SEO
10+ Ways That Really Work
If your business isn’t building quality backlinks, you’re not building prominence.
If you’re not building prominence, you’re missing one of the fundamental criteria to rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
It’s long been known that Google’s search algorithm rewards distance, prominence, and relevance.
All three of these SEO pillars impact your search ranking.
And while a business can’t always impact distance from the searcher, it can work to improve its relevance and prominence.
As Google shares, prominence is based on “information that Google has about a business, from across the web, like links, articles, and directories.”
The bottom line is: Every business needs quality, white hat backlinks.
White hat backlinks essentially serve as a vote of confidence from a website and tell Google your web page is a trusted resource.
The more votes of confidence your web page has, the more prominent it will be seen to be.
And, white hat backlinks are done through ethical means rather than leveraging spam tactics.
Yet, obtaining quality backlinks is easier said than done.
12 Ways To Get Quality Backlinks (That Really Work)
If you’re looking to build your white hat backlink strategy, you’re in the right place.
This post will share 12 proven strategies that work to get backlinks and boost your SEO strategy.
Let’s dive in.
1. Ask To Guest Blog
One of the most effective ways to build white hat backlinks is to find guest blogging opportunities.
Guest blogging allows your business to build your backlink profile organically by inserting links to your own resources, studies, and more, where applicable and relevant.
Additionally, sites welcome guest blog content publishing, as it surfaces new blog post ideas they may not typically cover and adds to their content schedule with little effort on their end.
Look for sites that accept guest post contributions and are relevant to your industry, products, or services.
Also, look for content publishing on sites with higher domain authority, as your backlink will have more mileage with these types of sites.
Higher domain authority means a page has a better probability to rank in the SERPs.
Use Moz’s free Link Explorer tool to check a website’s Domain Authority.
2. Ask Your Partners/Distributors/Suppliers
If you partner with a business or are a preferred vendor or supplier, ask for a link to your site.
Since you already provide a valuable service to a business, they’ll be more inclined to link back to you as you’ve already developed a business relationship with them.
Additionally, many businesses already have a partner page to showcase who they do business with.
If they’re not linking to your site already, this should be an easy ask and a quick way to get a credible white hat backlink to your site.
3. Ask For Credit Where Credit Is Due
Sometimes, your business may be mentioned, but you aren’t receiving proper credit.
For example, you may provide a glowing testimonial for a vendor, but they aren’t linking to your site.
Another example – a successful blog may point to a finding published by your business and fail to provide a backlink.
Your business should receive a backlink in both instances, as you’ve provided a service.
Ask current customers who reference your brand or current businesses you work with that mention you in any capacity on their sites to provide a backlink.
Additionally, if you find a business referencing your original research, it also should give you a backlink.
Set up Google Alerts or a similar tool to find websites mentioning your business.
You’ll receive an email notification whenever a website mentions your business name.
4. Leverage Brands And Influencers To Share Your Products Or Services
Find a blog niche or influencer within your industry to give a review of your product or service.
Once you find the right blog niche or influencer to support your brand, send them your product or provide the service free of charge in exchange for a review.
Or, if you have a larger budget, you can also pay macro-level influencers to give their honest feedback. Then, have the blog or influencer link back to your product or service.
Additionally, you may provide a blog or influencer with an affiliate link.
Whenever a potential customer clicks their affiliate link, they’ll receive a commission.
The commission may come from simply clicking the affiliate link or if the consumer actually makes a purchase.
This link-building endeavor requires more effort on your behalf; however, it also sends higher-quality traffic.
This traffic is already qualified, knowing they’re interested in your product or service, which leads to higher conversion rates.
5. Create Engaging Visual Content
Nearly 41% of marketers said original graphics (e.g., infographics, illustrations) help them reach their marketing goals.
And, 52% of marketers said visual content is very important in their marketing strategy.
Why is visual content a top priority for marketers? Because it is easily digestible and shareable.
Whether you’re creating an infographic or any other type of visual, it’s an easy way to increase the likelihood of your content being shared.
