Intro
Broken link building is a strategy with a considerably higher conversion rate than most other strategies.
It is the process of finding dead pages that have links pointing to them, and reaching out to the owners of the sites linking to the dead page. Then you ask them to replace the broken link with a backlink to an article of yours, which fills the same topic. Of course, you should always have some extra incentive, like a social share, a free subscription to your tool, etc.
You can either create new content specifically for your broken link building campaigns, or try to find opportunities for already existing content.
The reason why it’s more effective than a lot of other link building strategies is because, essentially, you’re doing the blogger a favor by pointing out a dead link on their resource (which nobody wants to have), and suggesting a solution how to replace it.
Your prospect has literally no reason to turn down such an offer, if your content can fill the gap created by the dead link organically.
The downside to broken link building is that prospects can be a little hard to come by.
Note: You will need backlink monitoring software, such as Ahrefs.
Discovery
Open Ahrefs and paste in the URL of one of your competitors into the bar. Let's use neilpatel.com as an example.
Go to the “Best by links” report.
In the “HTTP code” filter, select “404 not found”.
Select an article that’s either:
Relevant to the content you have on your own blog
On a topic that you’re willing to create your own content for this campaign
All page titles will be, of course, 404 not found, but you can still see what the page used to be about by looking at the URL slug, which in most cases contains an article’s primary keyword.
Click on the number in the “Dofollow” column.
Enable three filters:
One link per domain
Blogs
English language
Click Export > Full Export For Microsoft Excel.
Download the file and open it in Excel or Google Sheets.
Remove any irrelevant opportunities. We remove any prospects with DR > 40. To do that, sort descending based on DR, and remove anything with a Domain Rating less than 40.
Remove all columns except “Referring Page Title” and “Referring Page URL”. They will be irrelevant for Respona.
Save your file as a .CSV.
To import the sheet into your Respona campaign, click on CSV import mode in the Opportunities step in your campaign.
Because we only left two relevant columns in the file, attributes will automatically be mapped to corresponding Respona fields.
Click “Finish” and wait as your opportunities are imported.
Template
Unpersonalized
Subject: Suggestion for your [topic] post
Hi {first_name},
I was on your site and wanted to give you a quick heads up about a page you’re linking on this post: {url title}, looks like it was taken down by the host: [Broken Page URL]
Also, if you’re interested in new suggestions for a replacement, we’ve actually written an extensive [Guide/Post] on [Related Topic] here: [Your Article URL]
Feel free to take a look, I thought it’d be a good fit for your readers :)
We can return the favor by [value proposition].
Either way, I hope it helps!
[Signature]
Personalized
Subject: Suggestion for your technical seo post
Hi John,
I was on your site and wanted to give you a quick heads up about a page you’re linking on this post: How to Recover From Any Google Penalty
Looks like it was taken down by the host: neilpatel.com/blog/technical-seo-site-audit/
Also, if you’re interested in new suggestions for a replacement, we’ve actually written an extensive post on SEO here: https://respona.com/blog/seo-outreach/
Feel free to take a look, I thought it’d be a good fit for your readers :)
We can return the favor by sharing the article with our 100k audience.
Either way, I hope it helps!
Vlad Orlov