B2B Link Building: How Businesses That Target Businesses Can Level Up Their Link Building

At dofollow, B2B link building is our bread and butter. Most of our clients, past and present, are B2B companies, and we’ve gotten pretty good at finding backlink opportunities for them. 

In the below guide, we’re going to be breaking down some of our favourite tactics for business-to-business…businesses. 

Some of these tactics require more leg work than others to use, but all of them have their place in a B2B link builder’s arsenal. 

These tactics essentially fall into four categories: 

• Guest posts
• Niche edits
• HARO
• Linkable assets

Building links is tremendously important for search engine optimization and different niches and industries are better suited for different tactics. 

Guest posts

A lot of B2B link building comes down to how well you are able to find and take advantage of guest posting opportunities. 

Guest posting (or guest blogging) is a great B2B link building strategy because most B2B companies already have quite a bit of expertise and authority to offer. 

We’ve worked with clients in the past with really knowledgeable executive teams, fantastic products and services, stellar websites, and a lot of interesting insight into their industries. This all makes for relatively easy guest posting because people want to publish content written by knowledgeable experts in a given field. 

Guest posting for B2B companies works much the same way it does for non B2B companies.

Prospecting

You start by developing your list of prospect sites you want to reach out to–typically sites that you know are already going to be receptive to guest blogging inquiries.

There are a lot of different ways you can come up with your initial prospecting list. 

Ahrefs

You can use tools like Ahrefs to find guest posting opportunities at scale. 

This involves using the content explorer, and entering in a keyword related to your niche in the search bar. 

Clicking on the “Advanced” button and in the “include field”, entering in “guest post.” 

Using Google

The manual way to find guest posting opportunities involves using Google search. 

There are some common keywords that are associated with guest blogging that you will see websites across industries use. 

These include strings like “write for us,” “become a contributor,” and even just “guest post.” 

You can Google search these keyword strings to find websites in your niche that accept guest post submissions. 

If you were in the personal finance niche and looking for guest posting opportunities, you might try searching for something like the below: 

You could then take the same keyword “budgeting” and search for different combinations of the “write for us” string. 

The number of hits you get for each search string will depend on your niche and how popular it is. But you can very quickly put together a list of guest post prospects that you know are going to be receptive to your outreach. 

They’ve said so explicitly. 

Getting your pitch right

Then you hone your pitch–when link building at scale, you are usually going to be sending out email templates that you then personalize for each person or website you contact. 

Provide a couple of different guest post ideas when doing your outreach, and hope that the person on the other end is receptive to the request. 

A good way to sweeten the pot when submitting a guest post request is to go above and beyond and try to explain how the article you are suggesting fits with the site’s overall content (e.g., opportunities for internal linking) and perhaps even suggest keywords that could be used while writing the post.

Also, make sure you do some due diligence and look into their previous blog posts. You don’t want to suggest topics that have already been extensively covered, or you just look lazy. 

Websites, especially high domain authority sites, get a lot of guest blogging requests and you can easily find yourself ignored if you a) sound like everyone else and b) don’t bring immediate value to the table. 

Niche edits

Niche edits are another great B2B link building tactic–especially for B2B software companies–because they leverage the type of article that is very often written about B2B websites and services. 

One of these recurring articles is the product review or product compilation article. 

Take this example from Social Pilot for example.

It’s a list of 30 social media marketing tools. If you were a company that had created some sort of social media marketing software or tool, you would simply reach out to SocialPilot and ask if you could include your product in the article as well. 

Then, you would put together a quick blurb on what it is you’re offering, structure it in the same way the other products are structured throughout the article, include a link to your own site and voila. Link built. 

There are basically three niche edit link building tactics that you can use to acquire backlinks the safe say: 

1. Broken link niche edits 
2. Press mention niche edits
3. Resource page link building 

Broken link niche edits

Broken link building is probably one of the most widely used niche edit strategy. 

The best part is, not only is it safe, it’s also quite scalable. 

Here’s how it works. 

If you aren’t already familiar with broken link building, here’s a short primer. 

Basically, what you’re doing with broken link building is scanning websites you would like a backlink from for hyperlinks that direct traffic to pages that either don’t work or no longer exist. 

Broken link building niche edits start with 1) identifying the broken link, 2) reaching out and notifying the website and offering your content as a replacement, 3) getting your link placed on their site, and 4) rinsing and repeating. 

Targeting broken links can be a fantastic strategy because you aren’t just asking for something (i.e., a link), you’re identifying user experience issues on someone’s site (the broken links) and then offering a solution (your link). 

Either they or you write the niche edit (the short blurb or paragraph that surrounds/contextualizes the link) and then insert the link back to your site. 

Press mention niche edits

This niche edit link building strategy is one of the easiest ways to build niche edit links, but a lot of people don’t employ it. 

It involves capitalizing on any branded mentions you get. 

