SEO Link Building With SEMRush: 7 Techniques You Must Try

Junaid Ahmed • Aug 08, 2022

When you're working hard to get your blog on page one of Google, why not utilize every technique available to you? Link building is one of the best strategies out there, and there are several link-building strategies you can use to increase your search engine rankings and drive traffic to your blog.


To get high-quality backlinks for your website, you have to make a compromise between quantity and quality. If you prefer quantity, then implement tons of spammy techniques, and if you prefer quality, you have to afford a considerable amount of time.


SEO Link Building is one of the essential parts of On-Page SEO. There are many tools available in the market to do this task, but with link building, SEMRush is your best companion in 2022. SEMRush is a powerful tool that can be used for link-building purposes. But to use it to its full potential, you must try these 7 ways.


1. Check What Is New in Your Website's Backlink Profile

Check What is New in your website backlink profile

When analyzing your backlink profile, the first thing you should do is check the new links built to your site. It can be easy to spot the new links if you have an updated backlink profile and then compare it against an older version of your link profile. It is important to notice these links because they might point to pages where you don't want to draw attention or even contain malware.


Depending on how massive your site is, you may need to check on your backlink profile at least once every week, if not more frequently. To get started, try your domain name into SEMRush backlink report. Select the quick filter "New" backlinks, and as an option, select only the "Follow" type to check the most important ones first.

SEMRush Backlink Report New Backlinks

In this way, you can see your previous outreach and other marketing cooperation ended with new backlinks. Then, you can prove you are doing work by combining this data in a report to your client or manager with other KPIs such as:


  • Ranking improvements from position tracking.
  • A boost in your website's authority.
  • Amount of referral traffic from Google Analytics.
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2. Get Back Everything You have Lost

Get Back Everything You have Lost

Getting new backlinks is perfect for SEO, and you need to ensure that you are not losing any of your important pre-existing backlinks. Sites rewrite their SEO content, and links can be lost. To find lost links on SEMRush, select the "Lost" filter in SEMRush Backlinks report, add the "Follow" filter, and sort by descending authority page. In this way, you will find the biggest losses.

SEMRush backlink report lost backlinks

Once you discover the domains where the link was lost, you should reach out to their domain owners and make a pitch to get your backlink back. Above all, if the backlink was lost due to a page on their website breaking, the chances are high that the domain owner would appreciate you letting them know! You can see the dates when SEMRush first and last saw the backlink, which could add some context to your outreach email. 

3. Pick New Link Building Ideas from the Right Competitor

Pick New Link Building Ideas from the Right Competitor

If you do not know where to get new ideas, the ideal place to start is by looking at a website similar to yours. By looking at your competitor's backlink profile ad applying some filters, you could find the best website to reach out to in hopes of gaining new quality backlinks. There are some ways to select your most successful competitors. 


SEMRush backlink Competitors Report shows your competitors based on the number of your common referring domains correlated with the size of the site's backlink profile to avoid detecting wiki-type giants, which most SEOs do not want to analyze. 


Now you have an initial point of whose referring domains you will need to analyze. For example, if you are TechNinjaPro.com, you could look into the backlink profile of Tomsguide, VPNranks, and Privacysavvy for new ideas. You can tick on your competitor's domain from this report to generate a new backlink report for that website. 


Go to the Referring Domains page to see the websites that link to your competitors, and then use this listing to put together your prospect "Outreach" register. Do not forget to pay dedicated attention to the authority score to select valuable domains. 

4.Find Unique Content Ideas to Attract Backlinks

Unique Content Ideas to Attract Backlinks

Do you struggle to look for content ideas to create?


As in the previous step, you can easily get inspiration from your genuine competitors. 

In SemRush's indexed pages report, users can find their competitor's content that attracts the most quality backlinks. Just type in your competitor's domain and see what pages attract the more number of backlinks from different authority domains. 


At the top of this SEMRush report, you will see their homepages as the top page setting backlinks, but scroll down to find more content ideas that are working perfectly and getting backlinks in your niche.

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5. Smartly Implement Redirects for formerly Successful Pages

Smartly Implement Redirects for formerly Successful Pages

While It is normal to regularly earn links to a product page that always stays live, you could see new backlinks come to a non-permanent page on your website. For example, you could host a page for marketing that acquired backlinks, and then after a year, someone removes the page because your marketing campaign is over. Sadly, your website would lose all of the link power that specific page contributes to your site. 


What would be good to do is to redirect users to the main category page related to the thread topic. Pay attention to your high-performing pages from a link perspective because you do not need to lose customers and do not need to ruin relations with websites linking to you for future cooperation. 

6. Audit Your Anchor Texts 

Audit your anchor texts

Anchor text is one of the SEO details that can add up to making a significant impact if optimized. Any phrase or word that is highlighted as a clickable hyperlink is the anchor text of a backlink. Anchor text is important for two specific reasons:


  • Anchor text notifies your readers what to expect before clicking on the link. Anchor texts are the promise about what is on the other side of the backlink, so they must be relevant. 
  • It also tells Google what your content is about. Google's algorithms use your anchor texts to ensure that you are not engaging in spammy practices.


One way of ensuring that your anchor texts do not reflect spammy practices is by checking the ratio of what anchors exactly match a keyword that a site is trying to rank for. Since Google compared it to your on-site keyword optimization, it is superior to reduce the number of these "money anchors" or irrelevant anchors and maybe work on improving the number of branded anchors. 


To find all the backlinks with a specific text, go to SemRush's Anchor report and type the keyword you need to check. In the drop-down list, you will see the suggestions taken from all the anchor texts you have. 


In case of an overused keyword in your backlink profile, put together a template asking website owners to change the content of your anchors and speed up the outreach process. This would help users avoid a situation where Google considers your content strategy spammy or penalizes your web pages in the Google SERPs.



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7. Automate Your Link Building Ideas Search

Automate Your Link Building Ideas Search

last but not least is all about SemRush's Link Building Tool. This specialized tool was designed to help the outreach process of gaining new backlinks. It mainly covers three main steps of the backlink acquisition process: gathering prospects, outreach, and monitoring progress. 

To help users find quality prospects, this will look for some sources for ideas, including: 



  • Links that your competitors managed to get
  • Links that you have lost.
  • Mentions without any backlinks.
  • Automatic searches of quality sources using advanced search filters


To start your backlink campaign, click the setup button in the Link Building tool and enter up to 10 keywords and competitors. The next outreach targets will be presented based on the link helping other sites rank for your target keyword or audience. 


As soon as all the content ideas are gathered, SEMRush automatically estimates your prospects' quality with a rating out of 5. This rating includes many factors such as authority score, the amount of traffic this domain gets per month, the number of links,  referring domain leading to this site, common category relevancy, and any potential danger signs from the target site. 


After searching and filtering the prospects, you can work through your flow by sending some to the "In Progress" section and rejecting others. You can also use a template from SemRush's list of the most common link earning situations to narrow your targeting.


outreach strategy

Once you are done analyzing, it is the right time for you to contact the shortlisted domains about adding your required backlink. SemRush's automated wizard allows you to do this directly from the interface. Just customize the email template or save your template for future use. If you are interested


If you are looking for a digital agency to develop your website and build a strong SEO strategy, Bright Social Agency is the one-stop shop.

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