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Link building can be fairly daunting when you realize the amount of resources that it requires, the factors it’s reliant on, and all the moving parts that come with it.
However, as someone that has been doing link building since 2016, it’s safe to say that it becomes a lot less daunting, if you have a proper link building checklist to follow.
Once you follow a methodical approach to your link building, it makes the entire process a lot less confusing. You’ll feel a lot more confident about either building links at scale, or exploring it with a reputable link building agency, and being ready with a plan of action.
In today’s article, we’re going to cover all the elements of the link building checklist we follow. Everything from – your initial link auditing, how to source potential link prospects, the art of effective outreach emails, maintaining quality control, how to amplify results, and how to ensure link building is actually contributing to overall SEO goals and revenue.
Now let’s go into the 7 parts of our checklist. Following this will ensure you’re building links in the right way, if you want a truly holistic, and successful SEO strategy.
Before you can even build any links, you need to first assess the foundation you have to work with, and determine the nuances of your niche, or competitive landscape.
This step in the process has been broken down into 6 parts.
The first step is to audit your own site’s link profile. After all, if you know your starting point and where the strengths/weaknesses are – you know what you need to work on, and what you need to do more of.
So this involves examining areas like these from a high level:
Some of this blends into other parts of Step 1, and you can follow this guide to doing a backlink audit, if you want to do a very in-depth audit.
You’re naturally going to want to look at where your competitors are, and their link profiles.
Not only do you want to see how they compare in terms of overall domain authority or domain rating – but you want to see the content or keyword gap, how many links they have, and which pages of theirs are responsible for those links.
Most SEO tools like Ahrefs or Semrush will be able to run a quick report for you, and allow you to dig into these areas.

You can then analyze each competitor, and determine the pages which have picked up the most (or best) links.
For example, here I’m using the Ahrefs feature “Best by links” and filtering for all the dofollow referring domains, for this competitor. This allows me to get a quick overview of successful content.

Knowing exactly which sites they got links from is also useful, as you can use it to identify “patterns” and reach out to those sites yourself. More on this in Step 2.
From a business standpoint – knowing what your campaign goals are, is a very crucial part of the equation.
It’s not just about the micro – such as your link building goals, or SEO traffic movement but also about the macro – what do you hope to achieve in terms of sales and conversions, or closing a gap against a competitor.
We’ll cover this in more detail in later parts of the checklist, but you can distill everything down to these questions.
Now you have your actual traffic and commercial goals top of mind, it’s time to think about which pages you want to actively build links to, and estimate the volume it’s going to take.
It’s not to say that a scattergun approach won’t have any effect on your SEO – but it won’t be as efficient in terms of resource allocation.
The first step is to determine which pages you want to focus on. A few things you can do:


Link gap calculation then comes next. You want to do this in 2 stages:
(1) Domain-level link gap calculation – which is where you compare your site against comparative competitors, where you have significant keyword overlap.

(2) Page-level link gap calculation – where you look at individual pages and estimate the number of links you believe it’ll take to reach the first page or the top positions.
Here’s an example of a link gap calculation of a specific keyword:

We talk about doing these calculations, and the logic behind them, in this article under the heading “Link Gap Calculations and ROI”.
Of course, it’s important to also not neglect other factors, aside from link building.
Ensuring you have followed good practice in terms of on-page SEO, you have schema mark-up, good site structure and internal links, will help ensure that you are making the best use of your existing link profile – and any subsequent enhancement of your link profile.
It’s also common for companies to do this initial auditing stage, and realise they have content which is not performing, or which does not align with their target audience – so your content quality and ensuring it matches the search intent, is also tied in with this.
We’re edging a bit closer to actual execution now. So now you want to look at what is going to give you the maximum leverage, and efficiency, for link acquisition.
So for example, some things you can use to your advantage:
Next is knowing which content you have is performing well, from a link building POV. As mentioned, tools like Ahrefs and Semrush have a feature to display the pages which are getting the most links.

