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How to Build (Actually Valuable) Backlinks | Ultimate Tactics List

Why listen to me and follow the strategies here over some of the other pages talking about the tactics they recommend to build links?

Well, I’ve personally been building links for websites since 2007 and am featured on various podcasts and industry publications like Ahrefs, Moz, Buzzstream and many more because of my success as a link builder and digital PR. 

I’ve generated coverage in every major news publication on the planet multiple times over for household name companies and we’ve won a ton of awards for the impact these links have had on websites including Search, Content and Digital PR awards across the UK, US and Europe.

The links I’ve built have generated hundreds of millions pounds/dollars for clients in organic traffic ROI, and these link building tactics will work for you too – not only to improve your own ranking potential and traffic from search engines, but to also build your brand and direct traffic.

Hopefully that’s done a decent job of setting my stall out, and importantly giving you the confidence you need to follow some of these tried and tested methods from a near 20-year career (and counting! I’m not done yet…).

Now, let’s get to the point. Here are the jumplinks you need for all the tactics we use to build links for ourselves and our clients:

9 ways to build backlinks

1. Digital PR campaigns – create the news

Journalists and site owners around the world and in every niche are always on the lookout for one thing: great stories their audience will care about.

You may immediately think that this involves a company going bust that gets people talking or the weather, or something else you can’t control. 

But also think about the stories you see online every day with headlines like:

Hi. That’s us doing all of those.

We’re creating the news. And you 100% can too.

These are Digital PR campaigns and they come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. From small easy to run surveys or someone using Google search data to look-up the change in volume for a particular topic someone else hasn’t.

This all saves journalists time and provides them with value (a common theme I’ll mention a few times in this post).

Journalists typically have a target of X articles to post per day (will vary depending on the publication). And you emailing them with a well thought out campaign with an interesting hook makes their lives a whole lot easier.

The starting point is always a good hook. What headline could you end up with if you do a dive into a specific topic? And the other crucial thing – how are you going to research the topic to begin with?

The methodology and the hook are the two most important elements of a Digital PR campaign. All the rest, such as how to create a pitch and outreach to journalists will naturally fall in place when you have a killer story to tell.

But for now, start to consider what might be a really interesting headline in your niche and what research you might need to do in order to uncover it.

I’ve written about Digital PR ideation before in more depth but there’s a whole bunch of options available to you here and directions to head in. It’s certainly not as scary as it sounds.

For example, you can look for ideas in one or all of the following places:

  • Repurpose existing ideas
    • Look for existing campaigns that have performed well and see if you can adapt the methodology or the hook towards a different topic.
    • For example, I used the Big Mac Index for the basis of a piece I created called the iPhone Price Index (same methodology but different topic) back in 2012. It built over 1,000 links.
  • Competitors content
    • Using tools like Ahrefs is invaluable here. You can look at competitors or even popular companies or websites loosely within the same area as yourself and pop them in to find their pages that have built the most links. Look for the ‘Best by Links’ tab.
    • This will give you an insight into what’s working topically, the directions others have gone in for link building and also the websites that linked to those pages
    • A lot of the time these pages include the homepage and product pages, but here and there you’ll see pages that are unmistakably campaigns like studies or visual pieces. These are the ones you want to look out for.
  • The Digital PR community

As for methodologies, here’s also a quick list of the different ways you can build digital PR campaigns, which are absolutely crucial for how believable your hook is going to be: 

  • Existing published data from official sources
  • Survey platforms and the audiences you can filter by
  • Experts on the topic and if you can work with them
  • Reputable publications that journalists would know and trust
  • Books and studies published on the topic
  • Internal proprietary data you can share

That should give you an amazing starting point to build from, but simply start with a pen and paper (or Google Doc/Notes app in reality) and start jotting down cool studies and things you think would be good stories for you to tell and get those journalists interested.

All day, every day journalists are writing stories on a whole heap of stuff, and within those articles they need data points to reference and a source for where they got those data points from.

Journalists need sources.

You are going to become that source. And journalists are going to FIND YOU. Not the other way around.

By creating extremely high-quality content and finding relevant opportunities for you to create content on, journalists will find your content organically and then link back to you as their source.

