Great Content Gets You Links! This advice is repeated often, but it is often hard to start producing content that has a better chance of attracting links from other website owners. Good links may help improve ranking in search engines, but also give you an alternative source of traffic and visibility. Good links are a double win!
Promoting great content can be a big part of your outreach, digital PR and link building campaigns. See our article How to Run Link Building Campaigns for more information on how do to this.
The first difficulty encountered before starting outreach is finding ideas for link-worthy content and the aim of this article is to spark your imagination with a few ideas. You may not be able to implement all of them for your company website or blog, but hopefully you will find something here you can use to get more links.
#1 – Provide Business or Local News
It can be hard finding your niche for news as so many sites are already publishing the latest news for your business or locality. However, if you spot the niche, becoming the leading source of news for a specific subject can be a very productive way to obtain links.
#2 – Produce Infographics
Graphics to represent data or summarize an article are still popular shares on the web. This content could come from data that you collected or be a new visual representation of publicly available data. Most people sharing infographics will link back to the website that provided them, but make sure your business is clearly identified in the image.
#3 – Provide Lots of Photos
Photographs are very easily shared on Internet. A single photograph may be too easily copied without a link back. However, an article consisting of many photographs on one subject can be a very popular source of links. These could be photographs taken at an event or of the same place over a period of time.
#4 – Review a Business Event
If you attend a business event such as a conference, you can write a review of your experience. Name the companies and people you saw and ideally take a few photographs of the show. Event organizers and other attendees will be interested in reading and linking to your review.
#5 – Review a Local Event
You can share your experience and photographs of local events even if the event is not directly linked to your line of business. Links from local organizers and other attendees will help situate your business in a community and help local SEO.
#6 – Organize an Event
Because bloggers and press may provide links to upcoming events and also review events they attended organizing an event is a great idea. You should make sure that any event you organize has a distinct page on your website with the same URL before and after the event. Example: https://paris.wordcamp.org/2018/
#7 – Offer a Discount
Offering time-limited promotions on products or services may well be link-worthy news for some websites. You can create specific landing pages for special offers on your website so that the link remains valid even when a specific offer is finished.
#8 – Interview an Important Person
This could be an important person in your field of business or someone you have as a client or supplier. The interest that other people have in this person may attract links to your site. Perhaps the important person will link to you from their site or social media.
#9 – Provide Online Tutorials
If you have expert knowledge with a practical expertise, you can demonstrate this by writing or recording online tutorials. Detailed tutorials attract links, even from other experts.
#10 – Develop an Online Quiz
If you are an expert in a subject, you could easily write a quiz to test other people’s expertise. This could be a simple list of questions in a blog post, but an interactive quiz that gives a score at the end would be even more popular.
#11 – Run an Opinion Poll / Petition
Host an opinion poll on your website. People with an interest in the result will link to your website to attract votes. The results of the poll will also make shareable content, make sure that all the people who voted had the opportunity to subscribe to a mailing list to receive a link to the results.
#12 – Share Opinions
If you are an expert in your line of work, you may have strong opinions on subjects or products related to your expertise. Sharing these opinions may attract links from those who agree, and from those who disagree.
#13 – Write Product Reviews
If you use specific products or tools in your line of work, write reviews of those products on your website. These reviews will interest other users and the manufacturers.
#14 – Give Out Awards
Providing lists of your favorite websites can be popular sources of links. Some websites push this further by listing their favorite sites as a top 10 or even giving awards to the best sites in a category. Awards are often given in the hope that the winners will link to the article to say, “Hey look we won an award!”
#15 – Jon Mueller’s Favorites
In January 2021, John Mueller suggested we look at Gisele Navarro’s list of digital marketing campaigns for some excellent ideas of what link-worthy content looks like. Have a look at these for inspiration but also think of Gilele’s success of obtaining links from Google (and now from SEOPress!) simply by curating her favorite content.
Good links will improve ranking but also give you an extra source of traffic that is an alternative to search engines. Producing link-worthy content is a very good idea, but also make sure it is of value to your clients.
Linkbuilding does not end there, though, you need a strategy to promote your content and to reach out to people to you think will be interested in it, but don’t spam them. See our article on How to Run Linkbuilding Campaigns to find out what to do next.
