How To Use External Linking To Build New Content

Content marketing is not easy due to their being so many moving parts, and reliability of data on trends and each on topics become harder to source even with the help of various paid-for content marketing tools. Building a solid content strategy and continuing to expand on it can become harder as your site matures.

Depending on your niche, you may run into issues like:

• Coming up with new topics
• The rising level of competition
• Changes in search ranking factors
• Changes in social media outreach factors
• Lack of visibility due to having a weaker domain

These factors all play a role in the constant fluctuations in traffic that you're content can attract. While doing keyword research, reviewing competitor content performance, monitoring trends and constantly refining content is a great way to keep the flywheel going, it can always do with a little bit of help and new direction.

A nifty way I've found to help keep users on sites longer, capture more of a particular audience and reach more users is by leveraging external and internal linking but not in the way that you might think.

Reviewing links internal links in your content

If you've been creating content for some time, you must have build up a few hundred posts some that fair pretty well while a minority of them may become anchor posts bringing in the majority of your traffic. Review the internal links on your most popular posts are and check if that content can be improved.

As you list your internal links, you've chosen for your post at the same time being review the time on site, bounce rate and conversion rate of the linked pages. See if the content is outdated and if it can be refreshed if the page itself needs to be improved and if a call to action can be added.

Reviewing external links in your content

Your next step would be to look at external links. When you first created your content, you had to reference external sources and articles to support your claims or provide further context. In these cases, instead of giving away your traffic, why not create a similar post as the externally linked one, improve on it and link to your internal post instead. The more holes you can plug the better chances are of keeping visitors in your ecosystem.

Reviewing links internal links in your competitors content

Once you've completed the audit of your site, it's time to review competitor sites. Visit all the content competiting for keywords you would like to rank for and check where they are linking to and why they are linking to these pieces within their site. Use these as inspiration to create new content and improve on the current content provided by these sites.

More often than not, you will find trends that can lead to a host of new content opportunities. Use them as a template and make sure that your sites experience far exceeds the one they provide for visitors.

Reviewing external links in your competitors content

Finally, start to look at the links your competitors link to when referencing sources and content they aim to back up claims. You can use these links as a way to formulate new content strategies by seeing various ways other sources present information.

These external links can also be a great way to find alternative pieces of information you can use, curate and collate into brand new content no one has produced before helping you carve out new content niches for your site.

How to track outbound links on your site

You can track outbound links on your site using Google Analytics and get detailed reports of which page drives the most traffic to external pages. Using that report, you can then systematically look at which outlinks to prioritise and turn them into internal links over time. Reducing the amount of leakage from your site where you can help it will prove to be a popular strategy moving into 2020 as more sites struggle to attract new forms of traffic.

Keep your visitors around longer

By ensuring that anchor links are redirected to internal links you'll reap several benefits. You not only provide better value and a superior visitor experience but reduce the bounce rate, which helps improve rankings over time.

The more content needs you can fulfil for visitors, the more of an authority you'll become in a specific niche.

Additionally, users are likely to remain on your site longer, which has a strong correlation with improved conversion rates.

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Recommended reading

If you enjoyed this post and have a little extra time to dive deeper down the rabbit hole, why not check out the following posts on content marketing.

• Content Marketing Is Shifting From Egocentric To Customer-Centric
• What Is Mid Funnel Content Marketing?
• How To Combine PR, Content Marketing and SEO
• A 2019 Relook At Ahrefs Content Explorer Tool
• Best Ways to Use Interactive Content to Attract New Customers
• 10 Content Marketing Ideas For Small Businesses
• How To Create A Company Culture of Content Marketing

Tags: Content Marketing