Check this out.

Just as ChatGPT was blowing up in popularity, we quickly created a page targeting ‘ChatGPT statistics’ for a client. We built the best page we could including data points such as how many users does ChatGPT get per day, how much energy does the platform use, how much money the company earns, and so on.

These are all data points journalists who end up writing about ChatGTP or AI in general will want to use.

That page has (as of today) built 655 links in Ahrefs live index (2.5k in the all-time index) from 417 different domains (868 in the all-time).

And that’s all without sending a single email to anyone about it.

So how can you do it?

I first wrote up my process for Moz in 2021 having had success with the same tactic for years prior. There you’ll be able to read and follow the process from start to finish, but I’ll also provide a somewhat stripped back but still TL;DR version below.

First you want to do a little thinking around keywords you could create content for that journalists may be looking for.

As a starting point, consider keywords that include some of the below:

  • Chart
  • Statistic
  • Graph
  • Image
  • Numbers
  • By state (if in the US)
  • By country
  • Trends
  • Per year
  • By age

Now connect those with the core subject focus of your website.

For example, if you are a platform that helps people set up a business, you could consider keywords like ‘new business statistics’ or ‘number of business closures per year’. Topics that are connected to you and people may want more information about.

Just keep going from there. It doesn’t matter if these are right yet or not. Concentrate on building out a list of ideas around these topics and then we’ll hone in from there.

The next part requires some tools but all can be done for free.

Once you have your list of keywords, we want them to tick these boxes:

  • Have search volume or you think will gain search volume over time
  • The ranking pages for the keyword have some links already. This proves that people are referencing these pages and they are in demand.
  • There’s not one page that dominates all the links. Sometimes a .gov page will have over 1k links and the rest on 15/20 total. Don’t go after these keywords.
  • There’s a good chance you can rank. This might be because your existing authority and relevance to the topic is super high. But critically – look through the ranking pages and see how in-depth they are. Can you do better?

You need the opportunity to be there. Both in the data (i.e. there are links on offer) and also in your ability to outrank the competition.

If you can rank in any of the top positions for a keyword like this, over time journalists will find your content and they will link back to you.

From there, you just need to maintain your page. To do that:

  • Refresh your page periodically with new data to make sure you have the latest stats, figures and up-to-date visuals.
  • Look for new keyword opportunities for the page in Google Search Console. What are you ranking in 10th and below with that you don’t have a section on the page currently discussing? Create that section and watch those rankings jump up too.
  • Ensure the ‘last updated’ date is visible and clear – both for users and search engines

Then keep this process going. This link building tactic will compound more and more over time, and soon you’ll have a ton of pages driving loads of high authority and relevant links to your site – whilst placing your domain as a topical authority (huge for SEO gains!).

3. Guest posting on industry-leading websites

One of the first link building tactics that people told me to do way back in 2007 and then when I started full-time in 2012 was guest posting.

Since then, the landscape has changed but guest posting still very much has a role to play. There are just certain conditions.

You see, when the Google Penguin update originally occurred, it was in large part due to SEOs abusing guest posting. There were dozens of sites that existed purely for people to publish articles on with pretty much zero editorial guidelines in order to acquire backlinks.

That is not the sort of guest posting we’re going to do here.

If you read the tactic above this one, I linked to one of the articles I’ve produced for Moz.

That is a guest post. A massively valuable guest post especially considering how powerful their domain is and also how topically related it is to Root Digital’s.

Guest posting is no longer (and hasn’t been for a long time) about writing at scale and trying to just get your articles out there on any and every site you can possibly get accepted to. In fact, that’s more likely to harm your site than help it.

Instead, guest posting – and the sort that search engines value – is about crafting content written by you and published on websites that are visited by a high volume of people within your topical niche or that include your target audience.

Being a marketer myself, this includes publications like Hubspot, Moz, Majestic SEO, BuzzSteam and so on. This is where our target audience (i.e. other marketers) are.

But for a company selling bathrooms or furniture, a guest post opportunity might be on Ideal Home, Houzz, Apartment Therapy, and so on. 

