How Link Building Can Help Your Lead Generation Efforts [2023]

If you treat link building only as a means for acquiring links to influence search engine rankings, you’re doing it wrong. We at Digital Olympus also use link building to foster warm connections with prospective clients and flood targeted pages with referral traffic.

Curious to know the details? Keep reading to uncover 6 effective link building strategies for lead generation.

Why Is Lead Generation Important?

Lead generation is a broad notion for any type of activity intended to attract new clients. Hence, lead generation translates into revenue growth and is important for any business that wants to grow and scale. Without leads, there would be no customers or clients to sell to.

Most times, B2B marketers associate lead generation with cold email outreach, paid advertising campaigns, and search engine optimization. Link building, in turn, is considered a supplementary SEO tool for boosting and organic traffic since high-quality backlinks are an essential Google search ranking factor. When in fact, link building is also an effective standalone lead generation method. Let’s look into this.

How Can Link Building Affect Lead Generation?

Generally, link building is a way to get links to your site from other websites. When done correctly, backlinks help increase your site’s visibility and ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs) of search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. They can also help improve your domain authority (DA/DR) and trustworthiness. All that leads to increased organic traffic and leads. But there’s more to it than that.

Link building helps you reach new audiences that might not be aware of your brand or product. Here’s how it works.

For example, we offer link building services and want to start working with the FinTech niche. To acquire first customers, we can do cold outreach, contact friends from that niche, run targeted ads, and do other digital marketing activities — or establish great relationships with decision makers from the get-go by tapping into link building and content marketing tactics combined.

To do so, you can capitalize on the following strategies (we'll detail each below):

• Guest blogging
• Expert round-ups
• Collaborative high-quality content with decision makers
• Broken links
• Listicles embeds
• Linkable assets

However, each tactic will be slightly modified for lead generation purposes. In a nutshell, your steps become:

• Reach out to your target audience
• Collect their POVs of a subject
• Deliver outstanding content that bolsters your expertise and credibility
• Find a way to continue communication with prospects and invite them to customer development calls with your executives.

You should also not forget about the role of content in all of this:

»Link building can help the pages of your site rank for organic search terms that can help to generate leads. But the success of the link building also depends in large part on the quality of the content that you’ll be building backlinks to.

Helping content rank for words with high search intent is going to help generate more leads than ranking for terms with a lot of search volume but low search intent. So, if prioritizing lead generation in your link building efforts, be sure to focus on the content that can rank which is most closely tied to search intent.  — Aaron Anderson, Founder & Lead Link Builder at Linkpitch.io.

Now, let’s learn how to put together all that knowledge and develop a winning link building strategy for lead generation.

6 Strategies to Generate Leads Through Link Building

Let’s examine each strategy in more detail and explain how it can attract high-quality backlinks and leads.

Strategy #1: Guest blogging

Guest blogging is an ancient link building tactic that has proven to bring prolific results from year to year. In a typical scenario, link builders resort to guest posting to acquire links from relevant blogs with a high DR.

First of all, you need to pay attention to the site you choose to get a link from via a guest post. Here are the points Tabby Farrar suggests taking into consideration:

1) Avoid any website that says they will charge you money for including links — these types of sites inevitably end up being penalized and not only will any link value be lost (if there ever was any) but your own site can be at risk of a knock-on penalty effect.

2) In the same vein, use your preferred SEO tools to review the site’s backlinks, and ranking and estimated traffic history — here you can often see patterns of unnatural or spam linking, or evidence that the site has been affected by algorithm changes.

3) Only collaborate with a site that is topically relevant to your niche, and has a verifiable readership made up of people in your target audience.

4) Links from thought leadership article placements should only ever be branded homepage links, or links to expert informational resources. If you need product page links, your best bet is to pitch product press releases or seek out unique reviews from writers and editors who will talk about your product in return for honest feedback.»— Tabby Farrar, Head of Content & Digital PR at Candour.

When you’ve got that covered, you can reverse engineer the traditional approach to guest blogging to build links for lead generation.

Thus, you’ll first conduct a quick analysis of your winning web pages by referral traffic in Google Analytics. Second, you’ll try to identify commonalities of those outlets alongside published content.

What you’re going to do is:

1. Navigate to Acquisition > All traffic > Referrals and sort the User column or Goal conversion Rate to identify pages that send a lot of referral traffic with a high conversion rate.