Link Building Specialists’ Top Strategies That Work in 2025

To stay up to date on effective link building strategies, I scoured the web for what’s currently working for link building specialists in 2025.

I compiled my findings in this article. Check it out to find out how adopting these strategies can up your link building game and increase search engine rankings. 

Heads up: I’ll add a link to extra resources to master the strategies.

11 Strategies Link Building Specialists Use in 2025

1. Blog news articles 
2. Personalized outreach
3. Strategic content marketing
4. Systematic & creative guest posting
5. Press release (PR) with HARO & X
6. Reactive PR
7. Contemporary broken link building (BLB)
8. Brand mentions
9. Leverage competitors’ backlinks
10. Creating linkable assets
11. Infographics & custom image link building

1. Blog news articles 

In April, Ahrefs noticed that Hubspot’s website traffic went down and posted the news first. They used their own traffic overview tool to share the data. Other blogs picked up the story, and it trended the whole week. As a result, many websites linked back to Ahrefs as the original source.

Like Ahrefs, when you publish news or trending events in your industry, other websites (with high domain authority) may reference your post as the original source. It will also attract bloggers who are looking for original sources for their articles.

As long as your news article remains relevant, other relevant websites will continue linking to it. Interestingly, this strategy is white hat link building; it is safe.

2. Personalized outreach

Random, generic outreach emails have often failed over time because they feel impersonal. As a result, recipients tend to ignore them or mark them as spam. That’s why personalizing an outreach email is key to a successful outreach.

Here are examples of personalized subject lines:

• [First name], is a 50% increase in organic traffic not too small?
• Unlock Amazon link building secrets, [first name]

As simple as adding the receiver’s first name might seem, it can increase response rates by up to 43%.

Fact:

After analyzing over 100,000 emails, Klenty found that personalized subject lines (with first names) have a43.41% open rate.

Brian Dean, founder of Backlinko, also supports the use of personalized outreach. After studying 12 million outreach emails, he discovered that a personalized email body copy is32.7% more likely to get a response.

Beyond increasing open & response rates, personalization makes you different from other link building experts. You won’t be predictable, and that gets results.

In Bibi‘s (founder of Bibibuzz) words:

“We’re so stuck in a box about all aspects of link building. Who we should reach out to, what to write, and which type of content to create.”

Break free from this mindset. Follow the personalization route and don’t limit your personalized outreach to a few emails. Send as much as possible, depending on your industry.

The resource to master outreach: Tools and templates to use for outreach link building

3. Strategic content marketing

Content marketing is undoubtedly the king of link building. IMO, it grandfathered all other tactics. So, it’s no surprise that several link building experts use it.

According to Shelly Fagin (director of SEO at Credit Karma):

“When done correctly, no other link building technique can compare to content marketing.”

Shelly continued that content marketing leads to content strategies that meet searchers’ intents. This also leads to writing higher-quality content that attracts citations and referral traffic from reputable sources.

You might wonder: What part of content marketing is strategic?

The basics are the same, but SEOs are now creative with it.

Take Benjamin Houy (outreach team lead for Digital Third Coast) as an example. He uses content marketing by creating proprietary data from surveys, long-form pieces, and graphics. He then seeks publishers and pitches his data-rich content.

Another SEO, Levi Olmstead (associate director of content marketing at Whatfix), uses a variation of Ben’s strategy. Instead of creating data-rich content from scratch, he compiles a roundup of statistics.

According to Levi, he noticed an e-commerce company earned 300+ white hat links from a statistics roundup.

Another strategic content marketing in 2025 is visuals, especially short-form video. They are easy to create, and viewers find it easy to watch and understand.

Fact:

Short-form video is now the number one content marketing format with the highest ROI (Hubspot).

Overall, strategic content marketing will boost your link building efforts. 

The resource to master content marketing: how to qualify link prospects

4. Systematic & creative guest posting

Guest posting is an evergreen link building strategy. And its use is constantly on the rise — evident in the 5% increase in usage from 42% to 47% in State of Link Building, 2022.

However, there are concerns about guest posting resulting in unnatural links. Chloe Hutchinson (digital PR and creative team lead at Aira) echoed this concern.

She explained that brands could be wasting money doing guest posting because Google algorithms understand it might be unnatural.

So, should you do guest posting?

Yes, but only when done systematically and creatively.

