5 Types of Content That Help With Link Building

Building links is a critical part of SEO. External links to your website act as signals to notify search engines that your website is high-quality and deserves a higher ranking. Moreover, these links are an indication that you run a reputable brand that other brands find trustworthy. When it comes to link building, content is...

Building links is a critical part of SEO. External links to your website act as signals to notify search engines that your website is high-quality and deserves a higher ranking. Moreover, these links are an indication that you run a reputable brand that other brands find trustworthy.

When it comes to link building, content is king. Producing high-quality content on a regular basis helps you boost your brand’s backlink health and ensure consistently high rankings on search engines.

If you want to ramp up your link building efforts, these five types of content will help you achieve your goals.

  • Blog posts

It doesn’t matter what brand you have or what products and services you sell. Your website needs to have a blog page. It’s as simple as that.

Virtually every brand out there maintains a blog page on their website.

Blog posts are great drivers of organic web traffic, but they’re much more than that. When you publish informative and authoritative blog posts that contain relevant data, you are bound to get links from other websites that cite your content as reference.

It’s also important to update and republish your blog posts, especially if they’re already a year old. This prevents the information on your blog posts from becoming obsolete and keeps them relevant to your readers.

  • Infographics

Well-designed infographics grab the attention of your audience. Infographics are also far more visually appealing than purely text-based content. This makes infographic content a lot easier to digest, especially if the subject matter is complex or includes a significant amount of data.

The very nature of an infographic lends itself well to link building. Since infographics are images, they are much easier to share than text-based content. When you publish quality infographics, you are bound to not only get external links from other websites but also brands who will likely your infographics on their social media pages.

  • Research, data, and statistics

Doing your own research and publishing original data requires a lot of time and effort, but it’s a great way to obtain external links. When other brands or websites in your industry discuss the same topic, chances are high that they will cite your data.

Say you published data on content marketing statistics for 2019. Other brands who discuss or specialize content marketing will be compelled to link to your data when they publish blog posts related to content marketing.

  • Lists

There are multiple types of lists you can create.

You can write a long-form article that lists down items related to a specific topic. (This article is an example of a list.) Another good example of a list is content that provides tips on how to solve a problem within a certain niche (ex. “10 Ways To Write SEO-Friendly Content”)

A list can also be content that aggregates resources for a specific niche. You don’t exactly help the reader solve the problem, you just lead them to the best resources that can.

Neil Patel’s 78 Link Building Resources is an excellent example of this type of list. In the post, Neil Patel links to various guides that talk about link building, including strategies and think pieces. This list is a helpful tool for anyone looking for in-depth knowledge on the subject of link building.

  • Whitepapers and Ebooks

Compared to a standard blog post, whitepapers and ebooks are much more holistic and offer deeper insight and more complex thoughts on a subject. Although whitepapers and ebooks require heavy research as well as many manhours and effort to complete, the link building benefits are worth it.

This is because publishing a 2,000 to 3,000-word whitepaper or ebook filled with valuable insight allows you to show your expertise in your field. It also makes you more authoritative, which is great for branding and SEO.

With a thoroughly-researched and well-written whitepaper or ebook, you’ll be perceived as a leader in your industry. This significantly increases your chances of getting external links from other websites.

Promote your content with email marketing

Keep in mind that you don’t have to create all these types of content for your brand. Figure out one or two content types that match your brand and go with those—at least for the time being. It’s easy to switch things up later on if you think things aren’t going as well as you originally planned.

Once you’ve published new content, you can maximize link building results by promoting your content through email marketing. Here are a few tips on how you can go about it.

  • Segment your list. – Segment your list according to topics that subscribers would be interested in as well as what types of content they would likely engage with. For example, you could create a segment of subscribers that you could send blog posts to and then a different segment for list posts.
  • Send out surveys – In addition to segmenting your list, you can also send an email survey to your subscribers and ask them what type of content they would be interested in.
  • Allow social sharing – Place prominent social media sharing buttons on emails promoting your content. This encourages engaged subscribers to share your content on their social media pages. Giving your subscribers the opportunity to spread the word can expand your audience exponentially, which is crucial for link building.

Wrap up

If you want to build links, then you definitely need to produce more content. That being said, it’s not just about publishing one blog post after another. You have to decide which types of content your audience would be interested in and which types of content would suit your branding. Just because you see a competitor publishing list articles on a daily basis, that doesn’t mean you have to do the same.

After determining what types of content would work well for your brand, promote your content via email marketing in order to achieve better link building results.

To know more link building strategies, try this advanced guide on link building.

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Ash Salleh is the Director of SEO at Campaign Monitor, where he works closely with content, copy, and analytics teams to improve site-wide optimization. Prior to his time at Campaign Monitor, he also provided SEO and digital marketing expertise at Zappos and Axiata Digital.