The question I often get asked when a new website owner starts to learn SEO is what are the types of links that I should be building?
I think this is a little different to ‘how can I do link building’, as it assumes that you know what backlinks are and how to get them, but you’re not sure on the types of backlinks that you need. And it’s a fair question.
Ultimately, link building is a long-term strategy, something that never really ‘ends’ (and let’s be honest, does SEO ever really ‘end’ either?). So, you’re going to want to take the right approaches from the outset so that you’re not looking back in 12 months time to realise that the approach you were taking either hasn’t moved the needle like you hoped, or it was completely misaligned with the activity of your competitors and what you need to be doing within your niche.
There are multiple ways to approach link building, but how can you start to prioritise certain approaches or certain strategies? This article is here to point you in the right direction.
If you’re more of a visual learner then make sure you check out my video on this topic, with examples of the types of backlinks you should be building (and how to build them) below:
Where to start with building backlinks for a brand new website
1. Local Citations & Directories
Ultimately these are a quick win when it comes to link building. Building these types of links is a manual process, so it’s not something that is overly creative (sorry!). But, especially for a new site that doesn’t have any links, it’s a really nice way of getting that initial traction.
If you wanted to outsource the entire process you could use a service like Bright Local, or perhaps even hire a VA to do the filling-in of the directories for you, or you can put some time aside to do this type of link building yourself.
The way that I like to do it is to see what has actually been indexed already in relation to our competition. With a lot of the submission services, you’re going to be listed on sites that won’t even get indexed or pass little to no authority, so at least by using the Ahrefs link intersect tool you can see the types of directories that your competitors are signed-up to and, most importantly, those that are actually getting indexed.
So at least this way, you might have less directory links compared to a submission service, but you can see that they’ve been indexed by reverse engineering the citations already obtained by your competition.
What I would say is that these are not only good for local SEO to really solidify your business name, address and phone number (NAP), but from an indexing side it just helps to get those initial off-page signals pointing to the site (but don’t stress too much about trying to get hundreds of these types of links, Focus on quality links from directories and citations that get traffic and whose links actually get indexed, then move on to the below recurring strategies that I’ve put together below).
2, Journalist Request Platforms & Proactive Expert Commentary
I love journalist request link building because of a few reasons:
- Links typically point to the homepage of your site with a branded anchor (very natural)
- Many of the platforms are charging people to be on there, which means reduced spam and an increased trust in the platform from the side of the journalists
- You can set up systems to respond to requests daily, meaning that you’re spreading the potential of a feature across multiple responses in any given weekly/monthly period
I’ve offered this as a standalone service and within my managed SEO packages for years, plus it’s a staple for my own portfolio of sites. Why? Because it really helps to build brand trust and authority in a way that doesn’t rely on time-intensive, larger digital PR campaigns… It’s the time to write a good response, and then move on.
My favourite platforms for this type of link building at the time of writing are:
If you sign up to my newsletter you’ll get my SEO resources hub link which contains, amongst other things, a PDF with tips on how to get started with journalist request link building specifically. You’ll find more tips in there but, just to give you an overview on the types of things I would focus on if I was doing this for a new site:
- Go out of your way to show the journalist you’re an expert. Have social profiles, LinkedIn, YouTube, research papers (if applicable), imagery, anything you can within your email signature to make it easy for the journalist to ‘vet’ you as a trusted source
- Don’t just search the requests and find an answer from an existing article or via an AI tool. Put something together that is unique
- Think about what the journalist is looking for in the context of their article – Does your response align with what they’re wanting to see?
- If a site doesn’t link-out but does feature you, reach out for a link, but don’t pester. Also, make sure that you keep a log of the sites that link, don’t link, and even if they do link, what type of link are they giving?
You can take this one step further too and create expert commentary campaigns and send them to journalists, rather than waiting for the request to come to you.
For example, with one of my clients, we looking at “cleaning expert” “reveals” and “I’m a cleaning expert” to see what the opportunities were based on the last 12 months of coverage. So for example, we could do something like oven cleaning tips or air fryer cleaning tips in a release timed for December when most people are cooking and have their family over (this actually something we did around oven cleaning tips!).
3. Data Campaigns
Data campaigns are what I’d class as more of the traditional PR campaign approach to link building. You’re putting a unique spin or take on data that relates to your industry, in a way that presents that data as a story.
