How to Develop Content that Builds Links?

If you are involved in digital marketing, you know how painful it can be to create valuable content which will be shared by your colleagues and will get you links as well. We asked Steve Ryson, the Director of Buzzsumo, to give us his thoughts on the topic. He shared some of his experiences, as well as insights based on the results of the survey conducted by Moz and Buzzsumo. Within the survey, over 1 million articles were analyzed, to determine which content is best for sharing and link-building and how shares and links are related.

I think content amplification is a balance of getting both shares and links to the content. Social networks have become an important content discovery layer of the internet. Increasingly, people find content through their social feeds rather than searching for content via a search engine. It does vary according the nature of the content; for example, most millennials now find news through social networks. Overall Shareaholic's research shows that traffic is increasingly being driven by social media.

Thus we need to create content that is both share-worthy and link-worthy.

Shares are much easier to acquire. It is relatively easy to share content, it is almost frictionless and everyone can share. Links are much harder to acquire. Less people have the ability to link and they only link to something of sufficient value to their audience.

Links start with the quality of your content

In my opinion, earning links starts with the quality of the content. There needs to be something inherently of value in the content, for people to link to it. We also need to recognize that people share and link for different reasons. An entertaining video or quiz can acquire many hundreds of thousands of shares but zero links. The content that acquires a high level of links has a particular nature.

I recently looked at 1M articles for a research study and 50% of the articles only had 1 referring domain link (or less). The sites that had a high level of referring domain links created unique, quality content, that provided some kind of new insight. For example, content published on The Atlantic had an average of 18 referring domain links. Content published on FiveThirtyEight also averaged at about 18 referring domain links. These sites create serious, well-researched content, and often provide new insights or ways of looking at issues.

Few people want to link to yet another post on "5 ways to improve your landing page" or "top 10 tools". They want to link to well-researched, considered content, that provides genuinely new insights. Therefore, my first tip would be to conduct original research - to seek new insights into the topic you are exploring.

My second tip would be to write long form content. We have conducted numerous studies of long form content and each survey shows that long form content acquires more shares and links. Below is info from the research I did earlier this year, on 600,000 posts.

Around 90% of the content on the web is less than 1,000 words long, according to our research. However, few people link to content that is shorter than 1,000 words. It might be the fact that people are not aware of the data. Perhaps they are simply too lazy or lack the time to produce serious, well researched content.

Various experts have also argued that people are more likely to link to content if it is:

Highly relevant and useful, see Rand Fishkin's tips (Moz).
Comprehensive, evergreen content, that has longevity, see Dr. Peter J. Meyers' advice (Moz).
Authoritative content in an industry, see tips to impove your web content from Tom Howlett (Koozai).

These three views strongly align with my views on the importance of creating well researched content, that provides value through new insights.

Link building

There is an art to link building, once you have created content. For example, you can identify and reach out to relevant sites. You can identify these sites by using tools like SEMrush, Majestic, Moz or BuzzSumo. I like to see which posts are performing well (in terms of shares and links), by using BuzzSumo and to identify the sites that are suitable outreach targets. You can build relationships with these sites and make them aware of your content. I believe that the best way to do this is by creating content that adds value to their audience. This makes it more likely they will link to you.

Relationships can also create links, through the mutual benefit of reciprocity. To me, the best link building strategy starts with producing content that is worthy of being linked to.

A Content Checklist

In order to ensure you are creating linkworthy content, I would suggest you ask yourself the following questions before publishing:

Have I undertaken original research?
Does my content provide new insights?
Is it a serious piece of long form content?
Is it genuinely helpful to peoplel will it help them do their job better?
Is it the best content on the topic? To quote the skyscraper technique: people don't visit the 6th tallest building in the city. People have limited time and they want to focus on the best content on the topic.
Is the content authoritative? Will people reference it?

If you can answer "yes" to most of these questions, I think you are well placed to start building links to your content.

Steve has written a chapter in the Linking Building Book “Finding influencers and what they love sharing using Buzzsumo”.