The highest quality backlinks can be earned from organic backlinks. These types of links can be earned through editorial link building. Earning links from authoritative websites will improve your link profile and affect your search rankings positively.
The challenge here is HOW you will earn links. It’s not like authoritative websites will just link to your site. You have to work for these links by doing the best practices for link building.
In this article, we will discuss editorial link building to cater the novices and veterans alike. We’ll start off by comparing editorial links with acquired links. Let’s go!
Editorial Links vs. Acquired Links
1. Editorial Links
Editorial links are natural links. This means that these come naturally to your site without paying or asking for it. Either you attracted these links from making outstanding content or your brand is well-known in your niche so you attract these links naturally.
To keep it simple, these are links that you don’t ask for but need desperately. Creating link-worthy content is what gets you this quality link. Authority and credibility also play a big factor to earn high-quality links from your great content.
For example, whenever Apple releases a new iPhone, journalists and writers have their noses on the latest news. Apple gets backlinks naturally from all the writers in the industry that create posts related to the new Apple product release.
You can also work your way to get editorial links. This link, the one that you work for, has the same impact as an editorial link. You have to actively promote your content to journalists and other authority websites and outreach to them.
However, it’s not easy to earn these links. You have to be patient as these types of links can come very late. It can take months – even years – to earn the authority and credibility to attract links naturally.
2. Acquired Links
Acquired links, on the other hand, are links that you can get by paying for them or doing them yourself. This includes paid linking, links from web directories, and blog comments. These types of links have less value for Google, thus affecting your ranking on search engines lesser than editorial links.
Acquired links also add value to your site, but not as much as an editorial link. You can maximize your benefit from link acquisition by knowing what kind of links you want to get. To get inbound links, you have to acquire them from:
- Promoting your resources
- Directory articles and posts
- Blog comments
- Broken links
Acquiring backlinks can be tedious and depends entirely on the webmaster accepting your submission. This can result in a lot of rejection for your manual outreach. Thus, you have to craft good link building tactics to get the right backlinks for your website.
Editorial Links: Content That’s Worth Linking To
Nothing attracts editorial links more effectively than high-quality content. As most marketers and link builders say, “content is king”, and they’re not wrong about it. In fact, digital marketers are willing to spend a quarter of their overall budget just for content marketing alone.
But how do you create content that’s worth linking to? What are the recipes you need? How long would you have to wait to see an improvement in your overall search ranking?
Here are some types of content that normally attracts links:
- Educational posts
- “Catchy” articles
- Evergreen content
- A controversial standpoint that’s unique
Now the Hard Part
Now that you know what types of content are valuable for users, you have to make one of your own. Here are the major reasons why other bloggers and journalists in your niche would link to your content:
- If your content is a cornerstone article for your niche and it’s unique, meaning no one made the same article before.
- Product and article roundups are linkable assets. Mentioning authority brands in your roundup can influence them to share your roundup because they’re mentioned in it.
- You have unique data and statistics from company research that’s useful for your niche.
If you have content like this, your post can be considered a valuable resource for your niche. This will attract different web owners to at least take a look at your article. It will drive organic traffic to your site and possibly backlinks if you did it right.
Importance of Editorial Links to Link Building
Take note that the editorial links you get from publishing good content are not just any other link. These are authority links that improve your ranking and your link profile. There are a lot more benefits you can get from editorial links pointing back to your blog.
1. Vote of Confidence
Since editorial links are given without asking for them, it counts as a vote of confidence towards the credibility of your content. It signals Google that the content you are producing is top-quality and relevant for your industry. This builds authority and credibility for your site.
2. SEO Value and Ranking
The added SEO value and ranking are one of the major benefits you can get from editorial links. Your high-quality article will rank for a certain keyword on Google Search because of the editorial links it has. On-page SEO will also be optimized for the article to perform well on Google search results.
3. More Organic and Referral Traffic
Since your links come from authoritative websites, organic and referral traffic will also improve for your business. These authority sites have high traffic, and since you’re getting a vote of confidence from them, their audience may also visit your pages. This is also a way to boost your marketing strategy because you’ll be able to reach more users in your industry.
4. Build Business Relationships
Building relationships with other bloggers in your industry is great for your business. It’s a huge benefit for link building because you can build links and exchange referral traffic with their websites. However, be careful not to overdo this because it can result in penalties from Google.
