Link building, let’s be honest, is not one of the more glamorous or exciting elements of a firm’s search engine optimisation (SEO) and digital marketing activity. But it’s equally undeniable that attracting backlinks to your brand’s website will still be hugely important if you are serious about achieving strong search engine rankings for relevant phrases that a target customer might hammer into Google.

Furthermore, those links that your brand does build need to be high-quality ones. So, unethical techniques – such as simply buying links in bulk – will not suffice, and could actually lead to you being penalised by search engines.

This underlines the importance of attracting links from other sites to your own, and that feel relatively ‘natural’, instead of links gained from ‘gaming the system’. With that in mind, here are three content creation strategies you might think about following, to maximise the chances of your brand achieving such ‘natural’ and high-quality backlinks.

Publish in-depth guides

Think, for a moment, about the field in which your brand specialises, and in which it is therefore an expert. Your business might be an estate agent, for example, with knowhow in a particular locality. Perhaps, then, you could publish long-form content covering this area of expertise of yours?

Such content could be useful for human readers, at the same time as helping to boost the chances of others – such as bloggers in your industry – linking to your site.

Put together whitepapers

If the writing and publication of in-depth guides can be a great way to show off your organisation’s authority and expertise – attracting relevant links in the process – a similar thing can be said about the notion of publishing whitepapers.

The question of exactly what a “whitepaper” is can differ from one industry to the next. But broadly speaking, the term is used in reference to authoritative and in-depth reports on particular subjects that present a problem as well as offer a potential solution.

And yes, there can be a lot of time and effort investment needed to create a truly relevant and compelling whitepaper. So, you will need to think carefully about the topics your brand could conceivably address in such documents.

Get the approach and execution right, though, and researching and assembling whitepapers could hugely help your brand to build its profile in its industry and attract a greater number of relevant backlinks to its site.

Update old content

You don’t necessarily need to go as far as assembling comprehensive whitepapers from scratch, in order to build links to your brand’s site. In fact, even just looking back to some of the previously published content on your site, and updating and refreshing it, could go a long way to helping you generate fresh links from others.

Your estate agent business might have published a great blog post on the state of the property market in your local area, for instance – albeit, two or three years ago, meaning the statistics quoted are no longer up to date.

Going back to that blog post and replacing the statistics with newer ones – while updating or refreshing the rest of the content to ensure maximum accuracy and relevance now – could be great for cementing the usefulness of the content for people who continue coming across it in the future. And those “people”, of course, could include those who choose to link to you from their own sites.

There you go – three content creation strategies that could be invaluable to your efforts to build good-quality and relevant links to your site. For a more in-depth discussion about how the Jumping Spider Media team could assist, why not reach out to us today online or over the phone?