Category: SEO

If you have been involved in search engine optimization (SEO) for over a few years, you have undoubtedly witnessed a dramatic change in keyword research. Early on, obtaining keywords with a high search volume and little competition on search engines was at the top of the keyword research checklist.

As a result, few websites competed for the exact keywords, making creating a keyword research checklist simple. However, as more businesses entered the fray and the level of competition increased, it became harder to find high-volume, low-competition keywords.

Good SEO relies on getting your site to rank for the appropriate keywords, but how can you choose which ones to target? Or even how to rank for them? Well, we got you.

In this keyword research checklist guide, we’ll show you how to find opportunities to rank for terms your audience searches for that your competitors are ignoring.

So, let’s dive right in.

What is Keyword Research?

Keyword research is locating and analyzing search phrases or words that people are searching for in search engines. The idea is to use this information to determine which keywords will help your SEO and marketing campaigns.

Specifically, effective keyword research aims to identify target audiences’ inquiries and the frequency, difficulty, and intent of these searches. By adequately understanding your audience, you can optimize your content with the right keywords, aiding your content marketing strategy and approach.

The Definitive Keyword Research Checklist You Need to Rank in 2024

The cornerstone of SEO is keywords. No matter how hard you try, Google traffic won’t come to your site if no one is looking for what you’re writing about. Using a keyword research checklist helps guarantee that you are taking all the necessary steps to achieve your desired outcomes.

Additionally, you can use the checklist to ensure you have entered the appropriate keywords to increase website traffic and sales. Furthermore, it might save you time by making it simple to identify and fix any mistakes you made while conducting your research.

Look at the keyword research checklist for success in 2024 without further ado.

1. Study Your Niche

You need to understand your specialty before looking for and researching the ideal keywords for your website and content that you can rank for. It is impossible to sell everything to everyone.

Even big corporations target particular populations or demographic groups despite having thousands of items in their mix. You must identify and target your niche as a new business owner.

How to Understand and Determine Your Niche

1. Determine your hobbies and interests: The first step is to identify your passions and areas of interest. What do you like to do the most in your spare time? If your current job is tedious, you might consider changing careers. A new career might be challenging to establish and sustain, but the more you value your work, the easier it will be to keep motivation.
2. Identify problems you can solve: Any company or service’s principal objective is to address a problem for its clientele. Spend time coming up with ideas and researching the market. You may generate some prospective ideas for free by using Google Trends.
3. Determine the profitability of your niche: Get a sense of how much money you could make in your niche; this is crucial.
4. Gather feedback: If you’re uncertain, talk to people. Family members or coworkers can offer opinions and insights. Ask the people who could become your customers about their unique demands. 
5. Test your ideas: Testing your niche is the most significant approach to determining if it is correct. Create a website, or visit different business fairs to promote your ideas and see if people are interested in the products.

2. Know Your Audience

To succeed with SEO, you must have a solid understanding of your audience and their needs. Regardless of your SEO technique, if you understand your audience, you will know which keywords are pertinent to them.

Ways to Define Your Target Audience for Your Keyword Research Checklist 

1. Understand your current customer demographics: If you want to determine who your SEO strategy should target, it is prudent to begin with your present customers.
2. Use social insights: It is highly likely that the audience you’ve attracted on social media is intrigued by the goods or services you provide. Using the insights provided by your social media platforms can be a terrific approach to finding out more about your audience.
3. Study the SERPs: Although it may seem easy, analyzing the SERPs can help you identify the audience you should be targeting.

Read Also: How to Use SERP Analysis for Keyword Research and Content Creation

3. Define Your SEO Goals

You don’t just start searching for keywords randomly without first deciding your SEO objectives. SEO objectives are essential since they will give your plan a clear direction and enable you to concentrate more on your aim. You won’t be forced to fumble your way through in the dark. With goals, you can track your development objectively and correct courses if necessary.

While conducting keyword research, you aim to rank for specific phrases in your industry, increase traffic, and expand your business. Because your intention is clear and focused, you can figure out how to achieve it.

Read Also: SEO Tips to Help Your Rank Higher

You’re prepared to begin researching your primary keyword lists now that your niche and objectives have been identified.

4. Research Primary Keyword

Whether a page can draw visitors depends on the keyword you use on each page. Since pages with carefully selected keywords are more likely to draw visitors to your site, keyword research is crucial.

You must consider, select, and research the phrase or term that best describes your company. These key phrases can refer to a product or a service. Recognizing and examining the search engine terms that people search for is critical. Again, you need to ensure that they are relevant to the content you create on your website.

As a general guideline, your site’s primary keywords should be spread throughout the text and targeted to a larger audience. Your primary keywords should appear in the main title, headings, subheadings, anchor links, and first and final lines. You should include no less than one or two primary keywords on each page.

Tips on Choosing Keywords for Your Keyword Research Checklist 

1. Consider yourself a customer: When making your initial list of keywords, you must decide who your target market is and imagine yourself as a consumer. Consider what you’d put into Google to find your product or services.
2. Utilize keyword research tools: Use keyword research tools to look up prospective target keywords. With tools like SEMRUSH and Raven, you can obtain information on keyword traffic and trends, keyword competitiveness, related keywords, and more.
3. Examine the outcomes: After selecting your keywords, track them and evaluate the results and unique keywords your competitors might utilize.

Remember to include your primary keywords in blog articles, social media postings, metatags, and content on your website. Your target audience will find you more quickly if you frequently employ keywords.

