7 Secret Ingredients Your Link Building Campaign Is Sorely Missing 

There’s no worse feeling than seeing your link building campaign flop. It might be because of low-quality content, sites outside your niche, or even basic blunders like too many exact-match anchor texts.

But what if you’re an experienced link builder and you’ve already crossed these things off your list?

If so, you’re likely overlooking the finer details, the crevices necessary to make your link building campaigns as impactful as possible. 

So, let’s take a look at seven of them and how to spice up any backlink campaign, regardless of its size and scope. But first, let’s tackle the basics for a moment. 

What Is a Link Building Campaign?

Even experienced SEOs sometimes conflate link building campaigns with strategies, which begs the question:

What’s the difference between a link building campaign and a link building strategy?

While confusing at first, the specifics of both terms become more apparent once you break them down:

1. A link building strategy refers to a general approach to earning links, regardless of the means. Think of it more as a methodology of sorts, determining what specific techniques your brand will focus on. It can be affected by your budget, staff, and a plethora of less apparent factors. 
2. On the other hand, link building campaigns are shorter spurts of link building, with the goal of improving the ranking of a specific set of pages. Let’s say your SaaS product has a new feature, and you want to rank first for your targeted term—building 40 links to a blog about it is a campaign. 

In the example above, the strategy determines the backlink campaign, but also vice versa. If those 40 links to a blog page turn out to be more effective than 50 to your main product page, that might be a reason to change your approach entirely.

Of course, changing both is only a good idea if you have a large enough sample size. 

1. Focus on Contextual Relevance Beyond Keywords

In the early 2010s, the predominant way to run link building campaigns was to try and score as many exact-match anchor placements as possible.

And that’s it—there was no thinking things through, aiming for relevance, or attempting to present the link as a useful resource. 

However, Google became significantly stricter on backlinks starting in the early 2010s, particularly with the release of the Penguin algorithm update on April 24, 2012.

Penguin targeted websites using manipulative link-building practices, such as acquiring low-quality or spammy backlinks to improve search engine rankings. 

This update marked a shift in Google’s approach, focusing on the quality of backlinks rather than the quantity, penalizing sites that engaged in black-hat SEO tactics.

Over time, Google continued to refine its algorithms, including subsequent updates to Penguin and other related changes, further tightening its policies on backlinks throughout the 2010s.

So today, to maximize the impact of your backlinks, you must focus on embedding your links within content that resonates with the audience’s intent and interests. 

What do we mean by this? 

Ultimately, contextual relevance improves the likelihood of your content being shared, cited, or linked to by others. Readers are more likely to engage with and trust content that feels cohesive and well-integrated. 

This organic engagement can lead to a more successful approach to running a backlinking campaign, creating a virtuous cycle that strengthens your overall SEO strategy.

Therefore, investing time in creating or curating content that aligns contextually with your target audience is a crucial yet often overlooked aspect of link building.

2. Use the Impact of Link Bait to Your Advantage 

Traditional outreach involves sending cold emails to site owners or editors as part of link building campaigns, asking them to link to your content.

While this method has its place, reverse outreach flips the script by creating content so valuable that others naturally want to link to it. 

The key to successful reverse outreach lies in producing content that fills a gap in the market, answers pressing questions, or provides unique insights.

In particular, you can ask yourself these questions before tweaking your content strategy:

1. What content do people writing about your niche need but have difficulty finding? It can be original research, statistics, case studies or perhaps a tutorial. 
2. What other elements can make the content appealing? Think in the direction of infographics, auto-playable GIFs, embedded social media posts and even expert insights. 
3. Is it really unique, or are you just the first to do it? As strange as it might seem, SEOs and content managers often take their own bait, ironically thinking the content is successful just because it’s the first. In a matter of months, other, more authoritative competitors can take note of such a link building campaign, leapfrogging you without breaking a sweat. 

Don’t worry, though, as you have plenty of tools at your disposal. Use software like Ahrefs or SEMrush to analyze content gaps—areas where there is demand but little high-quality content available.

Once you’ve identified a topic, create content that is not only comprehensive but also engaging and easy to share. 

