top 5 reasons why most brands fail to link build:

Spaces that are highly competitive do so for a good reason.

Money. Mullah. Dinero.

This works in two ways

• There is a lot of money to be made, and there are many lucrative payouts.
• Your competitors will also have to spend a lot of cash in order to outbid you and outrank your position.

Spend it on CPCs or other hard costs.

Or, on soft costs such as savvy operators that are scrappy and ambitions – producing better marketing assets in order to create a moat of competition to keep you out.

One example is a lot of great content. The other example is links.

Find out why most brands are unsuccessful at link-building and learn how to create high-quality links every month.

The first mistake is to think that you do not need to build links proactively.

Sure. You might not have to build links if your niche is low-to no-competition, such as pet food niche websites or similar.

Guess what? There’s no competition for a good reason (read: low to no money).

Finance is a big, lucrative, competitive and profitable area.

I compiled a list 1,000 finance keywords and grouped them according to the Ahrefs data.

• The range of keyword difficulty
• Referring domains (for top SERP)

You’ll find that the same applies to other spaces. There is a bell curve.

Some keywords are easy, while others are very difficult. Most fall somewhere in the middle.

This means that you can expect a keyword difficulty of between 30-60, with approximately 50 to 200 referring domains on each page.

Please repeat that:

~50-200 referring domains (or backlinks). Per page.

So, if you can’t reliably build/attract/acquire ~50-200 external links for each individual article or page you want to rank, you’ll never, in a million years, be able to compete in a profitable space.

Quality and quantity are both necessary to be successful in a competitive environment.

Check out this SERP for a commercial keyword such as “how to create a website”.

The lowest DR is 76 and four are above 90.

The average number of domains referring to a page is “several hundreds” or more.

How can you ever compete against these brands? Which DR ranges are you referring to? You can also count the number of domains that refer to a single on your website.

What is the answer? You’re wrong.

You can’t scale quality and quantity of the links unless you have both. It’s not enough to compare one against the other.

This is not the time to be in a bloodbath on a red sea.

Mistake 2 : Leave links to chance, instead of systematizing success

Marketers who are not very experienced think that links will appear on their doorstep.

They will come if you build it. They say.

Ah, I wish I was young and naive once more. It might be true if you are HubSpot, Coca-Cola, or American Express.

What about the rest of us?

Ain’t going to happen.

Take another profitable example: the keyword “best project software”.

Ahrefs says you need to have 273 backlinks just to be on the first page.

Now. These are only estimates.

You may need more (or less) depending on other factors such as the quality of your links, domain rating, topical authority etc. mean you might need more (or less).

The point is well taken.

Do you think that 273 hyperlinks will just magically appear on your heavily-commercial product comparison page?

Ha! Ha!

Instead of buying links like a chump and assuming that other link partners will want to exchange them for yours, try to find out what they might need or want from you.

Three things are usually the most important.

• Money : Consider a site with content that requires advertisers.
• Assets/Content: Imagine a brand in need of creative assets.
• Visibility : Imagine an influencer who needs your audience.

What are your assets or core capabilities that you could leverage to help someone out before?

Ask for the favor first.

You’ll then get links. There are a lot of links. Consistently.

Mistake 3 – Using the wrong tactics to build links for the wrong types of links

You know that you have to create links at this point.

Unfortunately, they won’t appear by themselves.

Here’s the problem.

Many marketers are still using the wrong link tactic at the wrong moment. This limits their success and wastes resources.

Cold outreach is an excellent example. Cold outreach is usually only effective in industries with lower DR.

What about sites with high DR? You’ll need to use warm tactics like a foot into the door, referrals, or a need they have.

When people make mistakes, they do so by using the wrong tactic and at the wrong moment.

They waste time on cold outreach for large sites, while looking for warm introductions on smaller sites.

You should instead think of link-building tactics and strategies as a sliding spectrum.

On the left side, place the smallest DR/DA sites. On the right, place the largest DR/DA sites.

There are different strategies that you can use between ranges.

You can, for example, divide the following DR/DA Ranges:

• Below 30 : These will come to you naturally if your work is done correctly. Don’t chase.
• 30-60 Here’s where you can do your cold outreach, as smaller webmasters or site owners who are less tech-savvy will respond and link out.
• 60 – 90: These sites are run by knowledgeable, jaded people who have seen your cold outreach templates many times before. So give them content, creative assets, or create bartering partners to scratch each others back.
• Over 90% To be at the top you will need a network of personal contacts, a large budget to pay for sponsorships, donations and content syndications.

Are these universal rules? Are these universal laws? No.

Most of the time, they are accurate. Most of the time.

Scattergun link building is not as effective as doubling down on 2-3 scalable links

Marketers ruin everything

List posts such as this one are great. Classics are timeless. Never go out-of-style.

Marketers everywhere will ruin the format until they stop producing list posts.

The worst posts on the internet are those that use “1,093,394,560 links building tactics”.

They are not only misguided but also give you false hope.

You don’t have to use a thousand different tactics for link building. You don’t need more than a dozen.

Start with 2-3 of the most reliable ones.

You should then double-down as many times as you can.

Take Candor. They struck gold with their hiring freeze data during the pandemic (this was the OG layoffs.fyi )…

VentureBeat, for example, picked it up and ran with it.

Put yourself in the shoes of these people.

With proprietary data and linkable assets, you have literally struck gold.

What about the classic 404 broken link outreach emails?

No, of course not!

As fast as you can, continue to produce new proprietary data and linkable assets.

This is how you can win at link building.

Do not chase shiny things which are worn out, commoditized or overplayed.

Mistake 5: Prioritizing wrong pages at wrong times

It’s true.

The rankings of big brands continue to expand, even in categories where they have no business. This is happening with fewer and less links.

Is this right? No.

Is this the world in which we live and compete? Yes.

We can complain, and we can point fingers. Or we can double down.

The big brands do not need to link to pages with low competition often, because their topical authority plus content quality and internal links help them to crush small competitors.

However…

Another thing that big brands know is how to build a brand. How to prioritize their link building strategies based on the and page targets of their website.

As an example:

• Home: Building Brands! Building brand recognition is a priority that should continue to be at the top of your list for as long as you can.
• Commercial/product/service pages: Almost nobody (sane) links to these “naturally” (see point #2 above). You have to be creative to help others understand the value of , or you need to be creative to get them to scratch you back in order to scratch theirs.
• Pillar Pages: Focus the most competitive query within a hub-and-spoke content web. This is usually done with a commercial intention, then spread the love by using internal links to the child pages.

What are you missing? Links to long tail, TOFU-type pages.

Why?

Allocation of resources. Resource allocation.

What if you have a small or new site? You do need to start somewhere. This probably means linking to long-tail content.

The pros will move on from this point as soon as possible.

Then they add all of the points that we have made and concentrate on high-quality + quantity link building strategies for these key pages in order to scale up faster than amateurs.

This is your challenge.

Link building is difficult. It’s also why, if done right, it can pay off handsomely.

This is what sets the professionals apart from amateurs, who make the same five mistakes.

Build links like the pros

Link building can be misunderstood.

Some people believe it is illegal. Don’t worry, it’s not.

On the other hand, they think that they do not need it. This is also not true.

Like most things, the truth is somewhere in between.

The pros are distinguished by their nuance. This is why, as the song goes, they are able to grow small sites into large ones time and time again.

They know how to use the correct tactics at the appropriate time and from the proper sites to obtain the right type of links to the pages they want on their website.

Amateurs rely on gimmicks, silver bullets and hoping for the best.

The article Top 5 Mistakes in Link Building: Why Most Brands Fail first appeared on Search Engineland.