SEO Hacks 101: How to Get Backlinks Without Creating Any New Content
There’s no denying the fact that off-page SEO is as important as on-page SEO to boost your rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). In one of our previous articles, we had discussed what off-page SEO entailed and how backlinking or link building was a major part of it. All said and done, backlinking requires a lot of high-quality content creation.
More often than not, as a business, you may not have that kind of bandwidth to regularly generate high-quality content for your website or blog. Does that mean that you should put a pause on your link-building efforts and let your SEO suffer? Not really.
Unlike popular belief, creating new content is not the only way to get backlinks to your websites. While it would help to churn out quality content, you can still focus on backlink strategies using your existing content.
Here are some smart ways to get backlinks without having to create any new content.
1. Use your competitor’s efforts to your advantage.
Shrewd as it may sound, thorough competitor research can reduce a significant amount of effort you’d have to put to generate backlinks. How does that work?
As you may have read in our previous article, that a quick way of getting backlinks is to get listed on authority resource pages. To the unacquainted, resources pages are merely pages that list down all useful websites/blogs/resources for a particular topic or theme. Online directories, community websites, and informational hubs often serve as resource pages.
Here’s what a typical resource page looks like:
Source: Info-listings
More often than not, these resource pages require a direct submission of your website or blog, and not specific new content i.e. your website is a resource in itself. So, this has become one of the quickest way to generate backlinks without content. However, if you think about it, finding relevant resource pages related to your industry can be a time-taking task.
This is where you can find the resource pages that are linking back to your direct competitors and then get listed there. To find these resource pages, you can use tools like Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, and Monitor Backlinks.
This is the kind of results you’d get when you search your competitor’s website on Ubersuggest.
2. Leverage your existing partnerships.
Any business in the digital space tends to work towards building their SEO. Just like you’re putting effort and looking for ways to get backlinks, so would be your partners. This is where you can offer a win-win for your partners as well as B2B clients by linking to each other’s websites.
A link from a partner/client could be in the form of a partnership announcement on their blog, a listing on any of their webpages, or a shoutout/testimonial regarding your services while you do the same for them.
Just like Ahrefs used its testimonials to link to its reviewers’ websites.
Source: Search Engine Journal
3. Pave your way into listicles.
Writing articles in the form of lists, aka, listicles have become a rather popular form of content in the digital arena. Many websites and portals are completely dedicated to building listicles on relevant industries and topics and usually have high domain authority. So, it makes sense to get your business offering mentioned in listicles related to your sector.
The question here is how? Believe it or not, the easiest way to do this is to simply Google lists that can be relevant to your industry by typing best [your business type].
For example, if you are in the insurance industry, you’d have to search for the best insurance companies in the UAE.
Once you know the websites with such listicles, you shortlist the relevant ones that provide backlinks and reach out to them to review your business and add it to the concerned list.
4. Transform all “unlinked mentions” to links.
More often, there might be certain companies, webpages that may have mentioned you for some reference, or a quote, or even a data point but may have not linked back to you. In that case, it’s easy to add a new backlink to your website by just requesting them to convert that unlinked mention to a link.
You may be wondering how this is a backlink strategy and how would you get to know about these unread mentions on the vast web. Well, it’s quite simple actually. There are tools like Ahrefs Content Explorer and BuzzSumo that scout the internet and let you know about your brand mentions. All you need to do is just search your brand name on the explorer.
5. Don’t be left out.
Imagine you’re at a business conference and everyone except you gets a welcome kit with notepads, agenda, etc. You’d feel left out and probably go to the organizer or the person distributing the kit to offer you one as well. After all, in all likelihood, the person might have just not noticed you when you had entered. Similarly, if there’s an article or a webpage that’s listing all your competitors but not you, you should take a stance and request a mention.
The challenge, however, is to find such articles or webpages. While you can rely on tools to do this for you, we’ll tell you a simple hack–just google 2-3 of your competitors together in a search and check the results out. More often than not, you’d get solid leads to pursue from this search.
Over to You
While you may find more hacky ways to generate backlinks without content beyond what we’ve mentioned here, we’d recommend you to take them with a pinch of salt. We’ve exclusively mentioned white hat techniques for backlinking in this article. So, even if you may come across other black hat tacts, we’d always request you to avoid using any strategy that Google could penalize you for.
So, try these 5 hacks and boost your SEO with lesser effort in lesser time!
