Broken link building is just one of many backlinking strategies used to acquire links to your website. The short summary of how to execute a broken link building campaign is:

• Find a website that would be ideal to link from to your site,
• Identify any links on the site which are broken (the target page no longer exists)
• Create content to replace the link
• Contact the site owner to have the link replaced with your own

In a recent outreach article, I asked Brian Dean what strategy he thought was the most effective link building strategies for 2020 and broken link building was his immediate response.

Brian, who is one of the industry’s most well known SEO’s, boasted a 10% conversion rate on his latest campaign. This is an important point because when you set out to accomplish your link building campaigns you should set some realistic expectations.

Most people do not welcome email that essentially is a request for a link. If you’ve ever run an outreach campaign, it can be frustrating at times with the response you receive. If a 10% conversion rate is an above-average result, you can expect to hear deafening silence from over 90% of the webmasters you contact.

This is what makes broken link building a more attractive method of acquiring backlinks. Your outreach email is based on providing value for all parties involved.

• The website owner improves the UX and the SEO of their site
• The users are not taken to an error page
• You receive a juicy backlink

Automate broken link building with software

The best way to go about broken link building is to automate the process with software. Ahrefs seems to be the best option for identifying broken links because their software will scan an entire website and list every link that is broken.

The poor mans version of this process would involve a manual discovery whereby you would be required to go page by page and use an extension to highlight broken links. You can download an extension such as broken backlink checker (a bit out-dated) or check my links (recommended), both of which you can find in Chrome.

Build a list of prospects

The best option for the most success is to target sites that would have a lot of links pointing to their pages. You want to be able to find a broken link that not only one site owner will be happy to replace, but a number of site owners. If there is a missing page that 100 people have linked to, your chances of acquiring links go way up.

Make a list of the top sites in your industry. Shoot for the stars. Target domains with high authority and decent amount of traffic.

Plug your prospect site into Ahrefs and click on the inbound links. You can then click on the broken link tab to pull up a list of links that need replacing.

Choose topics to compliment your niche

When you’re looking at links to replace you will need to choose content that best suits your specialty.

Find links to pages that you are able to write quality content unless you’re outsourcing a freelancer to do your writing.

Although you are bringing a broken link to the attention of the site owner, you will still need to provide a good piece of content that will earn the link.

Hindsight is 20/20

If you’ve never used the Wayback Machine, get ready for journey back in time. This particular marvel of a site will show you what the page used to look like before it was deleted or moved. This is an important part of the process because you need to set the standard for the content your replacement page will need to cover.

Assemble the troops

Now that you have content that rivals your successor, you will need to get it in front of those who have linked to the page. Type in the URL of the broken link into Ahrefs and get a list of the sites that are linking to that page. You now have your list of sites to approach for link replacement.

Find the right email addresses

This part of the process can be automated with software like Hunter. Hunter offers a free option but if you want to find hundreds of email addresses in one fell swoop you can opt for the paid version and upload the list of websites.

You may want to rifle through your results in order to make sure you are sending your outreach to the right person. List your prospects on a spreadsheet in order to set yourself up for a template email approach.

Automate your outreach

Ninja Outreach can be your best friend for saving time in the outreach process. Your approach to contacting webmasters is already packed with value so make your email as simple as possible. Here is an example of what will get the best response.

Pay it forward

One twist to this method that many SEO’s overlooks is the potential to appease the fourth party. Everyone in the broken link building method seems to win-except one. The website who lost the link.

You can pay it forward and show appreciation for their loss by linking to their content. By giving the previous link holder a link from your content you really are creating a winning situation for all parties involved.

Conclusion

Consider the number of people who are spamming sites and asking for favours and this method of link building becomes more attractive by showing upfront value.

The truth is you can scale up your link building by using this strategy as opposed to the more time-consuming methods, such as guest posting.

As one of many tools you can use in your link building arsenal, broken link building tends to get a higher response rate than simply asking someone to link to your content.

Don’t be discouraged by dismal response rates. Outreach, in general, is riddled with a lack of response. The average conversion on an outreach link building strategy is somewhere around 8%. If you can get to that number or above, you’ve outperformed the standard, cleaned up the internet and acquired some juicy backlinks for your site.

Related reading: How To Write SEO Optimized Blog Posts

The growth of your business is not something that should be left to chance. Take control of the future of your company by making sure those that are looking for your products and services can find you. Strong local SEO will get your site ranked highly on Google for local search results. Whitby local SEO is one of the go-to sources for lead generation and new clients for a local business in Whitby.

The value of appearing in the organic local search results is obvious. Why not be found by people who are actively searching for your product? No matter if you’re a new business or have been around for years, you can increase the number of people who find you by improving your SEO.

The fastest way to make this happen is to hire an SEO company in Whitby. However, if you’re feeling brave enough, here are two major tasks to accomplish to make your website rank higher in the local organic search results.

1. Optimize your website
2. Build local backlinks

Improve your on-page SEO for searches in Whitby

The process for optimizing your website starts by making sure you have adequate content on your website. One of the biggest hurdles to overcome is making sure you have covered the content topics of your business. The ultimate goal is to answer every possible question a visitor may have who lands on your site by publishing local content about your company and what it offers.

