Quality content is right at the heart of SEO. It helps you establish your brand as an authority in your niche. Additionally, it plays an important role in helping you generate backlinks from prominent websites that are relevant to your niche.

And how does that happen?

When you create great content, it’ll likely catch the attention of your target audience.

Those who find your content useful might link to it from their websites, which will help you generate backlinks naturally. This works well in your favor as you can get backlinks without putting in the effort to run link-building outreach campaigns.

What’s more?

Even if you don’t earn natural backlinks through this method, it’ll likely increase the average time spent by visitors on your website. This, in turn, can boost your website’s search performance and attract more visitors, which can improve the chances of getting natural backlinks.

However, for all of this to happen, it’s critical to create great content. To help you with the same, I’ve put together this guide.

Content Writing Tips to Generate Backlinks

Here are some of the most useful content writing tips that can help you generate backlinks for your website:

1. Create List-Based Posts

One of the most liked content types is list-based posts or listicles. These posts are essentially blog posts that have a list of tips, tricks, strategies, tools, etc. (just like the post that you’re reading currently).

Typically, these types of posts include a number in the title.

For example:

• 10 Ways to Boost Your Website’s Traffic
• 5 Tips to Generate More Leads 
• 7 Ways to Improve Your Sales

A prime reason why these posts are considered useful is that the readers can quickly skim through them to get valuable information and actionable tips. Additionally, these posts can turn into informative social media posts engaging the audience.

But how do they help you generate backlinks?

When people find your list-based post useful, they’ll likely share it or link to it from their websites. As a result, your chances of getting more backlinks will improve too.

However, for this to work, it’s essential to ensure that the content quality is top-notch. For that, you can use the best writing apps. These apps will help with SEO-friendly content.

2. Use Infographics

Yet another handy content creation tip to generate backlinks is to leverage infographics. Infographics give you the ability to convey useful information in a short and engaging manner.

Additionally, the visual elements of infographics make them more attractive for your audience.

Due to these reasons, infographics have gained widespread popularity among B2B marketers. 67% of B2B marketers use infographics for their content marketing efforts.

Image via Content Marketing Institute

And the best part?

Infographics are very easy to create. All you have to do is pick a topic, conduct research, choose an infographic template, and start editing it.

But how can infographics help you generate backlinks?

You can add an embed code to your infographics. If they convey useful information, people might be willing to add them to their relevant blog posts and the embed code would make this process easy.

All they’d have to do is copy and paste the embed code on their website and the infographic would appear there. This, in turn, would help you earn a backlink.

I find this to be an extremely effective way of generating backlinks and growing your business organically. It has helped me build links for many of my clients and for my business too.

3. Come Up with Original Research Reports

There’s nothing quite as valuable as an original research report. It can help you position your brand as an authority in your niche as conducting research typically takes a lot of time, effort, and knowledge about an industry.

Additionally, research reports are sought after by numerous people from your target audience, industry, and even journalists.

Therefore, publishing an original research report is a great way to get backlinks from news websites. This is because journalists regularly look for useful information and statistics related to a particular topic that they’re writing about.

When they use these statistics from your study in their reports, you’d get a backlink. Typically, news websites have high domain authority and traffic. This means that a backlink from those websites would be highly valuable for you and help boost your brand awareness.

What’s more?

In addition to the above, you might also be able to generate backlinks from websites that are creating a collection of statistics related to a particular topic.

Some others, like me, may even refer to these statistics in blog posts and guest posts. For instance, note how I’ve added a link to the study report by Content Marketing Institute in the point about infographics mentioned above. 

4. Create Thorough Guides

Another way through which you can generate backlinks using quality content is by creating detailed guides. Detailed guides on a particular topic can help establish you as a thought leader in your space.

The idea here is to dive deep into the topic and cover it thoroughly to educate your audience. Some examples of guides include:

• The Beginner’s Guide to SEO
• The Complete Guide to Social Media Ads
• Advanced Link Building Guide 

Unlike regular blog posts that are typically a few hundred to a few thousand words long, these posts are much longer. You can expect a detailed guide to stretch to 5000+ words.

One of the reasons why such a guide can come in handy to generate backlinks is that it will be a very valuable and insightful resource for people. As a result, websites that want to provide value to their readers will link to it.

And that’s not even the best part.

What makes comprehensive guides even better is the fact that they can rank for tons of keyword variations too. To ensure that you’re able to rank high for your target keywords, you should consider using a SERP checker.

Such a platform can help you see the average word count of the posts for a particular keyword. You can then consider creating a post that’s longer than that.

Moz, for example, creates such in-depth guides regularly.

Image via Moz

5. Create Expert Roundups

A great way to use content to generate backlinks is to create expert roundups on a topic relevant to your niche. While these posts would require that you get in touch with experts and ask them for quotes on the topic, the hard work will definitely pay off.

Why, you may ask?

When you put together a resource that has the opinions of multiple experts in the industry, it’s highly likely that people would want to check it out.

What does this translate to?

Yeah, you guessed it — loads of traffic. 

This traffic would help you generate some natural backlinks as webmasters would want to link to such a resource.

And guess what?

There’s more to it.

When you get a quote from the experts and publish it, they may choose to link to it too. This would mean that you’d get backlinks from high-authority websites with ease. Additionally, create a strong author persona authority through personalized email outreach to good authority websites.

For example, note how Mangools has put together this expert roundup about SEO tips for beginners:

Image via Mangools

Any more?

You can do a strategic alliance for link swapping with good link builders who can help you build high-quality backlinks for your websites.

Final Thoughts

Content can play a crucial role in helping you generate backlinks. You need to email High-quality content can earn you natural backlinks from those who find it valuable for their audience.

To improve your chances of earning passive backlinks, you should consider creating link-worthy list-based posts (listicles) and thorough guides.

What’s more?

Infographics can also help you scale your backlink generation efforts. You can make it easier for people to share your infographics by providing them with an embed code.

You should also consider creating original studies and expert roundup posts to generate more backlinks.

Do you have any questions about using the content tips mentioned above to generate backlinks? Ask them in the comments below.