This is not only going to be of value from an SEO perspective, but it is also just good old-fashioned marketing. Your brand and expertise are going to be on show for anyone looking for what you do. You’re likely to get direct leads or customers out of it.

To make the most of this tactic, you need to find the most read and visited domains and publications in your niche that have a blog or feature articles somewhere.

You then want to drop them an email and sell yourself.

The question anyone receiving your pitch will be asking themselves is ‘why would we want an article from this person’.

You need to include some information on how long you’ve been in the industry (or someone in your business if you haven’t been in the industry too long), the awards you’ve won, the huge number of products you’ve sold as a business, the revenue you’ve generated for people – whatever is it relevant to you that will help you or the business you represent standout.

You also need to consider what topic or knowledge you can offer their audience that doesn’t already exist on another page they have.

An easy way to check this is a site search. Simply use the following in a Google search and have a look through the results to see if it looks like a page is already discussing the same thing or very close already:

Site:[domain] [topic of post]

Once you’ve done that, you want to pitch to them.

So how do you find people to pitch to?

There’s numerous options, but for the most part, we’re looking for someone who works on ‘content’ or ‘marketer’ (depending on the size of the company – ‘content’ is better for larger businesses) at the websites we’re hoping to strike up a partnership with.

For me, in the example of Moz and as it’s been a while since I last created a post with them, I do a quick search on LinkedIn.

First, find the company page on LI and you’ll see a box like the one below. This is where we’re going to do a search like ‘content’. We want to narrow down the people in the business who look like they work in that team and might be a good person to get in touch with.

You’ll then get a list of people but you want to look through the descriptions people write about themselves to narrow down who would be best to connect with and send a quick message.

We’re not talking anything long as an intro but a simple message like:

“Hi Chima, I’ve been in marketing for over 13 years specialising in digital PR and SEO. I’ve contributed to Moz in the past and I’d love to shoot some more ideas over for a post. Are you managing the content on the blog at the moment or is there someone else who might be best to reach out to? Thanks a lot!”

You might find the person straight away who is the person best to speak to, but if not, hopefully you’ll get a response back and a different person who is best to pick up a discussion with.

All you can do from there is put your best foot forward with some great ideas you think could really help the audience you both appeal to, and see where it leads.

Good luck with it!

4. Being a source for journalists

Have you ever seen articles with headlines like ‘Heating experts reveal their best tip for saving money this winter’?

I can tell you now, the person who wrote that hypothetical article sourced experts online through platforms like Qwoted, Featured.com or even using a hashtag like #journorequest on Bluesky or X (sadly HARO is no more but it used to be so good for this), and people just like you responded with their top tips.

These platforms connect writers with experts on all sorts of topics.

We’ve even managed to get a local plumber featured in major global publications through these requests.

The platforms work extremely simply – a journalist puts a request out looking for experts on a certain topic.

You sign up as a source (typically free btw) and set up alerts to get notifications when a journalist is looking for comments on a topic you’ve signed up for.

Pro tip: speed is absolutely key here. Sometimes journalists shut the request early if they get a decent level of response so make sure you jump on these opportunities quickly.

How easy does that sound? And we’re talking links and publicity in top-tier publications for as little effort as setting an alert up and then putting together a paragraph of copy on something you already know.

5. Dead competitor content

This tactic is a little more technical than some of the others in this list, but it’s by no means difficult.

You’ll need access to a platform like Ahrefs or SEMrush – something that can give you a breakdown of a website’s broken links.

The idea: we want to find pages on competitors’ websites that have backlinks pointing to them but those backlinks are broken (meaning they return a 404 response code).

Once we’ve found a page on a competitor’s website that has a few good looking broken links pointing to it, we want to recreate that page on our website then send it to those websites with the broken links on and let them know about our new shiny resource.

Here’s the really clever part.

Google (and other search engines) don’t like broken links. It’s not a good part of a user journey. Imagine trying to click a link yourself and it takes you to a broken page. It’s frustrating, and Google (and other search engines) will mark a page down if it has a rubbish user experience (like 404s).

Bonus points:

You also really want to find a page on a competitor’s site that has links pointing to it from pages that are generating traffic. These are the pages Google (and other search engines) provide the most amount of weight in – i.e. they will have a much bigger impact on your own ability to rank.

