Link Building Strategies: Pick the One Your Business Can Win, Then Run It for Six Months

A quota of links is not a plan

Ask an agency for its link building strategy and you often get a menu: guest posting, broken link building, resource pages, digital PR, the skyscraper technique. Those are tactics. Picking from the menu each month produces a scatter of unrelated links, some decent, many from sites nobody reads, none pointing where the business needs them. The monthly report counts them anyway, because a count is easy to show.

Google has a word for links pursued as an end in themselves. Its spam policies, updated in August 2026, define link spam as creating links primarily to manipulate rankings, and the examples include creating low-value content primarily for the purposes of manipulating linking and ranking signals. A thin "ultimate guide" written only so outreach emails have something to point at sits closer to that line than its authors think.

The rest of this guide works through those questions in order. If you need the basics of what a backlink does first, start at the link building hub.

Choose the pages that need links before chasing any

Links help Google find pages and act as a signal of relevance, per Google's link best practices. For a business, the pages that matter are the ones that sell: the service page for your most profitable job, the category page for your best-selling line. Those are also the pages nobody links to voluntarily. No reporter cites a page titled "Water Heater Installation."

So most link strategies work in two hops. The links go to a page people want to cite, such as a cost guide or a local report. That page then links internally to the service page it relates to, with plain descriptive anchor text, passing visitors and context along. Google's same documentation says every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site; a strategy simply chooses which page does the linking. Our internal linking service builds that structure on larger sites.

1. 1.List the five pages that would bring the most revenue if they ranked better.
2. 2.In Search Console, note which of them sit on page two for searches that matter.
3. 3.For each, ask what a related page would look like that other sites would cite.
4. 4.Pick one target page and one citable page to start. Two hops, one campaign.

Skip this step and the links land on the home page and an old blog post, which is pleasant and changes little.

Read the competitors' links for the pattern, not the list

The businesses ranking above you already ran some strategy, even if by accident. Their links tell you which one works in your market. You do not need to copy their links; you need to see what kind they are.

1. 1

   Pick three competitors

   Choose the businesses that outrank you for the target page's main search, not the biggest names in your industry.

2. 2

   Export their linking domains

   Search Console shows only your own links, so a third-party tool is needed for theirs. Our roundup of link building tools covers the options, including free ones.

3. 3

   Sort every domain into a bucket

   Press, trade publications, suppliers and manufacturers, associations, local organizations, resource pages, directories, and junk. Ignore the junk; it explains nothing.

4. 4

   Compare the buckets with yours

   Export your own from the Links report in Search Console. Google says the report is a sample, not a complete list, and its tables stop at 1,000 rows, which is plenty for a local business.

5. 5

   Name the gap

   If competitors have press and you have none, your strategy is stories. If they have supplier and association links you lack, it is relationships. If they have links to a calculator or a cost guide, it is an asset.

A competitor analysis does this sorting for you and adds what the competitors rank for. Whichever way you do it, judge each linking site by the standards in high quality backlinks, not by the vendor scores explained in domain authority.

Asset, story or relationship: the three strategies that fit a small business

Nearly every honest link building strategy is one of three engines, or a combination. Each produces different links, costs different things and suits different businesses. Pick the one your gap points to and your business can afford to run well.

Most small businesses should run the relationship strategy first, because it costs least and the links are already half earned. Our guide on how to get backlinks lists those sources one by one. A strategy, though, is what you do after the easy links are in, when the gap with competitors is still open. That is where the asset and the story come in, and they work best together: the asset gives the reporter something to cite.

The asset is what you make. The story is why anyone hears about it. The relationships are who passes it along.

Building a linkable asset other sites will actually cite

Google's guide to helpful content asks whether a page provides original information, reporting, research or analysis, and whether it offers substantial value compared with other pages in search results. That is also a fair description of a page people link to. A rewrite of the top three results offers neither, which is why it earns nothing.

A local business has original information that national publishers do not: its own jobs, its own town, its own invoices. Say a roofer in Boerne tallied what its last two hundred replacements actually cost by roof type and size, and published the ranges with a plain explanation. A homeowners' forum, a real estate agent's blog and the local paper all have reason to cite it. Nobody can copy it without the invoices.

