When to Start Building Links: Steps Before Getting Backlinks

Despite being one of the crucial aspects of a website’s SEO strategy, you shouldn’t rush into link building. There are a few obligatory steps to complete before delving into it.

When it comes to SEO, early birds get the worms. Starting in a niche where the competition has yet to build up is a nice way to build up your backlink profile quickly.

However, just because you have a website with little to no content doesn’t necessarily mean it’s time to start link-building.

In fact, as the process is continuous, your site should be totally ready before initiating that project. Overall, the readying-up process may take three to five months.

In this guide, we will show you the necessary activities to improve your website before you start getting backlinks from other domains.

Plans to Make Before Link Building

Before you even start with anything on your website, it is ideal to make some plans regarding the site. They can be on a wide range of topics. Some notable examples are:

Focusing on a Niche

After building a website and adding content, we usually have a particular niche in mind. However, this niche is often not as focused as it needs to be.

A focused topic usually attracts more traffic. Let’s say a website is on all things automotive, and another is about vehicle headlights. Now, you have an issue with your headlamps.

When searching online, you will likely prioritize the content specific to headlights as your guide to solving your issue. As such, focusing on your niche is often very important.

Alternatively, you can divide different topics in your preferred industry into multiple sections.

If your website has some content that isn’t focused yet, it is time to choose any particular topic unless the whole niche has low competition.

Making Your Aims

Aside from your niche, there are other goals you need to set regarding your SEO strategy. Some examples are-

• How much traffic are you looking for within a specific amount of time?
• What type of audience or community are you trying to attract?
• Your budget and the amount you can spend on various parts and processes of the site.
• How much money are you willing to make from your website?
• How will you monetize your website’s traffic? It can be through commercials, purchases, getting your service, or other means.

If you have these goals set, it will be easier to stay on track once you start getting a steady number of backlinks and traffic.

Learning Link Building

Whether you build your links yourself or have someone do it for you, it is always best to know the nooks and crannies of link building beforehand.

Information about backlinks can help you determine your goal and learn more about your competitors. It also tells you what to avoid when building links.

Knowing Your Audience

Researching your target community is a task that you must complete even before you start creating content for your site. It will give you insight into the people’s needs and wants.

Many website owners are experts in their niche but detached from their audience. Hence, what they deliver doesn’t often align with what the public wants.

It is better to go into community forums, groups, and channels specific to your niche to investigate your target audience thoroughly. Additionally, you can do the following-

• Research the market and find trendy stuff or products.
• Check your competitors for ideas or inspirations.
• Take expert suggestions.
• Reading the comments or threads under online blogs related to your niche.

This step is especially necessary when your industry deals with trendy products or services (like fashion or electronic gadgets).

Here, the public’s queries change constantly. So, getting in touch with the crowd is mandatory.

Processes to Complete Before Building Links

Knowing when you are ready to build links will prevent your site from facing unexpected challenges later on. After all, you need strong ground before building anything on it.

Let’s discuss the mandatory steps to finish to make your site ready for backlinks-

Having a Well-Rounded Website

A poorly built website is not suitable for link building for several reasons, such as:

• It won’t appear alluring to the people who would send backlinks your way.
• It may look uninteresting to the audience that comes to your site using the links.
• A poor user experience is very bad for your site’s SEO.

Before link-building, it is crucial to develop your website in a quality manner that works smoothly without any bugs. It should also have a nice interface and user-friendliness.

So, what makes a website’s display more appealing to visitors? Let’s find out below.

A Good User Experience

Certain aspects of websites are preferred by the general public. For example, some sites need a sticky notification bar, while others require it on the side.

Once someone enters your website, they may frequent it if they love the experience. A part of this falls on the appearance. Other notable factors are-

• Proper intractability
• Suitable color combination for the site, depending on your niche or industry (some color combinations look very bad)
• A visually appealing front page that showcases what your site has to offer
• A detailed ‘About’ and ‘Author’ page with information about yourself, your goal, and other important information
• Different sections for different parts to make it easier for the audience to navigate
• Quick operation and loading after the user interacts with anything
• Right placement of advertisements and links on the pages

Website Responsiveness

The responsiveness of a site means how well it appears and works on different devices and screen sizes. For a site to be well-developed and ready for link-building, it must be responsive.

A poorly built website may look astounding on a desktop screen but not nearly as good on a mobile device. Meanwhile, a good site will look striking, regardless of device or screen size.

You can see how a website works in different screen sizes by reducing the size of your tab or opening it on your mobile or tablet.

Having Indexed Pages

Your pages are unlikely to appear on SERPs if Google or other search engines have not indexed them. So, how do you get them indexed?

Most of it is possible simply by following our previous point, i.e., making a well-structured website with good navigation, structure, responsiveness, and content placement.

Additionally, there need to be some keywords related to your niche. While keywords are not very useful in SEO now, they still have pros, especially in getting your pages to appear in search results.

Making Quality Content

Quality content doesn’t necessarily mean only factually correct content. Your audience doesn’t necessarily come to read an essay but an engaging article.

So, while the content needs to contain accurate information, it must also be attractive, engaging, and, if possible, interactive. Of course, it should be helpful and solve the readers’ queries.

Remember our earlier section when we advised you about knowing your target audience? That task will come in handy here. Since you understand what your community wants, you can give them that.

Other attributes that you should consider when making your content are-

Better Than Your Competitors

During your link-building process, you will want to take some high-quality backlinking websites from your competitors to your site. It is called the Skyscraper Technique.

That will be possible if your content is better than that of your competitors. You can thoroughly observe their blogs, videos, etc. Then make yours more informative, add more pointers, etc.