Let’s dig into how to do this and what you’re really looking for.

(By doing this method right now for the screenshots I’ve actually just found a page on one of our own competitor’s websites with a bunch of broken links pointing to it – this method works!)

Let’s start with Ahrefs/SEMrush/your platform of choice.

First, pop a competitor’s website in the search bar and find your way to the ‘broken backlinks’ section (or equivalent).

If the competitor has a decent link profile, you can quickly scan the list here to see which links are broken and if there are a number of those links all pointing to the same destination URL. Like so:

Sorry for the marked-out sections but the ‘referring pages’ are the websites linking to our competitors, and the ‘anchor and target URL’ section are the pages on our competitors’ websites that are returning the 404 response code.

We can also see that some of these pages are actually generating traffic still – which makes this infinitely more worthwhile going after.

But how do you know what was on that page if it’s broken?

That is where Wayback Machine comes in handy. 

Take the broken link URL from your competitor’s website and then pop that into Wayback Machine.

That’ll then give you a screen like the one below, which will show you the last time they cached that page and be able to render it. Hitting one of those dates will show you the old page as it was and you can use that as the basis to recreate the content and key points onto a new page of your own.

Bringing ourselves back to the ‘clever part’ mentioned above – you can now email the websites linking to your competitor’s content mentioning the fact they have a broken link on their website but not to fear because you have already recreated the page and key insights onto a page of your own, whilst kindly providing the URL in the same email.

Value for them, and value for you. Love it.

6. Unlinked mentions (of your brand, people, products, etc.)

How to go from this:

To this:

Unlinked mentions are one of the easiest methods for gaining backlinks to your website, but there is a caveat; they work best for well-known businesses and people.

However, every company – even small ones – should still be looking for these opportunities, especially as you scale up your backlink profile.

Unlinked mentions are where the hard work has already been done. Where there are websites out there that have already written about something to do with your business. That may be the company name, a prominent person, a data point you discovered and so on. But they haven’t linked.

The next bit is the easy bit.

The only thing left is to ask them to update the article with a link back to your website where they already have the mention.

It’s a minimal amount of time investment on their side and it provides more links around the web for Google (and other search engines) to crawl and gather value from.

Here’s the type of email we typically send when emailing a journalist to update a link for us. In this case, the journalist had written up an article on a story we pitched but hadn’t included a link yet:

And, hopefully, this is the type of response you can expect:

Nice vibes, and you’ll often find journalists are more than happy to help out – especially because you are already a source of value.

Bonus tip: adding Creative Commons (CC) 4.0 to your website and assets can improve your chances of landing a link from 12% to 18% (we know because we’ve measured it). The CC is a digital agreement that anyone referencing the contents of a page will link back to the page it was published on as the original source. It’s not legal, but it has weight.

However, how you communicate is imperative.

DO NOT be a bully in your emails to journalists and demand they link back because you have a CC license on the page. Please gently nudge towards it (preferably in a follow-up email if you didn’t hear back after the first).

Otherwise, you might be subject to a call-out like this:

Be nice.

7. Newsjacking/Reactive PR – jump on what people are already talking about

Speed is the name of the game when it comes to newsjacking or producing a reactive campaign.

The general idea is that a news topic is already doing the rounds and you’re seeing articles popping up (seemingly) endlessly discussing this topic or thing that’s occurred.

You know more journalists are going to be talking about this story and so you kick into action and create a value add. Something that gives journalists another string to their bow that they can create a new article on or update their current article with.

Let’s run through an example.

Tipping in the US has been trending as a topic for a while, slowly gathering pace over the past few years. Nothing in particular triggered an explosion in articles here but there was an uptick in the number of posts on social platforms and supporting articles debating tipping culture in general.

One post in particular tipped things over the edge for me. It was a post about someone being asked to tip at a self-checkout. It was causing a stir online and brought a sense of rage amongst the commenters. It was pretty obvious that this was a topic on the verge of bubbling over.

So, we created a survey asking over 1,000 people in the US if tipping culture had gone too far. How many people had really been asked to tip at a self-checkout machine, and were people actively taking a stand against tipping or the amount they tip in general?

