Why does broken link building work?
We absolutely love broken link building.
Why? Not because it’s easy. Trust us; it’s not.
Firstly, it’s legitimate, white hat SEO that adds value to both parties.
Google doesn’t like broken links. They make it harder for Google’s software or Bots to crawl your web pages.
This negatively impacts your search engine rankings. So Webmasters with broken links on their pages already have the motivation to exchange dead links for live ones.
And our client’s score because they gain a relevant backlink to their site.
Secondly, when done right, there’s a high ROI.
And it’s that high return on investment that makes us popular with our clients. We’ve successfully landed links to previously broken pages or articles.
The ROI stems from creating awesome, relative articles that appeal to the web admins we reach out to and our client’s target audience. This ensures that they gain a wider, natural audience from our articles.
So, what does our broken link building service involve?
You can break the Broken link-building process down into a basic skeleton structure.
- Find broken pages with backlinks
- Vet the backlinks
- Create a replacement article
- Start an Outreach Campaign
It doesn’t matter who you ask, this is always the basic structure of a broken link-building campaign. But there’s a lot of effort that goes into each one of these components.
We use the Ahrefs platform for most of our link-building campaigns as it provides us with a lot of useful data and allows us to apply the right filters to hone in on only the very best high-quality links for our customers.
Our process for broken link building
It’s top secret. We can’t tell you about it.
Kidding.
Here’s the short story of how we go about our link-building campaigns. Keep in mind that this is just a rough sketch of what we do with each campaign, as we try to tailor our campaigns to the needs of each client.
Step #1 – Finding broken pages with backlinks
We use Ahrefs site explorer to find competitors broken links.
Here’s a broken link report from a sample website.
As you can see, we can filter out broken links by their dofollow or nofollow tag, their referring domains, and URL rating, meaning that we weed out any prospects that would be a waste of time right from the beginning.
We also try to find backlinks that are relevant to the customer. We do this by only searching for articles about specific topics. Topics that will interest our customer’s target audience.
Step #2 – Vetting the backlinks
Some SEO specialists will build many low-quality backlinks. On the surface, the campaign seems to be a success – But these low-quality links don’t really add value.
We don’t.
As we’ve said time and again, one good link is worth more than 20 bad ones. So we make sure that we only ever reach out to pages that will really add value to our customer’s websites.
We apply filters to our link-checking process. These filters ensure that our target websites and audiences meet the right criteria for our customers. They include the following
- Domain Authority
We only build links from websites that have a DR30 or more. We do this because we believe that lower-rated websites won’t pass on any significant ranking quality to our clients and thus do not help them gain online visibility soon enough.
- Language
Gaining a link from a website that is outside the scope of your target language is going to bring the wrong audience to your pages.
For example, a Thaispeaking audience won’t be genuinely interested in an article written in English. Your page won’t benefit from this audience and Google Knows that.
- Region
This is especially important when building links for eCommerce sites that handle shipping. We build links to pages that feature in the target audience demographic region of the website owners.
- Volume
Gaining a broken link from a page with very little search intent or search volume doesn’t move the needle. We apply filters to ensure that when we build a link, enough people are searching for a term on a monthly basis.
This adds lasting value to your clients.
By applying these filters and others, we can sift out the good backlink from those simply not worth pursuing.
It’s worth mentioning that this part of the process is not automated. We do this manually.
Yes, it might be painstaking at times, but we believe that an actual human being is needed to differentiate a good link from a bad one. There are too many fake websites out there, and the human eye will often pick up what AI misses.
Step #3 – Creating a replacement article
It’s tempting to simply recreate the article and ask webmasters to link to it.
But this copy-and-paste method isn’t a good idea. That’s because people link to articles for various reasons.
There might be an infographic on a page that they really like. They could be referencing a statement or another bit of data.
We make sure that we understand exactly why someone linked to an article before we create a replacement piece.
We then do keyword research and after that, our wordsmiths start with the writing process.
And lastly, our editors go through the article with a fine tooth comb. They ensure that the quality of the article is such that nobody can refuse to link to the content.
Step #4 – Starting an Outreach Campaign
Before reaching out to potential websites, we make sure to personalize each of our outreach emails.
Each link prospect receives an email saying, “hey, we’re talking to you.” They’re way more likely to open our emails and respond positively when we do this.
Our secret to success is the time we take to prepare for our campaigns, ensuring that the pages are relevant and that the prospects meet all the criteria.
Ideally, we try to reach out to about 1000 potential websites with our outreach campaigns. This should give us enough room to separate links worth pursuing from those that don’t make sense financially.
How much does our broken link building service cost?
Our once-off package costs $1,250 for 5 quality links.
That’s $250 per link with a minimum of 5 links ordered.
What does that include?
We will create and oversee the 4 step process outlined in this article with full transparency to our clients.
We also write the articles that we’ll pitch to link prospects during the campaign. These articles are optimized to rank well on google’s search results and are of the highest quality.
If you’d like to find out more about a broken link-building campaign, contact us here and we’ll get in touch within 24 hours.