5. Find Long-Tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords are search terms with comparatively little competition and search volume. Additionally, compared to most other keyword classifications, long-tail keywords typically have a length of 3+ words.

These exact keywords align with what a searcher would type in. Search volume is often relatively low for these keywords, but the potential conversion rate is significant. Creating high-quality content focusing on long-tail keywords will boost your website’s long-lasting SEO. 

To perform keyword research, competitor analysis, Pay-per-click research  (PPC ), and backlink research, you can utilize SEO tools like SEMrush or KWFinder. Additionally, you can use Google Suggest to look for long-tail keywords on the web.

How to Identify Long-Tail Keywords

1. Directly examine Google’s autocomplete suggestions: Simply typing a broad phrase into Google or another search engine) Checking the autocomplete options is a smart way to gather a list of long-tail keywords.
2. Google users are increasingly submitting questions instead of statements in their searches. Make sure to include some long-tail questions that start with modifiers like “what,” “how,” “where,” etc. when coming up with long-tail questions that your target audience might ask. When evaluating long-tail keywords in your preferred SEO tools, these words will undoubtedly frequently emerge as they reveal individuals’ unique problems.
3. Add qualifiers to short-tail keywords: Try reinforcing your keywords with qualifying terms relevant to your brand, products, or content. 
4. Analyze the gaps: To determine which subject areas and long-tail keywords to focus on on your pages, you must analyze the content of your website for topics that you are not currently addressing or performing strongly for.

6. Analyze Keyword Intent

The reason a user types a specific query into a search engine is called search intent or keyword intent. The motivation leads the user to use terms or keywords to search for information on the internet. It is essential to SEO because it enables you to understand the keyword’s intent.

Understanding user intent lets you choose the most relevant keywords for your initiatives and content. User intent is typically expressed as a search query entered into a search engine to find concrete answers.

There are three types: navigational, informational, and commercial.

1. Informational intent: The user wishes to learn more about a topic without intent to buy a product. For instance, one could look for how to walk a dog or What Google EAT Is.
2. Navigational intent: This keyword includes the name of a business or brand, and the searcher is looking for the appropriate website or web page. For instance, Facebook login or Netflix signup
3. Commercial intent: These keywords, or transactional intent, are used by people ready to purchase a product. They are also used by searchers looking for more information about a product before buying it, for instance, used vehicles for sale near me or the best laptops for gaming.

Therefore, it is possible that you won’t rank for your keyword if you only consider query volume and neglect search intent. Even if you manage to rank on search engine results pages (SERPs), the fact that your page does not correspond with the searchers’ intent will result in a negative user experience and a higher bounce rate.

Read Also: Top 10 Best SEO Practices to Dominate the SERPs

7. Research Related Search Terms or Competitive Keywords 

Checking out the related search terms at the bottom of a Google search result page is another excellent tactic to aid in understanding your keywords and target market.

If you are having trouble thinking of more keywords that people might be searching for related to your particular issue, you should use this method. These suggestions might provide you with some other keyword ideas to think about, after which you can use the methods described in the earlier sections to conduct keyword research.

8. Understand Your Competition 

Knowing who your competitors are, how they are doing, and why may be quite beneficial when attempting to improve SEO.

Using SEO software like Semrush, you can compare your website directly to your competitors, making it simple to see where you excel and fall short. A wise strategy is to get a list of your top-performing rivals’ keywords and track them frequently.

Knowing how your competitors are doing is helpful since it might help you identify the keywords they aren’t utilizing so you can outrank them. It’s vital to remember that any successful company will probably use these similar strategies; therefore, to compete and rank, you must continue to maintain and analyze your keyword research.

Read Also: Build a B2B Content Marketing Strategy

9. Update and Refresh Content

Consumer preferences change over time. You should update your keyword research and renew your content as often as necessary. Remember that your competitors monitor current changes, trending subjects, and popular issues and adjust as necessary.

Use the terms you’ve researched to naturally reference your products and services in your post. Maintain it as close to the top of the page as you can. Just write for real humans rather than just Google when you do so.

Conclusion

If you desire to succeed online, your keyword research efforts must be prioritized. Knowing which keywords are most relevant to your business can help ensure that your site shows up prominently in search engine results pages, generating traffic and leads.

Effective keyword research can be difficult and time-consuming, though. However, if you adhere to the comprehensive keyword research checklist for 2024 provided above and these SEO tips, your SEO efforts will be successful, and you will be well on your way to more significant positions on SERPs.

Whether you’re a savvy entrepreneur, a marketer, a blogger, or someone crafting content, diving into blogger outreach can boost your game. It’s all about broadening your audience, scoring top-notch backlinks, and advancing your business.

In this guide, we’ll dig into spotting outreach opportunities, sizing potential connections, and sealing the deal with some irresistible perks for SEO. That’s the secret sauce to standing out from the crowd. So, let’s dive in!

What is Blogger Outreach

In SEO practice, blogger outreach is like connecting with key players in your niche. Brands reach out to respected bloggers or influencers to spotlight their products and services. Choose influencers or bloggers who resonate with your domain, boast a solid following, and voila! Blogger outreach will become an influential asset in your link-building toolkit.

The end game? Persuade those influential voices with substantial, targeted audiences to talk about you and provide a link to your website. It’s a strategic move to spread the word in the right circles.

Step-By-Step Guide To Do Blogger Outreach

1. Set a Clear Goal

Begin your outreach strategy by establishing specific, measurable goals like any other project. Set concrete objectives to provide you with clear guidelines for how to evaluate your achievement. You won’t know whether your campaign was successful if you don’t have concrete goals.

