Link building is a part of SEO that often gets pushed aside, because it happens off-site (you don’t work on the website itself) and it can be expensive. Yet a solid link building strategy is essential if you want to optimise your website’s SEO.
It is a tricky pillar to get right, which is why working with a link building agency is always the safer bet.
Backlinks are a genuine indicator of your popularity, a kind of online reputation in the eyes of search engines like Google. They send valuable signals that strongly influence where your website ranks.
Of course, link building works alongside technical SEO and semantic optimisation. It is one part of a wider SEO strategy.
Like any SEO work, a link building strategy starts with a thorough link profile analysis. We use tools that list every backlink pointing to your site, where it comes from, which anchor text it uses and, of course, the metrics that tell us about domain authority, Trust Flow (topical trust) and Citation Flow (link volume and strength).
But a backlink analysis doesn’t stop there. You also need to see which pages of your site those backlinks point to. Having most of them concentrated on your homepage is not a good strategy: links should be spread across your site as a whole.
A link audit, ideally carried out by a link building agency, shows you what your current link profile looks like and, above all, helps you decide which link building strategy to put in place to improve your rankings.
A good link building strategy is built on an analysis of your own backlinks, but also of your competitors’ link profiles. That way you can see whether you are missing important links, whether some pages lack URL authority, whether some links need redirecting, and so on.
When building your strategy, keep in mind that a link strengthens the whole site, but first and foremost the page it points to. So you need to prioritise and draw up a proper link plan (which can be backed by an internal linking plan to pass some of that link equity on to other pages).
This is usually where a link building agency steps in, advising you on which pages deserve a place in your overall link building strategy.
The idea behind a backlink campaign is fairly simple: we reinforce one page and one keyword by pointing external links at it, using the key phrase as anchor text, alongside an article (often a blog post) that echoes the semantic field of that page. In short, a backlink is often the final hammer blow that drives the semantic nail home.
The goal of a link building strategy is therefore to improve your external link profile, so that your domain authority and online popularity grow, search engines favour your results in the SERP and your SEO rankings climb.
Ultimately, a link building strategy aims to bring more, and better-qualified, organic traffic to your website.
Anyone can sign up to a link marketplace and pay for backlinks. But an effective link building strategy takes a level of expertise you usually only find at a link building agency. Not all backlinks are equal, even with similar metrics, and the relevance of the links and of the content around them is critical to the success of your SEO link building.
A link building agency spends time analysing and searching several platforms for the backlinks that will do the most for your site, based on your priorities: Domain Authority (DA), Trust Flow (TF), Citation Flow. An agency also knows what backlinks should cost and will always aim for the best balance between link quality and price.
Link relevance is a key part of a good link building strategy, and it goes hand in hand with how well the article hosting the backlink fits your topic. A link building agency can write that content for you (or at least brief the platforms), and choose the anchors and target URLs.
Building links just to increase the number of referring domains (the domains that link to you) is not the best approach. To gain SEO positions, you need to stand out from the competition. A link building agency always analyses your competitors’ link profiles (well, the serious ones do).
This shows you the links you absolutely need to have, but also the gaps you can exploit to set yourself apart, for example by strengthening a category your main competitor has neglected.
A link building agency doesn’t just hand you a raw dump of your competitors’ links: it guides your choice of links so your link building strategy has maximum impact.
There are several types and categories of links: dofollow links (followed by search engines) and nofollow links (which aren’t counted), for example. When you want to optimise a link building strategy, you generally go for dofollow links.
But organic search has to look, well, organic! You need to keep a very natural backlink profile, and nofollow links are part of that. A link building agency will advise you on the right ratio.
Likewise, it is important to keep some lower-quality links too (maintenance backlinks), from directories for example, again to show a natural link profile. Diversifying your links and your referring domains is one of the core techniques of SEO link building.
In the same spirit, the ratio of optimised anchors is crucial! A link building agency will always balance optimised anchors and generic anchors so that your link profile never tips into over-optimisation.
Whatever Google may announce, a poor link profile or too many toxic links can still hurt your site and damage your SEO rankings. A link building agency’s job is to help you avoid any kind of penalty and to stay within the rules of an acceptable link building strategy.
Among the things a link building agency keeps an eye on: link anchors, the ratio of nofollow to dofollow links, the topic of your site and pages compared with the topic of the referring domains, and how often new links are published.
Beware of short-lived promises, too! Some sellers offer so-called temporary links (live for a set period, from 6 months to 2 years). Once that period is over, your site simply loses the backlink.
Given the price of a link, that can be frustrating. A link building agency warns you about this kind of practice and steers you towards permanent links.
A link building strategy isn’t only about creating new backlinks. You need to measure what those links do for your website’s positions in the SERP. Backlink performance tracking is therefore essential, and a link building agency has the tools and know-how to do it.
Tracking matters all the more because link metrics change over time.
Working on your link building strategy will boost your organic traffic, but if your site’s user experience (UX) isn’t optimised as well, you won’t necessarily get more conversions. It can pay to work on your site’s UX/UI at the same time, so you pull every lever and grow your revenue significantly.
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A link building strategy can be a big investment. The better the backlinks, the more they cost (sometimes several thousand euros for a single link!). An investment like that means you need to be able to measure the impact of your link building.
The ideal setup is a good data analytics tool, combined with a proper reading of your Google Search Console. If you need help making sense of data that can be rather murky, we can help.
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Link building complements an SEO strategy, of course, but it can also support the launch or redesign of a website to help it get indexed in the first place. If your project includes web development, building or redesigning a site, why not work with one single partner and pool resources?
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There are several kinds of link building strategy: guest blogging, manual outreach, partner links, link exchanges… Whatever you choose, the main goal of a backlink strategy is to improve your backlink profile, so that it is higher quality and your website looks more credible and trustworthy to search engines.
Put simply, a link building strategy means creating new links, cleaning up links that could be harmful and checking that existing links are still alive.
The 3 main goals of a link building strategy are:
Again, link building is an integral part of SEO work, and it is just as important to optimise the technical side and compliance of your site, its semantic SEO and its optimised content. All the more so because backlinks are a great way to support every semantic improvement you make.
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