How to perform broken link building from lost competitor backlinks to supercharge your SEO.
Earned backlinks are the lifeblood of the online marketing strategy of any website, but they don’t tend to last forever. Backlinks can break for any number of reasons that are all related to the removal of content:
- The outlet has pivoted to a different niche, so the content is no longer relevant.
- The content has been rewritten and replaced with a new post, and the site backlinking the content isn’t aware.
- The outlet hosting the backlinked content is defunct.
Broken backlinks are more common on the internet than you might think.
They’re frustrating for end users, and for sites hosting those backlinks, who now have a much less effective piece of content that may still be getting high traffic and may still have a strong Authority Score according to SEMrush.
This article will offer a guide to not only how to find dead links using highly recommended tools from SEMrush, but how you can use them as part of the online marketing strategy for your website.
It will offer a comprehensive and proven process for your broken link building strategy, that you can use to get the results you want: more high-traffic sites linking to your content.
What is Broken Link Building?
Broken link building, as a strategy, involves finding backlinks to your competitor’s broken posts in resource posts and articles, and reaching out to the outlet in question to recommend your own content as a replacement.
There are two methods that you can use to preparing the content you want to recommend in this way.
- Perform a content audit to find similar content that’s either a perfect replacement for the dead content, or that only needs small tweaks.
- Write new content that’s designed to be the perfect replacement for the dead content.
Broken link building is a three-step process:
- Find broken links in articles on outlets that are not only within your niche but highly popular and likely to draw much of that traffic to your website.
- Prepare similar content of a high-quality, to be worth linking to.
- Reach out to website owners to persuade them to replace the dead backlink with yours.
Performing the first step manually can be done manually, but this is time-consuming and takes you away from the task of producing high-quality content, which is, after all, what you’re there for.
SEMrush is here to offer you the tools to streamline your broken link building strategy, and persuade you why you ought to chase broken backlinks alongside more traditional link building strategies.
Why is Broken Link Building Important to Your Overall Link Building Strategy?
Like the usual link building process, broken link building is all about curating your content to be as good as it can possibly be to appeal to a wider audience. Both are about finding and seizing outreach opportunities, but that is just about where the similarities end.
With normal link building – purposefully courting active and popular outlets in your niche – you’re looking at data that points to an opportunity, but nothing more. You’re taking a stab in the dark and asking someone to take a chance on your content.
Broken link building is different – you’re identifying an explicit gap in the content of the outlet that you’re keen on adding to your backlink profile. When you’re contacting an outlet to plug that gap, you’re contacting them for a clear reason.
Rather than simply reaching out with content that an outlet may or may not be interested in, you could be offering them a solution to a problem they might not have even noticed, which is sure to put you on side with them.
You’re offering to help, rather than reaching out for your own personal gain. That’s why broken link building is important.
How To Find Broken Link Building Opportunities and Earn the Backlinks for Yourself
To find the broken backlinks that you’re most likely to have the content and profile to fill, you ought to find sites that have backlinked your competitors, much as you would a standard link building strategy, except you want to find which of those links no longer works.
SEMrush’s Backlink Analytics can help you with all of this. You may already have used it to identify your web domain’s immediate competitors.
Manually learning which of your competitors might have broken backlinks
But if you’d like to perform some additional manual research about who your competitors are, you can use Google, the most popular search engine, to search for the keywords you’re working to rank for.
Then compile a list of the outlets that are within your exact niche and of a similar size to you – those who will most likely be competing with you for the same backlinks, which you can verify with SEMrush’s Backlinks Analytics tool.
How can you find broken backlinks with SEMrush’s Backlink Analytics tool?
Enter your competitors’ domains into the Backlink Analytics tool, but click the ‘Indexed Pages’ tab to get a complete list of all the pages of a competing domain that have been backlinked by other sites.
Tick the ‘Target URL’ error box at the top of the list of pages to filter specifically the pages that link to dead content. What you have now is a complete list of the pages that have been backlinked by sites, but now don’t work.
Before you think about recreating any dead content, you need to identify which sites are backlinking it and whether they’re receiving enough web traffic to make it worthwhile enough for you to reach out to about replacing that content.
Click the ‘Backlinks’ tab to get a list of the backlinking sites, and sort by SEMrush’s Authority Score to see which of them receive the most traffic – the higher the number, the better the opportunity.
Note, also, that you should measure the quality of an opportunity by whether you have content that already suits the article, or whether you’ll need to write new content from scratch.
‘Re-creating’ the Dead Content Being Linked To
The starting point for plugging these kinds of gaps is understanding what the dead content was about. You need to know what it was to recreate it, but knowing why it was included in the article is important too, so you can focus on making your replacement content as relevant as possible.
The Wayback Machine is a popular tool used to archive dead content. In your case, it removes any doubt of what the content was, making it easy to replicate.
Requests to archive pages must be made manually, and while the page is still active, so there’s no guarantee that the page you’re looking at will exist there. Even if it does, media like images and audio might not be saved in the process.
But, if the content you’re looking to ‘replicate’ is there, you should still be able to look at the text and use that to inform a new piece of content based on it. The resulting content should be of a high-quality, and perhaps even more informed and researched than the original.
This will help you secure a backlink in the case of your competitor merely updating the backlinked content. If you can improve on their work, you could gain the backlink opportunity over your competitor just by offering the outlet something better.
How to Reach Out
When it comes to outreach as part of your broken link strategy, the outlets hosting the content backlinking to the dead content that you want to replace are your first point of call.
You will want to find a specific point of contact, but luckily, this is quite easy. You can look at the Author Biography of the author of the original article, or the outlet’s About Us page.
If there’s a general e-mail address or contact form for the site, use that. Ideally, though, you want to find the most appropriate individual person to contact.
A tool such as Hunter.io can help you find business e-mail addresses belonging to named individuals, but you should also check to see if this information is publicly available as well, to avoid sending an unwanted e-mail. Some may not appreciate it.
Writing a Great Outreach Message
When you’re contacting a named individual at your chosen outlet about replacing dead content with yours, use the person’s name, talk about the outlet in question, and explain clearly why you think your version of the content should replace it.
You’re a human, so sound like one. Be encouraging and persuasive. Follow-up where necessary after around three days, but don’t push. Sometimes an outlet won’t be interested, sometimes you just won’t get a response. Move on.
SEMrush’s Link Building Tool can help you index your domain prospects, as well as send and manage custom outreach e-mails all from one place. Manually enter your prospect domains and their contact details, and from there you’ll have access to our intuitive interface.
Keeping track of your outreach e-mails, and which outlets have resulted in successful broken backlink replacements, has never been easier.
Outro
Broken link building helps you earn backlinks by highlighting obvious opportunities for you to promote and create new content.
You’re providing a public service by cleaning up popular articles. Plus, with the right opportunities, you’ll even stand to gain a lot of user traffic by piggy-backing on established articles that people trust for advice and revisit often.