Even when your campaign achieves excellent success, evaluate its effectiveness to identify areas for improvement. Therefore, choose your goals before starting to develop a blogger outreach approach.

In case you want to clarify your objectives, consider the following questions:

• Do you desire to boost sales?
•  Do you desire to boost brand recognition?
•  Would you want to boost off-page SEO by acquiring some high-quality backlinks?

2. Define Measurable Success Criteria

After deciding on a specific objective or set of goals, you must establish the criteria for evaluating possible blogging partners. These standards will help you visualize your ultimate goal.

The standards may change depending on your niche and objectives. For instance, consider the scenario where obtaining high-quality backlinks is your aim. In that case, your primary considerations should be traffic, spam score, and domain ranking.

A few quantifiable criteria are:

1. Audience Engagement

There are various ways to gauge how engaged a site’s readership is. The easiest way is to ask yourself the following questions:

• Does the blog’s audience leave frequent comments? 
•  Do authors respond to comments? 
•  Do readers of this blog share posts on social networks? 

The more comments and social shares you receive on your blog post, the more engaged the audience is.

2. Traffic

A target site’s traffic might make it very qualified. The more traffic a blog receives, the better it becomes. The best part is that you can measure a site’s traffic, domain ranking, or authority using SEO software.

3. SEO

You can also evaluate a site using SEO data. If you want to obtain high-quality backlinks, use SEO metrics. Evaluate the following when analyzing SEO metrics:

• Page Authority: This reflects the SEO authority of the page; the stronger its authoritativeness, the better.
•  Spam Score: This shows the domain’s spam toxicity. You don’t want your site penalized by search engines because you link to spammy or unethical websites.
•  Content Relevancy: This indicates how pertinent a hyperlink is to a post’s context. The more relevant the backlink, the higher the quality of the audience you receive from the site.

3. Find Prospects

Now that you have quantifiable standards, it’s time to look for outreach candidates. Start by identifying the bloggers who best represent your brand. You may use a straightforward spreadsheet to determine who the best influencers are for your local brand.

For instance, you can use Excel or Google Drive to construct a spreadsheet with a list of popular blogs. For each site, you want to learn about the blogger who runs it and acquire their contact information. You can use tools like LinkedIn email finder Chrome extension to find their updated contact details from LinkedIn.

However, check each publisher against the following standards before you start reaching out to them:

• Quality: Their online design and content standards should be on par with or higher than yours.
• Relevance: Do they create appropriate content for your audience and brand?
• Opportunity: Do they frequently provide opinions from brands or individuals like you?

The best part is that you can use different tools to get around. For instance, you could use BuzzSumo. This tool is valuable if you are looking for relevant bloggers, trending topics, and content ideas for guest posting. Alternatively, you could use Google or your preferred search engine to search for your niche’s best bloggers. 

Now that you have researched and created your list of bloggers, you must group them into different categories.

• The first group is the elite influencers or bloggers you want to collaborate with—the handful of powerhouses in your niche. 
•  The second group should have a list of well-liked bloggers who receive respectable comments on their articles. They most likely have a long history of blogging.
•  The third group should consist of bloggers who are relatively new to the industry but often create relevant content. This section should have fewer bloggers.  

4. Choose Your Type of Blogger Outreach Strategy

Select the blogger outreach strategy that best suits your prospective outreach partner. Several fantastic blogger outreach methods are available. The kind of outreach you conduct will typically depend on your niche, target market, and objectives.

Here are some of the top blogger outreach strategies you can use.

1. Guest Posting

This kind of blog outreach is when organizations or individuals produce content for another blog. It can be helpful to reach a new audience, and you can use it to advertise a good, service, or website. Most of the time, specialists in their fields who can offer the blog’s visitors useful information write guest pieces. Blogger outreach services exist to do this for you at a price.

2. Sponsored Posts 

These are a sort of blog outreach where organizations or people pay to post their content on someone else’s blog. You can use it to advertise a particular commodity, service, or website. Most often, writers of sponsored pieces are subject-matter experts who can provide readers of the site with helpful information.

3. Product Evaluations

Another excellent chance for outreach is a product review. You can provide a free product sample for a blogger to review. Free samples are always appreciated; this is a quick and straightforward outreach strategy. 

Genuine reviews can position your company as a market leader, introduce your goods to a new audience, and build a long-lasting backlink profile.

4. Persuade Them Using a Powerful Incentive

After choosing your target bloggers and deciding on your blogger outreach strategy, developing an alluring perk will persuade bloggers to support your outreach plan. Consider what you can provide your prospects that they will find beneficial as you search for the ideal reward. Here are some pointers to assist you:

• Money: If you engage in high-volume blogger outreach in a highly transactional manner, using money as an incentive works well.
• Freebies or Subscriptions: Swag or free subscriptions can be effective marketing tools if you offer a product or service. This is especially true if you contact bloggers to get them to mention and evaluate your products. Swag or free subscriptions frequently accompany free samples and gifts.
• Content: If you aim to deliver the content in exchange for free placement, you have an easy task. Most bloggers won’t accept content unless you have built a great relationship with them, have specialized knowledge that they and their audience would value, or can produce an epic piece of worthwhile content. 

Whatever the situation, you must always give bloggers or influencers something worthwhile. Once you’ve identified the ideal bait, it’s time to contact your target.

