Slide 20 of 39

What Link Building Strategies Does an SEO Company Use?

6 min read

An SEO company can build links through six tactics: digital PR built on original data, editorial guest posts on relevant sites, broken-link replacement, reclaiming unlinked brand mentions, prospecting from competitors’ backlinks, and relationships with niche writers. In Editorial.link’s 2026 survey of 518 SEO professionals, 48.6% named digital PR the most effective. One rule covers all six: under Google’s spam policies, a paid link must not pass ranking credit.

The Six Tactics at a Glance

Tactic What the agency does Fits best when Main risk
Digital PR Publishes original data or expert commentary and pitches it to journalists The client has data, expertise or a story a publication can cite Effort with no guaranteed coverage
Editorial guest posts Writes articles for relevant sites that review submissions The site has an audience in the client's niche Paid placements or keyword anchors turn it into link spam
Broken-link replacement Finds dead links on relevant pages and offers a working replacement The client has a page that matches what the dead link pointed to Slow, low volume
Unlinked mentions Asks sites that already name the brand to add a link The brand is mentioned in coverage or roundups Small pool for lesser-known brands
Competitor backlink prospecting Lists sites that link to several competitors and pitches them Competitors have earned editorial links in the niche Copying competitors' paid or low-quality links
Niche relationships Builds contact with association leaders, regional reporters and niche writers over months B2B and local service niches Takes months before any link

Digital PR and Source Requests

Digital PR means giving a publication something it cannot get elsewhere: a survey, a dataset, a calculator, or a quotable expert. For example, imagine a regional moving company that surveys 500 recent customers about relocation costs by state; a local business reporter has a reason to cite that table. A workable pitch is short: a subject line naming the angle, two or three sentences on why the data fits that publication’s recent coverage, and a direct ask. Mass-sent templates that open with “I came across your website” can waste the list.

An agency can also answer journalist queries on source-request platforms. HARO, which Cision rebranded as Connectively in 2024 and later discontinued, was sold by Cision to Featured.com in April 2025; Qwoted is another platform that connects reporters with expert sources. A proposal that still lists Connectively as an active channel was written from old notes.

The survey data backs the emphasis. Editorial.link’s 2026 link building report, published March 25, 2026 and based on 518 SEO professionals (44.4% of them agency specialists), found that 48.6% rated digital PR the most effective tactic, ahead of guest posting at 16% and linkable assets at 12%. Agency respondents said they put 32.1% of their overall SEO budget into link building.

Is Guest Posting Still Allowed?

Unpaid guest posts on sites that review what they publish remain a normal tactic. Two things turn them into a problem under Google’s spam policies:

  • Payment. Google’s link spam examples include “Exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links” as one form. Paid placements are acceptable only when the link carries rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow", which means a paid guest post buys exposure and referral traffic, not ranking credit.
  • Optimized anchors. The same policy lists “links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases distributed on other sites” as an example of link spam. A guest post whose author link is a keyword phrase is a risk even if no money changed hands.

Google states that sites violating its policies “may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all.”

This matters because a paid placement market exists and is easy to buy from. BuzzStream’s guest post cost study (last updated June 15, 2026) puts the average at $461 through a typical vendor and $295 when bought directly from a site. Adsy’s analysis of 52,671 sites found the average guest post price rose from $427 in 2025 to $459 in 2026, with each additional 10 points of Domain Rating adding about 32%. Those are prices for paid placements. If an agency’s plan includes them, ask how each link will be marked.

When an agency vets an unpaid guest opportunity, it should look at the site’s organic traffic in Ahrefs or Semrush, not only its Domain Rating, since DR is a third-party link score. For example, a DR 55 site with 40,000 monthly organic visitors in the right niche is a better placement than a DR 70 site whose traffic has collapsed.

Broken-link building relies on link decay. In Ahrefs’ link rot study (updated February 2, 2024), 66.5% of the links pointing to the 2,062,173 websites it sampled had rotted since January 2013, and 74.5% counted as lost once links with temporary errors were included. The agency finds dead links on relevant resource pages, confirms the dead page covered what the client offers, and pitches the replacement.

Unlinked mentions start from the other side: a site already named the brand. The agency monitors for mentions with Google Alerts, Mention or an SEO suite, then asks the publisher to add the link. Because the site chose to cite the brand, the request is smaller than cold outreach.

Running competitors through Ahrefs Site Explorer or Semrush Backlink Analytics shows who links to them. A site that links to three competitors in the niche has shown it links to this kind of content. The report that produces that list, and how it is filtered, belongs to competitor analysis; here the point is to copy competitors’ editorial links, not their paid ones.

Links are scarce. In Backlinko’s analysis of 11.8 million Google search results, about 95% of the pages in its dataset had no backlinks at all, and the #1 result had an average of 3.8 times more backlinks than results in positions 2 to 10. So a handful of relevant editorial links is a better target than a large count of weak ones.

Two signals separate an earned profile from a bought one:

  • Anchor text that reads like natural writing. Brand names, page titles and natural phrases, with few keyword-rich anchors. Many links pointing at one page with the same exact-match phrase are the kind of optimized anchor text Google’s policy lists.
  • Correct link attributes. Google asks that paid placements be marked rel="sponsored" (rel="nofollow" is still accepted) and user-generated links rel="ugc". A nofollow link from a relevant publication can still send referral traffic and is not a sign of failure.

To see how these links move the third-party authority scores an agency may report, read the role an SEO company plays in improving domain authority.

No agency can promise how many links a campaign will earn or when. It can commit to inputs and show every result.

Field Why you need it
Live URL of each new link Lets you check the link exists
Publication and its organic traffic Shows whether the site has readers
Tactic that earned it Shows the mix, and whether one tactic is carrying everything
Anchor text and target page Catches keyword-heavy anchors before they become a pattern
rel value and whether anything was paid Shows paid placements are marked
Inputs for the month (assets built, publications pitched, follow-ups sent) Shows work when coverage is slow

On competitive terms, where links have to be earned steadily for months, the same report shows whether the pace matches the plan; see how an SEO company helps businesses rank for competitive keywords.

Questions to Ask Before You Sign

  1. Can you show three or four live links you earned for a client in the past 90 days?
  2. Are any placements paid or sponsored, and if so, are those links marked rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow"?
  3. What share of links come from digital PR, editorial guest posts and reclaimed mentions?
  4. Do any tactics use private blog networks or link exchanges?

If an agency cannot show live placements, will not say which links were paid, or uses private blog networks, do not sign. More warning signs for the wider hiring decision are listed in the red flags to watch for when selecting an SEO company.