Building Quality Links Without Quality Content (7 Examples)

Content is king.

Three words.

These three simple words published by Bill Gates in a 1996 essay have defined a lot of digital marketing ever since. The man is deemed a visionary for a reason.

There are multiple facets of digital marketing, but I can tell you as a link builder, content is extremely important. When you have relevant, linkable assets on your site, link building becomes a significantly easier process. 

This is because a lot of what link building is about is simply engaging with your niche’s online community and asking them to link back to you where relevant. When you can put impressive content right in front of their eyes, the link practically can build itself.

So yes, content for a link building campaign is wildly helpful.

Helpful… but is it necessary?

This answer may come as a surprise, but in reality, no: no, content is not absolutely necessary for a link building campaign.

In fact, there are a wide variety of methods that have worked for me and others over the years when building links for sites with little to no content. You have to get a little creative, but one of the main reasons I love link building is it compels and incentivizes such creativity.

Without further ado, here are a few tactics you should consider when building links to sites with little or no content.

Brand Mentions

You know how some people believe that if you sneeze, that’s an indication that someone is talking about you?

Why wait for a sneeze when you can use a mentions monitor?

A “mention” is simply your brand name (or something akin to it) being published online by someone other than you or your team and on a completely different website. And what’s more, it’s unlinked.

These are some of my favorite link-building opportunities, and some of the easiest links to build. They’re practically begging to be built. In these scenarios, the person you would be reaching out to already has awareness of you (they published your brand name!) and that’s a lot of the battle in link building.

There are a number of different ways to discover unlinked brand mentions.

My personal favorite is with ahrefs’ Content Explorer.

Enter your brand name or website URL and choose the ‘highlight unlinked domains’ option and export the pages with highlighted domains.

You will get a returned list of mentions from all around the web for all of your queries. When you find unlinked mentions, reach out to the sites and ask for a link.

I also recommend being proactive and using a tool such as Google Alerts or Brand Mentions to monitor your mentions as they come in.

Niche Directories

Directory link building has been a productive, rewarding strategy as far back as I can recall, and even though there aren’t quite as many online directories as in previous days, there’s no reason not to pursue them in your campaign.

The key factor to keep in mind when building links through directories is relevance. There are a plethora of link farms that are not-so-subtly disguised as directories out there. Many if not most of these are leftovers from a time when it was easier to rank with black hat link building techniques. 

When looking for directories, make sure to only look for directories that are specific to your niche, or at the very least have a section related to your niche. Click around on a few links to see that they’re going to real sites instead of spam.

Done properly, directory link building is a great way to get several quick, relevant links.

So if you are looking for links for your electronic accessory store, this would be an example of a good, relevant directory you would want to approach.

It’s relevant to your industry and it provides follow links. 

Guest Posting

Guest posting is a valuable strategy to broaden your online presence and acquire quality backlinks without having any content on your site.

Guest Posting Tips:

• Research: Identify websites that accept guest posts that align with your niche and target audience.
• Personalized Pitches: Tailor your pitches to each website, emphasizing the relevance of your proposed topics and the value you can offer their audience.
• Quality Content Creation: Craft compelling and informative articles that provide unique perspectives or actionable advice.
• Transparent Linking: Include relevant links to your website within your guest posts, ensuring transparency and providing additional value to readers.
• Relationship Building: Cultivate relationships with editors and website owners for future collaboration opportunities and mutual support.

Broken Link Building

Nothing lasts forever, not even on the internet. Links “break” all the time. They “break” in various ways. Sometimes the page the link was supposed to lead to gets deleted. Other times, it can simply be an error in the code, like forgetting to add the backslash in the closing tag.

The thing is that these links don’t have to be broken permanently. Instead of being a “link builder,” you can be a “link fixer.” 

Broken link building is a practice that frequently produces valuable returns. There are various types of broken link building. One way to go about is to look at backlink profiles of the most popular sites in your niche; simply pop the URL’s into ahrefs and click on the  outgoing Broken links:

This will show you all the links that are pointing to pages that are down.

After you have a list you can simply send outreach emails to all these sites and let them know that they are linking to a broken page and ask them if they’d be willing to link instead to a similar page on your site!

Another way to go about this is with the broken link builder tool which can do the heavy lifting for you and find dead pages based on any given topic.

Image Link Building

Just because you don’t have any written content on your site doesn’t mean you don’t have any images on your site. In fact, if you don’t have any visuals or pictures on your site, that’s an entirely different user-experience problem that you will want to fix before you start any link building.

Identify the images on your site or any that might be naturally associated with your brand and do a reverse image search in Google or TinEye. This will let you know if any site is using any of your images. If and when you find someone using your image without linking to you as credit, this is a link-building opportunity.

If you use WordPress as your CMS, you can take a more active approach to Image Link Building by creating unique images for your site and then setting up an Alert that will automatically notify you whenever someone links directly to an image on your site.

Once you get an email alert notifying you that someone is using your image, you can make sure they are giving you attribution and linking to you.

Engage With the Community

It may sound simple, or it may sound vague, but one of the best ways to get links to your site is simply getting yourself and your brand name out there.

One of the hardest parts of link building is simply getting someone’s attention, particularly if your brand is little-known. This is why incorporating link building into a holistic marketing approach is fundamental. The more people are generally aware of you, the more likely you will have their attention when you try to persuade them to link to you.

So what are some ways to start engaging with your online community? Here are a few ways:

• Sponsor an event
• Host a podcast
• Do interviews
• Participate in charity work
• Social media hashtags

Anything that might earn you good, positive attention will help you to build quality links down the road.

If we’re to use our electronics site again, there are some obvious ways to engage with the community using the tactics listed above. You could do a product review series on a YouTube channel. Or you could interview tech experts about looming developments. Or you could go to trade shows to show off what your products can do. The possibilities are endless.

Join a Local Organization

In the same vein as the previous section, another superb way to increase your link-building efforts without content is to join a local or relevant organization or association. 

Joining relevant organizations or associations will provide plentiful benefits which will extend way beyond the scope of link building and SEO.

This is more about long-term brand building and networking with the folks in your industry.

So if you’re operating an electronics/tech site, look for local/regional organizations that highlight technology, something like BICSI.

Wrapping It Up

I would like to emphasize again that quality content can be extraordinarily helpful to a link building campaign, especially if you are looking to scale.

But just because “content is king” doesn’t mean there aren’t legitimate ways to abdicate the throne.

There are several ways you can execute a link building campaign without content and hopefully, some of the ideas above will help you get started!