5. Structure Your Message 

You can begin structuring the messaging. The email you send will decide whether or not the entire adventure was worthwhile. Remember that if your messaging is unclear, you won’t get excellent results, regardless of how qualified your list is or how many emails you send. So, do this:

• Be concise and to the point. Include these three things in your cold email: your identity, proposal, and what you want the potential customer to do. Keep in mind that most people view emails on mobile platforms. Reading and responding to a short message is considerably simpler than scrolling through a short article. 
•  Keep it Personalized: Include the name of the person whose attention you are seeking. People are much more likely to respond if you know it, so look it up if you don’t. A little individuality goes a long way when emailing a generic email address, so try to find a contact who works there. Don’t be scared to take a step further with this, as it frequently determines whether you receive a response or if your email is deleted.
•  End with a CTA. Use the appropriate call-to-action (CTA) to increase your reaction rates. This section of your email convinces recipients to respond, click a link, complete a form, etc. The CTA and the objective of your email should be precisely aligned. Try to concentrate your outreach efforts on a particular goal.
•  Be prompt with your follow-up emails. Your outreach email should hopefully receive a response from the receiver. Your emails may occasionally go unanswered; if so, consider following it up. 

6. Track Your Results to Optimize Your Outreach Strategy

When your outreach effort is over, you must analyze your results. This will help you get the most out of your efforts and understand the overall performance of your campaigns. You can do this by comparing the outcomes to what you had anticipated.

Benefits of Using Blogger Outreach Strategies 

1. Increases Online Visibility

Having an active online presence is crucial for any e-commerce brand. Although marketing on social media is compelling, most people already use it. To differentiate yourself, you must look for an alternative. 

An influential blogger outreach strategy increases your brand’s online visibility while promoting it across different platforms. It ensures you step outside the social media bubble and advertise your business on various sites. The exposure is excellent for your company’s short- and long-term digital blogger outreach strategies.

2. Builds Relationship

These days, establishing good relationships with renowned industry experts who have an online voice or influencers has become crucial for business growth. A compelling blogger outreach strategy will help you build good relationships and enhance your brand.

3. It Is Cost-Effective

Outreach to bloggers is a very economical method of marketing. It’s a terrific approach to improving your SEO and content marketing strategies. Working with bloggers in your niche will help you market your brand to the right demographic. Additionally, this approach can generate more leads for your brand and is far less time-consuming than conventional approaches.

4. Blogger Outreach Strategies Enable Brands to Access New Markets

Given how quickly the eCommerce business world is changing, it is becoming clear that market diversification is essential for success. A business cannot afford to concentrate solely on one SEO strategy, and exploring new markets is a way to continue developing. Blogger outreach is one of the few strategies that will significantly improve your chances of success.

5. Blogger Outreach Strategies are Excellent for Backlinks

Backlinks are crucial since they direct potential clients to your site. Building many backlinks to your website through blogger outreach is an intelligent SEO strategy. Your website will rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) if you have more high-quality backlinks, increasing your brand’s visibility.

6. It Improves a Brand’s Connection with Its Audience

You cannot overstate the value of exposure for a business. However, raising awareness by itself won’t help your brand much. If you want to persuade an audience member to commit financially, connect with them. With this in mind, a blogger can improve a brand’s relationship with its targeted audience by educating and reassuring them about their products. The corporation can more easily encourage specific user actions with the help of this brand promotion.

Conclusion

In addition to introducing you to the most influential voices in your niche, a strong blogger outreach campaign promotes blog development and visibility. Develop and implement a successful blogger outreach strategy for your brand using the tips and techniques described in this blog. 

Link building is the backbone of any successful SEO strategy. Backlinks signal credibility to Google and resonate with your audience, showcasing your website’s authority and relevance within the digital community. However, amidst the quest for backlinks, a common question emerges: how many backlinks should one aim to acquire monthly? Let’s embark on a journey to unravel this enigma.

What Makes a High-Quality Backlink?

While building new backlinks, many things must be considered to verify the link’s legitimacy. Getting quality links is crucial and impacts your SEO results. However, gaining low-quality links might harm your website and impair your search rankings.

Yet, if link building is done correctly, a website will benefit from improved brand recognition, more organic traffic, improved keyword ranks, and new relationships.

We will give you a thorough overview of “what makes a good backlink” to help you get the most out of your link development approach.

• Authority of the linking page or site. Depending on the page’s authority that links to you or its URL Rating (UR), you may estimate how much “link juice” you receive from a specific backlink. Further details regarding the Ahrefs UR metric may be found here. Generally, a link from a site with high authority will be more effective than one with low authority.
• In addition to DR and UR indicators, a website’s outbound link count is also essential. The value of a backlink from a website (domain) or web page linking to hundreds of other URLs will be lower than that of a website with only a few outbound connections.
•  It is better to use “do-follow” links. The SEO experts have differing views on whether or not no-follow links improve your ranking. Seize the opportunity if you can obtain a no-follow link from a reputable domain.
• According to research, an anchor text may impact the relevance and quality of a backlink. The anchor text and the material around it should be on-topic for search engines to be able to select the appropriate keywords to rank your content.

How Many Backlinks Per Month Should You Get?

The burning question remains: How many backlinks should one procure per month? While the allure of escalating page ranks swiftly is enticing, it’s essential to recognize that quantity alone won’t suffice in the long haul. Google favors websites with a robust backlink profile, yet quality trumps quantity in link building.

