Linkable assets help establish your site as a trusted authority in your field. So, let’s unearth the mystery of “what are linkable assets” to boost your ranking in search engine algorithms.
What are Linkable Assets Exactly?
Linkable assets are high-quality pieces of content, tools, or services on your website that naturally encourage backlinks. Variously touted as 'referable content', 'link magnets', or 'link baits', these assets offer value that makes other sites want to link back to your pages.
Linkable assets are your pieces of content so compelling, unique, and resourceful that they become a beacon for inbound links. When other website owners or bloggers find your content valuable, they link it from their site, providing a high-quality backlink for your website.
The more high-quality backlinks a site has, the more popular Google considers it, and therefore, higher it ranks on the SERPs.
So, in essence, linkable assets are like a golden ticket to SEO success. When you create a piece of content that inherently attracts backlinks, you're creating a lasting asset for your website – something that will continue to boost your SEO efforts long after it's been published.
What are the Types of Linkable Assets?
Linkable assets come in all shapes and sizes, and there is no one-size-fits-all. The trick is to understand your target audience, their interests, and their values, then create content that they'll love to engage with and share with their audiences.
It’s important to notice that linkable assets are not strictly limited to the categories we will mention. They can take almost any form: from high-quality video content and podcasts that offer unique insights to engaging quizzes or comprehensive resource pages.
Additionally, sector-specific news or trends, case studies, e-books, white papers, and even user-generated content like testimonials and reviews can often serve as linkable assets.
Since our focus is on the most popular types of linkable assets, let's explore some of the effective ones you can start leveraging:
📈 Infographics
The popularity of infographics and other graphic-oriented assets lies in our brain's wiring. Our brains process visual information 60,000 times faster than text! Not to mention, infographics can easily break down complex data into digestible chunks, making them an instant hit with audiences and a deserving linkable asset.
Other graphic-oriented assets can include custom images, graphs, charts, and even interactive graphics. Creating visually engaging content is a surefire way to attract valuable backlinks.
🔧 Tools
Interactive content is on the rise, and online tools and calculators serve as tremendous linkable assets. They provide practical value to users, making them highly shareable and linkable.
Think of mortgage calculators for real estate websites, BMI calculators for fitness blogs, or SEO auditing tools. When you provide a tool that helps users solve a problem, they're more likely to link back to your site as a valuable resource.
📝 Tutorials
Internet users love comprehensive, all-in-one resources that answer all their questions on a particular topic. Step-by-step guides, how-to tutorials, or ultimate guide posts serve as one-stop-shops for your audience's queries. As a result, they tend to attract a high number of backlinks.
These guides and tutorials often go beyond simple blog posts, diving deep into a topic, presenting complex ideas in a simplified manner, and offering immense value to the audience.
🏆 Awards
Everybody loves recognition. Unsurprisingly, awards and ranking lists have proven to be effective linkable assets.
For instance, your website can offer annual awards for the top influencers, products, or companies in your industry. Not only does this provide value to your readers (as they get insights into the best the industry has to offer), but recipients of these awards are also likely to link back to your page in honour of their recognition.
🔬 Researches & Stats
Unique research or surveys that provide fresh, original data are highly attractive to other authors in your industry. If your website conducts a study and publishes data that isn't available anywhere else, you become the primary source of information on that topic.
Whether it's an original survey, a market research report, or an in-depth study, authors are likely to link back to your research whenever they reference that data, making this a potent linkable asset.
What are the Key Elements of Linkable Assets?
Not all content is linkable. There are several things that can hold content back from attracting backlinks like poor quality, lack of relevance, insufficient promotion or absence of value.
Crafting a linkable asset is a deliberate, thoughtful process rather than a random occurrence.
So let’s take a closer look at the unique features of a linkable asset:
Quality and Value
Good content might get you some traffic and perhaps a handful of backlinks. However, only great content — content that provides immense value and is of the highest quality — has the potential to become a key linkable asset.
Quality and value can manifest in several ways. Comprehensive guides, articles with in-depth analysis, or long-form content that dives deep into a specific topic, generally do well.
Also, if your content solves a specific problem or answers a pertinent question for your audience, there's a high likelihood it'll become a linkable asset.
Uniqueness and Novelty
We live in an age of information overload. Every second, every minute countless articles and blog posts are published online, making it almost impossible to grab the audience's attention. However, your content stands a fair chance of attracting high-quality backlinks if it offers something unique or novel to your audience.
New research or data, content that challenges common wisdom, a different perspective on an existing problem, fresh insights based on unique experiences — all of these can make your content stand out from the crowd and become a linkable asset.
Visual Appeal
As humans, we are visual creatures — thousands of times more likely to engage with content that includes images, infographics, videos, and other visual elements than with plain text.
Not to mention, visually appealing content simplifies complex topics and enhances the user experience, making your content more understandable, shareable, and therefore, linkable.
🔎 See: How to Reverse Video Search (in 3 Different Ways)
Credibility and Trustworthiness
No amount of uniqueness, visual appeal, or depth will mean anything if your audience doesn't trust you. Your content should be based on credible sources and should maintain a consistent level of quality across all pieces to retain and enhance that trust.
Shareability
There's a direct correlation between social shares and backlinks. Highly shareable content tends to attract more backlinks. Hence, making your content shareable on social networks, including optimizing it for mobile usage, can significantly contribute to its linkability.
