In the content marketing world, many experts agree that link bait plays a key role in the success of SEO strategy. Link bait refers to any piece of content that is specifically designed to encourage people to share it across social channels and link to their websites.
Explore how you can effectively leverage the power of link bait in the article below.
What Is Link Baiting?
Link baiting is the process of creating specially designed content to acquire backlinks from other sites. One of the foremost requirements for this type of link is the value it provides, encouraging people to share it on their social media channels or blogs.
In order to improve your website metrics, there are many kinds of link baiting you should consider. Here are the top 5 most popular link baiting forms for your SEO strategy:
- Research study
- Image, video and infographic
- How to guide article
- On-site tool
- Opinion piece
What Is The Purpose Of Link Baiting?
The more link bait your website gets, the more chances you have to achieve high rankings on search engines like Google and Bing. Taking advantage of link bait to generate more backlinks is an engagement tactic for building up SEO performance and driving traffic, aligning perfectly with Google’s link guidelines.
There is no doubt that controversial content can easily attract a significant number of visitors from external websites and social media platforms, thereby generating more qualified traffic to the site.
Additionally, you can strategically distribute the “authority” gained from your link bait to other pages on your website through internal links. This approach helps improve their rankings in organic search results.
How To Do Link Baiting Correctly
It’s essential to deeply understand how to attract quality backlinks for unlocking the maximum value from your link baiting strategy. With viral content resonating with your audience and aligning it with search intent, you are able to significantly enhance its impact.
Here are the checklist to optimize your link baiting campaign for better results:
- Prioritizing original and striking data: Publishing original data is a powerful way for earning media coverage through link baiting. Moreover, it serves as excellent material for creating compelling link bait.
- Make your link baiting more practical: People are drawn to practical link bait that offers immediate utility. Popular examples include tools like calculators, templates, checklists, and cheat sheets, which rank among the most effective formats.
- Controversial content: Creating debatable articles is one of the most effective tactics for capturing user attention. It’s not necessary for your site to be centered around a radical opinion. All the things you need to do is present data showing refusals to a common assumption of your audience.
- Visual content: Visual content containing impactful infographic link building is a hot trend in marketing today, particularly in social media strategies. It’s no surprise that it serves as highly effective link bait, capturing attention and driving engagement.
- Using storytelling tactic: Storytelling plays a key role in the content world these days. A well designed story not only catches your audience’s attention but also makes your content highly shareable.
6 Examples Of Link Baiting: Winning Campaign
Here are 6 standout examples of link bait that generated massive links, shares, and engagement:
IDRlabs’ Food Disgust Test
HDRlabs Food Disgust Test invites users to rate their level of agreement with 32 food-related scenarios. Upon completion, it provides a detailed breakdown of the food triggers the user is most sensitive to. This link bait has generated 4,000 backlinks from over 300 referring domains.
Why do audiences find this link baiting attractive?
- Bring emotions
- People always crave to learn and truly understand themselves
- People want to share their results
13 Reasons Your Brain Craves Infographics
This graphic was exceptionally unique in 2011, capturing attention as something most people had never seen before. Its creative design drew massive interest, contributing to the success of the SEO strategy with 75,300 backlinks from 1,500 referring domains.
JustPark’s Emergency Stop Game
JustPark reaction time test is designed as a fun and engaging game. All the things that players need to do is pressing a key to stop a virtual car when a stop signal appears.
Not only is this test insightful but it also sparks an emotional response. Being curious about how their reaction time compares to others, users are compelled to share the game with friends. This organic sharing drives repeated backlinks and grabs the attention of websites and journalists alike.
As a result, this clever link bait game has gained over 6,000 backlinks from more than 800 referring domains.
Pomofocus’s Pomodoro Timer
Pomofocus’s Pomodoro Timer tool is a simple link baiting form. Users will see a click button named “Start” to activate a 25-minute timer. The aim for this activity is to be productive during these 25 minutes.
Publishers are eager to link to tools that are both practical and engaging. Useful tools like the Pomodoro timer, with its broad appeal, attract attention from a wide variety of reputable websites. As a result, this link bait tool has secured over 525,000 backlinks from 4,600 domains.
How A Car Engine Works
This is an innovative media format that hasn’t been widely explored, offering a fast way to learn. Combining dynamic visuals with text, it’s not quite a video but a unique hybrid. Unlike traditional methods that may slow down the learning process, Animagraffs successfully simplifies it.
With text directly integrated into the visuals, users can instantly understand and learn what each element refers to. This unique approach helped Animagraffs to earn 2,100 backlinks from 400 referrals.
The Points Guy’s Monthly Valuations
What makes this link bait form so impressive is that it’s solution to a pain point for users. The page provides clear information that people regularly need but probably have trouble finding on their own. Additionally, it simplifies the process for publishers by offering a thorough resource, excluding requirements for building links to multiple sources. Thus, users can easily share diverse information with their audience.
How To Create Link Baiting For Your Audience To Boost Traffic
Before creating any content idea you should understand who your audience is. Innovative tools like Google Analytics, Semrush or Ahrefs are able to assist you with generating social media insights to conduct various surveys to gather data.
Besides, you can use content research tools to identify the trending content within your niche. On the other hand, it’s essential to organize brainstorming sessions with your co-workers to gain cutting-edge contextual link building for your SEO strategy.
Meanwhile there are some popular indicators proving an effective link baiting you should consider. Let’s find out now:
- The content should resonate with a wide audience, making it easier to earn links from diverse publications
- It should evoke emotions by referencing trending or hot topics that captivate the audience
- Successful link bait offers an unorthodox approach, presents a fresh angle, or is the best of its kind
- The content should be crafted in a way that linking to it feels natural. Examples include surveys, statistics, infographics, or interactive games that publishers directly reference
Final Thoughts
It can be denied that attracting external links is the main objective of link bait. However, you’ll need a combination of well-crafted content and a well-defined audience that help you to create a well-executed promotional plan.
By putting these best practices into execution in addition to digital shareable assets, companies can produce engaging content that enhances their online presence. increases more traffic and generate qualified leads.