As you can see here, we’ve filtered for dofollow links, with a DR of 10+ and Domain Traffic of 100+, to just filter out most of the junk/scraper links.
The goal here is to determine 2 main things:
Now it’s time to get stuck into the actual strategy, and link building process.
This part of the checklist, is about determining which tactics, niches or website types you want to be reaching out to – and ensuring you can prospect that data.
There may be missed link building opportunities, where you can get links fairly quickly and for relatively low effort.
Going back to the analysis we did in step 1 on our own link profile, and competitors links – we will start to build up a picture of the websites we should be reaching out to.
In other words, how exactly are those sites getting links, what are the common factors and what can you replicate?
By doing this, it opens up more opportunity and it really helps later, during the prospecting stage. If we can build a big batch size of a certain type of website/webpage and we have something we know they’d be interested in (be it a guest post content idea, article, tool, calculator or whatever), we can potentially reach out and get more links like that.
And by taking a very data-driven approach to your target lists, and looking at your surrounding competition – you know you are developing link strategies that are both niche-relevant, and are bridging the gap between your website, and a potential “linkable audience”.
For example, If you notice competitors getting a link from landlord magazines, you should in fact delve in deeper, build a bigger target list of landlord blogs/magazines and reach out with an appropriate value proposition, be it a relevant article you’ve already written or a guest post idea.
Here’s a specific example of us going through a website called Whereby.com:

We can find several examples of patterns inside the referring pages’ title, and all are associated with industry listicles. We can then take each of these seed ideas, and build more lists of roundup link prospects.
It doesn’t just stop at roundup targets, you can also look for patterns associated with:
Going back to your competitor link analysis, you have 2 main ways you’ll be using them.
If you are handling a lot of competitors and data, you could even build out a tool in Google Sheets or Power BI, where you can sort all the data, and consolidate it to find all the common linking domains, or linking pages.
Here’s an example below of how we did it in Power BI:

However, you can achieve a simple bulk extraction using the Ahrefs Competitive Analysis feature as well:

Once you need to move onto the actual link prospecting stage, you then want to create your lists and segment them in a way, where it makes sense.
This is so that it is easier at the outreach and personalization stage (more on this later).
Exactly how you sort this will be dependent on the tactic and what kind of sites you’re reaching out to. But you can use any (or all) of the following to do this):

Here’s an example below, where we scraped a load of online grocery/food delivery and had the AI look at the target audience of each. While never 100% accurate, it saves a lot of manual work and can help filter out irrelevant sites from your batches.

The other part of prospecting is to identify the right people to reach out to. There are tools like Hunter, SalesQL or Snov which help you with this – however, it’s best not to be wholly reliant on a tool.
For most sites you’ll be aiming to reach out to an editor or content manager, and in other cases a marketing manager or SEO person. Essentially, you want to find the person most likely to be dealing with content and with the authority to update the website.
Aside from knowing the name of the person, you’ll need to ensure you’re collecting the correct email addresses – that’s where following good practice in terms of email validity will be crucial to ensure email deliverability is kept in check.
As you perform link prospecting and outreach, and/or if you scale the link building process up – there is a quality control aspect to keep in mind between these 2 phases. In this step we’ll talk about what you can do to keep the process efficient, and ensure you are building the right type of links.
During the prospecting process, it’s also important to have quality control checks in place – since you should be trying to build high-quality links.
High quality backlinks are important because – they’re more likely to drive actual link equity and impact rankings for the medium to long term. Low quality links on link farms or PBNs, will either lead to zero impact, or will eventually put you at risk of a penalty.
Some of the ways you can identify high-quality websites:

