Broken Link Building For Small Business Owners: The Complete Guide

To increase your website’s authority, you’ll need to start link building. As a small business owner, this can be challenging. The most known strategy is guest posting, but it’s mostly paid. Contrary to guest posting, there is broken link building which is free. A little side note, broken link building requires more effort. If you’re on a tight budget, it’s your go-to strategy to build links.

If you’re interested in optimizing all the off-page elements for your business’s website, I recommend you my off-page SEO guide.

What Is Broken Link Building?

Broken link building is a link building strategy where you find broken links (404 links) on other websites and replace them with your own content. It’s a win-win situation, you help website owners spot and replace the dead links, and you earn a backlink to your website.

A 404 link creates bad experience for visitors and can harm a website’s credibility. By reaching out to website owners with a relevant replacement, you add value for the owner himself but also for their audience.

Why Does It Work So Well For Small Businesses?

Broken link building is a great strategy for small businesses as it require more effort than money. You don’t need a big budget to do outreach to other websites. It requires time and the right approach.

Website owners appreciate it when you make a proposal to improve their website. It builds a genuine connection. You help them solve a problem on their website. With a personal outreach, your chances of standing out increase a lot.

It’s also a great way of showing your expertise in your niche. When your content is the replacement, you’ll become visible to the audience of that website. Over time, this helps your website gain stronger authority, increasing Google rankings and organic traffic.

How To Do Broken Link Building

As mentioned earlier, having the right broken link building approach is crucial. This is the exact blueprint that I use:

Find broken pages with backlinks
Check the backlinks
Create a replacement page
Start reaching out

Find broken pages with backlinks

To find broken pages, we’re going to use Semrush. You could also use Ahrefs, but I prefer Semrush as I learned to work with it from the start.

If you don’t have a list of your top competitors, that will be your starting point. Create a list of the top 5 competitors in your niche.

Then, you’ll enter your competitor in the search box in SEMrush and you’ll press “Root Domain.”

You’ll then click on “Referring Domains.”

Here, you’ll click on “Indexed Pages.”

Here, you see all the indexed pages of that website. Then, you’ll click on the “Broken Pages” button.

Now, you have an overview of all the broken pages of that website, but there are also 403 pages, you’ll need the 404 pages. Check if the website has those 404 pages with enough domains linking to it. If they don’t have these 404 pages, that website isn’t a good fit to do broken link building. Even one 404 page with a solid amount of referring domains is great.

Check the backlinks

Now, it’s time to check the websites that are linking to the broken page. After finding a 404 page with enough referring domains, you’ll click on referring domains.

Then, click on “Active” and “Follow.” This will give you all backlinks that are still active and links that are do-follow and will give SEO value. Filter it on “AS” to show you the highest authoritative websites at the top.

Now, we’ll filter out our options. We’ll do this by clicking on “AS.” A box will pop up with additional information about the website. We’ll check organic traffic, monthly visits and referring domains.

This website seems like a good fit as all the numbers are solid. They have authority, great monthly visits and good organic traffic. A backlink from this website would be great. To see the exact page which links to the broken page, you’ll click on the backlinks and the page that pops up.

Check if the broken link is still there. If that’s the case, this website is a great fit to reach out to. Create a list with all the prospects you find for that one 404 page.

Create a replacement page

To be able to reach out to the prospects, we need to have a valuable, even better replacement page. One that the owner of the other website want to link to.

In my example, the broken page is about link building. So, we’ll create a page about link building. Make sure you do your research on what visitors expect from an article about link building.

Keep the E-E-A-T guidelines of Google in your mind while creating that page. This is your starting point. Make sure your heading structure is clear and easy to skim. Really put effort in this page as it will improve your website’s authority in the long run.

Apart from creating value for your audience, ensure your page is SEO-friendly. If website’s link to it, it will become more visible in search engines. When you optimize it, this page can also rank high in search engines.

So, make sure to:

Do your keyword research.
Optimize meta tags.
Optimize URL structure.
Optimize images.
Optimize internal linking structure.

Start reaching out

You have found the 404 pages, you have a list of prospects and you have an amazing replacement page. It’s time to do the outreach itself. For me, to be as time efficient and personal as possible, I create a script.

This is a script that worked for my broken link building campaign, but feel free to create your own script as you know your niche best. You can copy and paste this script:

Subject: Quick heads-up about a broken link on [page title]

Hi [First Name],

I was reading your page on [Topic/Page Title] earlier. I thought it was really helpful, especially the section on [specific detail from their page].

I noticed a small issue you might want to know about: one of the links pointing to [Broken Resource Name] looks like it’s no longer working. I tried it a couple of times and it seems to return a [404 error].

If it helps, I recently worked on a similar piece that covers the same topic and could be a decent replacement for your readers:
[Your URL]

No pressure at all, just thought I’d flag the broken link since the rest of the page is well put together.

Either way, thanks for putting together such a useful piece of content.

Kind regards,
[Your Name]

With this script, you personalize your outreach which stands out and offer your replacement in a non-pushy way.