Premium Link Building: Your Best Friends For Scaling SEO

Link building is a vital component of every successful SEO strategy. Still, the quality of these links plays a pivotal role in determining whether or not they benefit your website.

That’s where premium link building enters the conversation. Acquiring premium-level backlinks takes a nuanced approach that involves meticulously choosing high-quality websites for link placements that will drive maximum impact.

While premium link building may take more time and effort, the results in this new era of SGE, and AI content landscape are undoubtedly worth it, especially if you want to establish an authoritative online presence for your website.

If you are looking for ways to attract premium links to your website, this guide is your one-stop solution for understanding what you need to do.

What Makes a Link “Premium”?

Let’s tour the past to understand what makes a link premium. It started with Google’s Larry Page, an academic who believed that websites with backlinks from other reputable sites are trustworthy and credible; this was the basic idea behind why backlinks are a major ranking factor.

Premium link building is more than just another fancy word for acquiring links. Premium links signify a massive change in the quality of links with a focus on relevance, authenticity, and credibility. They’re a goldmine for your website and offer benefits that go beyond the SEO world.

While traditional link building involves gaining links through outreach, guest posts, resource pages, etc, premium link building utilizes an all-around strategic approach focusing on quality over quantity.

For example, receiving high-quality backlinks from sites like the Washington Post, Wikipedia, The Guardian, or educational and government websites holds immense value and is extremely powerful.

Let’s explore some factors that determine whether a link is premium or not:

• Relevance: The backlink contextualizes the piece and the written content. Similarly, the referring domain should belong to a niche similar to or overlapping with the backlink. However, a backlink from an authoritative site that produces trustworthy content on several topics is also considered high-quality.
• Authenticity: Backlinks on websites with few (or proportionally few) outbound links instead of many, are a sign of a premium link because it means the site doesn’t just link out at random to anyone, and links sparingly, and only required to. If they mention you, it shows your resource is unique and worthy of a backlink on their website.
• Traffic: One purpose of a backlink is to have readers visit the resource by clicking on it; this means it’s driving traffic from the referring domain to your website. Remember that people rarely click on links in ‘boilerplate’ sections like footers, so Google’s search engines pay little attention to them. As well as this, the Google algo leak in in May 2024, showed that:

“Google has three buckets/tiers for classifying their link indexes (low, medium, high quality). Click data is used to determine which link graph index tier a document belongs to. See SourceType here, and TotalClicks here. Click data is used to determine which link graph index tier a document belongs to.”

So links which attract clicks are likely to be attributed higher value.

• Link Placement: Regarding SEO value, backlinks that are mentioned in the main body of a page’s content have much more impact. High-quality links are prominently placed within the article and must be dofollow. While image alt text links don’t hold as much value, image credit links are valuable.
• Anchor Text: The backlink’s anchor text offers context to the information the reader will find when they click on it, so it must be relevant and descriptive, not spammy and clickbait-y. It’s also essential to avoid creating a repetitive pattern of anchors and use natural variations to avoid the risk of over-optimization. A diverse anchor text profile is also an indicating factor for high-quality links.
• DA/DR: A high DA or DA suggests that the website has a strong link profile of its own and backlinks from such sites should pass down decent link equity as well. Sometimes, websites use manipulative tactics to inflate their DA or DR, so it’s important not to focus only on these metrics but to use discernment along with other factors to determine their quality.

Overall, your website has premium backlinks if most of them check the above mentioned factors. In fact, these high-quality links to your site pack a heavier punch for long-term SEO success, solid ROI, increased traffic and search engine rankings.

To give you an idea, these are the types of backlinks Google considers to be premium:

1. High-quality guest posts in which you build informative content that positions you as an authority figure and your website as a credible contributing source in your industry.
2. Editorial links are seen as ‘endorsements’ because these backlinks are gained when you offer high-quality content that gains recognition through merit. Extra brownie points if those links are on highly ranked pages as well.
3. Collaboration with authoritative websites using valuable content, such as unique case studies, infographics, evergreen guides, original research, influential interviews, industry benchmarks, or data, indicates a reputable link.
4. Links from media sites (i.e. PR link building) as the links are on fresh pages, and these sites are often considered as ‘seed sites’ by Google’s algorithm, in their respective topic graph.

Benefits of Premium Link Building

If you want to stay ahead of the competition with a stellar backlink profile, settling for low-grade links will get you nowhere. Best case scenario it won’t grow – worst case scenario, the links will cause harm and be devalued. 

