Backlink Building for Small Businesses: A Complete Guide

We always said that small businesses shouldn't need an enterprise budget to build quality backlinks.

And we're here to prove it.

Link Building Foundations for Small Businesses

An Introduction into Backlinks

A Backlink occurs when one website (referring site) includes a hyperlink that points to another website (target site).

Think of it like a digital recommendation: when Website A links to Website B in their content, Website B has earned a backlink from Website A.

There’re 2 types of hyperlinks: Dofollow links and Nofollow links

Dofollow links are the default type and act like a vote of confidence, passing SEO value (often called "link juice") to the target page.

These are used when there’re relevant information into the article/website you’re linking to.

<a href="https://website-b.com/" rel="dofollow">Website B</a>

No worries if you forgot about the rel="dofollow" attribute, by default, all links are dofollow.

Nofollow links tell search engines not to count the link as an endorsement, commonly used for user-generated content, paid links, or when linking to untrusted sources.

Here’s how you can create Nofollow links:

<a href="https://website-b.com/" rel="nofollow">Website B</a>

While nofollow links don't carry the same SEO weight as dofollow links, they still provide value through referral traffic and brand visibility.

The Importance of Backlinks for Small Business

While AI is getting better every day, there's still a lot of people who prefer to search on Google and Bing.

And there's a reason... AI cannot be used for specific searches, such as case studies, researches, how to guides, last minute content, etc.

In 2024, Google processed approximately 3.1 trillion searches.

This is equivalent to about 8.5 billion searches per day, or 5.9 million searches per minute.

And this was only on Google, if we look at Bing searches - which is the Microsoft search engine, we have a total of 1.8 billion per month as January 2024...

Okay, let’s say you have a SaaS (Software as a Service) business, imagine the amount of leads and sales you’ll get if you can position your website into the first page of these search engines.

Depending on your niche, you could get hundreds or even thousands of visits per month into your business site.

According to Google's recent algorithm updates and confirmed by industry research, backlinks remain one of the strongest ranking factors that determine a website's position in search results.

This means that with a single backlink from a trusted site (high traffic and domain rating) you can scale a lot of positions on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages)

Appear on the first page of Google and Bing not only involves a lot of clicks into your website, but it also helps you to build trust and credibility in your niche.

For instance, when someone searches for "California lawyers," they naturally trust the top results more because search engines have effectively vetted these websites through various quality signals, including strong backlinks from reputable sources.

Yes, but it has some downsides.

1. You'll need a substantial budget since you're competing in real-time bidding against other advertisers, making it challenging to win placements with limited funds.
2. Meaningful results typically require a minimum investment of $10-20 per day, which adds up to $300-600 monthly for just basic visibility.
3. At the moment you stop paying, you instantly get removed from the first page.

For small businesses aiming for sustainable SEO success, investing in quality backlinks provides better long-term value.

While acquiring good backlinks can require initial investment, they continue working for your business 24/7 without ongoing daily costs.

How to Start Building Backlinks with Small Budget

Now you understand why the backlinks matter for your business, we need to know the best strategies to get them.

To help you choose the right approach for your situation, we'll evaluate each strategy across 4 key metrics:

• Difficulty: From easy (💀) to extremely challenging (💀💀💀💀💀)
• Time Investment: From quick wins (⌚) to long-term commitments (⌚⌚⌚⌚⌚)
• Cost: From budget-friendly (💰) to investment-heavy (💰💰💰💰💰)
• Scalability: From hard to scale (📈) to highly automated (📈📈📈📈📈)

1. Creating Unique Content

Well, this is not new…

Your unique industry insights are worth more than generic AI content in today's oversaturated digital space.

Don’t get me wrong, you can use AI but do not let it to create the whole article itself!

Focus on creating deep, experience-based content that addresses specific pain points your target audience faces, rather than surface-level topics everyone covers.

Do not forget to add unique images as well, such as charts, graphs, and infographics gets a lot of attention and backlinks.

Why it works?

Search engines prioritize content that provides fresh perspectives and original research, which naturally attracts backlinks from others in your industry looking for authoritative and unique sources.

