When trying to improve SEO for your webpage, backlinks are a great way to optimize. Backlinks, in simple terms, are links to your webpage from another page, which search rankings generally consider a “vote” for the authority of that webpage. In addition, outside of SEO, backlinking can create clicks for your website in general.
In practice, high-quality backlinks can be harder to come by than you might expect, particularly when you’re looking for free options. So where do you find the best free high-quality backlinks in 2021?
Find Unlinked Brand Mentions
This one is simple and effective—oftentimes, people may mention your brand but not backlink it in a way that is actually useful to generating clicks for you. By scouring for the internet for unlinked brand mentions, you can find organic places to link your content and also help improve the quality of others’ webpages in the process.
Be Featured by a Resource Page
There are many sites out there on the internet that focus on providing lists of resources to other information—for example, a list of repositories of information about car maintenance, or a list of resources for increasing website SEO.
If you can find resource pages relevant to your brand or product, reaching out to the owner of the webpage can often help land you a spot on their list and links from viewers interested in their content.
Outdo the Competition
Sometimes, you’ll find that all the articles written on a given topic related to your brand are low-quality and uninformative. Although that’s a bummer for people who searched that topic for you, you should consider it an opportunity.
Taking that poorly-covered topic, writing a better article, and promoting that content can help you gather new clicks, receive backlinks from other brands interested in the same area, and optimize your SEO going forward.
Use the Right Content Format
The truth of the matter is that some content strategies work better than others. For example, list posts are a clear winner in the content game, with honorable showings from quizzes, “why” posts, “how to” posts, infographics, and videos.
In fact, list posts have an average total shares of about 11k, while the next-best format, quizzes, had only about 1.5k average total shares. When looking for free high quality backlinks in 2021, lists clearly seem like the best way to go.
Update Outdated References
The truth is that most companies aren’t around, or around in their current form, forever. If a competitor in your area has died out, been acquired, or otherwise changed drastically, their linked brand mentions across the internet may now be useless.
Reaching out to the owners of those webpages offering to substitute your (relevant) links, or even changing those links yourself where you can, can go a long way towards generating clicks.
These are only some of the many strategies for finding free high quality backlinks in 2021; the gist of all of them is simply creating killer content and then making sure you find its audience. Finding the right backlinks might cost you a lot of legwork, at least at first, but it’s more than worth the effort. And eventually, as your backlinks help grow your brand, they’ll start doing the legwork for you.
