How to Do Link Building: A Step-by-Step Workflow
Link building is the process of earning hyperlinks from other websites to your own — links that signal authority and trust to search engines, directly influencing where your pages rank for competitive queries. The fundamental mechanic hasn’t changed: a link from a credible, relevant site is a vote of confidence that search engines still weigh heavily. What has changed is that the bar for earning those links keeps rising, and the tactics that worked through brute-force volume — automated submissions, private blog networks, link exchanges — actively hurt sites today.
- Step 1: Define Your Link-Building Goals Before You Prospect
- Step 2: Build a Prospecting List of Link Targets
- Step 3: Qualify and Prioritize Your Prospects
- Step 4: Find Contact Information and Identify Decision-Makers
- Step 5: Write Outreach That Actually Gets Replies
- Step 6: Execute Broken-Link Building Campaigns
- Step 7: Run Guest Post and Digital PR Campaigns in Parallel
- Step 8: Track Links, Monitor Your Profile, and Report
This guide walks through the complete link-building workflow that Salterra’s team uses on real client campaigns: how to identify link opportunities, prioritize targets, write outreach that actually gets replies, and track everything in a system that scales. If you follow this process consistently, you will build links. If you skip steps or rush the prospecting phase, you’ll spend weeks sending emails no one reads.
Step 1: Define Your Link-Building Goals Before You Prospect
Before opening a prospecting tool, answer two questions: Which pages do you need to rank, and what does a “good” link look like for this campaign? These answers shape every subsequent decision. A local business trying to rank a service page has different link needs than a SaaS company pushing a data-driven thought-leadership piece. Confusing the two produces unfocused prospecting that wastes time.
Set a monthly link target that reflects the competitive landscape. Use a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush to analyze the backlink profiles of the top three ranking pages for your primary keyword. Count their referring domains, note the authority distribution, and look at the anchor text profile. That’s your baseline — not an exact copy, but a competitive benchmark. If the top three results each have 80–150 referring domains with a mix of editorial, resource, and niche directory links, plan accordingly.
Step 2: Build a Prospecting List of Link Targets
Link prospecting is the sourcing phase: finding websites that could plausibly link to you and are worth pursuing. The quality filter matters more than the quantity of prospects. A list of 50 genuinely relevant, editorially active websites will outperform a scraped list of 500 low-quality directories every time.
Core Prospecting Methods
- Competitor backlink analysis: Export the referring domains linking to your top competitors using Ahrefs’ Site Explorer or Semrush’s Backlink Analytics. Filter for sites that link to two or more competitors but not to you — these are high-probability targets because the site has already demonstrated willingness to link in your niche.
- Resource page prospecting: Search Google for “your topic” + “resources” or “useful links”. Resource pages exist to link out to the best information on a topic — if your content genuinely belongs there, these are among the easiest links to earn.
- Guest post prospecting: Search for “write for us” + your niche or “guest post guidelines” + your niche to find publications that accept contributed content.
- Unlinked brand mentions: Use Google Alerts, Ahrefs Alerts, or Mention.com to track unlinked references to your brand or key content. These are warm outreach targets — the site already knows you exist.
- Broken link prospecting: Covered in detail below. Use tools like Check My Links (Chrome extension) or Ahrefs’ broken backlinks report to find dead links pointing to content similar to yours.
Collect prospects in a spreadsheet or a dedicated outreach CRM like Pitchbox, Mailshake, or Hunter.io. For each prospect, record: the domain, a specific page where your link would fit, the contact name and email if found, and a relevance note. That note — one sentence on why your content fits their page — becomes the foundation of your pitch.
Step 3: Qualify and Prioritize Your Prospects
Not every prospect deserves equal effort. Before drafting a single email, run a quick qualification pass. Check domain authority (DA in Moz, DR in Ahrefs) as a rough signal, but weight relevance over raw authority. A DR 40 niche blog with an engaged audience and consistent editorial publishing is a better target than a DR 60 general site that sells links to anyone who asks.