Laura Slingo (digital campaign manager at Seeker Digital, an organic link building company) advises link building specialists to ask a few questions to stay on the right track.

• Will your piece be good for web pages?
• Will it be genuinely useful and relevant to the audience?

Oli Baise (owner of Massive Kontent)  added that link builders should think outside the box. Be creative with your blogger outreach.

Additionally, step away from the operators like “write for us.” They are likely black hat link building traps. Move towards topic-based prospecting.

Using keyword research tools, Tom English (senior outreach strategist at From the Future Agency) finds what users want and sites creating content around the topics. He then pitched similar content to the said sites.

FYI: You can get results from guest posts using niche edits. There’s a higher chance of getting high-quality links.

Also, you don’t need to write articles. Plus, you can handpick high-traffic, ranking pages.

But you might need to pay.

The resource to do guest posting right: search and confirm niche-relevant sites for blogger outreach

5. Press release (PR) with HARO & X

In Mark Aseltine‘s (founder of Uncorked Ventures, an SEO agency) words: “HARO offers small businesses link building opportunities that they won’t find anywhere else, even without a PR team.”

With HARO, Mark got organic links from high-authority sites like AP, Forbes, and Fortune. That feat is more incredible, considering Mark’s sites are considerably unknown.

Like Mark, other link builders are also using HARO. So much so, it is the 4th most popular link building tactic in 2024.

In a study involving 755 link builders, Gael Breton & Mark Webster (founders, Authority Hacker) saw that 46.3% of respondents use HARO, making the tactic the 4th most-used after content,link exchange, and guest posting.

My take:

HARO link building can do wonders for both small ventures and large corporations. 

However, competition on HARO is growing stiff as link builders are jumping on the trend. You might want to combine it with other strategies.

You might not see significant results with established PRs on HARO because of the competition. I’ll recommend you search on X (formerly known as Twitter).

Does this tactic work?

Yes.

Benjamin Houy (founder, Grow With Less) uses X to compile a list of bloggers, content creators, and journalists to work with.

For the latter, monitor hashtags such as #journorequest.

The resource to master HARO: How to use HARO for link building

6. Reactive PR

Reactive PR, a distinctive part of PR link building, is a reputation management tool. Brands and individuals use it to correct public opinion and sentiments about negative comments.

Interestingly, outreach specialists also use reactive PRs. In fact, reactive PRs are the 4th most-used technique in 2022 [State of Link Building, 2022].

To date, reactive PRs remain a constant tool SEOs use to rank sites and pages. But how?

Surena Chande (journalist and copywriter at British Airways) explained:

There is always a demand for experts to comment on everything:

• Doctors and pharmacists on healthcare stories
• Psychologists on sex and relationship stories
• Lawyers on stories about driving fines and driving law changes

In essence, SEOs explore the opportunity by offering quick and insightful responses to get mentions. The tactic works even better for professionals.

This strategy is good for custom link building because insightful comments always help you gain quality links pointing to you.

The resource to master reactive PR: how to build press release backlinks

7. Contemporary broken link building (BLB)

Frankly, BLB is one of my all-time favorite link building strategies. And the reason is clear:

BLB offers value without being salesy. In my experience, the genuine care and “attention to detail,” involved is irresistible.

Beyond SERPReach, other link builders also use BLB. Aaron Anderson (founder of Link Pitch, a link building agency) is one of the lot. His use case is even interesting.

Unlike most providers of SEO link building services, Aaron does BLB contemporarily. He doesn’t limit his outreach to only sites with broken pages.

Aaron does not target sites with 404 responses. Instead, he focuses on repurposed, authoritative websites.

For example, say a website was a ticket generator. If the domain becomes expired, acquired, and repurposed as a generic blog. Such blogs are Aaron’s target.

But how does Aaron find such blogs, considering that SEO tools like Ahrefs, Moz, and Semrush won’t discover them?

• Aaron surfs the net for resource pages like X tools for finding broken links.
• He then goes through all the links manually for repurposed, relevant sites.
• And boom, the final cog is pitching to the author to inform them of the repurposed pages — and, of course, with a replacement tool ready.

Another BLB tactic is finding one-time, single-purpose sites (e.g., wedding sites for gift contributions or live streaming). These websites will undoubtedly be out of commission once the event is over. Then, you can leverage the broken links. Founder of Linkbuilder, Steward Dunlop, uses this tactic. 

Adopt this strategy or not? Whether traditional or contemporary, the answer is yes.

