How to do Contextual Link Building
We all know that search engines love backlinks.
They send powerful signals to search engines that help them evaluate and rank a website higher in the search engines.
But not all backlinks do that. In fact, some of them are way more powerful than others, and some backlinks can even harm your website and its rankings in the SERPs.
This is why it is highly recommended to get more contextual backlinks for your website. It is believed that a good contextual backlink is at least 5x more powerful than any other kind of backlink.
And in this post, I’m going to share some proven methods on how to get powerful, contextual backlinks for your website.
For now, let’s start from the top.
What is a Contextual Backlink?
A contextual backlink is a link that is acquired naturally within the body of a blog post or webpage and points to your website. Here is an example of a good contextual backlink.
As you can see the backlink in the above screenshot “11 content optimization tips” appears naturally within the post. It is totally contextual and adds value to the post.
Search engines love these contextual backlinks as they are appear more genuine, honest, and valuable for the readers.
It can be a bit tough, however, to get these contextual backlinks from high authority websites. Here are a few proven methods to help you get these powerful links.
1. Broken Link Building Strategy
This is one of the easiest methods to get high-quality and 100% natural contextual backlinks to your website. The idea behind this strategy is actually very simple and can be summarised in the following steps:
- Find broken links on a high-quality relevant website in your niche that you would like to get backlinks from.
- Create a relevant piece of content that can replace that broken link.
- Publish that piece on your blog
- Inform that owner of the website of the broken link they have and offer your piece to fix that broken link.
It almost always works if the blog post you’re offering is of very high quality.
For most people, finding those broken links can be confusing and difficult. You can use a free Google Chrome extension, such Broken Link Checker or Check My Links to easily find these broken links.
Or, if you have money to spend on a tool, you can also buy Ahrefs to help you find these broken links and much more.
2. Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is another very good way to acquire high-quality contextual backlinks from authority websites in your niche.
When people talk about guest blogging, they don’t often think of contextual backlinks. All they usually focus on is the author-bio link that they get at the end of the blog post. While it is a backlink, it is not a contextual backlink and, therefore, isn’t that powerful.
What you should do is try to include a couple of contextual backlinks within the body of the post, provided if it seems natural.
You can even get a couple of relevant posts ready specifically for this particular purpose, i.e., to include as contextual links in your next guest post.
3. Seek Roundup Posts
Another tip is to find relevant roundup posts and get one of your blog posts listed in there.
It’s actually a relatively simple process if you have some high-quality posts published on your website. After that, it just requires manually outreaching to a few website owners.
Here is an example of a roundup post.
Assume that you have a very high-quality blog post in the personal development niche. Do you see yourself contacting the owner of this post and getting your post included in this list?
If it truly adds value to the readers of personal development niche, the owner of this would love to include your blog post.
And any link from a roundup post like this is almost always a natural, contextual backlink.
4. Infographics
Blog posts are relatively easier to create. Infographics, however, are very unique and take a lot of time to create and publish on the web.
If you have some great infographics, you can use them to get hundreds of high-quality contextual backlinks.
Brian Dean from Backlinko has written a step-by-step guide to teach you how to do that. If you are interested in getting backlinks with infographics (which might not be as easy as some of the other methods mentioned in this post) I highly recommend you to read his post.
Final Words
Contextual backlinks always carry a lot of search engine power with them. If you’re building links anyway, always go for the contextual backlinks first.
By using these 4 proven methods mentioned in this post, I’m confident that you will be able to generate a lot more contextual backlinks to your website.
Thanks for such information…. It will surely help to those who are focusing on getting contextual backlinks.
Cheers!!!
Good article Josh.
Contextual links are the most difficult backlinks to get. And in most cases, you need to have a powerful content to get one.
Another way which I think would be useful is to create and industry report / research in your niche and reach out to bloggers and influencers.
I am new in the blogging world, your article helps me to understand better about contextual backlinks.
Nice post but I think the most successful tactics here is Guest post and round up also work to a point. Though to be honest I haven’t had any success with broken link building yet.
Interesting article you have here…how about internal link for any contextual backlink…is it worth to try?or it just to decrease the bounce rate on our site…if we add another external backlink is it okay and doestn make our bounce rate higher then ever?please forgive me,cause i usually use contextual to decrease my blog bounce rate.
If external Van do so…i Will considered to make some?
Hi Mike,
Internal links are great. Not only will they help with decreasing bounce rates, but increasing the internal count of links to important pages will benefit SEO performance too.
The post is very resourceful in building links. Recenty , I started using the influencer interview strategy on one of my blogs after reading this article and I’m tracking traffic now to see how it works. However, I discovered that, planning and preparing interview questions is time demanding and stressful sometimes because you have to research the products and services of the brand.
I enjoyed reading this article very much. I believe it’s going to be very helpful for me. Iv been having issues with gaining contextual backlinks for my website.but hopefully that changes for me. Thank you.
thanks for sharing with us