If you’re looking for a way to gain backlinks, drive organic traffic, and improve your website’s rankings, niche edits are an effective link-building strategy.
Also known as curated links or contextual backlinks, niche edit links involve a technique where a backlink is added to existing relevant websites within your niche or industry.
This is a great alternative to guest posting and creating content as you will find suitable blog posts or web pages and have the website owner edit the content to include a link that points to your website.
If you’re looking for a way to earn relevant, authoritative, and high-quality links, niche edits are an excellent place to start.
What Is a Niche Edit?
Rather than creating new, relevant content to build links, niche edits rely on existing content to build links.
Your first step in this link-building process is to find posts or other relevant content that already exists and that would benefit from your link.
These existing pieces need to be quality content that is highly relevant to your business or niche.
The next step is to approach website owners and ask them to place a link to your website in their existing piece.
Building relationships with site owners is crucial if you want to achieve a niche edit.
Often, you need to buy niche edits, rendering it a paid link. After all, you may need to convince a website owner to take action and edit their content to include your link. They may need a little encouragement in the form of payment.
As this is a paid link situation, which is not permitted in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, you need to act carefully.
However, there are also opportunities to earn a free link in niche content by building genuine relationships with webmasters, but this may take some time to achieve.
Are niche edits white hat?
This is something that has been widely debated in the world of search engine optimization (SEO).
What Is White Hat SEO?
White hat link-building practices are those that align with search engine guidelines and are handled ethically.
On the other hand, black hat SEO involves manipulative, spammy tactics that violate these guidelines.
Niche edits can be considered white hat if they are approached ethically and if you follow search engine policies in the process. The ethical approach to niche edits is to provide value to readers.
Ethical, white hat niche edits are those that are:
👍 Relevant: The backlinks should add value to the content they’re included in, and they should enhance the reader’s experience.
👍 Organic: The links should be acquired through genuine relationship-building and outreach. Your focus should be developing mutually beneficial connections to secure links naturally.
👍 High-quality and valuable: Your links should provide additional resources or information to readers. They should also increase the quality of the content they’re placed in.
The advantages of niche edit link building
There are several advantages to this particular type of link building.
✅ Relevance
Niche edits give you an opportunity to earn links in content that is highly relevant to your business.
The niche edit process involves targeting websites that are relevant to your niche or industry. Doing so increases the likelihood of receiving high-quality traffic from users that are genuinely interested in your product or service.
Gaining relevant links also benefits your backlink profile and can signal to Google that your website is authoritative and worth ranking in search results.
✅ Authority
When choosing websites to target in your niche edit outreach, you’ll want to opt for sites that already have authority and are trusted by search engines.
Gaining a backlink from a piece of content with decent page authority means some of that authority gets passed onto your website, improving your potential to rank well.
✅ Organic and referral traffic
A backlink pointing to your website from a quality website drives organic referral traffic to your site.
Additionally, because niche edit links are so relevant, the users that are directed to your site are likely those who are actually interested in your offerings, improving your chances of converting them into paying customers.
✅ A diverse backlink profile
Having a diverse backlink profile—which means having inbound links from a wide variety of sources—can do wonders for your search engine rankings.
✅ Affordability
Compared to some other techniques, like guest posts or broken link-building, niche edits are quite a cost-effective approach. Spending countless hours creating a new article, for example, can be expensive. Instead, with niche edits, you can leverage existing articles to build backlinks.
✅ Speed and scale
Niche edits are much faster to implement than other methods like those that require new content creation for a guest post, for example.
Additionally, you don’t have to create content and wait around, hoping someone will link to it. Instead, you proactively seek links, building your backlink profile quickly.
When you’re putting money behind your request, people react faster, and you can build links to many pages more quickly.
✅ Ideal for difficult pages
Niche edits are a great way to build links in highly competitive industries such as personal finance.
Also, you might have some service-based pages on your website or even just informational pages that aren’t particularly impressive but still attract the users you’re looking for.
The disadvantages of niche edit link building
As with any other link-building strategy, there are some downsides to building niche edits.
❌ Some websites won’t accept payment
Some website owners simply can’t be bought. Instead, you’ll need to find ways to prove to them how your link will benefit them and their audience.
Also, many sites work hard to stay on the right side of the Google guidelines mentioned earlier, so they practice caution when placing outbound links to other websites in their content.