And, you’ll get a quality backlink to your site.
6. Publish Original Research
When considering why and when people share content, you must consider the psychology of content sharing.
A recent study found that 94% of respondents said that they carefully consider how the information they share will be useful to the recipient.
In the same study, nearly half of the respondents reported sharing content because it allows them to inform others of products they care about and potentially change opinions or encourage actions.
The more informative your content is, the more likely it is to be shared.
You can become a trusted content-sharing source by leveraging your expertise and original research.
Every time a consumer, blog, or business mentions your research, you’ll receive a white hat backlink.
This helps improve your prominence, which ties back to Google rewarding you with improved search rankings, leading to more organic search traffic.
7. Build A Useful Free Tool
Are you a technology company?
Building a free tool or a light version of your solution is an effective way to build quality white hat backlinks. It can also drive potential leads.
For example, Adobe offers free or “lighter” versions of several of its tools, such as Adobe Acrobat Reader and Adobe Photoshop Express.
These allow users to preview the tool’s capabilities and may encourage them to convert to paid users in the future to maximize its software.
Hubspot’s Email Signature Generator has also prompted significant buzz in its own right.
Since its launch, it has received over 5,520 backlinks from 1,168 referring domains, proving its worth.
8. Publish Ultimate And Step By Step Guides
As the name suggests, ultimate guides are the “ultimate” resource on a designated topic.
The word ultimate suggests you have the best, most in-depth current knowledge on the subject, drawing consumers to want to learn more.
A step-by-step guide, in theory, provides an easy way to learn how to do something.
Consumers favor ease and simplicity, which a step-by-step guide aims to accomplish.
Both these types of guides can help a business build its backlink profile.
For example, if you’ve written an ultimate guide to digital marketing, a writer may reference one of your points in a blog post about affiliate marketing.
9. Use Citations
Citations may not be as prominent of a search ranking factor as they were in the past; however, their benefits are not completely obsolete.
Local citations help publish your business’ information across the vast search ecosystem.
While the greater majority of searches take place on Google and other popular search engines, these directories also receive traffic – and are another way for consumers to discover your business.
To start, ensure your business is listed on Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business), Yelp, Facebook, and Apple Maps.
Then branch out to other general or industry-specific directories.
These 21 web directories also still have value.
Every directory you’re listed on provides you with a backlink to help you build your backlink profile.
10. Leverage Public Relations
Having a public relations plan is a great way to build prominence and authority in your industry.
It’s also a surefire way to help you build your backlink profile.
For example, each press release your business publishes is an opportunity to add at least one backlink to your site.
It also establishes your business as an expert in your industry; The more often you have useful and relevant information to share in your industry, the more you’ll establish yourself as a voice of authority.
Public relations extends to social media too, where you can share links to content. If users find your content beneficial, they may reshare it, helping you build additional backlinks.
11. Create A Roundup Or “Ask the Experts” Blog Post
Asking others for insights around a certain topic can help strengthen your content and add valuable information you may not otherwise have had.
It’s also a great way for the contributor to include their own link in your post to improve their backlink profile.
Creating a roundup or an ask the experts-style post increases your chances for shareability, too.
Your contributors are more than likely to share the content piece with their own networks, which will cause the content to reach a wider audience.
Ask potential contributors for a short contribution – maybe two to three sentences – to encourage participation.
The less burdensome the ask, the more likely they will want to contribute.
12. Mine For Broken Links
Broken links negatively impact a user’s experience with a site.
Consider when a user eagerly searching for information clicks a broken link to your site.
This likely causes frustration and a potentially lost customer.
With its recent page experience update, Google also continues to prioritize the overall web page experience.
Broken link building entails finding pages that no longer exist (or have been updated) and reaching out to the websites that link to the pages to let them know you have a similar resource to swap in its place.
Broken link building takes time and effort, but it can be an easy way to build your backlink profile for sites that prioritize their SEO efforts.
