This guide was last updated on the 10th of April, 2026. The updates were focused on link building strategies and digital PR methods which were not cited in the original guide. Further sections on guest post link building and citations were also added, as well as fleshing-out the digital PR link building section to include examples of specific tactics.
Wondering how you can build backlinks, and where to actually start?
Whether you’re new to link building and are wondering where to start, or if you’re a freelancer or agency owner looking for a bit of a refresh, it’s certainly fair to say that link building is going nowhere.
Backlinks and overall authority are certainly still some of the primary ranking factors in the world of search engine optimisation. However, even the more reputable digital strategists amongst us can struggle to land the types of links that move the needle.
I’ve put together a link building guide based on what has worked for myself and my clients. This will include some of the strategies you’ve heard before, and maybe some that you haven’t. Either way, I hope that you get something out of this.
You’ll also find video guides throughout, so if you’re looking for a guide that teaches you link building over-the-shoulder, then I’m here to help. This list is in no particular order either. Essentially, I want to show you what’s out there when it comes to link building in 2026, what’s actually working and where t focus your efforts (and budget).
It can be daunting to get started because there are just so many approaches that you can take. The below are the ones that consistently work for me, and ones that you can immediately look to get started on. Yes, some will take more time and money than others, but regardless, just getting started is often the hardest part. So, let’s get to it!
1. Journalist Requests
Google is increasingly forcing what were once black-hat SEO’s to be real marketers, and nothing is more original than jumping on PR opportunities at every turn in the hope of a link. This approach isn’t for everyone as it can be time consuming and frustrating, however the payoffs in terms of the types of sites that you can land a link on are huge.
I’ve been featured in sites like The Sun, The Telegraph, Lad Bible and The Mirror, all in the name of shameless self promotion and a link (occasionally, when they decide to actually provide one).
So, how can you find these types of opportunities either for your own PR efforts or for the purpose of building links and drumming up a bit of press for your clients?
Using #JournoRequest and Specific Platforms
By far the most well-known method is the #journorequest hashtag on X. Slightly spammed a bit more than a few years ago, it’s still a complete goldmine and one of the best places to get in touch with journalists directly (and, more often that not, get a quick reply from them).
There are also a couple of ways that you can speed the process of trawling through countless tweets to find something relevant to you:
- Add your niche into the search bar next to the hashtag. That way, you’re quickly filtering-down opportunities that are relevant to you
- Use a tool like JournoFinder or IfThisThenThat to email you relevant updates. With IFTTT, you can also choose whether you want to receive a slack, or however you’d prefer to get notified so that you’re not missing any opportunities
- Qwoted also lets you track hashtags specific to each source that you represent, whether that’s yourself, your team or your clients if you’re building backlinks for somebody else
- Press Loft is also great if you’ve got a bank of imagery and want to work with journalists on gifting and buyers guides. They often publish requests specific to guides that they’re writing, so don’t miss out if you’re looking to do ecommerce link building and land yourself on quality publications
A good 70% of all national press features I’ve landed from clients have come from either direct journo requests, or being able to rapidly message a relevant journalist on Twitter; this tool helps to shorten the process significantly.
You can also send press releases, send mass outreach emails in one go (other tools like Pitchbox are great for this also), and easily acquire journalist information. It might be expensive, but if you’re an agency owner with a team looking for mass outreach options, then it’s certainly worth checking it out. If you don’t have the money for tools, check out hunter.io.
The toolbar extension will attempt to find (and, in most cases, successfully will find) the email addresses of contacts associated to the website you’re on. For example, on my site, this is what you see:
Sign up to my newsletter to receive SEO freebies including a PDF guide to mastering journalist request link building. It covers the recommendations and approaches to take to reduce the amount of time it takes to land backlinks using this method.
Overall though, I would say the critical part of getting journalist request link building right is to seriously think about what the journalist is looking for based on the request they’ve put out. If they’re looking for a specific expert, and that’s not you or the person you represent, then 99% of the time it’s not worth replying.
You want to view this as a means of building relationships with journalists because, when done right, they will come back to you and ask for further responses later down the line. You don’t establish trust if you pitch them experts they can’t use, regardless of how good the response is.
2. Link Insertions / Niche Edits
There’s still a bit of an argument on this point, but from testing extensively I’ve seen niche edits work incredibly well. The argument for the effectiveness is that a link within content that is already aged and indexed will be just as, if not more effective than a link coming from a fresh piece of content.
