There is something everyone in the SEO industry should understand—it’s often easy for established sites to build backlinks without much effort. Well, you might not have done any outreach for links for some time, but you realize that your link profile continues to grow at a steady pace.

Well, you might ask yourself why that happens— the reason is, there is a possibility that your brand has built an audience, credibility, and trust over time.

But what if you have a brand new website or if people don’t really know who you are in your industry? In this post, we shall discuss how to build links about new sites in a structured manner. In addition to building links, you will also learn how to progressively get quality links as you continue to build the credibility of your brand.

So, what should you do?

Let’s assume that you have started with zero links pointing at your site; the first thing that you should focus on is building links to your home page.

The following are 3 strategies that can assist you in doing so.

Building citations and creating social media accounts to promote your trust signals

Citations are the online mentions of your business, and they are most commonly used in local SEO. Therefore, if you are a local business, you would basically find business directories and add your business name, address, and phone number, which are collectively known as NAP.

A study conducted in 2018 by Moz revealed that citation signals help websites rank in both the map pack and organic search. And these are usually no-followed links; therefore, the purpose of these links is not to building website or page level authority. But it’s to legitimize that you have a real business.

A great way to find these opportunities is to search in Google for a term like “your city” and “your job.” Now, you can copy down several domains from local competitors, and ignore things like directories.

Next, you can use an online tool like the Link Intersect tool by Ahref, which should show you who’s linking to one or more of your target URLs. When you run the search, you might realize that the more intersections there are from the referring domain, the higher the probability of it being a place to create a citation.

If you want to analyze any link, click on the number, and then click on the link. This should give you the company’s name, address, phone number, and a link to their website are all there. Therefore you can now add your site to this directory too.

Now, whether your website targets visitors locally or globally, it’s also worth creating social accounts with a link back to your site. But don’t bother signing up for every network out there. Instead, you should focus on the primary ones in your niche, whether that be Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, or LinkedIn. Even if you don’t plan to use the social network immediately, it might be worth creating the account so you can also claim your business name.

Building authority links to your homepage

To do this, you can use Help a Reporter Out, also known as HARO. This is a company that connects journalists to sources and sources to journalists. You only need to sign up for an account as a “source,” and you’ll get emails with a list of queries from journalists at various publications. And these are not just your run of the mill publications. There are journalists from places like Forbes, The New York Times, Huffington Post, and more. Responding to queries quickly and concisely can land you mentions and links to both your homepage and social profiles.

This is the most natural place to get authority links that can boost trust and rankings, primarily since you’ll be judged on your knowledge more than your current online visibility.

Create podcasts

Podcasts are hot, and there are a ton of them in almost every industry. Moreover, podcasters are always on the lookout for exciting guests that can provide value to their audience. And for almost every podcast you will come across, they will provide a link to the guest’s homepage as well as other resources that come up throughout the interview.

To find podcast opportunities, just search in Google for a term like “SEO podcasts,” and the results should almost always be list posts with popular podcasts in your industry. Not only are podcasts an excellent source for links, but they will continue to send you new customers every month. Doing these three activities are a great way to build high-quality homepage links as well as to boost trust signals.

Page-Level Link Building Strategies

You should understand that links to your homepage alone will not be enough to build a growing and sustainable traffic. The following are the link building strategies that you should be aware of.

Resource page link building

This is where you get backlinks from web pages that curate and link out to useful industry resources. And the sole purpose of their existence is to link out to other relevant pages, making them easy links to get. The best thing about this strategy is that you can branch out to pages on broader topics.

For example, if you had a blog post on SEO strategies. With a lot of link building tactics, you’d probably have to find a page where they mention relevant terms like SEO tactics. However, with resource page link building, you can try and get links on pages that cover broader topics like keyword research, link building, and content creation, among others.

So just go to Google and search for something like inurl:resources.html intitle:SEO. What should do now is to visit the pages, and ensure that they are indeed resource pages and link out to external resources, and pitch your content appropriately.

The Skyscraper Technique

This is a simple, but yet effective. To do this, you should search for a page that has a lot of links, improve on that topic, and then reach out to those that are linking to the original page and ask them to link to you. One of the great ways to find Skyscraper opportunities is to use Ahrefs’ Content Explorer, which is a searchable database with over a billion pages of content complete with social and SEO metrics.

So let’s say that I want to create a post on Facebook marketing. You will type that in the search bar, but you will also need to change the search mode to a Title search. However, as a requirement for this technique, you will need to find pages that have many links.

For example, if you set a filter to show only pages that have at least 100 referring domains, you might realize that these articles have attracted many links. So, you can look at the content to see whether and what you can improve. After you’ve created your superior page, click on details, then click backlinks, and reach out to the linking pages to try and get your resource mentioned.

This is a basic way of how you can search and execute a skyscraper-styled link building. Also, since we have highlighted a somehow sequential order of building backlinks for your new site, it doesn’t mean that you can’t do skyscraper outreach while doing things like HARO or Podcasts. However, you should ensure that you build a balanced link profile where things like your homepage are not be ignored.