How AI is changing link building – and how you can use it to your advantage

Link building has always been an elusive area to specialize in. The goalposts are always moving, yet there is no rulebook on what changes are taking place. Gone are the days of spending most of our time manually reaching out, as we now spend more of our time with data.

Here, AI offers intelligent analysis – not in the manufacturing of content, but in solving the problems caused by the challenges of linkbuilding.

The mounting challenges of link-building

Traditional link prospecting has always been a time sink, but it’s grown to be even more difficult in recent years.

Firstly, keyword research is more competitive than ever before. Traditional keyword research may well still have its place, but it’s both time-consuming and increasingly difficult to find promising keywords that aren’t yet saturated. On top of this is the growing emphasis on E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) on search engines. This reduces the simplicity and effectiveness of keyword matching. Instead, genuine topical alignment and authoritative sources are now more important.

This brings us to the second challenge: securing backlinks from high-authority sites within your specific niche is crucial. Generic links, even with high authority, hold less weight.

Finally, given the importance that Google is placing on the quality and relevance of our link-building, outreach becomes a lot more difficult. Finding the right contacts and personalizing communication is needed to demonstrate value and secure placements of topical and relevant domains.

AI provides a new opportunity for prospecting

The above problems were born out of Google adapting to an influx of AI-generated content. While AI content is not the answer, AI for prospecting may well be! Language learning models are increasingly adept at understanding nuance – both with data and semantics.

AI can help assess content sentiment and contextual fit so that we’re not shoehorning in keywords and links for the sake of it. For marketers, it means going beyond the surface-level metrics (which more traditional marketing software relies on, and its very mass-adoption has led to its saturation).

This is the core value proposition of services like LEOlytics, which uses AI to help identify suitable publications, along with pinpointing existing ranked articles for strategic link placement. This aligns with the shift in Google’s view on link-building, which is semantically driven.

How marketers can be practical with AI

AI’s role in link building can come in a few practical ways, such as:

• AI algorithms, like LEOlytics’ Smart LEO algorithm, analyze your keywords with AI and semantically matches you with the most relevant media outlets. This improves link relevancy and overall link-building strategy coherence.
• These algorithms are extremely scalable, meaning they solve the problem of outreach becoming more difficult and time-consuming. Media proposals are customized based on domain authority, target audience and budget.
• AI-driven LEOlytics platform can help manage tasks from a single dashboard, as well as see real-time SEO metrics.

Integrating AI into a modern link-building workflow

Modern problems require modern solutions, and while AI has forced Google’s algorithm changes and made link-building more complex, it’s also the very technology that can help us build topical authority within a niche.