If you are building an online business in 2025, you have probably heard about the very popular link building technique known as niche edits.

In the age of AI, SEO is even more relevant as a brand building tactic and niche edits are important for getting your brand more online mentions and links in various websites within your industry.

What Are Niche Edits?

Niche edits, curated links, or contextual backlinks focus on seamlessly integrating links into existing content, taking advantage of the authority and relevance of already established articles on websites in your niche.

Unlike traditional methods that involve creating new content for backlink placement, this strategy usually targets already existing articles that are aged, indexed, and ranking somewhere in the SERPs.

Using this strategy, your website can gain very high authority backlinks faster, removing the hustle of creating new content, and therefore making it a wholesomely cheaper backlinking strategy as compared to other strategies like guest posting.

How do websites that agree to place your link in their content gain?

Websites that agree to place your link within their content will usually agree to this because they are linking to a resource that provides more value to their readers, or enriches their articles in one way or another.

Take for example, an article about “how to make gourmet breakfast” has been published by a hotel website.

Let’s say you are an online vendor who supplies fruits. On your blog, there is an article about “Why fruits are an important addition to your breakfast”.

You can write to the hotel website and request them to check out your article.

Suggest to them to add a link to it from their “gourmet breakfast article” as a valuable guide for their audience who might be wondering “if it is good to take fruits for breakfast”.

See? If the hotel website responds, you got yourself a backlink to your website, from a very good niche article without writing any new content.

That is what’s called a niche edit.

How To Build Niche Edit Links 

Acquiring niche edit links requires a strategic approach, meticulous planning, and adept negotiation skills.

You will have to convince other site owners or webmasters to edit their content and add your link to existing articles in a place where the link is contextual and valuable for their readers.

Here is the process:

1) Find the Most Suitable Sites, Articles, and Link Opportunities

First, you must identify sites that are relevant to your niche.

You can use SEO audit tools like Ahrefs or manually search for sites in your niche to determine which site to go for.

Once you find a list of sites, check that they are relevant, authoritative and have traffic.

Now, you must find existing posts on them that you can add value to by a link to your content.

When you have found the relevant sites and posts, find and compile a list of contact emails for the website owners.

You can find this data by checking the websites’ contact us pages, or using tools like Apollo, Crunchbase, Hunter.io, etc to check for the contact information.

2) Outreach

The next step is to contact the website owners for your link placement.

This is through a method commonly known as cold outreach.

Send them personal emails pitching your link.

Explain to them how your the content in your link will benefit their audiences.

Then wait.

3) Follow up

In cold outreach, you’re emailing people that have never heard from you before. Most of them will not read your email and not reply to you.

You have to act like a salesman. Patient and committed to getting the deal.

Great salesmen follow up. They follow up until something happens or until it makes sense to give up and find another deal.

You must do the same. Send follow up emails to try and invoke a reply from the website owner.

Some of the website owners will say ‘No’ to your request if they don’t see the value.

Others will say ‘Yes’ and link back to your valuable content. Hooray!

We advice not to send more than 3 follow ups because that could easily turn to harassment.

Guest Posting vs. Niche Edit Links

Guest posting links are links you get from fresh articles that you write and publish on other people’s websites with links in those articles pointing back to your website while niche edits are links to your existing content from relevant existing articles on other people’s websites.

Here is a summary of the main differences between these two types of backlinks:

1. Niche edits are added to existing blog posts that are already indexed and aged, while guest posting links are links in a fresh article that you get when your article is published on another website.
2. Niche edits are cheaper in totality since you are not writing the article from scratch and so your article writing cost is zero. On the other hand, guest posting requires a new article to be written, formatted, edited and published meaning more money is needed to get the fresh article ready to publish on the relevant website.
3. Niche edits take less time to get because you don’t have to write a new article as you are pitching valuable content already existing on your website. As for guest posting, it takes longer because you have to agree on the relevant topic with the website owner where your guest post will be published, then after that write the article, get it edited and reviewed then published.
4. Unlike guest posting, niche edits will provide almost instant results and guarantee higher ROI. Yes that’s true. Niche edits are published on already indexed pages, so your new edit on the page will get indexed usually in 2-3 days. You can start to feel the effects of niche edits on your website soon after. Guest posts take about 2 weeks to get the content ready, then another 2-4 weeks to get that new article indexed. You can start to feel the effects soon after that.

Pbn Links vs. Niche Edits Backlinks

PBN links come from domains on artificial or fake sites, usually made for the purpose of selling backlinks.

Normally, PBNs are link farms using old domains with good authority scores and built back to life but with zero traffic or usefulness.

Niche edits on the other hand come from websites that are getting traffic from various sources, and are usually actual blogs or companies with social media pages, and more online activity than just a website.

PBN links are not recommended because they are risky, and if the PBN network gets found by Google, it will usually be expelled from Google and all the website who got links from the PBN network penalized.