Concluding Thoughts
Cracking Google’s evolving search engine algorithm can be time-consuming and full of trials, tribulations, and errors.
Focusing on improving your brand’s relevance and prominence are two surefire ways to boost your page results in the SERPs.
Link building, including internal linking and backlinks, is just one way to get there.
There are plenty of other must-know SEO concepts to follow too.
But, working on building your backlinking and internal links is a great place to start.
More resources:
Featured Image: one photo/Shutterstock
SEO
How To Drive Pipeline With A Silo-Free Strategy
When it comes to B2B strategy, a holistic approach is the only approach.
Revenue organizations usually operate with siloed teams, and often expect a one-size-fits-all solution (usually buying clicks with paid media).
However, without cohesive brand, infrastructure, and pipeline generation efforts, they’re pretty much doomed to fail.
It’s just like rowing crew, where each member of the team must synchronize their movements to propel the boat forward – successful B2B marketing requires an integrated strategy.
So if you’re ready to ditch your disjointed marketing efforts and try a holistic approach, we’ve got you covered.
Join us on May 15, for an insightful live session with Digital Reach Agency on how to craft a compelling brand and PMF.
We’ll walk through the critical infrastructure you need, and the reliances and dependences of the core digital marketing disciplines.
Key takeaways from this webinar:
- Thinking Beyond Traditional Silos: Learn why traditional marketing silos are no longer viable and how they spell doom for modern revenue organizations.
- How To Identify and Fix Silos: Discover actionable strategies for pinpointing and sealing the gaps in your marketing silos.
- The Power of Integration: Uncover the secrets to successfully integrating brand strategy, digital infrastructure, and pipeline generation efforts.
Ben Childs, President and Founder of Digital Reach Agency, and Jordan Gibson, Head of Growth at Digital Reach Agency, will show you how to seamlessly integrate various elements of your marketing strategy for optimal results.
Don’t make the common mistake of using traditional marketing silos – sign up now and learn what it takes to transform your B2B go-to-market.
You’ll also get the opportunity to ask Ben and Jordan your most pressing questions, following the presentation.
And if you can’t make it to the live event, register anyway and we’ll send you a recording shortly after the webinar.
SEO
Why Big Companies Make Bad Content
It’s like death and taxes: inevitable. The bigger a company gets, the worse its content marketing becomes.
HubSpot teaching you how to type the shrug emoji or buy bitcoin stock. Salesforce sharing inspiring business quotes. GoDaddy helping you use Bing AI, or Zendesk sharing catchy sales slogans.
Judged by content marketing best practice, these articles are bad.
They won’t resonate with decision-makers. Nobody will buy a HubSpot license after Googling “how to buy bitcoin stock.” It’s the very definition of vanity traffic: tons of visits with no obvious impact on the business.
So why does this happen?
There’s an obvious (but flawed) answer to this question: big companies are inefficient.
As companies grow, they become more complicated, and writing good, relevant content becomes harder. I’ve experienced this firsthand:
- extra rounds of legal review and stakeholder approval creeping into processes.
- content watered down to serve an ever-more generic “brand voice”.
- growing misalignment between search and content teams.
- a lack of content leadership within the company as early employees leave.
Similarly, funded companies have to grow, even when they’re already huge. Content has to feed the machine, continually increasing traffic… even if that traffic never contributes to the bottom line.
There’s an element of truth here, but I’ve come to think that both these arguments are naive, and certainly not the whole story.
It is wrong to assume that the same people that grew the company suddenly forgot everything they once knew about content, and wrong to assume that companies willfully target useless keywords just to game their OKRs.
Instead, let’s assume that this strategy is deliberate, and not oversight. I think bad content—and the vanity traffic it generates—is actually good for business.
There are benefits to driving tons of traffic, even if that traffic never directly converts. Or put in meme format:
Programmatic SEO is a good example. Why does Dialpad create landing pages for local phone numbers?
Why does Wise target exchange rate keywords?
Why do we have a list of most popular websites pages?
As this Twitter user points out, these articles will never convert…
…but they don’t need to.