Red flags to remove from your list: sites with thin or AI-generated content, excessive outbound links on every page (a sign of link selling), obvious private blog networks, sites unrelated to your topic at any meaningful level, and sites with no real editorial standards. Chasing these wastes outreach budget and risks association with low-quality neighborhoods that can drag down your profile over time.
Prioritize your remaining list by a combination of relevance, authority, and estimated win probability. Tier 1: highest-relevance targets with strong authority — these get fully personalized pitches. Tier 2: good relevance and moderate authority — these get personalized templates. Tier 3: lower-authority but still relevant — batch these for volume outreach or deprioritize entirely.
Step 4: Find Contact Information and Identify Decision-Makers
The right email address is the difference between a campaign that gets 20% reply rates and one that gets 2%. Generic info@ addresses almost never produce results. You want the editor, content manager, or site owner — whoever makes the decision about what gets published or linked.
Use Hunter.io, Voila Norbert, or RocketReach to find email addresses by domain or person name. Many sites list an editor or writer name on their About page or in bylines — search LinkedIn for that person’s professional email format once you know the domain structure. For smaller sites, a contact form pitch written specifically to the owner works fine. Tools like Clearbit can enrich contact data at scale for larger campaigns.
Verify emails before sending using a tool like ZeroBounce or Hunter’s built-in verifier. Sending to invalid addresses tanks your domain sender reputation, which reduces deliverability across your entire campaign.
Step 5: Write Outreach That Actually Gets Replies
Most link-building outreach fails because it reads like a template — because it is one. Editors and site owners receive dozens of identical pitches every week. The fastest path to a reply is an email that proves you read their site, have something genuinely useful to offer, and can explain in two sentences why their readers benefit.
Structure a high-converting cold pitch as follows: personalized opener that references something specific on their site (a recent article, a gap in their resources section, a broken link), a one-line credibility statement about who you are, a clear and specific ask with the URL of what you’re pitching, and a short explanation of why it’s relevant to their audience. Keep the entire email under 150 words. Long pitches signal that the sender hasn’t considered the recipient’s time.
Subject lines should be specific, not clever. “Broken link on your SEO tools resource page” outperforms “Quick question!” by a wide margin. For guest post pitches, lead with the specific article idea, not a generic offer to write something. A subject line like “Guest post idea: how to audit a local citation profile” tells the editor immediately whether this is worth opening.
Follow-Up Cadence
Send one follow-up email five to seven days after the initial pitch if there’s no reply. Keep it short — reference the original email and ask if it landed. A second follow-up after another five days is the maximum for cold prospects; beyond that, you risk damaging the relationship and your sender reputation. Move unanswered prospects to a low-priority list for a future campaign rather than burning the contact with repeated contact.
Step 6: Execute Broken-Link Building Campaigns
Broken-link building is one of the highest-conversion link-building tactics because it frames your outreach as a favor rather than a request. When you find a broken link on a relevant page and have a resource that could replace it, you’re helping the site owner fix a real problem while earning a link in return.
To execute: use Ahrefs’ broken backlinks report to find pages in your niche that have inbound links pointing to dead URLs (404s). Alternatively, use the Check My Links Chrome extension to scan resource pages and articles manually. When you find a broken link, check what the original page contained using the Wayback Machine at web.archive.org — you need to confirm your content is a genuine replacement, not just a vaguely related page.
Your outreach pitch for broken links writes itself: identify the broken link specifically, note that it returns a 404, and offer your URL as a replacement. This transparency — showing your work — produces reply rates significantly above standard cold outreach. At Salterra, broken-link campaigns run as a standard component of new client link-building onboarding, particularly for clients in content-rich niches where resource pages are common.
Step 7: Run Guest Post and Digital PR Campaigns in Parallel
Guest posting — contributing original articles to relevant publications in exchange for an author byline and link — remains effective when done with genuine editorial standards. The key distinction: you’re writing for the audience, not manufacturing a link. Publications that accept low-effort content to fill their editorial calendar produce low-value links. Publications with real editorial standards, author vetting, and an engaged readership produce links that actually move rankings.