Part of this process requires building a blog with linkable assets. Not only does this serve as a resource for your clients and potential customers, but also it gives other websites a reason to link to your site.

Google bases a large part of its ranking criteria on the trustworthiness of your site. Is your site credible, authoritative and considered a source for expert opinion? Building a blog that generates traffic and backlinks demonstrates these qualities.

If you are knowledgeable about your business and can publish content to teach people about it in an organized manner, you are about halfway to owning a website that ranks highly. The two biggest areas to spend time on will be your content and backlinks.

Use as many optimization tactics as possible to improve your on-page SEO. Once you have built an optimized website, the final task to improve ranking ability is to acquire quality backlinks.

Whitby local link building strategy

Competing on a global level allows you to find websites from anywhere in the world to link to you. The challenge is how to get the websites with the greatest amount of authority to link to your site. This is the same concept for local SEO but within your target city.

A local business can use links from around the world to build authority to a website, however, they don’t have the same power to create a local presence. Acquiring links from websites in your target city are the most powerful backlinks for ranking in that city.

Think of links as referrals

A link from another website is similar to a referral from another business. Collect the most trusted types of referrals for your website to see the greatest gains in your site’s ranking. The more quality referrals your website acquires, the more convincing it is to search engines to rank your site closer to the number one position.

Let’s assume that you are in the market to buy a swimming pool. You ask two people for referrals on who they believe to have the best reputation for quality. One of the people you ask runs a bakery, and the other is another pool manufacturer. Whose opinion do you think would be more knowledgeable?

Obviously the person who is in the same industry should have more insight into the business. Think of the links you acquire from websites in the same way. The more relevance your links have to the keyword you are trying to rank for, the more powerful they are in moving your site to the top of the search results.

How do I find local sites in Whitby to link to my website?

The beauty of local SEO is that you can limit your search to the city you are trying to rank highly in. Resource page link building is an effective strategy to find sites that have pages that link to useful sites, suppliers and vendors. Here’s how you can execute a resource page link building strategy.

Create a list of link prospects

There will obviously be a tiered level of the quality of links you will find, so your first task will be to make a list of prospective links to choose from. You can start your search by typing the following into Google:

[your keyword] + [your city] inurl:links

The search results will list websites that are associated with your keyword and city and have the word “links” in the URL. For example, if your company does landscaping in Whitby, this would be a search you could perform to find relevant links:

landscaping Whitby inurl:links

To produce these results:

If you take a look at the first result, it is a site located in Oshawa, which is next to Whitby. This means it isn’t the best type of link if you’re targeting Whitby however, it is extremely relevant because it’s the next town and it’s a gardening site. This is a link prospect you would want to pursue.

You can repeat this search replacing variations of your keyword to generate different results. You can also replace the word you tell Google to look for in the URL with another probable word such as “resource” or “resources”.

[your keyword] + [your city] inurl:resources

The goal is to get links from the sites that are closely related to yours. If there is a slight connection you can still use those types of links to tie in your website to your city for a stronger local presence.

Tier 1 vs. tier 2 links

Separate your list into two tiers based on the relevance of the link prospect. If the website is not in your industry but is in your city, you would consider it a tier two link. Your first tier consists of the websites you will contact first because they are in your city and relevant to your business.

Make contact with relevant sites

This stage of the outreach process is the first of a two-pronged approach. You want to make contact with the website owner first before you go asking them for favours. At the end of the day, you’re asking other sites to give you a link so you don’t want your first impression to repel the owner or for your email to be dismissed as spam.

Here is an example of an email that will get your prospect warmed up to the idea of giving you a link to your site simply because you aren’t asking for anything.

The ask

Once you’ve sent this email, follow up with a second email, asking for the link to your site. What is proven to do wonders for your success rate is to offer value to your prospect as a way gaining more favour and encouraging them to give you what you want.

Avoid link exchanges

Try to avoid reciprocal links. A few instances of where you link to another site and they link back may not harm your site, but too many link exchanges may have an adverse effect on your site’s ranking. It’s ok to engage in a few, but if your backlink profile is all link exchanges, you run the risk of being flagged for unnatural link building.

Offer value by finding broken links

One way to offer value is notifying the prospect of any broken links to their site. By using the Chrome extension “broken link checker” you can quickly identify any broken links on the resource page and let the webmaster know about it.

Your next email can go something like this:

Follow up

Make it a point to follow up on your link requests to make sure your emails were not in vain. It may turn out that the Webmaster has added your link but hasn’t bothered to respond. Check the resource page before emailing a follow up email.

In some cases, it may even work out better to pick up the phone and call. If you can get to the right person who makes the decisions on the website you can get a straight answer. It helps to add a little personality to your efforts-just make sure you aren’t’ too pushy.

Gauge your results

When you get a link to your site, gauge your results. It should only take a day or two to see the effects of your link. If your niche isn’t that competitive you may be able to see large gains in ranking with just a few links. At any rate, the number of relevant local links you acquire will have the greatest impact on moving your ranking.

Resource link building is a Whitby local SEO strategy that is highly effective in getting your website found in the local organic search results. Explore what your city has to offer in terms of the resource pages offered by local businesses. You may be able to form alliances and make the connections with the companies that will catapult your website to the first page of Google.