Every published URL and targeted keyword is a new doorway from the backwaters of the internet into your website. It’s a chance to acquire backlinks that wouldn’t otherwise exist, and an opportunity to get your brand in front of thousands of new, otherwise unfamiliar people.
These benefits might not directly translate into revenue, but over time, in aggregate, they can have a huge indirect impact on revenue. They can:
- Strengthen domain authority and the search performance of every other page on the website.
- Boost brand awareness, and encourage serendipitous interactions that land your brand in front of the right person at the right time.
- Deny your competitors traffic and dilute their share of voice.
These small benefits become more worthwhile when multiplied across many hundreds or thousands of pages. If you can minimize the cost of the content, there is relatively little downside.
What about topical authority?
“But what about topical authority?!” I hear you cry. “If you stray too far from your area of expertise, won’t rankings suffer for it?”
I reply simply with this screenshot of Forbes’ “health” subfolder, generating almost 4 million estimated monthly organic pageviews:
And big companies can minimize cost. For large, established brands, the marginal cost of content creation is relatively low.
Many companies scale their output through networks of freelancer writers, avoiding the cost of fully loaded employees. They have established, efficient processes for research, briefing, editorial review, publication and maintenance. The cost of an additional “unit” of content—or ten, or a hundred—is not that great, especially relative to other marketing channels.
There is also relatively little opportunity cost to consider: the fact that energy spent on “vanity” traffic could be better spent elsewhere, on more business-relevant topics.
In reality, many of the companies engaging in this strategy have already plucked the low-hanging fruit and written almost every product-relevant topic. There are a finite number of high traffic, high relevance topics; blog consistently for a decade and you too will reach these limits.
On top of that, the HubSpots and Salesforces of the world have very established, very efficient sales processes. Content gating, lead capture and scoring, and retargeting allow them to put very small conversion rates to relatively good use.
Even HubSpot’s article on Bitcoin stock has its own relevant call-to-action—and for HubSpot, building a database of aspiring investors is more valuable than it sounds, because…
The bigger a company grows, the bigger its audience needs to be to continue sustaining that growth rate.
Companies generally expand their total addressable market (TAM) as they grow, like HubSpot broadening from marketing to sales and customer success, launching new product lines for new—much bigger—audiences. This means the target audience for their content marketing grows alongside.
As Peep Laja put its:
But for the biggest companies, this principle is taken to an extreme. When a company gears up to IPO, its target audience expands to… pretty much everyone.
This was something Janessa Lantz (ex-HubSpot and dbt Labs) helped me understand: the target audience for a post-IPO company is not just end users, but institutional investors, market analysts, journalists, even regular Jane investors.
These are people who can influence the company’s worth in ways beyond simply buying a subscription: they can invest or encourage others to invest and dramatically influence the share price. These people are influenced by billboards, OOH advertising and, you guessed it, seemingly “bad” content showing up whenever they Google something.
You can think of this as a second, additional marketing funnel for post-IPO companies:
These visitors might not purchase a software subscription when they see your article in the SERP, but they will notice your brand, and maybe listen more attentively the next time your stock ticker appears on the news.
They won’t become power users, but they might download your eBook and add an extra unit to the email subscribers reported in your S1.
They might not contribute revenue now, but they will in the future: in the form of stock appreciation, or becoming the target audience for a future product line.
Vanity traffic does create value, but in a form most content marketers are not used to measuring.
If any of these benefits apply, then it makes sense to acquire them for your company—but also to deny them to your competitors.
SEO is an arms race: there are a finite number of keywords and topics, and leaving a rival to claim hundreds, even thousands of SERPs uncontested could very quickly create a headache for your company.
SEO can quickly create a moat of backlinks and brand awareness that can be virtually impossible to challenge; left unchecked, the gap between your company and your rival can accelerate at an accelerating pace.
Pumping out “bad” content and chasing vanity traffic is a chance to deny your rivals unchallenged share of voice, and make sure your brand always has a seat at the table.