Premium links pointing to your site play a major role in maintaining sustainable and long-lasting SEO benefits for your websites. But what are they exactly? Let’s find out out:

Higher Search Engine Rankings

Search engines consider a healthy backlink profile one of the SERP ranking factors, so the more premium backlinks pointing to your site, the better your competitive edge in your niche.

Ahrefs conducted a study on over 14 billion web pages. They found that the number of high-quality backlinks a website has directly correlates to its position among SERPs.

Increased Organic Traffic

Once you start appearing on top of SERPs, your website’s organic search traffic will naturally increase. Google users have a search query with a specific goal in mind, so when your content appears on top, it means their intent aligns with what you’re offering.

Since user intent is directly related to organic traffic, potential customers are likely to find your product, services, or helpful content. This also increases brand awareness and is one of the most budget-friendly forms of marketing.

Increased Referral Traffic

Although increased referral traffic is a secondary benefit of premium links, it still holds more value than traffic generated from PPC ads or social media posts since these sources eventually stop pushing traffic once they’ve run their course.

As long as the backlinks remain active on high-ranking websites for relevant search terms, your website will continue receiving substantial referral traffic from the readers on the referring domain.

Improved Domain Authority

Premium links also boost your website’s authority, which determines a website’s value. DR or DA may also go up, since it considers your backlink profile and the metrics of websites referring to yours. Having fewer high-quality links is more important than having many low-quality links.

Although SEO metrics like DA and DR are not a ranking factor, its more correlative than causative. If you keep getting links from quality, authoritative sites, your “true authority” should be up as well.

Boost Brand Credibility

Building premium links also boosts the credibility of your website and its content. Suppose you get a link from a big gun, such as the New York Times or Washington Post – it shows your site is trustworthy, and you can even use this as a trust symbol on your website, or marketing material. So it can indirectly help with conversions.

Also, premium link-building campaigns don’t end after you receive your backlink. Having these relationships, and the credibility created by these links, helps you build on your connections and network within your niche – further increasing exposure.

Quality over quantity has been a primary focus of TLG’s premium link building services. So, let us help your website improve its rankings and brand visibility with a stellar backlink profile.

9 Effective Strategies To Build Premium Links

While there are endless shortcuts to acquiring backlinks, you should obviously avoid black-hat practices, as they are unlikely to be of the highest quality. Here’s a few tactics you should be using.

HARO or Connectively

You can become a source for bloggers or reporters to build high-authority backlinks through reputable news sites and blogs. To make it even easier, you can sign up for a  service called Connectively, formerly known as Help A Reporter Out (HARO).

This platform connects experts who want exposure to journalists or bloggers. After registering as a source, choose your plan. You will receive different content queries, from which you select the most relevant one to contribute.

Craft a brief but comprehensive pitch explaining how you can help address the journalist’s query. If they’re convinced, that’s your ticket to a high-quality link.

There are other platforms which work in a similar way – Qwoted, JournoLink, Featured.com and a few others.

Relationship Link Building

Relationship-based link building also goes against the grain of most of the link building out there. These are links that will generally be harder for others to replicate, may require you having to have a very specific type of approach or you can get it based on just having the rapport with the right people associated with that website (a case of “who you know not what you know).

So this could come under the banner of premium link building. You’re not necessarily paying a premium because of an arbitrary SEO metric – but because its not an easy link to build. 

At TLG, we’ve worked with clients where they have built links via relationships, as well as engaging with us, to help them build more relationships in related sectors – leading to highly relevant, impactful links. 

One example is a health & fitness news website we engaged with back in early 2021. They had been scaling up the site for a number of years, had a strong writing team and editorial process in place, and reached the point of probably around 1 million visitors per month – primarily all from organic search or direct traffic. 

Our plan of action was to:

• Look at direct and indirect competitors to create link strategy ideas. Not only to get links on the same sites, but also create custom prospecting lists, so we could secure links on sites competitors didn’t have. 
• Outreach also involved reaching out to universities, colleges, local government and organizations, so we could occasionally also attain some very rare, high authority links as well. 

Within a period from March 2021 to Sept 2023, we built ~1500 links and helped the site grow from ~1 million visitors to between 2.5 to 3 million organic search visitors per month.

While Ahrefs shows around 2.4 million, it was probably reaching peaks of closer to 3 million, by the end of 2022. 