Let’s rank this strategy:

• Difficulty: 💀💀💀💀 Creating truly unique, experience-based content requires deep expertise and creative thinking- but it’s worth it in the end.
• Time Investment: ⌚⌚⌚⌚ Quality research, writing, and editing typically takes 15-20 hours per piece
• Cost: 💰 Main investment is time, tools are minimal (basic content management system, free analytics)
• Scalability: 📈 Hard to scale as quality depends on personal expertise and hands-on experience. No matter what AI writer tool you use, you cannot automate this.

We don’t have a ‘Time to see results’ ranking system, but if we had, probably would be: ⏳⏳⏳⏳⏳.

Expect to see results in 4-6 months with this.

2. Backlink Outreaching

When link building for SMB owners you need a strategic approach, and outreach is your direct path to connect with potential link partners.

This strategy could be applied simultaneously with the previous one.

You create great and unique content and then reach out to people to link it.

Let's explore the most effective outreach strategies that have proven successful for small businesses:

1. Skyscraper Technique: Create superior content than what currently ranks, then reach out to websites linking to similar articles - they're already interested in your topic and more likely to link to better content.
2. Guest Post Outreach: Identify blogs accepting guest posts in your niche and pitch them valuable content ideas that naturally include a link to your relevant resources.
3. Broken Link Building: Find broken links on authority sites, create content that replaces what was lost, and offer it as a solution to fix their broken links - it's a win-win approach.
4. Resource Page Link Building: Target websites with resource pages in your industry and showcase how your content adds value to their curated list.

We'll go deeper into how to send these emails in next sections. Stay tuned!

Why it works?

Website owners are constantly looking for valuable resources to share with their audience - when you approach them with genuine value and expertise, they're more likely to link back.

Here's how we rank it:

• Difficulty 💀💀💀 Each strategy requires careful research, personalized communication, and consistent follow-up - but with the right templates and tools, you can streamline the process.
• Time Investment ⌚⌚⌚⌚ Successful outreach demands dedicated time for prospecting, personalizing emails, and nurturing relationships with potential link partners.
• Cost 💰💰💰 While tools can help automate parts of the process, the main investment is your time - though some websites might request fees for link placement.
• Scalability 📈📈 Manual outreach can be time-consuming, but tools like LinkyLeap help automate prospecting and follow-ups while maintaining that crucial personal touch.

3. Free Tools and Resources

Another cool way of link building for SMBs is creating free tools and resources.

It's a powerful way to attract natural backlinks, and new technology has made this approach more accessible than ever.

Gone are the days that free tools were hard and endless to create.

AI will help you to create your free tools and resources, whether you're creating simple calculators, data visualization tools, or downloadable templates.

Why it works?

When content creators find genuinely helpful tools that solve their audience's problems, they naturally want to share these resources.

Imagine you’re writing an article about ‘Best strategies for naming a new article’ and you discover a website offering both a title analyzer tool and a comprehensive spreadsheet template.

Linking to these resources becomes a no-brainer because they provide immediate value to your readers.

Here’s how we rank it:

• Difficulty 💀💀💀 Development experience helps significantly, but modern no-code platforms and AI assistants make it accessible for non-developers too.
• Time Investment ⌚⌚ Initial setup requires focused effort, but deployment and maintenance are minimal once launched.
• Cost 💰 Primary costs involve optional AI assistance tools: Claude, ChatGPT, but there's also free alternatives: Qwen, DeepSeek.
• Scalability 📈📈📈 Tools can serve thousands of users with minimal maintenance, especially when built with scalable frameworks like Next.js.

A personal story of this method:

I used to work for a personal development site where I created articles about goals, mindset, etc. However, when Gemini- the Google AI released their free beta, I created a ‘Smart Goal Generator’.

Despite being my first AI free tool, it only took a few days to build, and the results shocked me!

Not only did we get organic backlinks, but a content creator even created a video review of the tool for completely free!!

4. Become a Source for Reporters and Bloggers

This strategy consist on being a reliable source for journalists and writers, creating authentic backlink opportunities.

