only the most efficient method of earning links to your site, it is also the most difficult.

Consider using the Skyscraper technique to find the best content and even create better versions. Then you can reach out to those site owners who are linking to the original content and ask them to link to yours.  

When you write, be sure to write well and readable to humans not merely search engines.

Many people try starting a new business. However, because it is not an easy task, unfortunately, many don’t survive.

Analyzing link profiles of websites that are no longer active is a strategy suggested many professional search marketing experts.

He shares his experience of being able to reach out via email to website owners whose sites point to those dead websites and offering them replacement links.

The more creative you are in trying out different strategies and the time you commit to various types of link building approaches, the better your chances of boosting your positions in the SERPs.