That said, there isn’t a certain quantity of backlinks that you should aim for per month. However, Google will send more organic traffic to a website with more backlinks. Backlinks are among the best strategies for attracting visitors from authoritative websites in your niche. They can raise your domain rating, Google PageRank, Alexa rank, and domain authority.

Of course, these links must be high-quality and relevant to your website’s topic. Remember, high-quality backlinks will always protect SERP ranks. A new site can gain five to seven high-quality links per month for a prolonged period.

After the site’s DA increases, you may build more high-quality monthly links to advance its ranking. Think of links as Twitter and Instagram hashtags that you can use in social media. They can increase your content’s exposure, visibility, and brand confidence on your website. Links can also expand the website’s authority, raising its Google rating.

Read Also: Why is Content Marketing Important for Your Brand?

Although having plenty of high-quality backlinks is always beneficial, remember to improve your site’s meta tags, URL structure, and meta description.

As your page becomes more optimized, you’ll need fewer backlinks. If you have many links but your page needs to be optimized, you’ll find it challenging to compete with other sites with comparable links but higher optimization. This is because a poorly optimized site needs to improve the relevance and authority backlinks provide.

In other words, link building must maintain an optimized page to save time.

Great SEO works like a snowball: the more effective you are, the simpler it is to implement tactics to make it even more effective. When the traffic to your website increases, getting new links will be a breeze.

Also, it’s essential to keep your material relevant. You can be sure of this by updating your page with the most recent information.

A great rule of thumb is to refresh your page’s content every 90 days. Stay calm with your link building, even if your site starts to rank and your DA rises. It’s crucial to expand your link profile continuously.

Read Also: How to Remove Outdated Content from Your Website

Would It Be Safer to Avoid Quantity?

No. The total amount of backlinks you finally receive is still essential for ranking. A successful site should be allowed to expand and get more backlinks over time without your interference.

If you link growth to quality content, a website may gain many more new links over a month and still do well in the SERPs.

Read Also: Best SEO Practices to Dominate the SERPs

Because it’s natural for people to connect to good material more frequently, Google anticipates that increased backlinks will coincide with increased quality content.

Your ability to grow quantity while lowering red flags depends on having high-quality backlinks and content. And it’s safer to retain good quality over time than to heedlessly increase link acquisition while disregarding best practices.

Additionally, remember that compared to a new site with few connections, older, more established domains with many previous backlinks may safely acquire more links without generating penalties. This is only a tiny portion of how difficult ranking is.

Final Words

How many backlinks should you aim for each month? It should be clear that the solution to this question is rather complex. There are a ton of variables that affect how well a specific website will do for a given keyword.

A few things, though, are definite. As long as you do it ethically, you can safely get as many backlinks as you can each month. Google, however, prioritizes quality over quantity.

Lesser backlinks are necessary for steady growth, but reputable backlinks can accelerate your development. A balanced mixture of links from various sources is the secret to success if you want to master SEO and your backlink strategy.

With backlinks being one of the leading Google ranking factors, link building has become very popular with every industry. Most marketers are desperate to grow their brand’s backlink profile and will do anything to gain authoritative links. However, there is a fine line between how you should and shouldn’t build your links, and it can drastically impact your Google rankings. That’s where white-hat link building comes in.

What Is White Hat Link Building?

White hat link building is an SEO approach that uses search engine optimization techniques to drive traffic to a site. Unlike the other link-building strategies, white hat aligns with Google’s webmaster guidelines and is least likely to generate a Google penalty that affects a site’s search engine rankings. 

White hat strategies can be slower than other link-building forms, but they focus on long-term search engine optimization results. 

White Hat vs. Black Hat vs. Grey Hat Link Building

White, gray, and black hat link-building strategies aim to help a site rank. 

• White hat link building is an ethical and honest way to optimize your site. It follows Google’s guidelines, but it might take longer to work. It involves developing original, high-quality content, legitimate link-building through relationships or guest blogging and creating a valuable user experience on your website. This approach will help Google find, index, and rank your site.
• Black hat link building: This strategy works faster than the white hat form but goes against Google guidelines and is more of a short-term plan. With this strategy, you use tactics that can work until they don’t. 

The tactics employed here may bring some wins, but they also come with high risks, as Google can penalize you for using them. Therefore, if you plan to achieve long-term goals for your business, it’s best to avoid these strategies altogether. 

Some Black hat backlink techniques include spamming blog comments with links to your website, purchasing low-quality backlinks, and writing low-quality guest posts.

• Gray hat link building uses techniques that are not strictly against Google’s guidelines but are outside what would be considered best practices.

For instance, if you contact an authoritative site and request them to link your site and ask for a fee, that is considered gray hat link building. Requesting a site to link to your site is a white-hat outreach strategy, but it’s against Google’s guidelines to pay for it. 

5 Benefits of White Hat Link Building

1. For better website ranking

Besides following search engine rules and policies, white hat linking guarantees safer and solid ranking results. Although the results are slower and may take longer on the surface, they will become steady over time.

The best way to get a better ranking is to create insightful content. You can invite guest bloggers to create content for your site to attract traffic and build relationships with people in the industry. 

2. Build Brand and Site Authority

White hat link building will also help you build your brand and site authority. Since Google uses backlinks to signal that your site publishes high-quality content and is relevant, the links tell Google that you are the authority in the space.

The more authority you have, the more likely search engines will rank your website for keywords associated with your niche.

Additionally, a white hat helps you build trust with Google, which then helps build trust with your audiences or potential clients. These links can also help provide third-party credibility. 