You will have to get their attention in order to shift those linking sites to your domain. This can be done through guest blog posts, comments, or forum posts.

Emailing the website owners is another less effective method.

Aside from high-quality websites finding your content more linkable, Google may also notice your better content, which can raise your rank in SERPs.

Crawlable Content

Google uses crawler bots to analyze pages throughout the web and rank them properly. Since these bots follow the robots.txt policies, your content must also be according to them.

A non-crawlable content may not appear on the SERPs. Crawlers are what index your pages on the search engine. If you are wondering how to make your site crawlable, follow these points-

• Keep internal links between your pages, but make them look natural rather than artificial or forced.
• Make an XML sitemap and give it to Google.
• Last but not least, arrange your robots.txt files in the correct order.

Videos and Pictures

If words can’t describe something, visuals and infographics can. When creating content for your site, don’t stay fixated on blogs. Add other types of content and maybe nestle them together.

For example, if you explain something complex, like a DIY tutorial, a video of the whole process will attract more audience than blogs without it.

Natural Anchor Texts

A well-made piece of content or blog should have internal and external links. The former shares link equity throughout the domain, while the latter is also important for Google’s SERP.

The anchor texts must also seem natural for these links to appear natural. So, generic ones like ‘click here’ or ‘read more’ will only make the content look poor.

You can check some of the anchor texts we used in this article as examples.

Improving Your Content

You may already have content that is years old and not up to date. Some of this content may also not be suitable for your site’s current structure.

In that case, updating and improving these blogs and making them suitable for your site is necessary. You can-

• Update them according to recent times.
• Add more information, if possible.
• If you are offering new services or products that you didn’t offer before, you can include those in your content, too.
• Add more engaging and cohesive writing with better outlines.

Sometimes, you may even have to remove some content if it doesn’t align with your current goal or if you already have better versions.

Gathering Necessary Resources and Manpower

Link building is hard for various reasons. One of them is the cost of link building. There are multiple steps during the process that will require you to spend a good sum. The following are some-

• Buying Backlinks: The cost will depend on the linking site’s Domain Rating (DR) or Domain Authority (DA). There may also be subscription-based offers.
• Hiring Content Writers and Creators: Hiring writers for your site will cost a significant amount. However, the expense is well worth it.
• Hiring Link-Building Experts: Professionals such as link-building managers and assistants usually cost a lot to hire.
• SEO Tools: Before you start building links, competitor analysis is necessary. Tools like Ahrefs or Semrush will help here. If you get premium versions, each of these may cost over $590.

Of course, once you see the fruit of your link-building efforts, you will need to manage those backlinks and extra traffic, which may require additional manpower.

We should remind you that after all these expenses, you may still need resources to focus on your industry or business. So, assess your budget correctly before starting link building.

Checking Your Current Audience

Chances are that you are already getting some audience even before your backlinking campaign. These audiences may come from a wide range of places.

It will be good if you manage to find out where they are coming from. Many sites and apps do this in the form of surveys. 

Once you have this information, you can check the places that are sending the most crowds your way.

It will greatly help you later during your marketing and link-building process.

Setting Some Goals

We have already mentioned the aims of your link-building projects and website. However, while these aims are about results and budgets, there are other goals to set here. For example-

• You need to analyze and target some high-profile websites for backlinks as your goals. Using the skyscraper technique, you can get them from your competitors.
• You can use Ahrefs or Semrush to analyze your competitors’ backlinks. Of course, you will need to find your competitors first. Not all of them are worth researching.
• In that regard, keyword research related to your niche is imperative. Look at the keywords helping your websites rank, then check the top websites on SERP for those keywords.

Those are the competitors you should pay attention to and analyze.

Another goal to set is a predicted timeline for the entire process. You may plan to drastically improve your backlink profile within a few months. However, there is a catch.

The time it may take for your website to develop a good backlink profile and rank high may depend on your current position on SERPs.

If a site is already on the first few pages of SERP, it won’t take long since convincing reputable websites to send links won’t be difficult.

However, if the site’s ranking is much lower, it will take more time and effort. You may ask your SEO experts for an idea of the time it may take.

Steps to Take at the Beginning of Link Building

Okay, you have developed a well-structured website, made it easy to navigate, and filled it with high-quality content. So, what’s next?

We have already talked about keyword and competitor analysis. So, we won’t repeat those. Let’s say you have done these and found your target sites from which to get links.

It is the appropriate time to get their attention through various means. These methods are also part of your link-building scheme. Let us explain some factors here.

Creating Guest Posts

Guest posts are blogs you can post on other websites as a guest after getting their permission. Of course, you have to pitch in your idea of the article first and wait for their reply.

If they accept it, you can start writing a quality guest post to post it on their site. Making it engaging and high quality is crucial as audiences from that high-authority website will read it.

Make sure that the blog’s content is attractive to readers and suitable for generating leads. Nestle a backlink to your website inside the blog, but don’t add it repetitively.

The anchor text for this backlink also needs to be convincing for the readers to click on it, yet it should come off as natural.

Remember that not all websites will want to have guest posts. Some of them may even be very picky about them. These websites often set strict rules about guest posts.

Getting your ideas rejected can be common, and you may have to try several ideas on various websites before one accepts them.

Manually Reaching the Website Owners

Another way to get their attention is to reach out to website owners using personalized emails, letters, and other means. However, note that not all website owners may check their emails.

If you don’t receive any response, you can follow up. Don’t overdo it, though, and try other methods instead.

Of course, if you manage to build a collaboration, maintain it and stick to any set terms and conditions by the website owner.

Remember that you should start linking buildings as soon as possible. However, that doesn’t mean that you should ignore the necessary steps before that.

Readying everything before starting the link-building will be a clever move that increases the chance of success.