What to do When Your Link Building Gets Stuck

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Sooner or later it is bound to happen. You or your SEO professional are in month nine of the year-long link building strategy and you’ve hit a wall. It feels like there are no more quality blogs to comment on, your list of directories to submit to is getting smaller and good, new ones increasingly hard to find and creating new content feels like pulling teeth. You’ve hit the link building wall. If you work in a relatively niche industry, you may hit this wall sooner than others. But don’t let this stop your link building efforts or SEO tactics in general.

Here are a few ideas of what to do when your link building gets stuck:

Don’t get frustrated

It’s easy to feel like you are banging your head against a wall. The first thing to remember is to not get frustrated. Frustration leads to desperation which can lead you into black hat SEO territory. No matter how slow the link building is getting, it’s never worth using black hat SEO techniques to keep the process moving.

Take a look back

Sort through your previous link building activities and check on blogs you commented on to see if the comments actually went through. If they didn’t, trying commenting on another post on that blog. It’s possible that the blog owner isn’t actively monitoring comments, but that doesn’t mean you should keep from trying again.

Also look back at your directory submissions and make sure those got posted. If they didn’t, try resubmitting your URL. If the link did go through, make sure you filled out the profile as completely as you could. If you’ve updated any keywords, go in and edit the profile description to match.

Double check on your article submissions. If an article didn’t go through, feel free to resubmit it to a different site. Why let good content go to waste? As long as it is still relevant, you can publish it on another site.

Check out the competition

If you are really stuck, check out what kind of SEO your top three competitors are doing. What blogs are they commenting on, what kind of news are they pushing in press releases. Maybe one of them stumbled upon a really good link building source that you can use for your own efforts. What associations are they apart of? What trade shows are they going to? Their on- and offline marketing efforts might just be the inspiration you need.

Look outside your industry

If you’re a company that makes tennis rackets, you’ve probably focused your link building efforts to the tennis/tennis racket industry. Take a look outside your specific niche and find related industries that you can work with. Why not see if you can make headway elsewhere? Think outside the box and see where that takes you.

The important thing is to not give up. With so much time and effort already invested in your link building strategy, don’t throw away what you’ve done because you aren’t sure where to go.