One of the main arguments against niche edits is that, unless the content in question has sustained traffic and authority, the inserted link will not gain any benefit from the insertion.
I’ve seen this work for my sites before, and my advice would be to only get links from sites relevant to your niche, and to not go too exact-match with the anchor text. Generally, if you’re in the market to buy links, you’ll usually find that niche edits/link insertions are cheaper than a fresh post anyway. Food for thought!
In terms of a process for landing link insertions, you should be looking to:
- Find bloggers and publishers in your niche who have written about either topics or specific clusters that relate to your target keywords. This is particularly important if you’re looking to land links to a hyper-specific page or article
- Look at the traffic and links coming into that page. Does it consistently get traffic? Does it have any links pointing to it? If this all looks good, then look at the domain as a whole to assess quality in a similar way
- Is the publisher linking-out to any other sites recently, in a way that would suggest they’ll be open to a link insertion?
- When it comes to pitching, I usually offer to completely revamp their content, not just adding a sentence or a new paragraph. If I can see an article has traffic but hasn’t been updated in a while, then that’s a great opportunity to reach out and do it for them, and just ask for the link insertion as part of the process
3. Digital PR
Surveys
I’ve already touched on this point, but I can’t stress it enough. Creating these types of authority landing pages via stats and data then using them to pass authority back to your primary pages is one of the best ways to use outreach to your benefit. You’re creating your own linkable asset in the form of a data piece that, if done correctly, should continue to get data. You then also have full control over the anchor text you use back to the pages you want to rank (and the anchor text can then be updated and amended as required).
So, where do you start with creating this type of content? First, you’re going to either need budget for a survey, or the time to collate existing data and put a spin on it. When it comes to surveys, I’d recommend using something simple like Survey Monkey. When it comes to finding existing data to put a spin on, have a look at Statista.
Often the hardest part of creating this page is landing on an idea that sticks, and something that you know will have a high chance of gaining traction in the outreach arena. One of the best ways to do this is to review existing pages from competitor sites, and look at how you can make these better. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel here either. Try to find pages that have done well in terms of their quality referring domain count (bonus points if they have secured press coverage). How can you make this data better?
For example, for one of my clients I started to research around office hygiene, and noticed that no current datasets or surveys had mentioned hot-desking vs standard offices. And, some of these pages had managed to gain some quality links just off the back of some standard questions.
So, I took this idea of office hygiene with the angle of surveying office workers about their everyday office hygiene, with a comparison to how hygienic hot-desking is against the standard office environment. I then used hunter.io to obtain journalist information, and pre-outreached the idea to them in order to ensure that I was on the right track before paying for survey data. Here’s a reply from a journalist, which was actually one of the news websites that my client ended up getting a link from because of the finished piece:
Taking these extra steps may seem like a bit of a chore, but if you can get validation for your idea from the types of people who will be actively linking to you, then it’s certainly worth doing (and can save you a lot of wasted time and budget in the long run).
If you don’t have survey data to use, then don’t worry. There are other ways that we can look at using data to land press links.
Passive Stats & Data Pages
Having already referenced Statista, this is easily one of the best places to source data specific to a variety of niches. I would recommend looking outside of this too, but it’s a great place to start. You then also want to look at who else has supplied their own data, essentially other sources you can quote to make this as well-rounded a resource as possible. Just make sure you attribute a link to whoever you’re quoting.
I would also look at the types of questions that journalists are likely to ask in relation to your stats page. For example, if you’re doing a stats page on SEO, then one common question might be ‘How is Google’s market share growing in 2026’? You want to do specific keyword research here to really understand what questions journalists are going to be asking as a way of finding your data hub, not simply just ‘niche + stats + year’ searches.
Data League Tables
These are great, but can take a little bit of time to do. If you’re not tech-savvy, I recommend finding someone who can extract the data for you, particularly if you’re having to scrape data or get insights from websites that is going to take a lot of time to do manually.
League tables work because you’re able to broaden your outreach opportunities. For example, here’s a league table I created for a piece on ‘the best UK cities for freelancers‘ (click the link for the full data, and here’s a quick screenshot below):
This league table included data for each city, with points such as:
- Monthly cost of living
- Hourly freelancer rates
- Average Wi-Fi speeds
- Coworking spaces per 100k residents
- Networking events per 100k residents
I then created a methodology element to the study to show where the data came from. This was done as part of a press release, just to show exactly where all of the data was coming from.