🔎 Read our blog post: Mobile-First Indexing: What is It & How it Works
Promotion and Outreach
Promoting your content actively increases its visibility, which is crucial for attracting links. SEO requires decent promotion and strategic outreach to get your content in front of the right people who would link to it.
Relevance to Target Audience
Finally, remember that linkable assets should primarily cater to the needs of your target audience. They are the ones who would ideally engage with it, share it, and ultimately create links to your content.
If it doesn't resonate with your audience or meet their needs, it's unlikely to become a linkable asset.
What are the Pros and Cons of Linkable Assets?
Awareness of both the strengths and weaknesses of linkable assets is crucial. It allows you to build on the strengths while preparing you to counteract or even capitalize on the weaknesses.
The Pros of Linkable Assets
🌟 Increases Visibility and Traffic: When other websites or blogs link back to your content, it puts your content in front of a brand new audience, essentially giving your website some prime-time exposure. So linkable assets act as organic marketing tools, boosting your visibility, and by extension, driving high-quality organic traffic to your website.
🌟 Boosts Domain Authority: By accumulating high-quality backlinks, linkable assets signal to search engines that your website is a credible source of information. This helps in bolstering your website's domain authority, a key metric used by search engines to determine your SERP rankings.
🔎Use our Domain Authority Checker
🌟 Long-Term SEO Impact: Once created, a linkable asset can attract backlinks long after it's been published. As the content's value stands the test of time, so does the steady stream of backlinks, ensuring a long-term positive effect on your SEO.
🌟 Enhances Reputation: Great content also builds your reputation as an expert in your field. When multiple sources link back to your content, it showcases your brand as a trusted source of information, enhancing trust with both your audience and search engines.
🌟 Promotes User Engagement: Linkable assets typically provide high value or satisfy a specific user intent, promoting greater engagement in terms of shares, comments, and increased time spent on page. This, in turn, positively affects SEO.
The Cons of Linkable Assets
💥 Time and Resource Intensive: Crafting high-value, unique linkable assets requires investments of time, resources, and often, money. Conducting original research, creating top-tier infographics, or writing a comprehensive guide can take considerable effort.
💥 Results Aren't Immediate: Effective SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. While linkable assets do generate long-term impacts, they typically do not yield immediate results. This might be challenging for entities looking for quick, short-term interventions.
💥 Link Quality is Not Guaranteed: While you can control the quality of your content, the quality of the backlinks you attract isn't always in your hands. Low-quality or spammy sites linking to your content can potentially harm your SEO.
💥 Requires Consistent Update: As your industry evolves, your content might need updates to stay relevant and continue being a valuable resource. There is a risk of content getting outdated. This, again, requires ongoing effort and resource allocation.
How to Create Effective Linkable Assets in 5 Steps
Linkable assets offer value to users and have a high chance of attracting backlinks, and hence, the love of search engines.
With that, let's inspect a step-by-step approach to creating effective linkable assets:
1. Understand Your Audience
Invest time in understanding who your audience is, what interests them, what their problems are, and how your content can solve their issues.
Define how your content can provide value and solve problems for your target audience.
2. Identify Search Intent
Understand the type of queries your audience uses. Are they informational (seeking knowledge), navigational (looking for a specific site), transactional (wanting to purchase), or commercial (intending to buy soon)?
Check how competitors or industry leaders answer similar search queries. Make sure your content is of higher quality or adds more value. You can use SEOmator’s free keyword research tool to find out how your audience searches on search engines.
3. Craft a High-Quality Content Piece
Start with engaging intros, use simple language, and make your points clear.
Images, videos, infographics, and graphs can make your content more understandable and engaging.
Also, fact-check your sources and edit for grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors.
🔎 Read our blog post: Content Optimization: The Complete Guide to Boost Rankings
4. Amplify Your Linkable Assets
Share your content on social platforms that your audience frequents. Use appealing captions and high-quality visuals to grab attention.
Reach out to influencers in your niche and ask them to take a look at your content. If they find it valuable, they might share it with their followers.
Leverage your email database to spread the word about your content. Craft compelling email copy to encourage your readers to check it out.
5. Measure the Effectiveness of Your Efforts
Use SEO tools to monitor new backlinks to your content. With SEOmator’s Free Backlink Checker Tool you can easily check high-quality backlinks for your website.
Monitor website traffic, bounce rate, dwell time, and social shares to evaluate user engagement with your content. Check if there's a positive impact on your search rankings.
Conclusion
Imagine the Internet as a vast, bustling metropolis. In this big city, high-quality backlinks are the highways, connecting respected authorities with curious readers. Search engines like Google are like mapmakers, meticulously noting these connections to understand which sites have the best information.
Search engines use backlinks as a signal for trust and authority. More quality backlinks signal search algorithms that your website is a trustworthy and valuable resource. This directly impacts your SERP rankings, pushing your website toward the coveted first position.
Linkable assets play two vital roles. First, they provide high-quality, unique, valued information that satisfies users' search intent. Second, they are the bait that attracts the juicy high-quality backlinks your site needs for climbing up the SERP ranks.
Linkable assets can include various digital formats— blog posts, infographics, unique research, comprehensive guides, online tools, and much more. They can help raise your site's authority, increase organic traffic, provide long-term SEO benefits, enhance your reputation, and promote increased user engagement.
In the realm of SEO, linkable assets are like a secret weapon. Start utilizing yours to boost your rankings!
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