How many failures you’ve gone through in link building for your business?
One, two, more than anyone can imagine?
Trust me, you’re not the only one.
While link building is crucial for your SEO success, it’s also one of the most challenging, especially for the NEWBIES.
Even the most highly ranked websites have gone through many link building failures before they could finally become successful one.
Wondering how’s that even possible?
The answer is simple, they’ve learned their lessons.
In this article, we’ve gathered 11 lessons you can learn from a failed link building campaign.
Lessons Failed Link Building Campaign Can Teach You
Link building isn’t something that happens overnight.
It takes a lot of hard work, skills, experiments, as well as patience to launch a successful link building campaign.
While hard work and skills will help you to make fewer mistakes, patience will help you to deal with the failures and learn from them.
So, what are the lessons you can actually learn?
Let’s find out!
Content Quality Is Something That Can’t Be Compromised
In my SEO career, I’ve seen so many people writing poor quality content and submitting them without doing any editing and proofreading when it comes to guest posting.
Do you think you will just write an article, publish it to your desired site and start getting a massive amount of traffic?
Well, you’re wrong!
Unless you come up with a fabulous, niche-relevant content, that’s never going to happen in the first place.
The content you’re creating for link building must be niche relevant, value-driven, and completely error-free to ensure that it attracts your target audiences.
Otherwise, you may get some readers but they will be annoyed by the poor quality of the content, hence leave the page and never come back.
Worst case scenario?
Your content won’t even get published if it’s not up to the mark, let alone generating traffic.
So, in case you’re not seeing any success with your guest post link building, you may want to look into the quality of the content you’ve created so far.
You Should’ve Hired an Expert
Are you doing all the link building works all by yourself?
This can be another reason why you’re not seeing any success with your link building campaign.
Link building requires the right strategy, as well as a good amount of time to become a successful one.
You need to launch a manual outreach, find a relevant, high-quality domain from where you want to get your backlink, create content, pitch the publisher, and convince them to publish your guest post.
Besides, you need to optimize the page you’re planning to rank through this link building.
Doing such jobs sometimes requires a bit of technical knowledge on SEO, which you may not have unless you’re in the SEO business.
While you’re trying to save money by doing all by yourself, you may end up losing everything if your site fails to rank.
That’s why it’s important that you hire a link building company that can do this job for you.
Wondering where to get an expert and how? You’re just in the right place.
At OneLittleWeb, we’ve got everything from scoring niche relevant, high-quality backlinks to creating a long, value-driven content to ensure a successful link building campaign for you.
You can order your first DA50+ backlink at a $275 discount.
Incorrect Anchor Text Should be Avoided
Using the correct anchor text is a vital factor while you’re building links for your website.
If your guest posts are continuously failing to rank, look into the anchor links you’re using.
Do you often use keywords like Click here, Go to, or Visit?
Then it’s quite obvious that you’re not ranking since these anchor texts are barely useless.
Also, do not use your site name as the anchor text, instead, use one of your target keywords that will improve your ranking.
Since backlinks are counted by all the search engines, you need to learn how to use the anchor texts to make sure your rank keeps climbing higher on a regular basis.
Don’t Get Links from Notorious Sites
For years, you’ve been getting backlinks after backlinks but still not seeing a satisfactory result.
Do you know why?
Because like most bloggers, you’re just going for backlink count instead of recognizing its quality.
It’s crucial to evaluate the quality, as well as the reputation of the website you’re prospecting for backlinks.
Google hates websites like gambling sites, illegal sites, or spam sites like private blog networks.
You will be highly penalized or even get removed from the search result if you get backlinks from those notorious sites.
Link Building With Videos Is Difficult
Videos are extremely popular and can go viral easily.
But when it comes to getting backlinks, they are not usually a good choice to go.
Videos usually come to your mind first when you think about viral content.
That’s why you may think that they will attract a ton of backlinks.
However, when it comes to giving suitable ascription to videos, most publishers fail to do so. They end up embedding or linking the videos to YouTube, Which isn’t effective.