Essentially, what you’re doing is reaching out to websites that have mentioned your company or site in their content, but not provided a link. 

They either forgot to include a backlink, or they might have thought you didn’t care to receive one. As crazy as that sounds, you need to keep in mind that there are a lot of websites out there that are not all that SEO-obsessed. 

Sometimes it simply doesn’t occur to a person that a backlink would be so sought after. 

How press mention niche edits work

The most step when incorporating press mentions into your niche edits strategy is to set up Google Alerts. 

This instructs Google to let you know (via email) every time your target keywords or phrase is mentioned when they index a new page. 

You get a notification, and you can then pursue the link in the cases where just a branded mention was provided. 

Ahrefs also has a “Mentions” tool that you can use to find branded mentions: 

Depending on how many branded mentions you have, you can either draft individual outreach emails or, you can use an outreach tool like Hunter to find email addresses en masse and send out automated, personalized template messages. 

Make sure you customize the template so that it personalizes it for each person you reach out to.

Done right, it can be a great link building tactic that gets the kinds of backlinks search engines like to see.

Resource page link building

Resource page link building is another effective niche edit strategy for B2B link building. 

These are niche edits that can land you amazing links on reputable, high domain authority websites. 

The way they work is quite straightforward. 

A lot of sites have pages that are basically compilations of useful resources (also sometimes referred to as “expert round up article” for their visitors. You find these pages, reach out to the site master and request that they link to your service/product/page as well. 

Here’s how you use this link building strategy

You start by creating a list of prospects. These are pages on relevant websites that you stand a chance of being featured on. 

Be realistic about your odds. The BBC and the NYT probably have something resembling resource pages, but it’s highly unlikely you’re going to get a feature there with a simple outreach email. 

To find prospects, head to Google search and look for things like: 

• [your niche]+”resources”

or

• Inurl:[your niche] + resources

This is what the search engine results page might look like if you were in the RVing space, for example: 

Add each viable website to a spreadsheet. 

Once you’ve collected your outreach targets, you will need to filter them for relevance, authority and those that provide dofollow links. 

This way, you make sure that you are only getting backlinks from websites that are going to add real SEO value for you. 

You then repeat the outreach carried out in the press mentions section. 

Find the email addresses associated with the websites you are targeting, draft your personalized outreach template, and make your pitch. 

HARO as a B2B link building tactic

We’ve had some incredible success over the years using HARO for our B2B clients. 

And, we’ve put together a pretty comprehensive guide to HARO link building if you are interested in a much deeper dive into how we use HARO to build great links that search engines love. 

HARO is a service put out by digital PR service Cision. 

It connects journalists and writers with sources (you). 

The journalists, bloggers and writers solicit expert opinion on a wide range of topics and subject matter, you weigh in and, if they like what you have to say and decide to use it in an article, it often results in a link back to your website. 

Signup is free, all you need to do is create an account and complete a verification email. 

Once that’s done, you’re set up to receive Cision’s thrice daily HARO email.

These emails are separated into “queries” that are categorized by niche or industry. The above screenshot is a cross-section of some Business and Finance queries. 

HARO is one of the best natural link building tactics for B2B companies because the websites that use HARO are often very high domain authority, relevant sites, and the links are organic. 

There is no ranking manipulation going on with HARO; just websites and writers looking for valuable content. 

The B2B clients we work with are very often run by people with great industry expertise and experience, whose contributions and insight add a lot of value for the blogs, media outlets and other websites soliciting opinions on HARO. 

Linkable assets

“Linkable assets” refers to high quality content on your website that, because of its comprehensiveness and value to readers, over time, garners links on its own merits. 

These could be massive resource pages, helpful tools, or guides how-tos that are unmatched anywhere else online. 

Linkable assets often take quite a bit of time to create (and sometimes money as well). They might involve unique research or data that you have commissioned or collected, as well as interesting and dynamic visualizations of the data (in the form of infographics etc.). 

Most websites will create linkable assets and then go on a digital PR campaign, letting other sites and any journalists or influencers in the space know about them. 

These are also resources that should garner editorial links organically over the long term. Google rewards high quality content with visibility in the SERP, and so, over time, people should come across these assets, appreciate the quality, and link to it in their own content. 

Ideally, any linkable asset-focused link building should involve a considerable amount of outreach as well. 

Conclusion

All of the above link building tactics should be part of any B2B company’s link building arsenal. 

These are strategies we have been putting into practice for our clients for years and we’ve seen some amazing results. 

The combination of guest posting, niche edits, HARO and linkable asset creation is a solid B2B off-page SEO foundation that will help you move up the rankings and increase your organic traffic significantly. 

Of course, simply knowing how these tactics work and putting them into practice–particularly the relationship-building component of many of them–takes a lot of time and effort. 

Get in touch with dofollow to find out more about how our carefully honed processes and industry relationships let us build high-power, user-centric links for B2B companies at scale.