3. Drive More Traffic to Your Website

Despite helping you rank higher in SERPs, the White hat will also help you increase traffic to your website. You select a network of sites that direct audiences to your website when you build high-quality links. 

When recognized as reliable sources, these sites transfer their authority and audiences to you. Google notices this, and the SERPs reflect that. Having a higher spot on SERPs means better site exposure, which could boost traffic and expand your customer reach.

4. Save Money

Seeing results with black hat SEO takes a short time, but it uses much more resources than the white hat method. With the White hat method, you will require less Money and more time because search engines do not need to update security parameters regularly. Think of this strategy as a long-term investment. 

5. Improve Your Relationships With Other Websites

In most cases, you are required to reach out to other website owners and content managers to request for ask for links. Outreach is an opportunity to network and contribute to other people’s sites through guest blogs. You can continue to build upon all white-hat linking strategies with your new relationships.

For instance, if you have a great relationship with the manager or owner of a popular website, they will be willing to feature your site on their website or link to your content. This will help increase your website’s reputation, and you will likely rank on SERPs.

10 Techniques for White Hat Link Building In 2024

1. HARO Links

Help A Reporter Out (HARO) is a free online service for journalists and bloggers to receive feedback from the public. It enables them to connect with experts on issues relevant to their reporting. With the proper techniques, HARO can help you obtain high-quality backlinks and build brand awareness for your PR efforts, regardless of your niche.

As the source, you must only sign up for daily queries from other bloggers or journalists looking for experts in different fields. Then, you will have the chance to respond to any queries that interest you. This will likely result in high-quality backlinks from seriously high-authority websites.

Acquiring backlinks via HARO is considered a white hat technique since it’s an honest way to get relevant links from high-quality sources. 

How to Use HARO for White-Hat Link Building

1. The first step is to go to www.helpareporter.com and sign up for an account as a source.
2. Look for queries that match your expertise or niche.
3. Reply to queries that are relevant to your niche.
4. Create replies that are original, informative, and on-topic.
5. Have a link to your website in your signature.
6. Observe the responses you submit and respond to any questions from journalists.

2. Niche Edits

Niche edits or curated links are links from other websites in your area of expertise that mention or link to your site. These links point back to your site, improving your overall link-building strategy. Niche editing involves obtaining permission from other site owners and authors to link your site’s content to theirs, achieved via a contextual backlink. 

There are usually three types of niche edits. The most organic type is the white hat approach. In simpler terms, this means manually reaching out to other site owners to exchange content value for a free link. 

Even though this process is time-consuming, there is a high chance of building lasting relationships with fellow bloggers, enabling you to approach them again in the future with much ease. 

How to Use Niche Edits for white hat Link Building

1. The first step involves finding websites or articles relevant to your niche. You can use SEO tools such as Ahrefs to see what sites link to your competitors.
2. Then, analyze and evaluate the relevance, authority, and traffic of the site you have picked. This will help you determine which sites or owners fit your link well.
3.  Reach out to the webmasters for your link placement. It is advisable to send them a personal email pitching your link.

3. Guest Post-White-Hat link building

Guest posting or blogging is another white hat SEO strategy that will help improve its SEO ranking score and visibility in the SERPs and drive targeted traffic to your website.

A guest post is a piece of content you create for a site with a similar niche to yours to be featured there and get your word out. Your post will contain a section about the author, where you can link to your sites.

However, it would be best to link with credible websites with high domain authority. You can use free link-building tools to find the best sites or contact respected publications.

How to Use Guest Posts for White Hat Link Building

1. Find good link-building opportunities from sites in your niche
2. Contact the webmasters and craft a pitch that’s impossible to ignore
3. Write a high-quality guest post
4. Add contextual links to the post and homepage link in your author bio
5. Reply to comments on your post

4. Broken White-Hat link building

Broken link-building is another effective and impactful white hat link-building technique that can help you earn high-quality and relevant backlinks from other sites. It involves finding a dead page and requesting linkers to switch the links to a working page on your site. The idea is that they will do this because they don’t want to send audiences to a dead resource.

How to Use Broken Link Building

1. Find broken pages with backlinks. You can use Ahrefs’ free backlink checker for this.
2. Identifying or creating high-quality content that is worth linking to
3. Conduct outreach to persuade a site owner to replace the dead link on their page with your page link

5. Press Releases

Press Releases or PR Link Building uses public relations approaches such as press releases and media pitching to get valuable editorial links that direct back to your site. This white hat SEO backlink-building approach is a critical component of a Digital PR strategy that will result in measurable and consistent high-quality traffic coming to your site from relevant links.

The goal is to present your site as a thought leader and pitch to influential online publications. This strategy can be used to extend your content marketing strategy, aiming to generate publicity.

How To Get Started with PR Link Building

1. Identifying the target audience for your digital PR strategy 
2. Research the content you will create to leave a mark on the audiences
3. Create relevant and high-quality content 
4. Outreach and promote your content. Here, you can reach out to website owners, publishers, bloggers, influencers, and journalists to help generate enough buzz around your content.  

6. Link Magnets

Link magnets are content assets created to acquire links. Instead of producing high-quality content and waiting for someone to link to you, link magnets incentivize other sites to link to you. This is an excellent strategy for attracting quality links, driving traffic to your site, and ranking higher on the search Engine Results Page (SERP).

Unlike the spam-oriented black hat link-building tactic, this white hat approach helps you acquire more links organically with minimal outreach. This saves time and helps get links from web pages that typically wouldn’t link to you.

