16 Tips For Broken Link Building In Competitive Markets

As a brand looking to stand out in a competitive industry, traditional SEO and link-building tactics can feel oversaturated, with sinking returns. But broken link-building can transform your strategy. This article explains why broken link-building is an absolute groundbreaker, how to use AI to elevate your brand’s authority and rankings, and why you should invest in it. 

6 Tactics For Broken Link Building in Competitive Markets

Backlinks are the currency that builds your domain authority and shows Google that your content is worth being ranked. Instead of traditional tactics requiring the creation of brand-new content or competing for limited guest post slots, finding and fixing broken links is far easier. 

1. Find Opportunities for Broken Link-Building

Broken link-building only requires finding opportunities hidden in plain sight: broken, outdated, or dead links on high-authority websites and 48% of the experts use it. 

What makes it easier? 

1. Solving a Problem, Not Adding to It: Your chances of success are far higher when you approach webmasters with a solution: repairing a broken link than when you only request a backlink.
2. Less Competition: Everyone is vying for the same guest posting positions in congested markets. However, in broken-link building, you’re often the only one pitching a solution to a specific broken link problem, leading to higher success rates.
3. Authority: You can boost your brand’s credibility and reliability in your industry by aligning it with well-established businesses by fixing broken links on high-authority websites. 

2. Wikipedia’s Dead Link Strategy

Wikipedia contains an abundance of data on many topics, broken links and information that need to be cited or referenced. That makes it possible to receive a ton of highly focused traffic. Additionally, you receive second-tier organic inbound links from websites that point to the Wikipedia entry listing you.

How to Search broken links easily:

Website: wikipedia.org  + [industry keyword]

3. Combine Content Marketing with Broken Link Building

Broken link-building fits perfectly into a content marketing strategy to tremendously boost your brand’s visibility and authority.

How It Works:

• Create Targeted, High-Value Content: create valuable content that can replace the broken link you’re targeting. This means creating content specifically for the gaps you find. For example: if you find a broken link on a high-authority site linking to an outdated guide on “enterprise-level data security,” you could create an updated, in-depth guide on the same topic. This benefits your readers in addition to positioning your content as a useful resource for the broken link outreach.
• Identify Content Gaps in Your Industry: Learn what kinds of material are out-of-date or underrepresented in your market by consistently checking the broken links of your competitors. This develops a content pipeline that is both extremely relevant to your audience and worthy of links. 
• Repurpose and Reclaim: Repurposing existing content is another technique to connect your content marketing with broken link building. It allows you to frequently, edit already-written blog articles, manuals, or infographics to take advantage of broken link opportunities instead of starting from scratch.

4. Monitor Competitors’ Broken Links for Quick Wins

Stay ahead of your rivals by monitoring your competitors’ websites for broken links and turning those into backlink opportunities for your brand. 29% of marketers analyze their competitor’s backlink profiles to earn backlinks.

Follow these steps to monitor, capitalize on competitor broken links and outpace them in search rankings: 

• Track Competitors: Your efforts can greatly benefit by using tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Screaming Frog.
  • You can find broken links that lead to out-of-date or dead content quickly by conducting audits on competitor websites regularly.
• Turn Competitor Failures into Your Wins: It’s time for you to step in when a broken page costs your rival a valuable backlink.
  • Reach out to the webmaster of the website that is linked, and offer your excellent content instead of theirs. 
  • This helps you build authority, also weakens your competitor’s backlink profile.
• Analyze Competitor Content: These audits can do more for you than merely sniping their broken links; they can also reveal which of your competitors’ content is doing a poor job.
  •  If you notice a pattern in the kinds of content that draw broken links (older items, discontinued resources, etc.), you can create similar content that’s more up-to-date or informative, and replace it in your outreach.

5. Using AI to Streamline Broken Link Building

To automate, expand the process and increase its efficiency for businesses operating in competitive markets, artificial intelligence (AI) is brought into play. 

How AI Can Help:

1. Identifying Broken Links: Artificial intelligence (AI) programs such as ContentKing, DeepCrawl, or even more advanced features in Ahrefs and SEMrush can surf the web at a broad level and find broken links relevant to your industry.
   • These tools can flag broken links faster than a manual audit, assisting you in prioritizing high-value opportunities more efficiently.
2. Automating Outreach: Once you’ve identified broken links, AI can also streamline your outreach efforts. Tools like Pitchbox or BuzzStream use machine learning to personalize and automate outreach emails.
   • These tools can assist in crafting tailored outreach at scale by studying previous successful email campaigns and increasing response rates without needing to perform infinite manual labor.
3. Predicting Content Success: AI can go one step further by predicting if a specific piece of information will be approved as a replacement for a broken link.
   • These tools can analyze the authority of the site, the quality of the broken link’s content, and other factors to give you a ranking of which opportunities are most worth pursuing. 
4. Tracking and Reporting: AI-powered tools also simplify the process of tracking your broken link-building progress.
   • These tools make it easier to track the effectiveness of your campaigns and report on results by offering dashboards and real-time updates instead of manually updating spreadsheets.

6. Invest in Broken Link Building 

Missing out on broken link-building investments is a huge opportunity wasted, particularly in a cutthroat business. This is why it’s essential to invest in broken link-building right away:

1. First-Mover Advantage: The earlier you jump on broken link building, the more low-hanging fruit you’ll find. Being proactive allows you to gain useful high-authority backlinks before your rivals do.
2. Sustainability: Broken links will always exist. Websites will always contain dead pages, out-of-date content, and discontinued products. So, it isn’t a one-off tactic, but an evergreen tactic that provides consistent backlink opportunities over time.
3. Proven ROI: In contrast to content development or guest posting, which needs a large investment of time and resources. Broken link building makes use of pre-existing information and fast turnaround on results. Compared to more traditional strategies, brands who invest in broken link building frequently notice rapid benefits in their domain authority, organic rankings, and backlink profiles.

Summing Up 

Identify content gaps, monitor your competitors, and use AI to streamline your strategy, to transform broken link-building into a powerful driver of brand growth. At OutreachMani, we specialize in helping businesses like yours scale their link-building efforts, including broken link building. Ready to turn broken links into high-value backlinks? 

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