If you’re still writing cold outreach emails, begging for a single backlink to your website, you should stop RIGHT NOW.
Traditional link building is becoming obsolete, and the reason why is – you guessed it – AI.
Don’t get me wrong. Backlinks from high authority sites are still important for SEO in 2024. However, focusing solely on backlinks isn’t enough anymore.
Brands need to shift their focus from merely generating backlinks to comprehensive brand-building.
AI is reshaping the off-page SEO landscape, offering new tools for outreach and engagement.
Backlinks were once the cornerstone of off-page SEO, but today’s strategies require much more: building a recognizable brand, increasing visibility, and fostering engagement across platforms like social media. Let’s explore how this shift affects your link-building efforts and how AI can help streamline the process.
Think about what you truly want from your off-page efforts. Is it visibility? Brand awareness? Authority? Reach? Ultimately, aren’t you really aiming to drive ✨conversions✨?
Now, reflect on where that goal should come from:
Clearly, focusing narrowly on link generation for the sake of improving your backlink profile won’t cut it anymore. Link building alone doesn’t work in isolation; it’s part of a larger strategy.
Plus, with the rapid evolution of AI technologies, particularly in search engines and content discovery, link building has been further disrupted. AI systems like ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, and other AI-based content aggregators have changed how users find information online.
AI-powered summaries now answer user queries directly on search engine results pages (SERPs). That means, users do not have to click away and land on your site to get the answer they were looking for. Hence, you have to find another way to get their attention and drive traffic to your site.
That means:
Now is the time to diversify your off-page tactics, integrating link building, social media, and public relations into a cohesive strategy. Building a recognizable entity, generating trustworthy content, and having authoritative online conversations are now critical. Without focusing on these elements, even the best backlink strategies may fail to compete with content directly pulled into AI results.
The goal is no longer just to rank with links but to create an omnipresent digital footprint that resonates with both human audiences and AI algorithms.
Most of our link building strategies in the past have followed the goal of getting as many backlinks from authoritative websites as possible. And sure, it is nice to get linked to from big media outlets. But will those links really increase your rankings and, what is even more important, will those links really affect your bottom line? Not necessarily.
When you choose your link targets, you should not only take into account their Domain Authority. Ask yourself whether they receive a decent amount of organic traffic, whether they reach an audience that is likely to convert on your website and whether your link or mention will get the visibility you desire instead of ending up in a content desert.
Determine whether the content published on the website is relevant to your target audience and check whether it is engaging and interesting.
That being said, yes, I encourage you to be picky about the websites you reach out to – even if you are working for a small brand, even if you are under pressure to build any links at all.
Think about what you would really consider a successful off-page campaign and when you have decided, you should overthink your metrics. Instead of looking at ranking increases for a keyword you are targeting with an off-page campaign, have a closer look at these metrics:
But not only those hard metrics determine whether your off-page activities were successful. Once every quarter, you should evaluate soft metrics. These could be:
The notion that brand building affects rankings is nothing really new for SEOs. Rand Fishkin, co-founder of Moz and SparkToro and well-known influencer in the SEO scene has started delving into this topic over a decade ago, making his voice heard about the power of ‘implied links’, such as brand mentions.
However, how major of a factor branding is for your organic presence, has only been discussed now with the huge drop in organic traffic, especially for smaller businesses and the rise of AI models like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews.
Fact is that big, well-known websites rank higher for queries than smaller brands. It may sound unfair but those websites that do not rely on backlinks at all do not only rank better but also seem to automatically generate better traffic and a higher number of backlinks.
So, no matter how many backlinks you generate, it is highly unlikely that you will outrank a well-established brand.
That realization can be frustrating at first, but it also opens the door for an important learning: You need to shift your focus from pure link building to building a brand.
That’s not to say you should abandon classical outreach altogether. Some link-building targets, like listicles, still have significant value—especially for SaaS and tech brands. If your brand is mentioned in listicles, it may also appear in AI-generated search results, helping you capture attention in new ways.
Here is a simple example. Imagine someone asks AI Overviews “What is the best recruiting software?” Google will now most likely crawl listicles and search for the providers that are mentioned positively in every article. If your company is among those providers, you will most likely also appear in the search result AI overviews provides. Hence, users will take it from there and research more about your company, and ideally, sign up for your software.
Long story short, make sure you are mentioned everywhere so your brand also pops up in AI search results.
You can see that I emphasize the importance of incorporating social media in your off-page strategy a lot in this piece. Hence, this channel deserves a bonus section in this article.
Jumping back in time, SEOs dismissed social media. “Nope, social signals do not have a direct impact on your site’s organic performance.” That is what I have heard repeatedly when I started out in SEO back in 2020.
But – and I am a little proud of that – little old trainee me knew that the “indirect” impact of social media will definitely be reflected on your brand’s organic presence eventually.
When you think about it, the reasoning behind it is quite simple and logical. Social media platforms have a much higher engagement rate compared to websites. Liking, commenting, discussing – with all of that, you create attention around yourself, your brand or your content. Naïve to think that this “attention” would not be relevant to Google and its competitors.
The more you appear on social media, the more people talk about you, and hence, the more known you will get by users and by search engines.
So, imagine your blog post gets shared by a reputable LinkedIn influencer, or someone with quite a bunch of followers on X mentions they have taken your course, or they are using your software. These opinion leaders are the key to making you known and building trust in your brand. Their followers will automatically check your brand out and ideally engage with it aka drive your conversions. And that’s worth a dozen links coming from guest posts on mediocre websites.
You should also keep a close eye on where your brand gets mentioned. Use tools like Buzzstream to get notified whenever a person on social media talks about you. Whenever that happens, it marks a great start for a networking connection, or a potential link collaboration.
Plus, by monitoring what is being written about your brand online, you gain control over your reputation. You will be able to respond to critique immediately or to receive praise and use it for your advantage (e.g. sharing positive feedback, use it as social proof, etc.)
Of course, I also recommend you to be active on social platforms as well, simply because the engagement on social media is much higher than on a regular website. Consequently, your content (and the links you share) is much more likely to be reshared and responded to as well. Building an engaged online presence on social media will help you boost organic links and brand visibility.
Let me guide you beyond theory and hook you on some actionable strategies that will help optimize your off-page SEO in the age of AI and organic traffic challenges.
So where does AI come to play in this whole reshaping of link building strategies? Well, AI is not the doom of all off-page efforts. Rather, and that is true for almost every field in marketing, AI can help you enhance your outreach activities.
Here is how:
There’s been a long-overdue shift in off-page SEO, and AI-driven search engines have been the catalyst. Off-page SEO is no longer just about building links; it’s about creating a lasting online presence that resonates with people.
The future of link building lies in creating valuable, engaging content and focusing on building a brand that people trust and follow across multiple platforms.
In my opinion, the SEOs of the future will need to evolve into more versatile marketers—thinking outside the box to align trusted SEO tactics with bold, multi-platform strategies, whether through social media, employee advocacy, or innovative partnerships.
AI will be key in optimizing outreach, from identifying the best targets to crafting creative and effective campaigns.