While it’s possible to embed your videos without linking, the process is time-consuming and requires some extra steps.
Stop Creating Publisher Specific Content
How much are you involved with your publisher during the content production?
Are you doing it to give them a sense of ownership, assuming that it will be easier for you to get the content published if you blindly follow their specifications?
This approach should be avoided at any cost since it will make the publisher trap you in only work for their site.
Remember, the publisher will only post your content to get views and engagement on his site, not to generate links for you. So, creating publisher-specific content won’t help you much in the ranking.
Say No to Hyper-Local Content
No matter how amazing your content is with some noteworthy information, it may not be a huge success if you focus on only one city or area.
Focusing on only one area or city limits the number of publishers you can pitch the content.
And if none of them are convinced to publish your article, you’re in trouble.
On the other hand, content that targets a wide range of cities and areas helps you to reach a significant number of local and national publishers.
This is quite helpful since you can pitch a wide range of publishers. So, chances are you can convince some of them to publish your content.
Stop Making Content on a Topic You Can’t be Credible On
How much authority do you have on the subject you’re planning to create content?
Is your content relevant to your brand?
Publishers usually don’t show interest in the content that doesn’t have any connection to your industry.
So, if you created such content before, you know why it wasn’t accepted by the publishers.
Always stick to creating content that is highly relevant to your niche and goes extremely well with the publishers.
Be Careful About The Tools You’re Using
Using fancy tools for creating content may sound cool, but things can go completely wrong if you get carried away by this so-called coolness.
You can create a number of content using the latest technology but without the human touch, it can still be a boring one.
So, instead of relying on those tools so much, try to take care of the format by yourself and make it more interesting and less robotic.
No matter how advanced those tools are, they can’t create content that can create a connection between you and the readers. So, stop this practice right now.
Do Not Misuse Social Media
While social media is an excellent way to connect with your audiences and share your content to get traffic, this is the platform that gets most abused.
If you can create quality content, you can easily share them on social media and get high traffic by targeting the right audience.
However, don’t get tempted by thinking that getting a backlink from social media will be something beneficial for your site.
Social media sites tend to set the external links as “no-follow,” thus making sure no PR juice can flow through them.
Don’t Go for Super Niche Topic
Unless you want to increase your risk or zero return, do not ever go for super niche relevant topics.
The more you narrow down your topic, the more you diminish your potential audience.
And if you’re unfortunate enough, it will reduce the number of potential websites that will link to your site.
For example, everyone likes sports, but very few will be interested in a niche sport like snowkiting, which has seen a spike in participants in Russia, Canada, and Norway over the last decade.
Final Thoughts
Failure is inevitable when it comes to link building.
You will hardly find a company that has never gone through a failed SEO campaign.
However, how early you learn from those mistakes can ensure how successful you will become.
One of the best parts of link building is, with every mistake, you’re going to learn something new that will help you to achieve greater success in the future.
So, don’t get intimidated by the failure.
Analyze your link building process to find out what’s wrong and start working on it. And if possible, make an expert do it for you.
Sujan Sarkar is one of the co-founders of OneLittleWeb. He leads the agency with over a decade of experience.
In 2018, he founded OneLittleWeb, driven by a vision to fill a void in the industry, providing top-quality SEO and backlink services.
His impressive track record includes crafting over 25,000 backlinks for more than 1100 clients, generating over 1 billion in traffic. This has earned him a significant presence in the SEO realm.
He successfully leads a dedicated team of 65+ SEO professionals, focused on helping SaaS and Enterprises scale their organic traffic.
Sujan firmly believes that the best backlinks are not paid for but earned through high-quality content and strategic relationships.
Every day, he works tirelessly to position your business at the forefront of your customers’ minds, striving to elevate your brand’s visibility and authority.
His daily inspiration centers around securing client features on top-tier publications like Forbes, MSN, BBC, Yahoo, and many more. He leverages the right SEO strategies to achieve this mission.
