Ultimate Guide to Backlinks for SEO

What are backlinks and why do they matter?

Backlinks serve two key purposes for your domain:

1. Word of mouth of the internet (recommendation)
2. A means of traffic acquisition for ready-to-convert users (mostly)

Think about it like this. If someone in real life recommends a place to eat or visit, your chances of going there vastly increase because you trust them, and they know what is relevant for you. Backlinks work in a similar way. By associating your domain with a third party, Google essentially sees this as a recommendation to use your website to gather more information on a specific topic. They see you as a pro in this field.

However, if one of your friends or family says to avoid somewhere or reflect on a negative experience at a particular establishment, the chances are it will put you off. Similarly with Google if a domain that they see as ‘negative’ or in their word’s ‘toxic’, recommends you via a backlink this can tarnish the way that Google views your domain and therefore they place less trust in you as a source of information. In turn, this damages your EEAT rating and therefore has a knock-on effect on your ranking position which in time will lower your organic traffic levels.

Other than just building a correlation and relationship with your domain and the third party linking to you, backlinks do provide a means of increased traffic acquisition.

Being linked on industry-relevant sites means that your captive audience is just a click away from discovering you. This specific traffic is known as ‘referral traffic’ in GA4 (note the name – referring users elsewhere).

If you are linked on industry magazines, high-value news sites or relevant award pages untapped users are able to discover you from a site that they trust and come directly to you via a link. Chances are you will be exactly what they were expecting to find through that link meaning that they will spend a considerable amount of time on page, interacting with your content and diving deeper into your site, all of which send positive user engagement signals to Google and therefore contribute to higher rankings by a matter of user intent relevance.

 

Quality vs quantity of backlinks

This all sounds great! So why don’t you just buy into those paid backlink tools and spam emails to get as many people linking to you as possible? It all comes down to that age-old saying – quality is more important than quantity.

This is particularly true for Google. Whenever the topic of link building comes up, they are sure to anchor the messaging of ‘quality’ backlinks. See this article below, where they are discussing best practices for link building, and even their heading stresses quality (and this is from 15 years ago!):

Essentially, you don’t just want anyone and everyone linking to you. You want top industry voices, thought leaders, highly trusted domains, and those with high monthly traffic levels to talk about you, and ultimately link to you.

So what are all the different ways of doing this?

 

Types of good backlinks for SEO

1. Editorial backlinks

2. Guest Post backlinks

3. Business Profile backlinks 

4. Acknowledgement backlinks 

5. Badge backlinks 

6. Image backlinks

 

Editorial backlinks

Editorial backlinks are arguably the hardest backlinks to obtain as they take a lot of work and persistence, but work out to be some of the most beneficial to have. Editorial backlinks occur when a third party website references your work, by the means of content writing for a specific purpose (think news articles, blog items, guides and resources) or just generally helpful information on your domain.

Here you can see one of the editorial backlinks that our client in the chemical industry has gained. This stems from a strong on-page content plan, rich with informational-intent keywords that is genuinely helpful to users.

This specific example is from a news site with a specialisation in health, education and automotive. These links have a long life span as news sites tend to keep articles live for the duration of their domain hosting, and therefore you are extremely unlikely to lose editorial backlinks.

Looking to get editorial backlinks? Here are some key tips to help you improve your chances:

1. Keep your website updated with fresh, up to date and informative content.
2. Track and target informational keywords in terms of intent.
3. Research and write about heavily referenced topics in your industry.
4. Reach out to editorial opportunities directly with ideas.

 

Guest post backlinks

Guest posting backlinks are similar to editorial backlinks due to the tendency to sit on news and magazine sites, although tend to be less informative industry-wise and more navigational to your exact domain. Oftentimes guest posting backlinks allow for an entirely self-generated article to be published, which allows users to learn more about your business.

Overall, guest posting is a way to publish content of your choice onto a third-party website and then link back to your domain.

Below you can see PSI magazine and their dedicated section entitled ‘interviews’ that hosts a series of guest posts, centred around a specific topic. In this instance, they have gone with a niche of certified alarm installers and then sought out a number of them across the country to feature. It is likely that companies within this industry then reach out to PSI magazine to request a feature. How do we know this? Because that’s exactly what we did for one of our clients.  

It is important to note that some website owners will say payment is required to feature. This is not a black-hat SEO tactic, but comes from their awareness of the value having a backlink from them will provide your domain. That said, many guest posting opportunities are free, and can be just as valuable.

Looking to get guest posting backlinks? Here are some key tips to help you improve your chances:

1. Reach out for guest posting opportunities directly with content ready to go.
2. Review existing content to see if it is aligned with what you do. If the site already generates similar content regularly, chances are that they offer publishing for free.
3. Show the performance of news articles/blogs on your website. If you acquire good organic traffic from them, they will be more inclined to put your content up on their website. 