Final thoughts
These types of articles are miscategorized—instead of thinking of them as bad content, it’s better to think of them as cheap digital billboards with surprisingly great attribution.
Big companies chasing “vanity traffic” isn’t an accident or oversight—there are good reasons to invest energy into content that will never convert. There is benefit, just not in the format most content marketers are used to.
This is not an argument to suggest that every company should invest in hyper-broad, high-traffic keywords. But if you’ve been blogging for a decade, or you’re gearing up for an IPO, then “bad content” and the vanity traffic it creates might not be so bad.
SEO
Is It Alternatives You’re Looking For?
Whatever the reason, in this article, I’ll share some alternatives to HARO and a few extra ways to get expert quotes and backlinks for your website.
Disclaimer: I am not a PR expert. I did a bit of outreach a few years ago, but I have only been an occasional user of HARO in the past year or so.
So, rather than providing my opinion on the best alternatives to HARO, I thought it would be fun to ask users of the “new HARO” what they thought were the best alternatives.
I wanted to give the “new HARO”—Connectively—the benefit of the doubt.
Still, a few minutes after my pitch was accepted, I got two responses that appeared to be AI-generated from two “visionary directors,” both with “extensive experience.”
My experience of Connectively so far mirrored Josh’s experience of old HARO: The responses were most likely automated.
Although I was off to a bad start, looking through most of the responses afterward, these two were the only blatant automated pitches I could spot.
These responses weren’t included in my survey, and anyone who saw my pitch would have to copy and paste the survey link to complete it—increasing the chance of genuine human responses—hopefully.
So, without further ado, here are the results of the survey.
Sidenote.
The survey on Connectively ran for a week and received 101 votes. Respondents could vote for their top three HARO alternatives.
Price: Free.
Help a B2B Writer was the #1 alternative platform respondents recommended. In my survey it got 22% of the vote.
Help a B2B Writer is a platform run by Superpath that is similar to HARO but focused on connecting business-to-business (B2B) journalists with industry experts and sources for their stories.
Price: Free and paid plans. Paid plans start at $99 per month.
Coming in joint second place, Featured was popular, scoring 18% of the vote.
Featured connects journalists with experts and thought leaders. It allows experts to create profiles showcasing their expertise and helps journalists find suitable sources for their stories.
Price: Free and paid plans. Paid plans start at $99 per month.
Qwoted is another platform that I’ve heard talked about a lot. It came in joint second place, scoring 18% of the vote.
Qwoted matches journalists with expert sources, allowing them to collaborate on creating high-quality content. It streamlines the process of finding and connecting with relevant sources.
Price: Free for ten pitches per month
Despite being the “new HARO,” Connectively came 4th on my list, scoring 12% of the vote—surprisingly, it wasn’t even the top choice for most users on its own platform.
Connectively connects journalists with sources and experts. It helps journalists find relevant sources for their stories and allows experts to gain media exposure.
Price: Free and paid plans. Paid plans start at $5.95 per month.
SourceBottle is an online platform that connects journalists, bloggers, and media professionals with expert sources. It allows experts to pitch their ideas and insights to journalists looking for story sources. It scored 9% of the vote in my survey.
Price: Free.
JournoRequest is an X account that shares journalist requests for sources. UK-based journalists and experts often use it, but it can sometimes have international reach. It scored 7% of the vote in my survey.
Price: Paid. Plans start at $1,150 per year.
ProfNet connects journalists to expert sources. It helps journalists find knowledgeable sources for their articles, interviews, and other media content. It helps subject matter experts gain media exposure and share their expertise. It scored 5% of the vote in my survey.
Price: 7-day free trial and paid plans. Paid plans start at $147 per month.
JustReachOut is a PR and influencer outreach platform that helps businesses find and connect with relevant journalists and influencers. It provides tools for personalized outreach and relationship management. It scored 3% of the vote in my survey.
Price: 14-day free trial and paid plans. Paid plans start at $50 per month.
