Building links is arguably one of the most difficult and time-consuming aspects of SEO today. You may have set up what you believe is a great website, with great design, interesting content, and everything else. But without at least a minimum of quality back links to your site, you’ll struggle to rank in searches. And unfortunately, quality backlinks are becoming increasingly difficult to get.
An effective way to overcome this, and get yourself on a path to gain more backlinks naturally, is to focus on creating what we call “linkable assets” on your websites. These are unique, valuable and interesting pieces of content that naturally attract traffic, and, in turn, backlinks from other websites.
So, we know that having linkable assets will usually help you in growing your number of backlinks organically. But even for those that want more than that, and are looking to get a larger portfolio of diverse backlinks set up as fast as possible through a dedicated link building campaign, having multiple linkable assets on the website is essential.
Having articles, infographics, videos or images on your website that provide real value on a topic makes it much easier to work a link into a piece of content that we later pitch to bloggers and others as part of our link building campaign. And since most reputable bloggers and website owners will only allow links that provide real value to be included in articles they publish, chances that they will allow the article with the link to pass are dramatically improved.
A good linkable asset is first and foremost something that offers valuable information to website visitors. This is, in other words, information that cannot be easily found from other sources.
For example, a linkable asset could be a guide on a specific topic that goes into much more depth and is more actionable than other guides on the same topic. It could also be the result of original research that isn’t published elsewhere, or it could be a compilation of information that can only be found in fragmented form from a large number of sources.
And although many website owners tend to opt for an article when they set out to create a linkable asset, other forms of content shouldn’t be dismissed either. Among some of the best types of content for generating traffic and backlinks are explainer videos, infographics, posters, and various types of charts for visualizing data.
With content like this on your website, your link building efforts (whether you choose a passive approach or an active blogger outreach approach) will become a breeze. But without it, building links to your website will be much more difficult. And the links you do get may not even be very effective, given the lack of relevancy and value.
As a result of this, we always encourage our clients here at Nordic Links to make sure they have something that is worth linking to before they go out to acquire backlinks. This way, a link building campaign is far more likely to have a lasting effect on rankings for years to come.