Aside from digging into the quality of individual websites – you should also always be keeping your prospecting process in check. This is particularly important if you scale up the process, and/or have an entire link building team in place.
So make sure to:
Outreach is one of the most challenging areas of link building – people are inundated with emails from every direction. So this part of the checklist will cover how to ensure this stays as efficient, and effective as possible.
Once you have your prospected lists, and you have them appropriately segmented – next you’ll want to create email templates.
Now, using templates requires a balanced approach. You want them templated enough to help keep the outreach process streamlined – but, with enough room to edit so you’re aren’t simply doing ’email blasting’.
There are different approaches to email template segmentation – but it could be themed around their niche, business type, a content idea crossover, or anything else where you can make it fit that batch of targets. This works especially well if you’re guest blogging.
The key thing is to ensure it is relevant, is valuable (not transactional), uses good copy and follows sound email psychology principles.
Many of these templates should be written in a way where (if required), it allows personalization to be injected into the email at the outreach stage.
By doing this, it keeps the email specific to that person or website, and shows you’ve done your homework. Plus, natural variation of emails is essential for email deliverability.
It needs to go beyond simply mentioning their name and website – and for example, you can talk about something that is unique to them, pitch a content piece that perfectly aligns with theirs, or pitch a content idea that aligns with their content strategy/audience interest.
“If at first you don’t succeed, dust yourself off and try again”… Is a lyric from an Aaliyah song! But it holds true for outreach as well.
You should aim to use a follow up schedule. Don’t be too persistent that you annoy people – but follow up enough that you don’t miss out.
The sweet spot may be following up 2-3 times, over a period of 2-4 weeks.
Most outreach software will allow you to streamline this process, and automate the follow ups.
Just ensure that it’s done in a way, where it stops sending follow ups, if the person replies. And don’t forget to change up your follow ups and keep them snappy and value-driven.
It’s all very well putting all this hard work in data prospecting, and great quality outreach – but ultimately, when replies come in, you need to ensure you keep on top of everything.
This simply boils down to: being responsive/timely with replies, being helpful, negotiating on the content idea (if they want something else), or negotiating on the price (or alternative value propositions) if you’re doing paid strategies.
The basics matter – such as knowing what anchor text you’ll be able to get, if they’ll allow commercial links, if you can add any other links, and they’ll be dofollow rather than nofollow.
But once you do link building at scale, it then starts to be about organization skills and ensuring you keep that in mind that it isn’t just about sending a reply because it’s another chore to do, but that there is a human receiving each reply. And the way you reply, can ultimately affect whether you will get the link/coverage you are hoping for.
I talk a bit more about the ‘death by a thousand cuts’ concept, when it comes to organizing your link building process, which is particularly important at the final stages of the outreach process.
When you are doing guest posting tactics – this is where content ideation, the selection of topic and the process of writing valuable content comes in.
Not every editor will want your initial idea, but if you’re in the right ballpark or your pitch resonated, they may have alternative suggestions or want you to pitch more ideas.
So make sure you research this well, and offer something which aligns with their current content strategy and you know will likely resonate with their audience.
For added effect, you can even do a content-gap analysis, and pitch an idea that one of their competitors has covered within their SEO strategy- and show them the traffic potential. For instance, if I was pitching Pitchbox a content idea, I may show them the ones in red below:

Failing that, if they are not publishing new content or have filled up their content calendar for sometime, offer to refresh one of their existing pieces.
It’s so easy to get caught up in your link building checklist, that backlinks go live (or disappear) without you being aware.
Sometimes when you’re doing outreach to journalists, or busy editors, they won’t always have time to tell you it’s gone live. Using an SEO tool like Semrush or Ahrefs will obviously come in handy, as links appear pretty quickly in their databases.
While if you want to make sure those links stay live and you aren’t facing a large link attrition issue, you can use a backlink monitoring solution.
Once you acquire links you also want to ensure it meets your requirements from a technical POV as well.
This includes:
On the last point, if the page has not been indexed, you just need to get the editor to send the page for indexing from their end, ask them to link to it internally – or as a last resort even use a service like IndexingExpert.com to force the page to be indexed.
As you build links, it’s also good to run an analysis from time to time, to see your anchor text distribution.
Tools like Semrush and Ahrefs, will allow you to look at your anchor list, and you can quickly get an idea if you have good distribution, or if you are over-optimized on exact match anchor text.
Better yet, if you use TLG’s Anchor Text Analysis tool (available as one of the tools in “The Ultimate Link Building Playbook”), you can run the analysis on the data of your site/your competitors to see how they compare.

After acquiring links, this should also act as a feedback loop back to Step 2, and your overarching link strategy.
You should have learned the type of sites/sectors where you have been able to get links, where you haven’t been able to get links, and with enough time, you can also determine if those links have driven actual results.
By always tweaking and iterating the steps on this checklist, you can then start to improve the ROI on your link building.
Sometimes you need to throw in other tactics to get links.
This is both for efficiency reasons – because you may find your site lends itself better to some tactics than others – but also to amplify your SEO efforts.
Aside from the usual benefits of digital PR links, this can be a really good way of amplifying overall SEO results, and top-tier media can act as highly credible trust symbols you can place on your site.