5 Ways to Get Editorial Links for Your Website
1. Analyzing Competitor Backlink for Positive Leads
Finding authoritative websites in your industry can be a challenge. But if you do a competitor analysis, you’ll be able to find editorial links on their top-ranked blog post. Make sure you analyze your direct competitors so you’ll get more relevance on your crawl results.
After finding your competitor’s editorial links, you can make these links yours by introducing your high-quality content that’s valuable for their users. If your competitors can do it, so can you!
However, you may not find exceptional links all the time. Regardless, this is still an effective way to get a high-quality link that will help you rank your keyword. You can use free SEO tools to find competitor’s editorial links such as SpyFu.
2. Content Planning and Marketing
Planning what content to release to attract link builders is an important step in editorial link building. Good content will earn links, but well-planned content for marketing purposes can overtake good content in search rankings.
What you want to do is to make a draft or a mockup that you can present to your prospects. You don’t have to include everything here. Just give them a teaser for what value you can add to their website by linking to your content.
PRO TIP: Read industry-related news and stay updated on the latest technologies. If you’re the first to create a feature article for new technology, there’s a great chance that you will get editorial links for it.
3. Creating Evergreen Content
Evergreen content does not become irrelevant even after a couple of years. All you have to do is to update this content every now and then to make sure that the data presented are up-to-date. Your content can be considered evergreen if:
- It never loses interest.
- People are always asking or searching for it.
- It’s always useful for your industry, such as common industry concepts for beginners.
But how will this type of content add value to your link building efforts? To simply put it, evergreen content is useful and always relevant for your industry. That’s why other bloggers will see your content as something worth linking to.
Let me give you an example. If you’re in the cooking industry, a valuable post can be about “how to boil different kinds of pasta”. Because it won’t go irrelevant and it’s very useful for your readers, it can be considered as evergreen content.
Once you gain enough links to your evergreen content, search engines will now see this as a valuable piece of content. Your search engine ranking will improve and the evergreen content you produced will continue to gain quality links.
4. Do Manual Outreach
Link building for editorial links requires you to communicate with other businesses in your industry. Other sites receive hundreds of outreach emails every day, so you have to make sure that your outreach is unique. Building relationships with other sites is important to keep your link building tactics sustainable.
It’s better if you can include your link in a curated post like a product roundup. By sending content that can add value to his or her curated post, you can earn an editorial link. This will strengthen your link profile and establish a good relationship with the other website owner.
By doing manual outreach, you can also pick which sites will you be linking to. This way, you are certain that you’re not linking to low-quality websites.
5. Accept Interviews
Interviews from local newspapers, magazines or news websites, podcasts, and other media, are great ways to attract editorial links. These media outlets will be inclined to cite you whenever they mention your interview. And remember, these are news websites, meaning they are high PR backlinks that will greatly improve your link profile.
Getting mentioned on other websites will also increase your referral traffic. Since you’re cited in a post from an authoritative website, their audience will also see your site as an authority.
You can also initiate to interview other famous personalities in your industry. This is a good way to attract new audiences to your website. They can also share your interview in their personal blogs as a featured post.
FAQs
1. What are editorial Links?
Editorial links are links found in websites like blogs that point back to your website from another website. The search engine’s algorithm treats the editorial links as a signal to rank content. Also, if your links come from a high authoritative site you get improved SERP rankings.
2. What are the benefits of editorial link building?
- Markets your brand to a large audience.
- Increases your brand authority.
- Increases your SEO Traffic.
- Increases your web traffic.
- Improves your brand building.
3. What are the disadvantages of editorial link building?
There are certain disadvantages in editorial link building when you add links to another website, such as a risk of people finding the source website more interesting than yours. Other drawbacks include:
- Time-consuming.
- Low-quality links will lower your search engine rankings.
- You can be penalized if the links are misused.
Final Word
Editorial link building is great for your SEO, backlink profile, and your website in general. Link building for editorial links will boost your website’s SEO, thus boosting your search engine rankings as well. But you have to exert more effort to gain editorial links for your website.
Search engines, webmasters, and users see these links as authoritative. This is also good for your brand marketing strategies because you’re rewarded with an online presence. If ever you had a chance to grab an editorial link, you should put a lot of sweat and effort to work for this high-quality link. If you want to amplify your editorial link building strategy and make your website rank in Google without backbreaking efforts, reach out to linkdoctor.io and see what we offer.
