Link building is a heavily discussed topic in the realms of SEO & online marketing.

If there’s no obvious exchange of money, you can usually get away with buying links on quality websites. You can use every white hat SEO tactic in the book and still see your competitors outrank you. In competitive industries, you may have to buy backlinks to keep your site visible in search engines. The key to not attracting Google or your competitor’s attention is to buy contextual links on relevant, authoritative websites. Don’t buy footer links or links from link farms. The best backlinks to buy are editorial links, niche edits and links from guest posts.

Editorial Links

Editorial links are always on authoritative websites that people trust and respect. They focus on providing value to a niche audience. Companies selling editorial links will promote your content through outreach after identifying target authorities. Authority sites often prefer linking to content referencing current news or hot trends. It makes their own content rise in the rankings. Your content can take many forms, including infographics, presentations or animated videos.

Niche Edits

Niche edits are links put into relevant, existing articles. You don’t have to write content, it’s already written and indexed by search engines. As long as the page isn’t loaded with links, the tactic works well. Niche edits are nothing new, but the name is fairly new. People used to call them curated links.

Guest Posts

Guest posting is publishing your well-written content on a relevant, authoritative website. Publishers like guest posts since they add another voice to their website and provide useful information to their readers.

Paying for guest posting on a quality website is a highly effective SEO strategy. It’s also a good way to drive interested traffic to your website if the site where your guest post goes gets a lot of traffic. People who like your writing may click through to learn more about your product or service.

Ahrefs has a great video on how to scale guest posting outreach:

Link building campaigns take enormous amounts of time and energy, especially when you do everything yourself. People buy these three types of links because they are difficult to obtain by finding websites that will place links and doing outreach. Selling your website to a publisher as an excellent resource isn’t easy unless you know a middleman who knows what they want. You can save time and resources when you get help, which you should use to create stellar content that is better than anything your competitors publish.