External links — what are they, and are they still important for SEO? In this article, we’ll break down the concept, what they represent, and how to get them.
What is a natural link profile?
A natural link profile is a collection of external links to a website that appear organically, thanks to the real value of the content, product, service, or company expertise, rather than as a result of direct purchase, exchange, or artificial placement. Users, editors, journalists, bloggers, and website owners link to your content themselves when they genuinely find the material useful and worthy of mention.
And yes, it is crucial for SEO. For search engines, a natural link profile looks organic: links appear gradually, are placed on different types of resources, lead to various pages of the site, and are accompanied by diverse anchors or even naked URL mentions.
4 Methods for Getting Natural Links
Here are four approaches that help grow a link profile organically and effectively.
1. Create content that people actually want to link to
One of the most reliable ways to get external links is to produce materials that become a trusted source of information for other authors, editors, and specialists. Formats with practical and evidence-based value work best. Research on demand dynamics, analysis of typical website errors, comparative tool reviews, technical specification templates, audit checklists, and campaign launch instructions are all highly effective.
In B2B, budget calculators, document templates, industry metric compilations, market analytics, or visual process diagrams can attract links. In e-commerce, platform comparison tables, CMS selection guides, product card templates, and research on conversion and logistics are valuable.
Unique data is especially in demand. This doesn’t have to be a massive industry study; it could be a compact, well-designed analysis, such as a comparison of 100 competitor pages, year-end project statistics, or customer survey results.
However, even strong material is cited less often if it is overloaded, poorly structured, or fails to provide quick takeaways for the reader. Pages with informative headlines, logical structures, short blocks, tables, graphs, section conclusions, and key points work much better. The easier it is to integrate your material into someone else’s article, presentation, or post, the higher the probability of a link.
2. Crowd Marketing: Links through helpful answers
Crowd marketing involves links from relevant discussions on forums, Q&A services, comments, and professional communities. It only works when the link is embedded in a meaningful response, rather than appearing as a random drop for the sake of placement.
Topics where a person already has a specific question — how to choose a service, how to solve a technical problem, which tool fits their situation — perform best. In such cases, you can provide a short, helpful answer and, if necessary, link to a guide, checklist, case study, or research.
The key here is relevance. You need platforms where your audience is present and where there is active moderation. Good crowd marketing provides not only a natural link but also referral traffic, trust, and brand awareness. Bad crowd marketing quickly turns into spam.
3. Social media, directories, and company profiles
Another foundational source of natural external links is official company profiles: social media, maps, business directories, industry handbooks, ratings, and review platforms. This is a simple and safe way to strengthen your link profile while simultaneously increasing brand trust.
But it’s not enough to just leave a link to your site — the profile must be complete: description, contacts, category, services, photos, address, and business hours. For local businesses, maps and city directories are particularly important; for B2B, industry catalogs and ratings; for digital companies, specialized platforms and services with contractor reviews.
Priority should always be given to quality over quantity. One active profile in a relevant directory is more useful than dozens of empty entries on random sites.
4. Partner content and mutual mentions
To get external links, you can create joint content with partners and publish it across several platforms linked by a single theme. This could be a series of articles, a collaborative special project, a compilation of expert opinions, a guide, or a case study where each participant covers their part of the topic and links to the partners’ materials.
For example, an SEO agency, a web developer, and an analytics service could release three linked materials: technical site preparation, content and structure, and analytics and result evaluation. Each text is published on its respective platform and logically leads the reader to the next. As a result, the links look natural because they help expand on the topic rather than being formally inserted.
This format is especially effective when partners do not compete directly but share the same audience. Examples include lawyers and accountants, designers and developers, or logistics companies and e-commerce platforms.
It’s important that this doesn’t look like a mechanical link exchange. The connection between the materials must be real: a shared topic, different angles, and logical transitions between publications. Then, this format works not only for SEO but also for brand awareness, trust, and referral traffic.
5. Develop Digital PR and expert commentary
Natural links are often the result of brand awareness in the information space. When a company, specialist, or founder regularly appears in the media, industry roundups, columns, and expert pieces, links begin to emerge as a natural accompaniment to the mentions. In this case, the link is not the goal itself, but a consequence of real expertise and public presence.
Expert commentary is in high demand. Journalists, editors, corporate media authors, and niche site owners are constantly looking for specialists who can quickly and effectively comment on a trend, explain a market shift, advise on where to find links for highly competitive niches, evaluate a tool, or provide a practical perspective on a situation. If a brand becomes such a clear and reliable source of expertise, it begins to be quoted and cited as the primary source of the opinion.
Conclusions
Building natural links is the result of strong content, real expertise, and systematic engagement with your audience. The more value, unique data, and reasons to link a brand provides, the more steadily its link profile grows. That is why, in the long run, the winners are not those looking for quick schemes, but those who create value for the market.
If you find it difficult to establish direct communication with website owners, using a specialized exchange can be an effective solution. This tool significantly simplifies the negotiation process and guarantees a high-quality result, especially when working with sites in Tier-1 locations. This approach allows you to automate routine tasks and focus on scaling your campaigns.
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