Climbing the ranking of search engine results requires sophisticated SEO practices, including link building – acquiring inbound links or attracting other websites to link to your content. If done right, this can be one of the powerful growth strategies that catapult visibility and authority onto web pages.
When sites link to your content, they drive traffic in your direction, which is crucial for discovery and exposure, especially if your sports site is brand new. Probably even more importantly, backlinks’ quality and quantity are among Google’s most important ranking factors and determinants of a site’s domain authority.
In other words, a site cannot perform well SEO-wise unless its managers strive for successful link-building.
Here are some effective techniques that will juice your sports SEO.
1. Make Pitches to Relevant and Authoritative Sites
Outreach is essentially one of the major strategies of link building, and it involves requesting links from relevant websites in the sports industry to link back to your website. The key to successful outreach is creating a compelling, persuasive pitch that shows why your content is helpful, comprehensive, relevant, and informative, not easily replicated by some inexperienced blogger.
E-mail and social media are the most preferred link-building outreach channels. However, you can also use online tools and attract audiences from different platforms with exceptional precision.
If you find this process challenging, you can opt for the services of a company that offers link building for Sports Company. Such service providers have a team of professionals that create high-quality links for your websites.
2. Broken Link Building
Mostly, all websites have broken or dead links that lead to an inaccessible page or just do not exist. These links may harm the UX and SEO performance of the site, and usually, the owner is looking for ways to handle them.
For broken link building, you can contact sites hoping they’d consider your content a “replacement” for their dead links. That is similar to the above outreach technique, except that your request centres on providing an alternative external link, so the same tips apply — including highlighting new content’s originality, accuracy, and helpfulness.
3. Produce ‘Link-Worthy’ Content
Organically improving your inbound links involves producing quality content. When other sports websites find yours helpful, factual, and original, they are more likely to link to associated pages – even without you asking them to do so.
So, what makes sports content link-worthy? Value.
If writers, bloggers, and journalists find value in what information or opinions the content offers, they will most likely add their links to their work.
4. Comment on Blogs and Forums
A lower-value way to build links for your sports company is with comments on related blogs and forums. You can find them just by searching for your topic along with the word blog or forum. You also might look for subreddits on Reddit and dedicated groups on Facebook or LinkedIn.
Many sports blogs and forums will let your username or signature be a hyperlink to your website. Others won’t have this, but you can post comments that include links.
Once you find places to comment, remember the 80/20 rule. Eighty per cent of the time, you should add value to the community, answer people’s questions, and make a good-faith effort to contribute. Then, about 20 per cent of the time, you can probably get away with promoting yourself or your content.
5. Benchmark Your Competitor’s Links
To better understand how to improve your link profile, benchmark against others in your industry. Observe their pages that gain more backlinks; try to infer why. Perhaps one or another competitor stands out because it creates some neatly crafted how-to guides or data-driven insights.
More so, “glimpsing” into competitors’ link profiles will likely introduce you to potential link sources relevant to your company’s content. You can find websites, blogs, or directories interested in linking to content like yours and then reach out to them.
6. Apply the Skyscraper Technique
This strategy refers to beating out widely linked competitor content with a better, more valuable version. Once you’ve published your improved version, contact websites that link to your competitor’s content and ask for a link to your improved version instead.
Managed effectively, the result will be new inbound links and nabbing competitors’ traffic as you climb the search results. To make this technique work, however, it’s vital to thoroughly assess how to noticeably surpass the quality of your competitor’s content. Perhaps it could be by having a more authoritative author, updating facts and data, adding new viewpoints or insights, incorporating visual elements and making the entirety easier to read.
7. Leverage Professional Sports Organizations
Have you ever noticed how professional sports pages often receive a link to their website? You may even get a full page on an industry website. This may happen if you officially sponsor someone in the sports niche. There are all types of associations, institutes, and organizations that you may want to join or contribute to.
As well as potential links, these groups could help you build relationships with fellow professionals in your niche. It could be worth researching organizations and selecting a few that may help boost your credibility and link profile.
Final Remarks
Numerous link-building approaches exist, but implementing these seven strategies will get you ahead of the competition.
A combination of targeted content, outreach with influencers, and increased visibility will do wonders for your traffic and, in turn, your rankings in the SERPs.