It went well.

That piece has so far generated backlinks on 173 different domains, from publications like the New York Post, Daily Mail, Fox and a bunch more.

However, sometimes events do happen in the news that you have to jump on instantly – before the news cycle fizzles out.

Remember when Paramount announced they were going to be making a Sonic the Hedgehog film? Do you also remember that there was a different visual version of Sonic that Paramount was absolutely hammered for? We put some stats together for that at the time:

With our client and using their knowledge of VFX (something they specialised in and would have a ton of authority when speaking about), we also estimated how much it cost them overall to redesign Sonic.

It took three days overall from seeing the first initial outrage around the Sonic design to gaining our first piece of coverage with it. It blew up from there.

Building backlinks with reactive can feel like a waiting game for something to happen that you can then jump on, as in the Sonic example, but if you have you’re constantly involved in a specific niche, you’ll know what topics are important to your audience and what you might be able to jump on in the moment to gain their attention.

Reactive doesn’t always mean instant.

8. Testimonials – use a service you really like? Tell them (and get on their website)!

This can be an absolute gem of a backlink tactic, and it takes very little time before you see the results.

Do you use any suppliers or platforms as a company that has a website? These are prime candidates for a testimonial (and link back).

There’s a chance they either have testimonials on their site already or, if they’ve never really thought about it before, they might be very excited to have one of their clients want to share some lovely words about their product/service and have it displayed on their website for other potential customers to read.

Here’s an example of it working for me on an SEO tool we use called URL Profiler.

This is a testimonial on their front page (which is the most valuable from a link building perspective as it passes the most link equity) and has been on there for at least 5 years at this point.

In an E-E-A-T world – where authority and trust signals are more important than ever online – testimonials are increasingly important for companies to showcase real people (hopefully) vouching for them and their products.

It not only helps convert users but is important for search engines to see companies investing in their own trust signals, which in turn, boosts SEO performance.

So start by crafting a list of the products and services you use as a company that are closely aligned with the services you provide.

For us, an SEO tool we use is clearly aligned with an SEO and Digital PR agency.

However, we wouldn’t go so far as to provide a testimonial for the pens we use or the manufacturer of the keyboard I’m using.

With that, you’ll then want to look through the sites (will take 2 minutes each) and see if they already have testimonials on there, or if this would be something new for them.

Firstly, you want to reach out to those that DO have testimonials already. These are the quick win opportunities.

Then, send them a nice friendly email offering a testimonial. Like this:

Once you get a response, you can then dive into what the testimonial is, but crucially also include who to reference and provide the URL of your domain for that all-important backlink.

9. Event talks or podcast appearances

This one is going to be industry dependent and also depend on who you have in the business who is able to and happy to do conference talks or podcasts, but there’s a ton of value to be had here as industry events are inexplicably linked to your industry and have a ton of topical relevance (something that is huge for your SEO gains).

I did a talk with BuzzStream for their (fairly new at the time) podcast with the super cool Vince Nero.

Doing podcasts and event talks usually leads to a page on the host’s website detailing the conversation or discussing your talk at their event.

BrightonSEO, one of the most popular SEO conferences in the world, provides a list of ‘Upcoming Speakers’ even before the event has happened. Each speaker then has a profile page on the site and a link back to their site:

Most industry events are the same.

It may be that you’re speaking or have a stall setup or you’re part of a round-table – whatever it is, these are also link building opportunities that provide long-term value from a highly relevant website for search engines to pass value from.

Obviously the primary benefit of speaking at a conference or appearing on a podcast is the audience your expertise will be exposed to, and the direct leads that can generate, but there’s a very good secondary benefit (and also a long-term one) is having such an aligned domain linking back to yours.

Related Case Studies

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  • Links & placements

    59

  • Key features in

    CNBC, NY Post, Business Insider

  • Exposure in

    US & ES markets

Digital PR Recruitment Campaign: Hiring Icks

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  • Full page features

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  • Number of LRDs

    23

  • Key Audience

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Digital PR: Living with Dementia – Photography showing impact on everyday life

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