 

Business profile backlinks

Business profile backlinks were once one of the easiest methods of acquiring a strong backlink profile. For the most part, business profile backlinks come under a local SEO strategy, whereby your SEO account manager will find a series of local and industry directories for you to feature your NAP (name, address, phone number) and services/products on. The best ones here are industry-specific ones, where somebody looking for ‘care home near me’ would see your business listed amongst your competitors and be able to click directly through.

However, the value of these has become harder to maintain recently. Following the March 2024 Google Core algorithm update, a number of local and business directories changed the status of their linking. The guidelines from this core update stated that ‘Sometimes, websites that have their own great content may also host low-quality content provided by third parties’. This meant that these authoritative sites that linked out to loads of different businesses feared being penalised and therefore changed their link status to ‘no-follow’ – this takes away the value of a backlink, but not the ability for users to click through, and therefore you could still acquire the traffic.

This is not the case for all directories, though. A number of them will still link via a follow link. Just be sure you check the linking status if your primary aim is to build your backlink quality profile. For example, our client below is on a care-home specific local directory, with their website linked. This remains a follow link, and therefore is providing them with great word of mouth in terms of correlation for Google, as well as acquiring a captive, ready-to-convert local audience over to their domain.

Looking to get business profile backlinks? Here are some key tips to help you improve your chances:

1. Manually search for industry-relevant local directories to feature on.
2. Conduct competitor research and ensure there are no gaps where you should be appearing.
3. Look into localised opportunities.

 

Acknowledgment backlinks

Acknowledgement backlinks are like celebratory backlinks, or a thanks. These occur when you have participated in something, maybe given you’ve a donation as a business, collaborated on a project or contributed toward a larger cause.

These are relatively difficult to obtain as the opportunities for them are few and far between, however the value they provide once instated are incredibly strong. Take one of our clients for example, a local hospice. They are currently participating in a national campaign and therefore have acquired an acknowledgement backlink from the organiser.

Looking to get acknowledgement backlinks? Here are some key tips to help you improve your chances:

1. Donate into larger causes through your business.
2. Put a focus on business philanthropy.
3. Actively work within communities and be a part of something bigger than just your business.
4. Reach out to work with like-minded businesses in your space.

 

Badge backlinks

These are like credibility links. Think about specific training your employees may have under a certain accreditation, awards in your industry you have won or even a specific status you’ve achieved if its widely recognised.

More often than not, the assigning bodies of these awards and recognitions have dedicated pages to all of the businesses that have achieved them – this reassures users of your claims of accreditation and gives them a space to validate this.

Take one of our clients for example who have undergone the NSI training course for their alarm installers. Now, when users are searching this directory for NSI-approved installers near them with a specific specialisation or within a specific area, they appear due to their silver NSI status. On this page users are able to click directly over to their website knowing that their claims of being an NSI-approved installer are valid.

Looking to get badge backlinks? Here are some key tips to help you improve your chances:

1. Undergo widely recognised and industry-specific training.
2. Enter or encourage votes for awards within your industry.
3. Encourage inspections from third parties.
4. Look for ‘sign up to’ or ‘become a’ pages on relevant websites.

 

Image backlinks

Image backlinks tend to be one of the most naturally occurring but are very similar to editorial backlinks in their difficulty to acquire. Much like editorial backlinks, it requires the third party website to deem your content, whether it be your logo, an infographic or general photography assets to be highly relevant to their users.

The most common occurrences of these are your logo appearing on a third-party site. This could be if you have provided them a service, they’ve used you as a case study or you’ve collaborated.

In other cases, logos and your business's assets are used as supporting imagery to guest posting, editorial pieces and business listings.

These backlinks tend to be great for word of mouth for both user recognition (brand awareness amongst a captive audience) and Google’s correlation although they do tend to have a lower click through rate than hyperlinks. This is because it is not as immediately obvious to users that an image is clickable as it is for text and therefore a lot of the time they just don’t click. In the example here, you can see our clients logo as an image but would you know you could click on it to get to the website? Likely not. Therefore if your primary goal is increasing referral traffic, our recommendation is to stick to text-based links that are immediately obvious to the user, like some of the examples we have given earlier on.

Looking to get image backlinks? Here are some key tips to help you improve your chances:

1. Create and publish helpful infographics that third parties are likely to share and credit.
2. Reach out directly to opportunities with a correctly sized image file for placement.
3. Look for NBD opportunities who may feature you as a supplier/service provider.

 

Help in getting backlinks

We know how overwhelming this area of SEO can be – and to think that this is just a small piece of what needs to be a much larger SEO strategy to drive results can make it hard to comprehend. Backlink opportunity sourcing is a time-consuming activity that many in-house marketers and business owners simply don’t have the time, resource or tools to fulfill efficiently – but that is where we can help.

Our dedicated SEO team is experienced in knowing the who, what and when of backlink acquisition, constantly searching for new opportunities for you, building a quality backlink profile and securing a strong EEAT Google rating to aid your rankings.

For help with backlinks, and the rest of the SEO puzzle, get in touch with our SEO team today.