For example, let’s say you operate a website in the fitness niche, then this could be data pieces like:
- The best UK cities for running enthusiasts (looking at the number of parks, access to gyms, cost of gyms, number of running shops, number of running coaches in the area)
- The most fitness-obsessed cities in the UK (looking at the average number of fitness-equipment or gym-related searches per 100,000 residents)
- The most Instagramable gyms in the UK (look at the number of tags and # for gyms across the country to see which is the ‘best’ from an aesthetics/Instagram perspective)
The reason why I tend to focus on the UK or US here is so that the ‘winners’ and the ‘losers’ of the city or state can then also have their own press releases. So, you can do a national press release based on the findings, then let’s say Manchester was the best city for running, you could create a Manchester-specific release for local journalists too, increasing the chances of landing a link.
I’ve seen it before where the fifth and sixth-best cities in a data piece cover the story but the ‘winner’ didn’t, so you never know who’s actually going to give you the coverage!
When it comes to getting the data, you can go to sources like:
And, when it comes to ideation, make sure you put a document together so that you can really flesh-out your ideas. Ask questions like:
- What’s the campaign name and what will the title be?
- What’s the summary of the data and the ‘why’ behind it?
- Why is it a good idea?
- What are the data sources that we can get?
- Has this been done before (which could indicate potential success)?
- Can we put a new angle on something that has been done before or find data more specific to our industry?
When it comes to finding journalists, if you’ve got a bit of budget, you can use tools like Muck Rack or Roxhill. For those starting out though, you can use a tool like Hunter.io to find the emails of journalists, which is much more of a manual process, but it’s way cheaper than some of the bigger tools that you can get hold of.
4. Statistics Pages & Tools
Stats and data pages specifically are great because you can often get backlinks in a passive manner, and then use the authority from the pages with your links to internally link to the commercial pages across your site.
Journalists and publishers also love to link to these types of data pieces and hubs, even if it’s not your original data.
By that, I mean that you don’t literally have to find the data for, say, gardening statistics, and only use the survey data that you put together. You can create a resource of gardening statistics by finding the most interesting stats for that year or time period, and make sure you reference where you found the data.
Ultimately, you’re not getting the link because of your unique data, you’re getting it because you compiled and ranked the most comprehensive data resource on that topic, and that’s what wins you the link.
5. Blogger Outreach & Niche Edits
And them finally we have blogger outreach and link insertions or ‘niche edits’.
I feel like this approach gets a bit of a bad reputation because it’s often linked to spammy guest posts and private blog networks, but it can still work very well if you take the time to vet the websites you’re outreaching to.
In the same newsletter I mentioned before, you also get access to a blogger analysis template. It’s by no means exhaustive, but it puts you in the mindset of understanding what quality looks like and how you can start to understand what a ‘good’ blogger site is.
You can also see an example of the analysis sheet here: https://www.tiktok.com/@jamestaylorseo/video/7402568748290280736
For example, points to consider include:
- Have they been hit heavily by recent algorithm updates (I appreciate that many bloggers were hit somewhat unfairly by the Helpful Content Updates, but if you’re seeing a huge decline in a short period of time, then it could genuinely suggest spam)?
- Do they link out to casino, forex, and any grey niches excessively?
- Do they have an active social presence?
- Are they relying too much on blatant AI usage?
- Is there a ‘real’ author behind the blog?
- When you contact them, do they just give you a backlink price and nothing else? What are their content policies and vetting procedures?
- Do they have ‘Write for us’ pages and banner links to odd niches?
The same goes if you’re trying to get link insertions into an existing piece of content too. Whether it’s a fresh piece of content or a link in something the blogger already has, make sure that you have a process to know what ‘good’ is, and what your quality vetting process is aiming towards.
In terms of actually finding bloggers to work with, I like to take the approach of how their audience would actually find them. So let’s say we operate a nursery and we’re looking to work with parenting bloggers, we might search something like ‘Peppa Pig World Review’. It’s the type of thing that a parenting blogger would write about, right?
We can then scrape the SERP to find parenting bloggers and start to vet their authority using the aforementioned checks. We can also see who they’re linking out to within Ahrefs > Outgoing Links > Sort by first seen.
Are they linking out to anyone else in similar niches and, if so, can we then run their website through Ahrefs too to see who else they’re getting links from?
As you can see, this process can take up some time, but it’s a great way of finding genuine bloggers to work with and get a real understanding of how similar sites to yours are also conducting blogger outreach specifically.
In Conclusion
So, there you have the approaches that you can take to start to build links to a new website, and really start to get those trust signals flooding in from external sources.
To round this off I would say that it’s so important to focus on quality over quantity, so don’t feel like you need to just get a higher number of backlinks than your competitors. Focus on the strategies and approaches that will actually pass genuine authority to your site, and establish yourself (and your brand) as a trusted source.