Since HARO's discontinuation in December 9, 2024, a few alternatives have emerged:

We recommend you to start with Featured.com or JournoRequests since they're more welcoming to new contributors.

Then expand to MuckRack once you've built some initial media relationships.

The strategy works in two ways:

1. Directly pitching to current queries: You have free pitches on the platform so make them count.
2. Creating content from queries: Use the queries from journalist to create your content. Even if these topics doesn’t have much searches on search engines.

Why it works?

Well, journalists constantly are looking for expert sources on their articles on big media sites like Forbes, New York Times, etc.

Getting one of those backlinks will be a game-changer for your site, believe me.

Here’s how we rank it:

• Difficulty 💀💀 Require expertise and quick responses from you. Sometimes they just pick between the first 10 pitches they receive and then forgot.
• Time Investment ⌚⌚⌚ You need to constantly be watching the platform for new queries, and then craft the pitch.
• Cost 💰-💰💰💰 Start with free plans for initial pitches, but scaling requires paid subscriptions which can be significant investments.
• Scalability 📈📈📈 Working within a specific niche allows you to build a repository of pitch templates and expertise proof points - always customize these for each query.

Again, do not abuse of AI here.

They’re not dumb, journalist receive thousand of pitches from AI, they know what it’s human and what’s not. Be smart!

How to Find High-Impact Backlink Opportunities

Before starting reaching out to every site and every journalist out there, you need to understand that there’re some important variables to consider.

And I’m not talking only about domain rating, which is the most common one and the most easy to manipulate.

Sometimes, a single backlink from a big site can make your site scale positions in the SERP, while 100 backlinks from smaller sites won’t move the needle.

How to Find Sites that Moves the Needle

Let’s review the variables that will make your site scale from most to last important.

As an example to see, we’ll use a personal development site.

1. Domain Relevance

Getting backlinks from domains that naturally align with your site's core topics and audience interests directly impacts how search engines evaluate your authority and trustworthiness.

For instance, if you run a personal development site, high-value backlinks would come from:

• Productivity platforms like MindTools (mindtools.com),
• Psychology resources such as Positive Psychology (positivepsychology.com), or
• Life coaching authorities like Tony Robbins (tonyrobbins.com).

Avoid pursuing irrelevant high-metric sites, even if they appear authoritative at first glance.

2. Organic Traffic Quality

Quality backlinks come from sites demonstrating consistent and growing organic traffic from targeted markets - a clear indicator of genuine audience engagement and lasting domain authority.

You can check the organic traffic of a website for free using the Ahrefs Traffic checker- Here is an example of a backlink into a free tool 😉

While raw traffic numbers matter, focus on sites showing stable or increasing organic traffic over 6-12 months, especially within your target audience's geographic regions and topical interests.

For instance, in the personal development space, a established platform like mindtools.com shows strong and consistent organic traffic.

Even in the image it looks like it's declining but +600k organic traffic is still a lot!! It is on the top 50,000 websites in the world.

3. Content Quality & Publishing Frequency

High-value backlink opportunities come from sites that maintain consistent publishing schedules (typically 2-4 times monthly) with well-researched, original content that generates genuine reader engagement through comments and shares.

Sites with diverse content formats (long-form articles, case studies, original research) and strict editorial standards (fact-checking, expert quotes, proper citations) signal lasting authority that search engines consistently reward.

Back in our personal development site, Take Mark Manson's blog- it publishes thoroughly researched articles bi-weekly, maintains a clear editorial voice, and regularly updates its cornerstone content.

4. Indexed Pages Ratio

A site's ratio of indexed versus total pages reveals how search engines evaluate its overall content quality - aim for domains with at least 80% of their pages indexed, as this indicates strong technical health and content trustworthiness.

The simplest (and free) way to check indexed pages is using a Google’s operator to see total indexed pages for a website and then checking on their sitemap.

Let's check James Clear's blog (jamesclear.com):

1. Type site:jamesclear.com in Google = 1,700 indexed pages
2. Check sitemap or crawl = ~2,000 total pages
3. Calculate: (1700/2000) x 100 = 85% indexed ratio

While this is not 100% perfect, it gives you a good enough sense of indexation health to make backlink decisions.