Tips for making your site a Link Magnet

1. Write outstanding blog posts and place valuable resources on your webpage.
2. Create a section for news, trends, and tips on your page
3. Run an affiliate program for people in complementary businesses
4. Blog about issues that are controversial and people are passionate about
5. Create a forum on your website for your visitors to exchange ideas.

7. Content Promotion

Most of the white hat link-building strategies we have mentioned are low-volume approaches, but content promotion is quite the opposite. If you follow off-page SEO practices, you can quickly place many links on your site, resulting in a high volume of referral traffic and quick brand growth.

With this approach, you will create and publish unique content on your website. Then, reach out to several online media outlets, such as news stations or magazines. Then, request that they cover your content on their website. This strategy will showcase your brand’s expertise and help to build its authority in your niche.

Content Promotion Tactics and Tips 

1. Know who you’re creating content for
2. Research and create content that is relevant to your audiences
3. Research Your Competitors and tackle their best-performing topics
4. Promote your content

8. Commenting on Authority Blogs

Blog commenting is a simple yet effective strategy that lets others know about your site. It involves publishing blog comments that link to a site or post. You can include the links in the comment or as a link behind your name.

When you leave a relevant and insightful comment on a blog post, you create a noteworthy connection with the site’s owner and the audience. Blog commenting helps you build online relationships with webmasters with authority sites, who then share backlinks to your site.

Tips on How to Write Comments for Your White-Hat link building Strategy

1. Add valuable stuff to the conversation.
2. Comment early
3. Don’t over-promote yourself.
4. Do you disagreeable or agree with the comments
5. Please include links to external references where they will be most helpful.

9. Reciprocal White-Hat link building

Reciprocal linking is another simple white-hat link-building tactic. It occurs when two or more site owners agree to link to each other on their sites. This kind of linking makes up a large portion of earned backlinks because you are trading outbound links for inbound links to your website.

However, you must know that not all sites are willing to engage in this kind of linking, especially if your site lacks authority.

How to Use Reciprocal Linking for White-Hat Link-Building

1. Make sure the link is to relevant content
2. Ensure the linking content adds value
3. Check SEO metrics of the linking site
4. Build authentic relationships

10. Podcasts Features

Lastly, Guest podcast features are a perfect way to get more white-hat links for your website. Since most brands and companies use podcasts, it shouldn’t be hard to find one you can feature.

 The good thing is that you don’t need to feature in podcasts only within your niche. You could also feature in podcasts that concentrate on your job role, demographics, life events, etc. 

When asked to feature in a podcast, request a free backlink in the podcast notes in exchange for your time. You could also use this and mention your brand as you speak.

Ways to Find a Podcast for Your White-Hat Link Building

1. Use Google to search for the “best of” lists.
2. Use a podcast newsletter.
3. Use social media platforms like Twitter to search for a specific topic.
4. Using niche podcast discovery apps

Final Take: White Hat link building Strategy

Gray and black hat link-building strategies are tempting since they are speedier and require less work. However, white hat strategies are the best ethical option for a long-term strategy with no risk. 

Hopefully, this guide has given you a better understanding of white hat SEO and provided insight into some link-building techniques you can use.

1. Keyword Optimize your content.

2. High quality content.

3. Structure your content well.

4. Seek the featured snippets.

5. Optimize your Page Titles.

6. Optimize Your Meta descriptions.

7. Keep your URLs short, tidy, and readable (memorable?).

8. Get backlinks and Niche Edits from high-authority sites.

9. Optimize your page speed.

10. Add internal links to your content.

11. Add high-quality – high authority external links to your content.

12. Use high-quality and well-optimized visuals.

13. Do a technical site audit often.

14. Audit your content often.

15. Study the competition to find content gaps.

16. Study the competition to find link gaps.

17. Reduce your bounce rate.

18. Remove dead non-trafficked pages.

19. Use related keywords in your content.

20. Update old content.

21. Leverage SEO tools for unseen wins or optimizations and to track SEO KPIs.

22. Leverage blogger outreach to find guest post opportunities.

23. Improve organic CTR (Found on Google Search Console).

Whenever I hear the term E-A-T in SEO circles, I always think of food first. Then, after a reality check, it dawns on me that we are talking about Google E-A-T.

Over the years, this has been a common term for SEO professionals. However, the bigger question to the SEO pro reading this right now is why this Google E-A-T matters and what it is.

E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

It has been part of the Google algorithm over the years. It is also part of the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, which determine how a site rates on the E-A-T scale (although Google denies any existence of an E-A-T scale or score).

However, we assume this is very important to Google because of the number of pages Google spends explaining every aspect of E-A-T in the Search Guidelines (57 pages out of 175).

Therefore, in this article, we want to discuss the following:

1. What is E-A-T?

This term first appeared in Google’s Search Quality Guidelines in 2014. Over the years, there has been a lot of iteration of that section of the guidelines to improve it. However, from the beginning, E-A-T has always meant:

• The Expertise person creating the content.
• The Authoritativeness of the person creating the content, the content itself, and the website where the content is published.
• The Trustworthiness of the content creator, the content itself, and the website on which it is published.

In summary, consider this question.

Who would you trust to feed you with actionable content on a particular topic?

A simple answer would be:

Someone with professional credibility who writes content for a website that displays continuous authority and consistency in the topic.

So here are quick examples:

• A professional violinist who started a website that talks about Violins inside out.
• A professional psychologist who creates content about mental illness on a website that consistently covers mental illness across the board.
• A renowned cyclist who creates content about cycling for other cyclists and cycling enthusiasts who continuously engage with the content.

