Strategic vs. Tactical Link Building

Tactical link building techniques by nature are easy to copy, more likely to be devalued, and almost never generate value outside of the link itself.

In today’s video, I break down why we should think strategically in our approach instead in order to generate the most sustainable results.

So first, I should define what tactical link building is.

To me, tactical link building is something that you, or any vendor does, and they only do that specific thing. You hear about them and you’ve heard that they do great guest posts. Guest posting is a tactical link acquisition technique, and if no matter what, it’s a one-size-fit-all thing. That, to me, is tactical.

It could be a scholarship link building, or any other technique that this vendor does, or even that you’ve read or Googled and that’s just the thing they do. It’s more likely to be tactical because they’re just doing it to generate links and they’re not matching that to your market.

On the other hand, strategic link building to me is the reverse of that. They are specifically matching it to your market and finding a link strategy that fits your business and your need. Overall for that reason, to me, is a lot more beneficial.

Examples of this in action would be looking at an industry and seeing how are people generating links or what is specific about that business that we can tie to a link acquisition strategy to overall scale that technique. One example of this in action would be Airbnb.

So Airbnb gets a lot of brand mentions on the web. A lot of these aren’t linked. You could go to these people, reach out to them say, “Link back to Airbnb. We’re glad you had a great experience, but we’d much appreciate if you can link back to X or Y page in doing so.”