5. Geographic Relevance (For Local Business)

Backlinks from regionally authoritative sites often outperform global domains when targeting specific markets, as search engines heavily weigh geographic context when determining local search rankings.

For businesses with physical locations or region-specific services, prioritize links from local business directories, regional news outlets, and community organizations that share your geographic focus.

6. Spam Score

While not definitive, spam score serves as a quick preliminary filter - generally aim for sites with scores under 30%, but don't let this metric alone disqualify otherwise quality opportunities.

For checking this, you can use this free spam score check.

Some legitimate sites might trigger higher spam scores due to technical issues or aggressive monetization strategies.

Always aim to combine this metric with manual review of the site's content quality and overall authority signals.

Email Outreach: Create High Response Rate Emails

Every single day, 347 billion emails are sent across the most popular email platforms worldwide.

In such a crowded inbox, it’s likely that your target prospect receives anywhere from 50 to 60 emails daily —and that’s just on a typical workday.

But here's the exciting part: while others send generic pitches, you're about to learn how to craft emails that actually get opened, read, and responded to.

Creating an Email Subject: The Psychological Trigger

Think about the last time you opened a cold email - how was the subject that drives you a lot of attention on it?

Here’re a couple of things to have in mind when creating a subject:

1. Ideal Subject Length: 36-50 Characters (4 to 7 Words)

Research shows that shorter subject lines tend to perform better because they are easier to read quickly.

A concise subject line ensures that your message isn’t cut off on mobile devices, where over 50% of emails are opened.

Aim for clarity and brevity, ensuring that your subject line communicates the core idea without overwhelming the reader.

2. Drive Curiosity Without Being Too Specific

A good subject line should pique curiosity but not give away too much information. The goal is to make the recipient want to know more, prompting them to open the email.

However, avoid being vague or misleading, as this can lead to frustration and a quick deletion.

3. Personalization: Make It Relevant But Concise

Personalization can significantly boost open rates. Including the recipient’s name, company, or a specific detail related to their work shows that you’ve done your homework.

However, avoid overloading the subject line with personalization tokens, as this can make it feel robotic or forced.

• "Hey [Name], you’d like this for your next article"
• "[Company Name]’s backlink secrets?"
• "I noticed something about [Industry]"

4. Understand Your Prospect’s Pain Points and Interests

Before crafting your subject line, take the time to research your prospect. What challenges are they facing? What topics are they interested in?

Tailoring your subject line to address these issues will make your email stand out as relevant and valuable.

• "Struggling with lead generation? Here’s help"
• "I know how to boost your ROI in 30 Days"
• "Solutions for your sales team’s challenge"

5. Avoid Spam Triggers and Urgency Words

Certain words and phrases can trigger spam filters or come across as overly aggressive, leading to lower open rates.

Words like “Free,” “Act Now,” or “Limited Time Offer” can raise red flags.

If you want to make sure your email is clean from these words, check our: Free Email Spam Checker.

6. Never Sound Like a Sales Pitch; Keep It Personal

People are bombarded with sales emails every day, and most of them go straight to the trash.

To stand out, your subject line should feel like it’s coming from a real person, not a marketing robot.

Focus on providing value and something that will help them rather than pushing a product.

7. Make It Relevant to the Topic You’ll Talk About

Your subject line should accurately reflect the content of your email. If the body of the email doesn’t match the subject line, recipients will feel misled and lose trust in your communication.

Relevance builds credibility and increases the likelihood of a response.

How to Create Email Bodies That Get Results

What situation do you think it will be more likely to get a response?

A) A megaphone announcement at Times Square?

B) Showing up at someone's doorstep at 5am with a powerpoint presentation about your life story

C) A one-on-one conversation at a coffee shop?

The answer is obvious, right?

You need to add as much as personalization as possible, this will make your email stand out and get more response rates.