The great thing about this is, you can do a national press release with the overall data, then also do press releases to local news sites based on the winners and losers. It’s such a good way of broadening your outreach scope, by still using the one piece of research data.
Google Keyword Planner Data
You can also use keyword planner data to show the most searched-for keywords in certain cities. You can then put releases together to show which cities are the most ‘obsessed’ or ‘best’ for a certain cluster. For example, if we were doing one on gaming-obsessed cities, then we could look at search volumes across console types, popular games per-console and gaming events in each city.
I’d recommend using keyword planner for this, as you can’t often get city-level keyword volumes from SEO tools.
Google Trends
When there’s a big event, it’s interesting to see how interests spike based on something happening. You can then use this data to provide opinions to journalists, presenting your expert opinion on a topic they’re already likely going to cover.
For example, when Kendrick Lamar played at the Super Bowl, I saw searches for ‘bell bottom jeans’ spike significantly because of the pair he was wearing. If you’re then in the fashion niche, you’ve got a great opportunity to use this data and provide expert commentary on a topical event.
If you like this topic on using data for digital PR as a form of link building, you can see more in the below videos:
This is all well and good but, when does getting a link actually happen through digital PR?
I hear you. Landing a link through any sort of national press sites can be a difficult thing to do, and even when you get one they’re likely to be no-followed (don’t let this put you off though, as these links contribute to a perfectly healthy link profile overall). Here are the three most common ways of influencing a link that have worked best for me so far:
- Links within press releases or pre-written content – These tend to work best on the more specific types of industry sites, for example if you have a client in the engineering sector and you’re outreaching to ancient journalists who don’t know how to remove links from a word doc, so they’ll just keep it in when they paste the press release to their site. Naturally, national press journos can be a lot more savvy, so unless you’re linking to data or a study, you may struggle here (it’s certainly not unattainable though).
- Link via image attribution – One of the better ways to either easily get a link, or directly request a link from a press feature. If it’s an image you’ve taken and they’re using it, you need to be attributed. So, directly request an attribution via a link to your site. Again, this doesn’t work every time, but it’s always worth a try.
- Link to a study or dataset – By far the easiest way to land a link, especially in press features. If you have a really interesting landing page with a load of stats and data from a survey you’ve done, the journalist or blogger almost has to link to it, otherwise the piece would be pretty much redundant without it. It’s also easier to approach sites who have not linked when you’re guilt tripping them into saying you’ve spent all that time and effort on putting the data together, so the least they can do is link to it!
You then use this page, which will have its own authority because of the referring domains, to pass authority back to the pages that you do want to rank via exact match internal links. This approach is much safer and much more natural than actually shooting a load of links to the pages you do want to rank and hoping for the best…
4. Infographic Outreach
If you’ve already paid for the data and landed the outreach links you wanted to go after, what’s next? Creating an infographic and putting it on the data landing page will increases the chances of the page appearing in image search results, and also it’s another link opportunity as you can request that any sharing of the infographic requires attribution in the form of a link back to your site (or to your client).
I don’t think this approach perhaps work as well as it used to but, it’s certainly not completely dead. Image link building in general is a passive method of acquiring links, and infographics just give that extra justification to share a data piece, and to give publishers the option to link to either the data landing page itself, or an image alternative.
5. Guest posts
When I mean guest posts here, I don’t mean just searching for ‘free guest providers’ and working through a list of questionable websites that will link to anyone and everyone without a thought as to their own quality and protecting the authority of their website.
Guest posting in this sense refers to actually reaching out to websites in your industry, and genuinely forming a partnership with them to provide quality content that actually makes sense for them to publish. You’re genuinely establishing a relationship with the person behind the website, and providing content that they’re proud to have on their website.
Instead of just searching for ‘industry‘ and ‘write for us‘ and those types of variants, you want to have a process that looks more at providing value outside of what they’re already covering.
Let’s take a link building agency as an example, just in the context of this article. If I wanted to try and get a link to my homepage or to this article and decided to approach a link building agency, I would work on the following process to land a guest post:
- Research the agencies that I genuinely think are providing a quality service, with websites that actually receive relevant traffic based on the content they’re publishing
- Assess their websites to ensure they’re not artificially inflating any metrics or have questionable links from shady places
- Look at how they like to write their content. Is it long-form guides, or shorter pieces? Depending on the type, you can tailor your pitch based on what they’re likely to approve e.g. a shorter series of articles or spending time on a huge guide to compliment their others
- You have to have an understanding of their niche to know what they’re missing. I would use a guide like this to look at the broader types of outreach methods, and then the guides I can write for them based on that. With that in mind, what are they missing?
