How to find backlinks to target for my site?
I'm confused. I'm new to the voodoo that is SEO and I'm trying to rank for some keywords.
I'm following the suggestion made here - https://www.indiehackers.com/post/i-have-hundreds-of-blog-posts-and-over-100-youtube-videos-website-traffic-is-still-30-per-day-what-am-i-doing-wrong-6d0f72c84c?commentId=-MjzEJO4qWlFoQDhGOPr
I found some sites that were ranked for my target keyword "WA Secretary of State Business Search" (https://secretaryofstates.com/washington/). I wrote an article that I feel does a better job than theirs (https://cobaltintelligence.com/blog/wa-secretary-of-state-business-search/).
Now, I want to reach out to sites that backlink to this site and ask them to consider using my post instead of this one. I went to some backlink checkers and all of the backlinks pointing to this page are really complete garbage. Some examples:
- www.keyword-suggest-tool.com/search/wa+state+corp+business+license+search/
- s.gmx.co.uk/find?q=sos wa&devi=02&mkt=EN-GB&lang=en&origin=999999999999999999&ae=
- www.get-insurance-quotes.net/site/secretaryofstates.com/
Am I doing something wrong here? Trying to get sites like that to add my backlink feels pretty hacky.
The best backlinks are the ones that describe your website the most. Once I have used the services of https://mywebadvantage.com/seo/. I had to promote my website, so they needed a piece of short information about my website and its primary purpose. It helped them give missions to copywriters to create texts and insert the backlinks. This seems to be very easy, but when I tried to repeat their strategy on my own so that I could save some money, I understood that without a big team, I would need to spend a lot of time on it.
I think that way of acquiring backlinks is dead. Trust me. Do this instead: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-build-backlinks-to-every-article-i-write-c0ba351cb9
Awesome, thanks!
This way of acquiring backlinks - reaching out to websites to ask them to link to you instead of someone else - has been beaten to death.
I get emails like these all the time and I always send them to spam. Because people like Neil Patel blogged about this once, everyone is doing it and as a result it is an overused tactic that is becoming less and less effective. You may get 1 or 2 links, but it will require a lot of outreach that just isn't worth the effort.
Here's my POV when I get reached out to like this: Why should I link to them? What value are they creating for me? How are they helping me?
If people haven't heard of you, doing, a favor will require them getting something out of it too.
The "hack" here is for them to have heard of you.
Think about backlinks like sales - the best way to sell is to build a relationship and solve a problem, you can build backlinks the same way.
Establish relationships in the niche. Find the influential sites you want a link from, and get to know them. Create value for them, and understand the markets they serve and their readers. Then, go in for the "ask" and ask them for a favor (like a link).
I'd also recommend you create extremely valuable and original content (beyond a simple blog post, I'm talking about a deep dive study using original research - these are link magnets) that people in your niche would really want to link to.
Or use tools like HARO to get a foot in the door for news publications.