Backlinks have been important for as long as SEO has existed and that’s not really changing anytime soon. What has changed is how hard they are to get. A few years back you could send a hundred outreach emails with a little bit of personalization and a solid chunk of those would turn into links. People were more receptive, the ecosystem was less crowded, and you could build a decent backlink profile without too much work. Nowadays that same approach gets you a lot of ignored emails and not much else.
So what actually works now.
The short answer is whatever takes effort. That’s kind of the universal rule with backlinks and honestly with SEO in general. If something is easy to do then everyone is doing it and it doesn’t move the needle anymore. The links that actually carry weight are the ones where there was no automated path to getting them. You had to find the right site, reach out to an actual person, make a case for why a link makes sense, and follow up. That friction is what makes those links valuable.
The approach that works best for us is competitor backlink analysis. The idea is pretty simple. Find the sites that are already ranking well for the keywords you care about. Google clearly likes those sites for whatever reason, whether its their content, their links, their domain history, whatever. So you pull all their backlinks, go through them one by one, and look for opportunities. Maybe they wrote a guest post on an industry blog. Maybe they got listed on a relevant directory. Maybe some local publication did a write up on them. Each one of those is a door you can also knock on.
Then you do the outreach. Not a mass blast, actual individual outreach to each site. Hey we noticed you featured this company, we do similar work and we’d love to contribute a guest post or be considered for your next roundup or whatever the relevant pitch is. It takes more time but the conversion rate is way better because you’re targeting sites that have already demonstrated they’re willing to link to businesses like yours.
The thing about easy backlinks is they’ve essentially become worthless. Like those sites where you create a free account, fill out a profile, and boom you have a link? You and a hundred thousand other people have that same link. Google knows it. It’s not going to help you. The links that take real manual effort to acquire are the ones that make a difference because most of your competition won’t bother doing the work to get them.
There’s no shortcut here that actually holds up. If someone is selling you a hundred backlinks for fifty bucks, those links are going to either do nothing or actively hurt you. The answer is boring but its true. Find the right sites, reach out like a human, and earn the link.