The one-page brief for an asset

• Who will cite it, by name or type: the reporter, the association, the realtor's blog. If you cannot name three, rethink the asset.
• The question it answers that nobody else does, in one sentence.
• The source of its facts: your records, a public data set, a survey you run. Never invented numbers.
• How it stays current: the date you will update it, and who does it.
• The service page it links to, with the sentence that carries the link.

Writing and building the asset is content marketing in its most practical form, and a written brief like this one is covered in depth in our guide to content briefs. The skyscraper technique is one way to promote a finished asset to sites that already link to weaker versions of it.

Running the story and relationship strategies without crossing Google's line

The story strategy turns your knowledge into coverage. A reporter writing about a freeze needs a plumber who answers; a trade magazine needs a project with numbers. Our digital PR guide covers angles and pitching, and email outreach covers the email itself. Coverage also puts your name where people and AI engines read it, link or no link, which our page on brand mentions vs backlinks examines.

The relationship strategy makes existing ties visible: a co-written guide with a realtor you refer clients to, a case study for the equipment maker you install for, a sponsor page for the league you already support. Partnerships are where rules bite, so keep Google's distinctions close.

Google's spam policy says it understands that buying and selling links is a normal part of the web's economy for advertising and sponsorship, and that such links are fine when qualified with nofollow or sponsored. Our guides to reciprocal links, guest blogging and nofollow links cover each case.

Six months, one campaign: the plan

This plan runs one campaign around one asset and one target page. It assumes the easy relationship links are already collected; if not, spend a month on them first. The pacing is our practice, not a rule, and it suits an owner or one staff member working a few hours a week.

1. 1

   Month 1: pick the target and read the gap

   Choose the service page that matters most, sort three competitors' links into buckets, and decide which strategy closes the gap. Write the asset brief.

2. 2

   Month 2: build the asset

   Gather the data, write the page, design any chart or calculator, and add the internal link to the target page. Publish only when it is better than anything else on the subject.

3. 3

   Month 3: tell the people who already know you

   Send it to suppliers, associations, partners and customers who might reference it. These are the warmest readers and the most likely first links.

4. 4

   Month 4: pitch the press

   Turn the asset's most surprising finding into a short pitch for local reporters and two or three trade publications. Offer an interview, not a link request.

5. 5

   Month 5: widen the circle

   Find pages that link to older or weaker versions of the subject and suggest yours. Offer a publication an article built on the data, written for its readers.

6. 6

   Month 6: measure and decide

   Count what the campaign earned, check the target page's rankings and leads, and choose: refresh the asset with new data, run a second promotion round, or start the next asset.

Six months is a unit, not a deadline. A good asset keeps earning after the campaign ends, especially if you update it on the date in the brief. Our off-page SEO guide shows where a campaign like this sits in a full year of reviews, listings and mentions.

How to measure a link campaign without a vanity score

Link campaigns are easy to dress up with a rising third-party score. Measure what the campaign was for instead: links from sites that matter, visitors, and the target page's performance. Some numbers move in weeks, others in months, so read them on different clocks.

Google says the Links report does not show whether a link is nofollow, so open the linking page to check. Our guide to SEO KPIs covers the wider set of numbers worth reporting, and if the conversions column is empty because nothing is tracked, fix that first.

Running it yourself, and what handing it off buys

The relationship strategy is within reach of any owner. The asset and story strategies take research, writing, design and persistent follow-up, and they are where most in-house efforts stall in month three. If you have older links bought by a previous agency, run a backlink audit before adding new ones.

At DataCram, link earning is part of a monthly SEO program: no long contract, a defined scope, from $625 a month, with most local businesses between $625 and $2,250 per our SEO pricing page. Our content marketing team builds the assets, and on sites we build, Athena CMS's Odysseus agent lists backlink prospects for approval. Not ready to hire? The free website audit checks whether the pages you want links for are ready to convert the visitors.