Tactical Link Building vs Authority Link Building: Why You Need Both

Tactical Link Building Campaigns

When it comes to building links for your website, there are two different types of campaigns you can embark on. The first is a tactical link building campaign, which encompasses links placed on highly relevant websites in a way that helps you rank for specific keywords. Often this can be done through implementing guest blogging or working directly with bloggers and contributors at niche publications. In a tactical link building campaign, links are built to specific pages on a website, typically to blog posts that have already been optimized to fit with your keyword research.

However, when building tactical links, you have to keep in mind that outside websites do not typically like to build links directly to product or sales pages. That’s why any good tactical link building campaign uses the ‘pair up’ link building strategy, which allows you to build links to a large content asset on your website that internally links to your big money pages. This asset is the cornerstone of a tactical link building campaign and will help you target and focus on the correct pages with the precise keywords you are trying to rank for.

Authority Link Building Campaigns

The other type of link building you should be engaging in is an authority link building campaign. Here, you are simply going for the highest authority publications possible and trying to implement your business niche as best as possible into the article topic. That being said, when engaging in digital PR tactics, you need to be careful and make sure that you have an actual pitch. Think about something noteworthy that your company has done, and more importantly how that can be packaged to benefit the readers of the publication you are pitching to. Think about what angle the person you are pitching typically writes about, and try to frame your authority link building campaign within that context. Otherwise, you’re just shotgunning press releases; which is not an effective tactic.

In fact, it is estimated that there are about 5 PR professionals for every journalist in North America. This means that an authority link building campaign needs to be conducted with the utmost of integrity, as there are many more pitches on behalf of clients than articles actually being written about clients. This is mostly because many authority link building campaigns are poorly targeted and the outreach emails they are sending out are often unwelcome to many journalists.

Building High Quality Backlinks

However, the key to getting coverage is already having coverage. This may sound like a catch 22, but it’s actually a very solvable problem. Nobody wants to give legitimacy to a company they’ve never heard of, and that’s where tactical link building comes in. By taking charge of your own link building and being able to show tangible examples of your clients featured in articles, you’re only helping yourself in building high quality backlinks.

Both tactical link building and authority link building campaigns need to be conducted in conjunction with each other. This is because raising a site’s authority allows it to compete in the SERP’s for competitive keywords. While your site is likely never going to outrank The New York Times for a competitive keyword, you can beat out your competitors. But first, you need to identity where you’re trying to boost yourself rankings-wise. Otherwise, your site won’t be as considered authoritative enough to climb in the rankings past competitors with higher overall site authority. To do this, you’re going to want to build both tactical links and authoritative links and see them as having a symbiotic effect as opposed to having separate functions on your domain.

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