I hope that the concept of E-A-T now makes sense to you. We now delve deeper into the Google E-A-T and how it affects your SEO strategy.

2. Summary of Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines of E-A-T

Google’s Search Quality rater guidelines provide a framework for evaluating and ranking web pages. This framework helps webmasters understand Google’s expectations of their sites and how that affects their ranking in the search engine rankings.

We have discussed the Quality Rater Guidelines in greater detail in this post: How the Google Algorithm Perceives Quality.

However, for the sake of our article, we will summarise below the guidelines with an emphasis on the E-A-T requirements.

The whole Quality Rater Guidelines PDF can be summarised into the following two areas:

• Page Quality – this is the quality of a website divided into the following areas:

1. The goal or purpose of a website.
2. The content quality.
3. The E-A-T of the source where information on the website is coming from.

• Satisfying the users’ needs – Does your website content meet the needs of its visitors?

Therefore, Google rates a website as high quality if it scores very highly in the guidelines mentioned above – one of which is E-A-T.

3. Is E-a-T a Ranking Factor or Not?

Google has a set of ranking factors that are well-known to most SEO professionals. However, E-A-T is not a direct ranking factor.

Sometimes, it is essential to read between the lines of what Google says regarding Google’s guidelines.

Gary Illyes from Google has said people talk about E-A-T more than it is talked about at Google:

No eat. Externally it's mentioned infinitely more than internally.

— Gary 鯨理／경리 Illyes (so official, trust me) (@methode) May 13, 2020

However, in the Google Quality Rater Guidelines, Google mentions E-A-T more than 100 times in over 50 pages.

This document shows how Google fights misinformation on the Internet. E-A-T is an essential part of how Google determines search rankings.

In this set of tweets by Danny Sullivan, Google’s Public Liaison of Search, he said that there are some signals that Google uses to determine E-A-T where some of the signals could be ranking factors;

Is E-A-T a ranking factor? Not if you mean there's some technical thing like with speed that we can measure directly.

We do use a variety of signals as a proxy to tell if content seems to match E-A-T as humans would assess it.

In that regard, yeah, it's a ranking factor.

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) October 11, 2019

In summary, there is no Google E-A-T score. However, E-A-T is an essential concept for Google. It uses other measurable factors to determine whether a website achieves the level of quality that showcases Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EAT).

4. Importance of E-A-T

If E-A-T is not a ranking factor, then what is its importance? I know this is the very question going into your head.

It’s simple. Google has human reviewers. This Google E-A-T guideline tells those reviewers that Google wants content with the following attributes considered high quality:

• An expert writes content.
• Content is written on an authoritative blog.
• Content is trustworthy.

This is all about the importance of Google E-A-T. If your content doesn’t meet the attributes above, you are not creating high-quality content.

Therefore, how do you bake Google’s E-A-T into your content to achieve that credibility with Google? Here is a 5-step checklist.

5. How to Integrate Google E-A-T Into Your Content: A 5-Step Checklist

a) Create an Author or About Page

The first requirement of the E-A-T acronym is Expertise.

Google wants to know who is creating the content on your website. So tell them that it is you or your team.

Tell Google why you have the required expertise in this content.

For example, be open about your team’s credentials on your About page. This could also be part of your team page.

Highlight your team’s qualifications and why they should be trusted to inform others regarding your niche or topic.

Create author pages, too. Each author can have a brief bio where Google gets to learn about why they are experts on what they are writing about.

A hobbyist DIYer could start a blog about designing and crafting various types of furniture. This is a hobby, but Google loves that it’s your hobby – you are obsessed with it and have built up some experience, too.

You don’t have to be a professor of carpentry to write a blog about DIY furniture. The bottom line is that you have the expertise.

b) Collaborate With Experts in Your Industry

Collaborating with experts further adds to the Expertise-Authoritativeness-Trustworthiness of your content.

Instead of working with writers who are not experts in your topic, find experts in your niche and work with them to publish various high-quality issues and research.

c) Update Old Content Regularly

Google wants your website content refreshed with something new and valuable every chance.

Old content that is just so out of touch with the current trends sucks. And Google knows that its users (literally everyone) want to see ever-current and helpful content.

If you have old pages that have not been looked at for ages, you should update them with new visuals and data, fix broken links, and improve their information.

Read Also: How to Remove Outdated Content From Your Website

That way, it shows Google that your site can continuously provide relevant, accurate information for users.

d) Link to High-Authority Sources

How do you stamp your understanding and Authoritativeness of a specific topic? How can you show Google you are a trustworthy source?

Link to other authority sources to back up what you publish in your content.

Use accurate raw data, links to research papers, and even social posts from people in your industry who are known experts.

This way, Google sees that you rely on high-quality sources for the content you share with your users.

e) Generate Backlinks from High Authority Sources

What is more E-A-T than getting high-authority backlinks from other high-authority websites? This is one of the best wins you can continuously push for by generating high-quality, linkable content.

When people in their high E-A-T industries link back to your site through various types of backlinks like niche edits, press releases, infographic links, etc, you can quickly stamp your credibility in your industry.

Bottomline

Google has clarified that E-A-T is not some internet destroyer. However, it will matter if Google wants to determine whether the content is high quality.

Therefore, you now need to serve E-A-T in your content marketing strategy.

The Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T) of your content can no longer be ignored. Or you won’t eat? At least not from the internet money.