This means you may need to deliver a polished pitch that clearly displays the value your link will provide. These pitches can be difficult to produce, and you’ll have to develop new and original concepts if you want publications to link to your website.
❌ Quality becomes a slippery slope
Sometimes people get sloppy when doing this type of link-building. They end up paying for links that are black hat.
Quality checks become more and more infrequent, and people end up focusing on quantity rather than the quality of links.
How do Quality Niche Edits Work?
To build niche edit links, you would use a similar approach as a SkyScraper link-building outreach campaign.
SkyScraper link building involves finding popular content that has been linked to by other sites and working to create an even better piece of content to replicate backlinks.
A Fitness Niche Edit
Imagine you own an eCommerce business that sells fitness equipment online.
If you find an existing article published a year ago on a blog about how to get fit that is ranking well, you could reach out to the site owner and suggest they place a link to your store in their post, as it would enhance the reader’s experience and help them reach their goals.
If the website owner agrees to place a link to your online store in their existing blog post, you’ve earned a niche edit link.
First, you need to identify websites and content that you want your inbound link placed on. You’d need to do some research and analysis to find the websites you want to target with your outreach tactics.
The process involves reaching out to websites and editors with the purpose of having them add your link to their content. You need to prove that inserting your link in their content will be seamless and provide value to their readers.
Your outreach campaign for niche edit backlinks should be carefully considered. We’ll go into more detail on this shortly.
How to Get Niche Edits Right
As niche edits often involve payments, it’s imperative that you approach this type of link-building ethically. Niche edits can quickly go awry if you offer money to the wrong person or if your link placement is unnatural.
In fact, getting niche edits wrong could mean ending up with a Google penalty—also known as a manual action—because you’ve accidentally found yourself in the black hat SEO realm.
However, when executed properly and with caution, this strategy can work well and prevent a penalty as it becomes difficult for Google to distinguish the difference between a paid link and an unpaid link.
Here is some of our best advice for getting niche edits right and generating valuable links for your website:
Don’t use a branded email account
Don't use a branded email account when pitching for paid outbound link insertions. This will protect your brand and maintain ‘plausible deniability’ in the event that someone misinterprets your offer.
Only reveal the site you’d like to build a link to after you’ve agreed to terms with someone.
Keep your email concise and to the point
Webmasters are inundated with convoluted and confusing emails for link opportunities all day long.
Deliver them a clear and concise email showing them exactly what page you want the link on, and what page you want them to link to, along with the sentence and preferred anchor text.
You’ll also want to be crystal clear about your value proposition and any payment that will take place.
Negotiate price clearly
To maintain an ethical approach to niche edits, you must be completely transparent about payment and avoid engaging in deceptive practices that could harm your website or your reputation.
When it comes to price, we recommend negotiating 50% of the website owner’s original asking price and letting them know you can issue payment immediately via PayPal. You can ask them to share their PayPal information immediately.
Identify pages with many links
Use an SEO tool like Ahrefs to find websites worth linking to. The same tool will help you identify the top content on these sites.
You'll get a comprehensive list of pages on that site with a decent amount of backlinks and social shares.
In addition to this, you can also use Ahrefs’ organic traffic tool to identify the most highly trafficked pages on your target website and try to get a link on those pages as well.
Consider anchor text carefully
Anchor text is the clickable or hyperlinked text in a piece of content that leads to your website. Your outreach emails should be specific about what you want your anchor text to look like.
Google uses anchor text to understand what a link is about. And, increasingly, the search engine also considers the text surrounding your anchor text to determine relevance.
Always follow up
If you don’t hear back from website owners once you’ve emailed them, be sure to follow up at least once. However, at the same time, you don’t want to send them an endless string of emails.
Additionally, if you’ve agreed with a website owner to place your link in their content, our advice is to follow up with them regularly until your link is secured, especially if payment is involved.
Wrapping up on Niche Edit Links
As you now know, niche edits are an excellent way to build diverse, quality, and relevant backlinks and they should form part of your SEO strategy.
From driving organic and quality traffic to your website to improving your search engine rankings, leveraging niche edits can generate powerful links.
However, although niche edit requests might sound simple enough, it’s easy to get this process wrong. Always err on the side of caution to ensure your link-building practices are ethical and that they don’t manipulate search engines.
For this reason, we recommend working with a professional agency like LinkBuilder to deliver a niche edit service that is completely ethical and transparent. Visit our website if you’d like to learn more about how we use niche edits to help our clients generate backlinks that boost their brands.