Pitch specific article ideas, not offers to “write about anything.” Research the publication’s existing content gaps — topics their readers would want that the site hasn’t covered well. Your pitch should solve a problem for their editor, not add to their workload. When your guest post is published, link internally to one or two of your relevant pages where it fits naturally in the content. Never stuff keyword-rich anchor text into an unrelated sentence — editors will remove it and your relationship with the publication suffers.
Digital PR takes a different approach: you create inherently linkable content — original research, surveys, data visualizations, tools, or definitive guides — and pitch it to journalists and bloggers who cover your niche. AI Overviews and AI-powered search engines increasingly surface original data and cited studies; a piece of research that earns editorial coverage from credible publications builds authority signals that extend well beyond traditional link value. Tools like Connectively (formerly HARO), Qwoted, and Roxhill help connect brands with journalists actively looking for sources and data.
Step 8: Track Links, Monitor Your Profile, and Report
A link-building campaign without tracking is budget spent in the dark. Set up a tracking system from day one that logs every outreach contact, reply status, and earned link — along with the referring domain, anchor text, target page, and date acquired. Ahrefs’ backlink alerts or Google Search Console’s Links report will confirm when new links are indexed.
Monitor your overall backlink profile monthly for toxic or spammy links you didn’t build — negative SEO is rare but real. Use Google Search Console’s disavow tool only for links you have evidence are causing active harm; a reflexive disavow of any low-authority link does more damage than the links themselves.
Tie link acquisition back to ranking movement for the pages you’re targeting. Track target page rankings weekly using Ahrefs, Semrush, or a dedicated rank tracker. If a page gains 15 referring domains over 90 days and shows no movement, investigate: is the on-page optimization competitive? Is the content genuinely better than what ranks? Link building accelerates good pages — it rarely rescues fundamentally weak content. Report monthly on links earned, referring domains added, anchor text distribution, and target keyword movement. This loop — build, measure, adjust — is what separates campaigns that compound over time from campaigns that plateau.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many links do I need to rank on the first page?
There is no universal number — it depends entirely on the competitiveness of the keyword and niche; analyze the backlink profiles of the pages currently ranking in the top three positions for your target keyword to get a realistic benchmark for the referring domain count and authority distribution you need to compete.
What makes a backlink high quality?
A high-quality backlink comes from a topically relevant site with real editorial standards, an established organic readership, clean link profile of its own, and a placement that appears naturally in editorial content rather than in a sidebar, footer, or paid link network.
Is guest posting still an effective link-building tactic?
Yes — guest posting on publications with genuine editorial standards and real audiences still earns valuable links; the tactic fails when treated as a link-manufacturing exercise on sites that exist solely to publish contributed content without any quality filter.
What is a disavow file and when should I use it?
A disavow file is a list of domains or URLs submitted to Google Search Console to tell Google you don't endorse those links — use it only when you have clear evidence of a manual penalty caused by spammy links, or a large-scale negative SEO attack; disavowing links indiscriminately can remove link equity you actually want to keep.
How long does link building take to impact rankings?
New links are typically crawled and processed by Google within a few days to a few weeks, but ranking movement from a link-building campaign usually becomes visible over a 60–120 day window as Google re-evaluates the page's authority relative to competitors — consistency over months outperforms bursts of activity followed by inaction.
What anchor text should I use when building links?
A natural anchor text profile includes a mix of branded anchors (your company or site name), partial-match anchors, generic anchors ("read more," "this resource"), and a smaller proportion of exact-match keyword anchors — over-optimizing toward exact-match anchors triggers algorithmic signals that can suppress rather than boost rankings.
Terry has 30+ years in software and SEO. He’s the founder of Salterra Digital Services and SEO Spring Training, host of the Roundtable SEO Mastermind, and lead instructor at SEO University — teaching the exact tactics his team uses on client work.
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