Annually, we know that the client was getting over 30 million visitors per year organically (They didn’t run any paid ads or paid traffic.)

Niche Edits

Niche edits, also known as link inserts, are an excellent premium link building strategy that involves placing backlinks into existing content, which means it’s already published on a website.

The process involves contacting renowned website owners with content related to your backlink and requesting that they include it in their pieces.

Since you also get to choose the relevancy, niche edit backlinks constitute a significant SEO win because the more contextual the link, the better it is in search engines’ eyes. Similarly, you also have control over the quality of your links because you can hand-pick high-quality websites, or potentially even get links in highly ranked pages which already receive traffic. 

For example, we refreshed an article in one website which was already receiving ~500 monthly visitors, and inserted a client’s link contextually. Not every link you get will be like this, but these are highly valuable ones you should try to get at least some of the time.

Unlinked Brand Mentions

Unlinked brand mentions or link reclamation involves finding high-quality websites that mention your brand or content but don’t link back to your site. You can either search manually with a Google search of your brand name or use tools like BuzzSumo to find such mentions for you.

Finding these mentions is just half the work; next, you have to contact these site owners and request that they add a link to your content. While this may require time and patience, it’s definitely a worthwhile and efficient tactic. Be polite, offer value, and follow up once or twice, but be generous.

You can also use BrandMentions, Google Alerts, or TalkWalker to identify your brand mentions online and notify you as they find them. To ensure these are premium links, the target website must be high-authority and niche-relevant. Keep in mind that not all editors will give you a link, but it’s still worth a shot especially if it’s a media site.

Skyscraper Technique

While it may require some elbow grease, the Skyscraper Technique is one of the best premium link-building strategies, if you have the right content to leverage. The first step is to identify content already performing well within your industry. You can find these with a simple Google search using a relevant keyword.

The pages ranking on the first page will have generated a substantial number of backlinks, which have helped them climb the SERPs. Now, your goal is to create better content than what’s already published. There are many options to improve content – go more in-depth, add visuals, write in a digestible format, include additional data, etc.

Once you’ve created the content, contact the websites with the existing content and let them know about your improved version. However, for this strategy to actually work, you have to put in the effort to make your fresh piece exceptional. If you’re reaching multiple sites, ensure the emails are personalized and meaningful for a higher response rate. We talk about our “modified skyscraper” approach in more detail here.

Digital PR

Using Digital PR to build high-authority, dofollow links is a great strategy because it involves reaching out to online publications, journalists, industry podcasts or industry influencers. 

This can expose your website to a large audience –  improving your brand reputation, but also expands your website’s link-building efforts – allowing you to secure very large authority links, which can help raise your domains overall authority.

Unlike link building through press releases, where an official statement containing your backlink is syndicated across many news websites (and press releases generally don’t have much impact other than acting as ‘pillow links’), digital PR takes a more focused approach to obtaining links from influential sites with “real” news articles. 

Digital PR tactics do have their limitations as well, sometimes leading to a lot of syndicated, nofollow links, or brand mentions. But, this still drives SEO impact, and is definitely a worthwhile activity to perform alongside the other traditional link building techniques described here.

Broken Link Building

Simply put, broken link building involves pages among competitor websites that no longer exist but have reputable backlinks pointing to them. This could happen due to a lousy redirect, technical issues, or simply when the site owners take content down for whatever reasons; the backlinks to this content still exist, leaving the referring websites with broken links.

Since it could be better for their users as well as SEO efforts, reaching out to replace these dead links is a great opportunity for you to build high-quality links to your site. Once you find these pages, find the most relevant content on your website and reach out to them with a value proposition of why they should link to it.

You can use two ways to spark a conversation with the website owners. The first one involves mentioning that you read their blog and noticed a broken link when you wanted to read more about their reference. The conversation may develop, and you offer your replacement resource further down the line. If you want to be more straightforward , you can pitch them straight out the bat – pointing out the dead link and suggesting your resource, within the first pitch.

Link-Generating Content Formats

A study of 912 million blog posts conducted by BuzzSumo and Backlinko showed that most of their content needed to be addressed, with 94% of published online content getting absolutely no external links.

As bad as it sounds, they did identify that specific content types generated links and performed better than most. Posts at the top of the list discussed content emphasizing “why” and “what.” Similarly, content with infographics, videos, and how-to tutorials also did quite well.

So, to attract premium backlinks, focus on creating content with these formats. However, simply publishing a bunch of them doesn’t mean you’ll attract backlinks; it needs to be valuable enough that it can be used as link bait. 

