How to get backlinks: start from the pages that already earn them

The pages that earn links on most sites are tools and real-world events, not articles anyone pitched. How to read your own top pages before you write an outreach email, and four plays that earn links.

Mostly from things that already exist. Before you plan an outreach campaign, look at which of your pages have earned links without one. The backlinks tool lists them, and the list is usually a surprise.

Sort your pages by referring domains and skip the homepage. The rows near the top are often not the articles you worked hardest on. They tend to be a page about something the business did in the real world, which gave local sites a reason to mention it, or a small free tool, such as a calculator, that other sites link to because it saves their reader time.

Neither kind of page usually started as an outreach campaign. That is the pattern across most profiles: the pages that earn links are the ones that do something for the linking site's reader, and the pages that get pitched are the ones that do something for you.

Four of them, in rough order of effort.

1. Build a tool instead of a post

People are more willing to link to a good tool that solves a problem than to another blog post with a wall of text. A calculator, a template or a checklist is the small version of that idea.

The test that keeps it honest: can you rank for the tool's keyword, and will people find real value in the tool? There are plenty of calculator keywords, and a tool nobody searches for earns links from nobody. Check the demand for the tool's name before building it; keyword research covers how.

2. Do something in the real world and let the web report it

A page about a community event does not earn links by being well written. It earns them because the business ran the event, and the city, the chamber of commerce, event listings and local news mentioned it.

Sponsorships, memberships, events and community work produce links from the sites that report on them, and those sites are exactly the local, relevant sources that a backlink audit says count for most. The link is a by-product. That is why it works.

3. Map the businesses that share your customer

Before any outreach, write a document that lists every non-competing business that wants to reach your audience and has a marketing budget. An assistant can help you brainstorm it.

Call it a nexus: every business that reaches your customer and does not compete with you. A realtor's nexus is inspectors, painters, movers and lenders. A SaaS company's is the tools its customers already pay for, the consultants who set them up, the newsletters they read. Each one is a site with a reason to mention you, because you are useful to their reader, and each mention is a link from a relevant domain.

Write the list before you write a single email. The email to a nexus business is short, because you can name the reason the link helps their reader. The email to a random blog is long, because there is no reason.

4. Make it personal enough that nobody else could have sent it

A handwritten letter or a printed book in the mail, sent to someone whose work you have read, stands out because almost nobody sends one, and fewer still understand the recipient's business well enough to make it relevant.

The lesson is not the postage. It is that ten letters to ten right people beat a thousand emails to a list, and the emails cost more once you count the reputation they spend.

From the receiving end, a pitch that makes the writer's job easier is welcome. A pitch that includes the quote, the data and the image, so the writer has to do nothing but paste, gets used. A pitch that asks them to look at your site does not.

What to skip

Buying links from the people who email you about buying links. The backlink audit shows what those look like on a profile: casino domains and "premium PBN network" anchors with high spam scores, which Google is built to ignore. There is a newer risk too. Google eventually forgave a cleaned-up profile. There is no evidence yet that the AI systems that now cite sources will, so be careful with anything that looks manufactured.

Run this with the SEO Scaler MCP

Connect the SEO Scaler MCP. The link-prospecting skill packages the competitor side of this; the prompt below starts from your own profile, which is cheaper and usually better. The agent shows the credit cost before each call runs, and nothing spends until you approve.

In SEO Scaler, open Backlinks, choose Top Pages, and sort by referring domains, highest first. Copy the first ten rows, including each URL and its referring-domain count, into your assistant with this prompt.

Using the SEO Scaler MCP on project [name], find where my next links
should come from, for [domain]:

1. Use the Top Pages rows I pasted to list my ten leading pages by
   referring domains. Read each page and classify it as a tool, an
   event or service page, an article, or a company page. Mark any
   unreadable page as unverified. If I have not supplied the rows,
   ask for them before continuing.

2. Call get_backlinks_profile for the two non-homepage URLs with the
   most referring domains in that list, using scope "page",
   mode one_per_domain, hideSpam true. Read the linking pages and
   suggest why each linked: cited data, used a tool, reported an
   event, listed a partner, or something else. Mark uncertain reasons
   as hypotheses and unreadable pages as unverified.

3. From those reasons, tell me which of my pages could earn more of
   the same kind of link, and what would have to be true for it to.

4. Pull Search Console performance by query for the last 3 months and
   list any query containing "calculator", "template", "checklist",
   "tool" or "estimate" where I have impressions. Those are tools
   people already want from me.

5. Give me a list of 20 businesses that share my customer and do not
   compete with me, from the referring domains I already have and the
   domains linking to my two closest competitors.

Step 5 is the nexus document. Step 2 is what makes the outreach email short.

Earn the first ten before you pitch the hundredth

The profile you already have tells you what people link to on your site and why. Build more of that: a tool someone searches for, a thing you did that a local site can report, a list of the businesses that share your customer, and ten personal notes to ten right people. Then count referring domains, not backlinks, and read the linking pages to understand why they chose to mention you.

Start with the businesses that share your customer and do not compete with you: partners, suppliers, the tools your customers use, the communities they belong to. Ask for a mention where it helps their reader. Then build one thing worth linking to, a tool or a piece of data, and tell the ten people most likely to use it.

What is a linkable asset?

A page that does something for another site's reader that a paragraph of prose cannot: a calculator, a template, a dataset, a checklist, a tool. On many small sites, a simple tool earns links from more domains than any article.

Personal outreach to a short list works. Mass email to a purchased list mostly produces replies from people selling links, and those are the links that show up in an audit with high spam scores.

No. The sellers who email you produce links from casino and PBN domains that search engines ignore and that make your profile look manufactured. AI search systems may also not forgive a manipulated profile the way Google eventually did.

The backlinks tool shows which of your pages attract links and from where, which is the starting point above. It shows the same for any competitor, so you can list the domains that link to them and not to you. Use the app's Top Pages table to compare referring-domain counts by page; the MCP provides backlink summaries and individual backlink rows. The link-prospecting skill packages the competitor workflow.

Run this strategy in SEO Scaler

Run the MCP prompt in this guide with SEO Scaler. SEO Scaler is free to try, and asks before every paid call.

Start with SEO ScalerBack to Link Building