Don’t Forget to Monitor and Maintain the Content

As difficult as creating link bait is, it’s just the start of a successful link building campaign. Once your content is live, engage with influencers, bloggers, and communities who might be interested in your topic. 

Share your content on platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and niche forums where your target audience congregates. As your content gains traction, it will naturally attract backlinks from those who find it valuable. 

3. Leverage Niche Directories

Local and niche directories are often overlooked in favor of more mainstream link-building tactics, but they can be a boon when you’re running link building campaigns.

These directories are typically highly specific, catering to particular industries, regions, or communities. As such, the backlinks you gain from them are not only relevant but also carry significant weight with search engines.

To leverage local and niche directories, start by identifying those that are most relevant to your industry or location.

For example, if your SaaS company has a blog, getting listed in a directory like Alltop’s technology section can be highly beneficial.

Once you’ve identified the directories you want to target, ensure your listing is complete and optimized.

Furthermore, you should include all relevant information, such as your business name, email, and a brief description that includes your target keywords. Likewise, don’t forget to add a link back to your website. 

Ultimately, the key here is consistency—make sure the information you provide is uniform across all directories to avoid confusing search engines.

4. Content Repurposing for Link Building

While we’ve already discussed the importance of creating quality content for a link building campaign, it’s also worth pointing out how tiring and resource-intensive the process is.

Even the best writers, SEO, and content specialists can’t always produce linkable content. 

That’s where content repurposing comes into play. With just a bit of clever ‘recycling,’ you can churn out linkable content indefinity.

Perhaps the best part is that you don’t need any extra tools, only the usual content creation tech stack and a bit of creativity. With that, you can do things like:

• Turning stats pages into infographics. Big, comprehensive statistics-based blogs can be an excellent resource, but they aren’t digestible. If you turn each stat into an infographic and plan out a series of blogs and social media posts around them, you can create linkable assets out of something that already exists. In addition, sites can take the images and link to the original page as the source. 
• Creating video tutorials out of written ones. If one of your old software tutorials isn’t getting that much monthly traffic, why not make it more interactive with videos, additional questions and, of course, a dedicated section for documentation? As you can see, link building campaigns can also be done in reverse, in a way where you don’t have to rely solely on outreach. 
• Conducting basic content reworks. The higher your content ranks, the more organic links you’ll gain. Since creating new outstanding pieces all the time is unsustainable, you can easily make changes to existing content and improve its rankability. Whether it’s better formatting, higher-quality images or even a new layout—there are plenty of things you can do to refresh an old piece and have it rank once again. 
• Switching content formats. Other than converting blogs to infographics, you can also tailor your link building campaigns according to current content trends. That way, you can follow trends and increase the likelihood of 

5. Strategic Internal Linking

While external backlinks often get the most attention, internal linking is an equally important aspect of a successful link building campaign.

Internal links connect the pages on your website, helping search engines understand the structure of your site and the relationship between your content.

When done strategically, internal linking can boost the authority of key pages, making them more competitive in search results.

But, does that mean you just add as many internal links, and all your link building campaigns will become more effective? Absolutely not. 

Google’s algorithm still severely punishes link stuffing, so you’d want to avoid your content looking like an online dictionary. You can do so properly by splitting the links into three categories: 

Another vital aspect of internal linking is to ensure that your site’s navigation is logical and user-friendly. 

A well-structured site with strategic internal links will encourage visitors to explore more of your content, reducing bounce rates and increasing the time spent on your site—both of which are positive signals for SEO.

That’s exactly how Wikipedia gets you to fall into its notorious ‘rabbit holes.’ All it takes is one link, effective content and a stellar UX, and your bounce rates will drop dramatically.

Yes, we’re talking about link building, but, in SEO, everything is connected and one good move will beckon another. 

6. Unlinked Brand Mentions

Unlike most strategies for earning high authority backlinks like these, this one is fairly low-cost and isn’t even particularly time-intensive. 

An unliked brand mention occurs when your brand is mentioned online without a hyperlink back to your website.