Ironically, the study I mentioned above, is highly cited, and to date, has attracted more than 500 unique backlinks (after filtering out the junk links. Studies and “stat pages” like these are a really good format to use as well. 

Create Comprehensive Guides

If you want to start ranking higher among search engines, creating ultimate, all-inclusive guides is one sure-shot way to attract many premium backlinks. Creating long-form content will contain extensive information, with a whopping word count of 4000 or more being commonplace with some topics.

Several studies also show that these ultimate guides generally perform better in Google than a short blog post or article because they cover an entire topic in one go and become the go-to resource for finding information about that subject. 

Start by identifying a topic you know in-depth and see that it hasn’t been published. Next, create an outline with the subtopics of what you will discuss in your guide; keep it as informative as possible, and be bold and cover everything under the sun. Now, you can write to create a definitive resource that generates backlinks.

Note: If you want your ultimate guide to rank, this should match the search intent of that topic/keyword group in question. If you don’t need to make a long form piece, and it can be answered with a short form content piece – then stick to doing that. But if it’s a very broad topic, and the SERPs indicate that long form pieces are generally being rewarded, then that’s when you need to use this tactic.

How Many Premium Backlinks Does Your Website Need?

While there is no specific number of premium backlinks, as a general rule of thumb, always focus on quality over quantity because that matters for a healthy backlink profile.

Is there a magic number for how many links you must obtain for it to make a difference to your website? The simple answer is as many as possible as long as they come from high-quality, authoritative websites.

For example, here, we conducted a keyword search for “best meal delivery service,” and you can see that FoodAndWine, CNET, and Forbes dominate the rankings. However, FoodAndWine has only 86 backlinks, followed by CNET with the highest number among the top three ranking sites, and Forbes, with 165. 

Despite the New York Post having 9,278 backlinks, it still ranks in 4th place, showing that Google rewards worthy sites for other factors (such as matching intent, topical authority, etc) and not purely based on the number of backlinks they have.

Similarly, TLG worked with a client from a notoriously “spammy” sector: the entertainment niche. Most of their competitors had backlinks from link farms, giving them prominent backlink profiles on the surface, making it challenging to outrank them.

The client used a combined approach of TLG’s premium link building strategies and the client’s in-house team using HARO and digital PR to acquire high-quality links instead of settling for spammy ones. As a result, the client’s website spiked to millions of monthly visitors within 18 months to 2 years, proving that quality and relevance always win.

How Much Do Premium Backlinks Cost?

We’ve all heard that old adage “you get what you pay”. The same holds true for link building as well. 

If you want to hire the best, and build better links – you’ll ultimately have to pay a bit more. Exactly how much link building costs is dependent on a number of factors, which we talk about in our guide to link building pricing. 

Long story short, you’ll be paying anywhere from $350 to $1000 (or even higher) for a decent quality link. It isn’t cheap, but its better than wasting money on low quality link building services.

At TLG for instance, our premium services range from:

• $4000 to guarantee 10 links a month
• $7500 to guarantee 20 links a month
• Or custom pricing dependent on the volume of link building that is desired. 

We also work on the price if  paying upfront for a larger block of work. This is premium-level link building, so we know we are not the cheapest service out there – but because of our internal costs in running this operation, we have to charge a premium.

Steering Away From Low-Quality Backlinks

Many low-quality backlinks, also known as toxic links, are the worst possible to happen to your website’s backlink profile. These originate from spammy, low-quality websites and can seriously hamper your SEO efforts.

Unnatural link placements, editorially irrelevant links, spun, explicit, or illegal content, and spammy referring domains are common giveaways of low-quality links. Acquiring these links means using black-hat SEO practices that go against Google’s Webmaster guidelines; this includes links acquired through link farms, PBNs, and organized link schemes.

Due to the increase in such link-building malpractices, search engines have become highly adept in identifying and devaluing low-quality backlinks. Google’s Penguin algorithm update (and subsequent updates) have devalued spammy links.

Supercharge Your Business With Premium Backlink Services

To summarize, premium link building services don’t just use run-of-the-mill strategies to acquire backlinks; it’s a decisive process that requires attention to detail, finding authoritative websites, and building a backlink profile of relevant links.

TLG never compromises on quality and relevance because we know the value and impact of premium link-building strategies. Get in touch with us to find out how you can transform your website’s backlink profile for long-lasting benefits.