One of the primary goals of content marketing is to get more backlinks. Backlinks do more than just boost your search engine ranking, but they also allow you to subtly boost your brand authority by leveraging the audience of other people or companies.

There’s absolutely no downside to backlinks. They’re great for you and they’re great for your brand.

Since your brand can benefit so greatly from backlinks, it’s only natural that you’d become anxious to get them as fast as possible.

In this post, we are going to give you some ideas on EXACTLY how to get more backlinks to get more traffic.

Let’s get straight to the meaty part of this article... the tips that WILL grow your business and help you get more website traffic:

1. Create a useful tool

Creating a tool that your target audience would find useful is a great way to start racking up those valuable backlinks.

A company that has done a great job of using a useful tool to increase backlinks is Moz. Moz has created a tool called Open Site Explorer that allows people to easily research backlinks, find link-building opportunities, and discover potentially damaging links. It’s a tool that is easy to talk about on other websites since almost every digital marketer can find some value in the tool. (and they just got a backlink out of us because of it!)

2. Use Help a Reporter Out

Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is a fantastic tool to try to get REALLY high-quality backlinks back to your website.

HARO is where journalists go when they need a source for their articles. The journalists on this site aren't from small publications, but rather big ones like Inc., Forbes, Entrepreneur, and similar. When you first sign up for HARO, it quickly becomes easy to see how it can become such a valuable tool to both increases your backlinks and also drive some very targeted traffic to your website.

3. Guest post on other sites

Guest posting on other sites is a great tactic for boosting the number of backlinks to you. While this is naturally a more time-consuming tactic to follow at first, it’s one that can ultimately be rather effective (making it worth your time investment).

The website Inbound Rocket had a really great tactic for finding relevant websites to write guest posts for. They explained:

“Using Google Search, by using Google search for one of the following search queries, it will immediately give you back a list of websites accepting guest writers. Try one of the following:

• your keyword(s) + inurl:write-for-us

• keyword(s) + guest-posts

• your keyword(s) + inurl:guest-post-guidelines

• keyword(s) + become a contributor

• your keyword(s) + bloggers wanted

• keyword(s) + submit an article

• your keyword(s) + want to write for

• keyword(s) + contribute

• your keyword(s) + become an author

• keyword(s) + guest post by

• your keyword(s) + now accepting guest posts

We like this search suggestion from Inbound Rocket because it makes finding websites where your target audience is very easy.

4. Look for broken links on other websites

Since most websites don't typically live forever, websites are bound to end up having broken links on them.

By broken link, we mean that there may be a blog post on a website that mentions another site, and the site being mentioned no longer exists… so it goes to a 404 page or non-existent website.

These 404 pages or non-existent websites are a great opportunity for you to swoop in, point out the broken link, and ask if the broken link can be replaced with a link to your website.

Whenever you stumble on a broken link, take a moment to email the webmaster of the website or article author and let them know that you found a broken link. Then politely share your solution of your link going in the spot of the broken link. You’re doing this other website a service since broken links reduce their credibility, so you’ll get a surprising amount of "yes" responses when you ask people to do this.

Now what?

The ideas above will take a bit of time to execute, but we can’t stress just how much the time investment will be worth it. It’s worth it because when you get backlinks, your search engine rank will rise and more people will discover your business. Every time a person finds your business, it’s a brand new opportunity to get a new customer and grow your company.