Turning these unlinked mentions into backlinks is a low-hanging fruit that can significantly boost your link-building efforts with minimal effort.

However, there’s always a but. 

First and foremost, there’s little to gain from companies adding a link to your home page or main product page.

Let’s say your software gets mentioned in a New York Times article—they could link to you, but why would they? 

The hard truth is that bigger sites most likely won’t see your message. Nevertheless, you should still try and chase every possible mention.

You never know when someone might be scrolling through their inbox or if a particular person is receptive to the SEO needs of up-and-coming brands. 

Spice Up Your Link Building Campaigns with PR Mentions

Fortunately, there are several approaches that can increase the effectiveness of your link building campaigns in this regard: 

• Reaching out to realistic targets. While everyone wants big publications and high-DR domains linking to them, catching their attention through cold outreach is pretty futile. That’s why you should aim for sites with similar (or slightly higher) metrics and offer them a link exchange. You see where we’re going with this? Smaller company, fewer emails and a bigger need for link juice. 
• Personalize. Anyone, and we mean anyone, can fire up an LLM and craft all kinds of cold emails. Even though it seems discouraging, these circumstances put you at an advantage. Start by doing thorough research and use that information to mention specific details in your email. The goal is to leave an impression of someone who’s not just in it for the link. 
• Build up your backlink profile before ambitious campaigns. Simply put, Forbes, NYT, AT&T and just about any big site have an experienced SEO person manning their linking endeavors. If you only have toxic backlinks or those from DR20 sites, why would they risk their SEO health? But if they see a couple dozen organic, contextual mentions, they will most likely take a second look at your outreach

7. Hire an Agency to Run a Link Building Campaign for You  

Even if you apply all the strategies we outlined so far, it’ll still put a dent in your overall approach to SEO.

Why?

Well, all the research, planning, and blogger outreach can take dozens of hours during a single workweek.

We’re talking about a full team tasked with this, and many companies don’t have the resources to form one. 

To sidestep this expense and climb up the SERPs, you can reach out to our team of experts at BlueTree.

Our link builders and outreach experts have been doing this for almost 7 years now, while our writing department involves developers, financial advisors, and software engineers—all seasoned experts in their respective fields.

If so, you’re likely overlooking the finer details, the crevices necessary to make your link building campaigns as impactful as possible. 

Furthermore, by working with us, you can:

On top of all this, every link building campaign we run is completely hands-off, which means all you have to do is read our updates and watch the changes on your Ahrefs page. 

If you want to take your brand to the next level and ensure your metrics match your dedication to developing a premium product, you also need premium, white label backlinks.

Contact our sales team to start building them today. 

Wrapping Up 

No backlink campaign is the same, but even something tailor-made to you and your brand can fall apart if you don’t pay attention to details.

This means going above and beyond when chasing unlinked brand mentions and personalizing your outreach even further. 

Likewise, you can capitalize on the fact that internal links and the content you create are completely under your control. At the end of the day, however, these efforts are unquestionably taxing.

BlueTree’s team of experts is at your disposal to take this weight off your shoulders, by methodically developing a backlink profile that’s worthy of The Louvre.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is the main difference between a link building strategy and a link building campaign?

A link building strategy is a long-term approach that outlines your general methods for acquiring backlinks. A link building campaign, on the other hand, is a short-term effort focused on building links to specific pages or content with the goal of improving their search engine rankings.

How does contextual relevance impact the effectiveness of a link building campaign?

Contextual relevance improves the impact of your backlinks by ensuring that the linked content aligns with the topic and intent of the site where it’s placed. This increases the likelihood of the link being considered valuable by search engines and boosts engagement from readers.

What is reverse outreach, and should I add it to my link building campaigns?

Reverse outreach involves creating content that is so valuable and unique that other sites naturally want to link to it. This strategy focuses on producing content that fills a gap in the market, which can lead to high-quality, organic backlinks without relying heavily on cold outreach.

Why should I consider leveraging niche directories in my link building campaign?

Niche directories are highly specific to certain industries or communities, making the backlinks you gain from them more relevant and authoritative. They can also help improve your visibility within your niche, leading to stronger SEO results.