Hi Reader,

Backlink building is a topic that's very confusing and often overwhelming for business owners and Squarespace website designers. It was a mystery to me in the beginning as well!

In this month's newsletter, I'll break down all of the different ways you can do backlink building with a list of several resources to jumpstart things.

☆ For those of you who are in my Squarespace SEO course, I just uploaded this information to a new module dedicated to backlink building, so you'll have access to this information indefinitely.

Use Your Network

The best way to build backlinks is to use your network. Backlinks that are related to your niche or industry are going to be far more effective than backlinks you buy.

Who do you know?

Make a list of everybody you know in your industry who either has a similar business, or is "business adjacent".

For example, I'm a Squarespace website designer, but I have partnerships with people in my network who do services that I don't, such as plugins, WordPress, graphic design, etc.

There's a lot of opportunity to share guest posts and/or request a backlink for a blog you've written from within your own network.

Backlink types:

• Guest posts
• Backlink to a blog you've written
• Podcasts and webinars
• Directories and listicles
• etc

Competitor Research Links

As you are browsing Google and doing various competitive research, you're going to start to notice certain articles, blogs, listicles, etc.

Take note of these resources. Use Hunter to track down the email address of the owner and reach out to see if you can be listed. It's always a good idea to offer something in exchange!

Purchasing Backlinks

I have yet to purchase a backlink for myself or my clients. However, it is a good supplemental way to do backlink building, especially if you're working with a niche or industry that has a limited number of resources.

There are a couple different places you can buy backlinks that only do white-hat methods and are completely safe to use.

FatJoe

​FatJoe offers backlink building, in addition to other services such as PR, brand mentions, and citation building.

In the testing I've done, I find their links are okay, but typically the DR numbers can vary. Even if you pay for a certain number, you might end up with less.

Ranktracker

Ranktracker just released a backlink marketplace that looks worth looking into.

There are dozens of different industries. All of these sites are owned by RankTracker. They are transparent about the domain rating, and everything looks to be really high quality. In addition, they give a lot of additional opportunities for backlinks, not just links, but guest posts, etc.

The only downside is the starting plan is $40/month, but on the plus side, the quality looks better then FatJoe and you can actually choose the specific site you are getting linked on!

Local Backlinks (citations)

For those of you that have a local business and are doing local SEO, citations should be the first backlink building you do.

The word citation is essentially a fancy word for directories. Citation building just means you set up your business listing in 100 different online directories (including Yelp, Apple, Bing, etc).

This builds trust with Google and it helps reinforce your name, physical address, contact information, and of course each listing comes with a URL, aka a backlink.

This is not only critical for local SEO, and something I do for every single local SEO client because it's extremely effective. It's also the cheapest backlink building you can do. You can get up to 100 citations (backlinks) for a couple hundred bucks, which is very cheap for backlink building!

​Fat Joe offers this service, but I personally prefer Bright Local because you can come back in a year, pay them the same fee, and they'll update all your listings for you (plus, they also offer the option to do a service-based business, which allows you to hide your address).

Relational Links

Backlinks that really work aren't just random links on random sites. Our networks hold the most weight. This is what drives real rankings, and real leads.

I put my data from the past year into this tool and put the "relational" filter on. If you wonder why I get leads from SEO every week, this is a huge reason why!

I'd recommend checking yours. I've got 9,108 “relational” links.

How many do you have? does your map look like this?

If not, this is the type of backlink building strategy that will build trust and "fame". And I recommend this strategy over purchasing backlinks when possible.

Hopefully you found this helpful today and finally feel like you have some direction to start your backbuilding journey.

I'll leave you with one more resource. Backbuilding is really helpful in building your domain authority. To check your domain authority, you can use the free Ahrefs domain rating checker.

Over time, you'll see your domain rating go up with more backlinks. And once your domain rating goes up, you'll start to see an increase in overall rankings and better SEO and online visibility!