Good link building strategy depends entirely on extensive research, which you need to do beforehand. In simple words, the link building research work needs to be proactive to be beneficial. But for most of the link builders, figuring out where to start is nothing less than a mystery.

It is most crucial to be proactive. Unless you are as big company as Forbes, you are going to have to work considerably hard, aside from creating fresh content, to get links.

Link building research can be plenty helpful in building high-quality links in large quantities. Here is how you can do it.

Dig a little deeper into competitors’ profiles

The most obvious way of building links is to look at your competitors. But digging into their profiles might not always work. You might not find something out of the ordinary in terms of the number of links. That’s where you may need to dig a little deeper to see what sites are linking to them. You can leverage that information to get those sites linking your website. For this purpose, the most necessary thing to do is to create high-quality content.

Gather together links from contenders showing up in SERPs

Every site that ranks ahead of you in Google SERPs is your contender. It is a significant factor among several other factors that remain critical in site ranking.

To rank ahead of your competitors on Google, you at least need to get identical domain ratings and equally good content. And when it comes to links, you have to make sure that you are performing well. That should help you rank better than your contenders.

You can start by going to Google and typing in the keyword against which you rank on the second or first page. Compile a list of all URLs, including the ones that rank below you. Since you need to start small, it is necessary to look at what the companies, which rank below you, are doing. Also, they might have inferior content as compared to what’s on your site. That’s the reason they rank below you. What you can do is get a list of their backlinks, and try contacting sources of those backlinks. That will give you a further advantage over your competitors.

Establish alerts

There is not even a second that goes by without content publishers publishing new content. With the new content going live every second, there is a higher possibility for your brand being mentioned quite several times, given that you have a substantial online presence already. You can search for your mentions and ask the publishers to add a list of your site to those mentions. You can also do the topic research to find newly published pieces of content related to your topic. If your content has good value to offer, you can contact publishers of those sites to ask them to link back to you. You can set topic and keyword alerts to get to know about the newly published content as soon as it goes live on the web.