- For example, they may mention ‘podcast link building’ but not actually have a dedicated guide to it. That’s a really natural one for me to then pitch because they’ve a) referenced it before and b) will understand the value from the pitch
Guest posting can work really well as a means of getting links from other websites in your niche, you just have to be willing to do the research and look at it more as a long-term relationship building process rather than a quick-win method to obtaining relevant links.
When it comes to price, guest post outreach is often one of my favourite methods of low-cost link building because, once you’ve established a relationship, it’s more about the time to write an article than it ever is about paying for backlinks.
For more low-cost link building methods, check out the below video:
6. Blogger outreach
Blogger outreach is a great way of finding niche publishers who are willing to work with you. It can work in many ways but, the most common ways I’ve seen work are:
- Providing content for free (often with a publishing fee)
- Providing product gifting
- Providing social shares and shoutouts in exchange for content being publisher onto their site
What I would say about blogger outreach is that, unless you’re in a niche where there are lots of bloggers, then you might need to widen your net when it comes to the types of bloggers you want to work with. For example, travel as a niche is going to have way more bloggers than logistics does, but you could always look to outreach to broader business and tech sites instead of stopping at logistics (if that’s your industry).
In terms of vetting bloggers, focus on:
- Whether they actually get traffic to their site
- Evidence that they’re not constantly linking-out to grey niches
- Evidence of social media activity, or at least proof that they’re a real person and not an AI content farm with fake experts
You can see how this sheet works in the below video:
@jamestaylorseo How to start analysing website quality for link building purposes #seo #seotraining #learnseo #searchengineoptimization #seotips #digitalmarketing #marketing #seotiktok #seoforbeginners #backlinks #linkbuilding #bloggeroutreach #linkbuildingseo #linkbuildingtips
There’s always going to be some sort of compromise with blogger outreach because of the pool of bloggers that you’re working in, regardless of niche. These are not going to be overly-niche specific in the same way as landing guests posts on niche websites via relationship building, nor are they going to be at the same level as news websites. What they are though is a great way of establishing link velocity, and building external trust through publishers that genuinely want to shout about your brand. I’ve done a deeper breakdown of how this all works in a blogger outreach guide.
This can work for all niches but, generally, I find blogger outreach works best for:
- Travel
- Interior Design
- Beauty
- Personal Finance
- Fashion
- DIY
- Real Estate
- Fitness
- Parenting
7. Podcasts
Podcasts offer a very natural and logical way to land a link on a relevant site. Whatever podcast you feature on will naturally mention your business and what it is you do, and they will more than likely publish the podcast across multiple platforms. Each site it is published on then means more opportunity for a brand mention, and more importantly, a link.
It’s also great for actively proving authority across your niche because, you’re getting out there across trusted platforms with other brands that are likely also as authoritative as you are. So, from a traditional PR and trust perspective, you’re on to a clear winner with podcasts before you even start to think about the backlink benefits.
8. Citations & Directories
These are still huge for new websites, and for local SEO in particular. These types of link validate what you do, who you are and your location, however, not all of them are made equal.
If you’ve ever used citation services before, you’ll quickly realise that many of them don’t actually get any traffic even at the top-level of the domain, let alone within the specific section that you’re likely to have your business listed in. Yes, you can look for citation site lists and, some of them will be legit, but my advice for building these is as follows:
- Start by just looking for citation lists updated for 2026, and paste the root domain into Ahrefs/SEMrush etc to get an idea of whether they do actually get traffic. Look at their recent listings too and run a site: search on the URL. Is it actually getting indexed? This approach is great for broader citations as a means of getting the process underway
- For specific industry citations or smaller directory sites, run a competitor link intersect. In fact, run multiple, and start to build-out a solid list of citations specific to your niche. Note that some you’ll have to pay for, but most sites, it’s never usually that much.
- Then, sort traffic in the tool you’re using to over 500 at the root domain level. You’ll quickly see many of the sites drop-off. This is what you want. There’s no point in wasting your time signing up to directory sites that have little to no traffic, unless you really identify one that is used by your customers regardless (which is often unlikely, but not unheard of)
Conclusion
This has been a bit of a quick overview based on the types of link building tactics that work well in 2026. As search engines inevitably update their measures against manual link building and trends implode within the industry, I’ll come back and update this guide as it necessary.
If you’re struggling with building links for your site or for your clients, then give me a shout via the contact form.