OnePitch is a platform that simplifies the process of pitching story ideas to journalists. Businesses and PR professionals can create and send targeted pitches to relevant media outlets. It scored 3% of the vote in my survey.
Price: Free.
PitchRate is a free PR tool that connects journalists and highly rated experts. Useful for subject matter experts looking for free PR leads, media coverage, or publicity. Or journalists looking for credible sources. It scored 1% of the vote in my survey.
Price: Free and paid plans. Paid plans start at ~$105 per month.
A UK service that connects media professionals with expert sources, press releases, and PR contacts. It scored 1% of the vote in my survey.
Price: Invitation-only platform.
Forbes Councils is an invitation-only community for executives and entrepreneurs. Members can contribute expert insights and thought leadership content to Forbes.com and gain media exposure. It scored 1% of the vote in my survey.
Price: Free.
Yes, you read that right.
HERO was created by Peter Shankman, the original creator of HARO, who said the platform will always be free. It scored 1% of the vote in my survey.
Peter set up the platform after receiving over 2,000 emails asking him to build a new version of HARO.
Price: Paid. Sign up for details.
Meltwater received no votes in my survey, but I included it because I’d seen it shared on social media as a paid alternative to HARO.
It’s a media intelligence and social media monitoring platform. It provides tools for tracking media coverage, analyzing sentiment, and identifying influencers and journalists for outreach.
Price: Free.
Expertise Finder also received no votes in my survey, but it was included as I saw it had been recommended as an HARO alternative on LinkedIn. It’s a platform that helps journalists find and connect with expert sources from universities.
HARO had a dual purpose for SEOs: it was a place to acquire links, but it also was a place to get expert quotes on topics for your next article.
Here are a few more free methods outside the platforms we’ve covered that can help you get expert quotes and links.
We’ve already seen that JournoRequest is a popular X account that shares journalist requests for sources.
But you can also follow hashtags on X to access even more opportunities.
Here are my favorite hashtags to follow:
I used to track the #journorequest hashtag to find opportunities for my clients when I worked agency-side, so I know it can work well for quotes and link acquisition.
Here are two opportunities I found just checking the #journorequest hashtag:
Here’s another example from the Telegraph—a DR 92 website:
Certain types of content are more likely to be shared by journalists and PRs than others.
One of these types of content is statistics-based content. The reason? Journalists often use statistics to support their points.
Once they have included your statistic in their post, they often add a backlink back to your post.
We tested this with our SEO statistics post, and as you can see, it still ranks number one in Google.
Another method is to use the Linking authors report in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer. This report shows the authors’ names who link to any website you enter.
You can see which authors link to their site by entering your competitor’s domain. Some of these authors may represent outreach opportunities for your website as well.
- Head to Site Explorer, click on Linking authors
- Type in your competitor’s URL
- Contact any authors that you think may be interested in your website and its content
Tip
If you download your website’s linking authors and your competitors into a spreadsheet and put them into separate tabs, you can compare the lists to see which authors are only linking to your competitor’s website.
When I was about to wrap up this article, I was contacted by Greg Heilers of Jolly SEO on LinkedIn.
He said he’d sent 200,000+ pitches over the years and wanted to share the results with me.
These are his top three platforms over the last 1,000 pitches he sent. Interestingly, we can see that it’s similar to my much smaller-scale survey.
Hopefully, the data here speaks for itself. The high-quality links and traffic from HARO alternatives is considerable.
This research shows that Featured gained the most link placements in this campaign.
We have compiled some helpful content related to link building that you can get your teeth into. These hand-picked guides will take you from beginner to expert in no time.
Here are my favorite resources on this topic:
Final thoughts
There are many options for sourcing expert quotes and getting links for your next marketing campaigns. HARO may be dead, but its legacy lives on.
My highly unscientific survey suggests that most “new HARO” users liked Help a B2B Writer the most, but for HARO purists, there really is only one choice—HERO.
Give your favorites from this list a whirl, and let me know if you have any success. Got more questions? Ping me on X. 🙂
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