High quality backlinks do not just help your website to get noticed by the search engines faster, but also help your pages to have top rankings in search engine result pages. More high quality backlinks a website has, the better it ranks in search results. Yes, the onsite optimization plays a vital role in search engine optimization, but you cannot truly leverage the on-site optimization without good backlinks. So, you must have to have some high-quality backlinks for your startup website in order to uplift it in the search engines as well as get some referral traffic.

Getting backlinks is comparatively easier for startups when they have already spent a lot of marketing and promotion, but for early-stage startups on a tight budget, things are not that easy.

This article will guide you through five highly effective ways to acquire best quality backlinks for little or no cost.

1- Guest Blogging: If you have good command over written English and can spare some time to discuss the hot topics of your industry, you can get your writings published on top sites like Entrepreneur.com, Fobes.com etc. as well as on top industry related blogs. Alternatively, you can hire a person to find relevant blogs and do guest blogging on your behalf.

2- Strategic Partnership with Online Portals: Strategic partnerships great for businesses on almost any stage of the business activity, but they can prove to be lifesavers for early-stage startups as you partner up with established businesses relevant to your product/service, it gives more exposure to your business.

The more strategic partnerships you have, the more quality backlinks you will have. So, do not just rely on looking for relevant product/service, but also look for as many media partners as possible, create a partner’s page on your website and ask them to do the same. Also, give them a periodic update about your startup which they can list on their portal against a small fee or some other type of compensation.

3- Post Shareable Content on Company Blog: One of the best ways to get links from relevant resources is to publish something shareworthy on your company blog. Let it be a research report, infographic, case study, video, images, statistics, how to guide, list of resources, list of people, list of companies and so on. The more engaging content you develop, the farther it will travel and more backlinks it will bring. However, you must keep an eye on the quality of backlinks through some tool like LinkOkay. Keep a check and if you notice some low quality/bad links pointing to your site, get rid of them using Disavow Links Tool.

4- Offer Free Trail to Bloggers: Whether you are selling a product or a service, giving away a few free products/services to industry bloggers is a great way not just to get quality in content backlink but also targeted traffic that may increase your sales as well.   

Don’t just focus on regular bloggers, but also consider V-loggers, Instagrammers, Facebook pages with large number of followers. In case of Facebook pages and Instagram or Twitter users with huge following, you can organize a competition as well whereby you will distribute the freebies among winners and so on.

5- Build a Free Tool: Well, this one comes with a little investment, but not much if you have already invested a substantial amount in your startup website. Let me give a few examples, Zillow is one of the top property websites and it offers a great deal of free calculators including mortgage calculator, affordability calculator, refinance calculator and so on. Similarly, MyFitnessPal is the leading health & fitness app that offers premium health tools, but they have tens of free tools which pull most of the backlinks to them, i.e. calorie counter, BMI calculator etc.

To create such a tool, you just need to conduct a quick research and find what people are looking most anxiously for in your niche, build it and offer it for free or offer a part of it for free.

The Bottom Line:

There can be hundreds of ways to get high quality backlink for early stage startups, depending upon the type of business, and qualitative research is a must to find those hidden opportunities. The above five ideas can, however, help all type of startups on a tight budget.