Blogging and content creation are pillars of any good digital marketing effort. While a quality blog builds your brand and establishes you as a resource in your industry, it also has a much more technical benefit: it helps you garner organic links to your web properties.

Links “back” to your website from other pages are known as backlinks. Backlinks are signals to Google’s search algorithm that a domain or page is a helpful resource on a particular topic. The sites that appear at the top of a search result on a given topic no doubt have hundreds, or even thousands, of backlinks from assorted properties around the internet.

Most robust digital marketing teams today dedicate at least some of their resources toward link building—reaching out to a relevant party (the editors, or business owners, for example) at a website and requesting that they add a link to a page.

If your website, small business, or other organization doesn’t have a link building team, however, you’ll have to gather backlinks organically. That means you’ll need to write quality organic content that people want to link to.

Writing content that earns organic links requires more than just being a good writer, or a knowledgeable source. You’ll need to utilize a few important tactics in order to create content that ranks organically, pushing your web properties to the all-important first page of Google’s results pages.

What you need to know about good organic content

If you plan to build your backlinks without a link building team, you’re not alone. Plenty of organizations lack a dedicated link building team, whether because it’s not a priority or not in their marketing budget.

Plus, gathering links through content alone is scalable—if you find a content creation process that works for you (and we’ll get into that below), you can repeat this process many times for additional links.

As mentioned above, however, there’s more to good content than just a firm grasp of the language and good writing skills—both of which you’ll need in order to succeed.

Here’s a rundown of what you need to know about what makes for content that produces lots of organic links:

There are different types of content that attract links naturally

Generally speaking, there are three kinds of articles that are more likely than others to attract links from third parties:

  • Articles with facts or data that could easily be used in articles
  • Reports with new or original information
  • Newsworthy articles

Providing other websites—news outlets, other small business blogs, etc.—with original information, analysis, and/or data that they could not have come up with themselves is a great way to attract their interest and their links.   

Your existing content contains clues for what does well

If you’ve already been blogging for some time, you may have already noticed trends in terms of what kinds of content garners links.

For this content: Did you link build for these topics (i.e., did you reach out to other sites and pitch them on the idea of including your content in one of their posts)?

If not, why do you think this content was so effective in gaining links? Can you create similar content—articles that touch on another, related concept, using the same formatting?  

(Not sure what articles of yours are gaining backlinks and driving traffic? Use a tool like Ahrefs to capture that information—setting up email updates from them about new links earned, or reviewing your entire domain or individual pages for your history of backlinks.)

For example, three of the below pieces of content (satellite photos, scientific 7-minute workout, and the ‘busy trap’) on The New York Times could give clues to the next types of interactive content or articles they should research and create because of their high number of referring domains and backlinks, each in the thousands.

To get started, go to your ahrefs dashboard and click on Best by links under the pages section on the left-hand toolbar.

Content from your competitors is also telling

Similarly, you can use Ahrefs or other SEO tools to see what content from your competitors and peers have a lot of backlinks.

Examine that content. Then ask yourself: Can I create a better post on that topic? Can I create something that will be even more useful to readers? If so, you’ve found a topic and an opportunity.

Keyword research is key

Keyword research is a tenet of SEO: You identify popular words and phrases that people use while searching a topic related to your business and build your content around those terms.

Earning backlinks to keyword-focused content is optimal since you’ll be boosting the authority of content that attracts people searching for concepts related to your business. These people are more likely to become consistent readers, customers, or referrers.

To see keyword search volume, ranking difficulty, and more, check out Neil patel’s Ubersuggest for free insights. Below is a chart from Ubersuggest with the monthly search volume for the keyword: ‘sneakers.’

How to create content that earns organic links

Now that we understand the basics of good content, we can go into details about what good content actually looks like.

Let’s assume some of the necessities—that you have a strong command of the language, that you write well-sourced, proofread copy that doesn’t turn off readers with industry jargon. Now let’s look at what you can do to help boost your content’s effectiveness in terms of earning links.

Rank for a specific keyword

Choose a keyword or keyword phrase and build your content around it. Place it naturally throughout your copy and include related keywords that build your post’s case as a meaningful resource on the topic.  

Optimize the backend

Your blog post platform, such as WordPress, should give you the ability to optimize certain key aspects of the best, including:

  • The URL string: Your post’s URL should be the keyword phrase you want to rank for.
  • The title: The post’s title should be either the question you’re answering with your post, a top finding, or a clear description of the post with the keyword you’re featuring included.
  • The meta description: This 155-character-or-so description of your article appears in the search results under the title, and should include your keyword.

Inlink to your other content

Strengthen all of your content by making them into topic clusters—webs of related content, connected by links. Make sure that you link relevant content, rather than connecting tons of unrelated articles to each other in an attempt to promote your lesser-performing articles.

Below is the optimal structure for a website for easy crawling by Google bots. The top circle is your homepage followed by topic clusters, subclusters, and finally individual pages or blog posts.

Source: https://moz.com/learn/seo/internal-link

Add a snippet

If applicable, make your content even more visible to Google: Add a snippet code and the answer to the question people might ask to the top of the article, so that Google creates a snippet for the content.

Update the content as needed

Your articles don’t need to be engraved in stone: Google appreciates it when you update your content with new information, and will often crawl your site again to see whether these updates make your piece more authoritative and worthy of a higher search rank. This will also make your content more appealing to sites that want to link to the most recent and up-to-date information.

What good content looks like

With all of this in mind, let’s take a quick look at what good content that earns organic links looks like, with “What Percentage of Small Businesses Fail? (And Other Need-to-Know Stats).”

This article seeks to answer a very popular question. In seeking to answer it, Fundera built an article around the topic—with an optimized title, URL string, and meta description that all mention the keyword phrase, as well.

In part thanks to these efforts, it’s on the first page of Google search results for the question it answers:

And as a result, the article has over 5,000 backlinks and 641 referring domains, as of this writing, according to Ahrefs:

And below is a chart of the page’s accumulation of referring domains since it was published:

As mentioned above, creating a fact or data-based article isn’t the only tactic you can use. A news site that often breaks stories will likely gain many links as other blogs or outlets link back to them. A site that focuses more on the analysis or on creating reports based off of existing data might have their content picked up by outlets looking for a fresh perspective.

Whichever track you take, make sure that you have the tools in place to measure your efforts, and be prepared to tweak your content creation tactics to reflect your findings.

Earning links through creating great content is an admirable goal, but it’s an uphill battle. Don’t be afraid to supplement your efforts by sharing across social media, or doing PR outreach.

Most importantly, experiment with your content to find formats, methods, and topics that resonate with your audience and work for your bottom line. SEO is as much an art as it is a science—so don’t settle if you find that your content isn’t earning the kind of links you know it should.

About the Author: Nicolas Straut is an SEO Associate at Fundera, a marketplace for small business financial solutions, who specializes in content marketing and link building. He got his start in SEO by writing and promoting content at startups in the recruiting and email productivity spaces and hasn’t stopped since.