Key Takeaways
Importance of Niche-Relevance: Niche-relevant backlinks, coming from topically related websites, are vital for effective SEO strategies. They not only boost site authority but also outperform unrelated links in terms of influence.
Diverse Sources for Backlinks: While direct competitors are unlikely to provide backlinks, local businesses like plumbers, for example, can benefit from links from tangentially-related sectors such as HVAC, home renovation, and property management.
Strategies for Acquiring Links: Effective methods to gain niche-relevant backlinks include creating linkable content, link reclamation, broken link building, testimonial link building, leveraging journalist queries, and using unique images for potential backlinks.
Caution in Link Building: Avoid reliance on guest posts and paid link insertions from potentially toxic domains. Instead, focus on a diverse, natural-looking backlink profile and gradually build your links to avoid penalties and maximize benefits.
What are Niche-Relevant Backlinks?
Niche-relevant backlinks come from websites covering the same or similar topics with their content.
Topical relevance doesn’t need to be strict, especially for local business websites.
You might assume that a local plumber should seek backlinks from other local plumbing websites for niche relevance.
However, this is basically impossible, as it would require gaining backlinks from direct competitors, which rarely occurs in the real world.
Instead, a local plumber should aim for backlinks from tangentially-related niches like home renovation and remodeling, HVAC, property management, home inspection, and so on.
How Valuable are These Links for SEO?
Niche-relevant backlinks are extremely valuable for SEO.
They’re the bread and butter of every link-building campaign.
Backlinks serve as votes for your content, and those from niche-relevant sites are more influential than those from unrelated sources.
Such backlinks pass a lot of ‘link juice’ or site authority from the referring domain to your website.
Even for backlinks from weaker domains, topical relevancy reigns supreme as a factor in judging the value of a backlink.
How to Get Niche-Relevant Backlinks
There are several tried and tested ways to obtain niche-relevant backlinks:
- Creating linkable assets – crafting information-dense content like statistical posts, case studies, whitepapers, and checklists designed to attract backlinks.
- Link reclamation – identifying unlinked mentions of your business and reaching out to convert these mentions into links.
- Broken link building – locating broken links that previously connected to topically similar pages and proposing your content as a replacement.
- Testimonial link building – offering reviews for tools and services relevant to your niche with the hope of securing a linked mention on their websites.
- Serving as a resource to journalists – responding to journalist queries on platforms like Connectively or Source of Sources in hopes of being featured in their articles.
- Image link building – uploading unique, high-quality images to royalty-free platforms, aiming to convert them into backlinks eventually.
- Citations and reputable industry directories – particularly valuable for local businesses, these links are straightforward to acquire and beneficial, even though they’re usually NoFollow and don’t pass on ‘link juice’.
Cautionary Advice When Building Niche-Relevant Backlinks
You’ll notice that I haven’t included guest posts and link insertions in the previous section.
That’s because there’s a big pitfall in paying for links on toxic domains that exist solely to sell backlinks.
More often than not, you’ll waste time and resources as Google will likely ignore those links, and they could even harm your rankings.
If you can properly vet the domains or have a trusted link vendor, definitely consider guest posting and link insertions for your link-building strategy.
Another piece of advice is to diversify your link-building methods and maintain a natural-looking backlink profile.
Don’t focus exclusively on one link-building method, especially for newer domains that lack a diverse backlink profile.
Lastly, avoid building too many backlinks quickly.
A safe approach is starting with 5-10 links the first month for a new site, or 10-15 for an established one.
After that, you can increase the number by 5 each month, capping at around 30 per month.
At that point, it’s much more beneficial to focus on the quality rather than the quantity of backlinks.