There is no denying that the best link-building tactic is one that consistently earns you high-quality and excellent links from other websites to your own. While this may sound promising, most link-building tactics are quite challenging to not get out of style.
For instance, most marketers believe that broken link building is a scalable and convenient tool for a successful link-building strategy, but they also believe it’s not effective in today’s time anymore. They believe it’s time-consuming, not worth the effort, and results are less impressive.
However, the thing is that with the right process and effort, broken link building still works for your link-building strategy — even the greatest digital marketing firms in Toronto would agree on this. Especially with the latest SEO efforts and marketing trends, it’s now easier to develop a comprehensive, modern, and updated broken link building scaling for your business.
In this article, I’ll discuss exactly what you need to know about broken link building and some of the best practices you can try to spearhead the success of your link-building strategy.
What is Broken Link Building Strategy?
Broken link building is a tactic that looks for broken external links on other websites (within your niche) then recommending them your own content as a replacement for their dead links.
This technique needs a well-comprehensive strategy to be effective. For instance, you need to find broken links from relevant and high-quality web pages, create great content that is worth linking to, and carry out the right persuasion to website owners so they would link to your page.
Why Use Broken Link Building?
Broken link building is a neat and refined way to build links for your website. However, this shouldn’t be the only link-building strategy you should use. Building broken links should come as only a part of your broader strategy. Nevertheless, working on broken links can get you real and competitive advantages, in which you can:
- Build links on established authority sites
- Build links from within high-quality and relevant content
- Acquire links that beat your competitors
- Push your SEO strategies
- Build valuable connections with other businesses.
How To Find Relevant Broken Links?
Fortunately, finding relevant broken links isn’t difficult. In fact, plenty of link builders advertise broken link building because of its scalability. To maximize the opportunities of broken links, you need to fully understand first how to find them before you turn them into links.
You need to have the right tools like HubSpot.com and Ahrefs. These broken link checkers can help you find relevant broken links faster and provide you information about the pages that are linking to the broken pages. You can also check out tools like Deep Trawl, Xenu Link Sleuth, or Screaming Frog to see the list of links that have 404 error status.
Why Does Broken Link Building Work Well?
Broken link building utilizes outreach emails to ask permission to publishers to replace their dead links with your content. Now, why does this work?
It’s simple: because you offer help first before asking something (a long list of dead links on their sites). To give you an idea, here’s an example of a Broken link-building outreach email:
Hey, [webmaster]!
I read your latest content and I think it’s really awesome, I love it!
I actually found a great list of Tree stores, thanks to your article!
Anyway, I regularly read your blog and I noticed that #10 from XXX doesn’t seem to exist anymore — the link says “Access Denied”.
If you want to make changes, I recently created an article about mature trees on sale in Toronto that might be a great replacement.
Let me know your thoughts on this.
Talk soon,
[link builder]
What Are Some of The Best Practices to Convert Broken Links into Wins?
While we’ve already mentioned some of the backlink tools above, that is just the easy part. The hard part is asking websites to replace their broken links with your own link. So, how do you make sure you convert broken links into wins?
1. Find Dead Pages with Plenty of Links
In BLB, it’s imperative to focus on pages or sites that have tons of external links. Pages with plenty of links have higher chances of having broken links.
2. Look For Everyone Who is Linking to THAT Broken Link
The next thing to do after finding broken links is to find everyone who is linked to it. Ahrefs can help you scale this process.
3. Offer a Replacement
When you use BLB, make sure you use the right approach. For instance, saying “I have a list of broken links in your X page, will you link with me?” is better than saying “please link to me with this”.
However, if you want to be more effective, offer a replacement for the broken link. This means you need to replace the broken link by creating a similar piece of content. This way, web owners will more likely add and convert your link.
4. Recreate Content
Remember, you need to give webmasters reasons why they should link to your content. To make sure you win their trust, the replacement that you offer them needs to be well-written and highly related to the dead link.
Either you find a page on your website that already discusses the topic, or create new content that is more valuable than the dead page. For instance, if the dead link is about website development in Ontario, you can recreate content about professional web designers in Toronto.
5. Outreach Emails
To make your BLB more efficient, have a list of potential prospects that you can reach out to. You can start by looking at their “about us” pages, contact pages, and bio pages to get contact details about their site owners, editors, or webmasters.
It’s necessary that before you craft your outreach email, you know the person that you’re going to reach out to.
6. Skip Dead Sites
Every now and then, you stumble into dead sites. So, when you encounter sites that are completely abandoned for many years, just skip sending outreach emails and move on to your next potential active sites to save more time.
7. Avoid Being Pushy
In BLB, it’s a big NO to keep on nudging other websites asking for a link. So, when you craft an outreach email, don’t be too pushy and observe the right approach.
Creating Your Broken Link Building Strategy
The thing about BLB is that there are a plethora of backlink tools that will help you. If done right, it can be highly beneficial to your SEO efforts and build great relationships with other businesses as well.
Although I’ve mentioned before how BLB should only be a part of your link-building strategy, BLB can definitely help you gain links that will link back to your site.