Here’s a pattern that's been quietly effective for our clients:

1. Opening Hook: Drop a specific insight about their content strategy or recent business move that shows you've actually done your homework.
2. Value Bridge: Show that you understand their goals or challenges. Connect their needs to what you’re proposing in a way that feels natural and relevant.
3. Clear Offer: Present your core value proposition in one punchy sentence that focuses on their audience's benefit, not your need for a backlink
4. Friction-Free Action: Keep it simple and effortless. A single sentence like, “Would you be open to exploring this idea further?” works wonders.

Always remember: Website owners prioritize their audience’s engagement over your backlink needs. Frame your request in a way that aligns with their priorities, not yours.

Some strategies you may found interesting to follow in 2025:

• Leverage the "Mutual Benefit" Approach: Instead of focusing solely on what you want, frame your request in a way that highlights how both parties gain from the collaboration
• Use Social Proof Strategically: Mention any notable brands, influencers, or publications you’ve worked with recently.
• Propose a Mini-Collaboration: Rather than asking outright for a backlink, suggest working together on a small project, such as co-authoring a blog post, hosting a joint webinar, or creating a short video series.
• The Content Audit Approach: Offer a free, detailed content gap analysis of their top-performing page (include 2-3 quick insights in your email as proof)

The Magic of Follow-Ups: Double Your Response Rates

A follow-up (also known as a follow-through or bump email) is a gentle reminder that continues the conversation from your initial outreach without sounding pushy or desperate.

Research reveals a fascinating insight: sending strategic follow-ups can boost your response rates by 160%, yet 76% of email outreach campaigns stop after the first attempt.

The anatomy of a perfect follow-up looks like this:

1. Reference the Original: "Just floating my email from Tuesday about improving your AI marketing guide"
2. Add New Value: Share a fresh insight or resource you didn't mention before
3. Keep it Short: 2-3 sentences maximum
4. End with a Clear Question: Make it easy to respond with a simple yes/no

Things to Keep in Mind

Timing is everything on the follow-ups - wait 3-4 business days after your initial email, then space subsequent follow-ups 5-7 days apart.

The sweet spot for follow-up attempts is three emails total (initial + 2 follow-ups) - anything more risks damaging your reputation and annoying your prospect.

Things to Absolutely Avoid

• Using guilt trips ("I'm disappointed I haven't heard back")
• Asking if they got your last email (they did)
• Sending multiple follow-ups in the same week
• Using aggressive or pushy language

Hope you enjoyed this backlinks for small businesses guide!

If you have any questions about this guide or want to know more about how we can help you to get more backlinks, feel free to reach out to us at hello@linkyleap.com.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many backlinks does my small business website need to start seeing results?

Quality trumps quantity when it comes to backlinks, with most small businesses seeing meaningful improvements from just 10-20 high-authority links in their niche. Focus on securing links from websites that your target customers actually visit and trust.

Should I pay for backlinks or stick to free methods?

Yes but only as a last resort- check this free tool to calculate the price of a backlink, always try to get the backlink offer something in return. Consider allocating your budget toward creating valuable resources that naturally attract links and using prospecting tools to find relevant opportunities.

How do I know if a website linking to me is actually helping or hurting my SEO?

Check the website's organic traffic using tools like Ahrefs or Semrush – if it receives consistent organic visitors in your niche, it's likely beneficial. The best indicator is whether the linking site ranks well for keywords relevant to your business.

What's the fastest way to get quality backlinks for my small business?

Create a resource page listing and reviewing the best tools or services in your industry, then reach out to those companies to let them know. Companies love being featured in positive reviews and often reciprocate with links.

How can I compete with bigger companies that have huge link building budgets?

Focus on building relationships within your local business community and leverage your unique expertise to create niche-specific content that larger competitors can't replicate. Your authentic industry insights and local connections can often outperform generic content from larger companies.

Is it better to get backlinks from many different domains or multiple links from the same domain?

Diverse backlinks from different relevant domains carry more weight than multiple links from the same website. Prioritize getting one quality link from each new domain rather than multiple links from the same source.

What should I do if a website wants to charge me for removing their backlink to my site?

Never pay for backlink removal - instead, use Google's disavow tool if the link is truly harmful and document any extortion attempts. Most negative SEO attempts have minimal impact if your overall link profile is healthy.