The resource to master BLB: How to do broken link building

8. Brand mentions

Like niche edits, brand mentions are low-effort link building tactics. The best part is that claiming brand mentions is free.

There is one issue, however. Brand mentions, on average, are only effective if you are popular. The case is not HARO, where you can acquire high-quality backlinks by supplying answers.

Either way, outreach specialists are getting results with brand mentions. One of them is Eva Cheng (digital PR consultant for Evolved Search). She’s had significant success converting mentions into a daily routine.

According to Eva:

“Chasing brand mentions feels like an underutilised technique, especially when partnered with outreaching a creative campaign.”

Monitor your brand mentions with Google Alerts.

9. Leverage competitors’ backlinks

I always say when you don’t know where to get backlinks, highlight 2-3 industry leaders in your niche. Analyze their backlink sources; target them.

And trust me, the method works all the time. I’ve used (and still use) it for my sites and clients.

Other SEOs also leverage competitors‘ backlinks. Amit Raj (founder of Amit Digital Marketing) is an example.

Amit even takes this method a notch higher than typical competitor analysis. Here is how:

• Pick 3-4 competitors, then analyze their backlink profile 
• Find the lucrative keywords the competitors target
• Use the keywords to find more targets from adjacent niches
• Create your article
• Now, pitch to the targets and include niche-specific lingos.

Another link building specialist, Jacob Landis-Eigsti (owner of Jacob Le), leverages competitors‘ backlinks. But he uses it for local link building to increase domain authority. And it works every time.

Here is how Jacob does it:

• Plug all competitors into Ahrefs Site Explorer
• Filter the search for only dofollow link building opportunities
• Filter off the spammy sites
• Create 15-20 profiles on the targets daily.

Read more on how to master competitor backlink analysis.

10. Creating linkable assets

Linkable assets are one of the diverse link building strategies. They can be in written form, images, interactive videos, resource pages, or even tools.

Either way, you will enhance your backlink profile. And often, it’ll all cost you zero dollars.

So, what linkable assets are link building specialists using in 2025?

▶️Original research and data — these are insights that are not readily available elsewhere. Creating this will be valuable to others in your niche and will naturally link to you. For instance, Backlinko analyzed 11.8M search results to identify key ranking factors. This original research led to 5,000+ backlinks from authoritative sites like Semrush.

▶️Resource and stats pages — George Driscoll (senior digital PR, Driscoll Digital) uses this tactic to generate up to 100 backlinks annually. And that’s the result without outreach. Imagine what you could get with a campaign targeted at journalists.

▶️Free tools — Tony Mastri (digital marketing manager at Marion) uses a combination of calculators and press releases to get backlinks in the legal and real estate niche. They work. 

You can adopt this strategy too, but don’t build another calculator.

Building calculators is common and might lead to spammy links. Think differently. Who do stakeholders need in your niche? Can you automate that for free? Can you build around it?

11. Infographics & custom image link building

Infographics are not only cute and shareable; they are also vital link building tools. Nicolas Straut (senior SEO associate at Fundera) uses them to get backlinks from adjacent but relevant sources.

FYI: You can do better than get backlinks from adjacent sources.

With well-designed infographics, you can get backlinks from the top guns in your industry. I discussed this extensively in my infographic link building article [link to this at the base of this tactic].

Also, your infographics can rank on Google Images. That could fetch you more traffic.

Similar to infographics, you can build links with custom images. Jason Thibault (owner of Massive Kontent) uses this method to get up to 6x 75 DA+ backlinks monthly. Here is how:

• Create a Flickr account and sync it with stockists like Unsplash, Pexels, or Creative Commons
• Upload custom images > set the permissions to “some rights reserved.”
• Check the sites linking your images monthly
• If the attribute is not correct, send a polite email to the author in question.

Read more on how to master infographic link building.

Copy link building Specialists but not blindly.

Failure to critically analyze your backlink will cost you significantly. You will spend your hard-earned money and not see increased search rankings. So, choose your link building strategy carefully.

Bottom line: don’t be a bandwagon SEO.

Indeed, copy what works for others in your niche. But don’t take it all in hook, line, and sinker. Test the strategies on a micro scale first.

Also, don’t limit yourself to one strategy. Use different tactics for different pages.

Would you like to contribute to this article?

I’d love to hear from you if you have a strategy that works for you or a use case for the ones listed here.