When you conduct a link gap analysis against a competitor, you may find they have links from these particularly high authority news websites.
You might choose to do this via proactive outreach, and use PR databases like Prowly, CISION or MuckRack. However, for that you’ll need to brainstorm compelling news stories, and pitch ideas to journalists who cover that beat.
Or you can use reactive PR platforms, and contribute media sound bites.
HARO has since been sunsetted by CISION, but there are plenty of alternatives like Source Of Sources, ProfNet, Qwoted and HelpAB2BWriter.
The caveat with these tactics is it may only lead to an unlinked brand mention, or a nofollow link.
However, brand mentions and nofollow links can still be beneficial, and will help you with brand awareness.
Social media is something you should try to leverage as part of your outreach anyway.
If sites share your content, or publish your guest posts, ask them to share it on socials, and re-share it from your end as well.
We find this works particularly well for ecommerce, and we’ve had success with a client in the food industry who has done very successful social collaborations with influencers in the food and BBQ space.
Social media is not a direct ranking signal but is a highly important part of the marketing flywheel, as illustrated here by Rand Fishkin.

But also, social campaigns can amplify your brand and its content. The more people see your content, the more likely it’ll drive searches (particularly branded search) and this can also lead to you earning links naturally.
Any content you make on your site, should also be repurposed, to squeeze out the maximum benefit.
Maybe if it’s a long-form ultimate guide – you can turn it into a video series for your YouTube channel. From there, you could chop the clip down into loads of shorts, and share it on Instagram, TikTok or Youtube Shorts.
Or perhaps you have some extensive data, that you can turn into something that’s highly linkable.
For example, Synup produced a report, looking at what types of websites/web pages ranked in certain local business sectors.

For what could have been a humdrum, boring whitepaper – was turned into an easily digestible (and actionable) set of graphs explaining how local businesses should interpret the findings.

It’s always worth going back to the content you produced before, and refreshing it.
You need to do more than updating it to the latest year, or stuffing a few keywords in. Think about fresh insights, embedding a useful video, data or a downloadable, to enhance the user experience and for information gain purposes.
By doing this, you might find that it ranks better, gets more visibility and you can more easily earn links, or build links to it via outreach.
Now it’s time to look at, and measure the impact of your link building. This won’t happen overnight, but if you stay the course and keep quality top of mind for everything you do – this part should go well
At the basic level, you want to be looking at the impact that link building is having on your organic traffic and referral traffic.
Google Analytic 4 (while not the most user-friendly!) or Google Search Console is sufficient for this.

Just compare the time periods to gauge if your link building efforts led to any significant enough increases and just remember to filter out any branded traffic. In GSC you can use the Custom(regex) filter for this.
B. Revenue and commercial impact
Of course, it’s all very well driving more and more traffic – but is it leading to an actual increase in sales?
You also cannot put this down to purely link building – because this is heavily reliant on your websites’ CRO and if you are ranking pages that are targeted towards the right audience.
However, if you have those areas in check, you want to ensure you are able to set up attribution correctly, and determine which sales/enquiries are coming from organic search.
if this isn’t going in the right direction it could be that:
Just remember, that there are short term metrics you can look at, but link building ROI is a medium to long-term endeavor.
If you’re running a busy company, and your in-house marketing team is already busy with other activities like producing content, running events, and a million other things… you might be thinking when you’re going to get the time to do link building.
That’s where working with a reputable link building agency, such as The Links Guy, can help you scale up your link building.
We follow the above checklist which we’ve developed and refined since 2016 – and we’re always thinking outside of the box, for other tactics we can use, or ways we can speed up results for our clients.
Above all else though – we do link building ethically, we’re transparent about our link building process and everything we do is about moving the clients towards results, and revenue.
By following this 7-step link building checklist, you’ll be well onto your way to building high quality backlinks.
This helped us build close to 10,000 links since 2016, for clients across 40+ industries, and helped drive millions of dollars of revenue via organic search.
And if you want more in-depth insights into any of the topics we discussed in our blog, head on over to our blog, to see how The Links Guy does it.

I’m a marketer, entrepreneur, SEO consultant & link building agency owner based in Scotland, United Kingdom. I'm also the founder and MD of TheLinksGuy