How to build authoritative links with data-driven content

Looking for the extra punch your content needs in order to earn links from your outreach and publishing efforts? One important solution lies in a place that may not sound exciting: data.

We all understand the importance of search engine optimization (SEO) and link building in particular. But earning links can be hard unless we understand why people link.

Most people who link to a web page are looking for something to support a claim or back up their narratives; they are looking for data to support their ideas.

Let’s look at three types of data-driven content that will dramatically improve your ability and opportunity to earn authoritative links.

1. Data analysis

Content-based data analysis might sound dry, but the reality is that much of the best-performing, link-attracting content on the web is the result of data analysis.

Content data analysis includes original research, such as correlation studies and other applications of statistical techniques to data. The data itself may be publicly accessible, or it may be obtained through more proprietary means.

As an SEO, you may be familiar with ranking correlation studies conducted by various companies like SEMrush and Ahrefs, which have earned each company many backlinks.

In the case of these ranking correlation studies:

1. They used proprietary tools to crawl the search engine results for a large list of keywords.

2. They crawled various on-page and off-page metrics associated with the pages in the search results.

3. They reported correlations between these metrics and rankings in the search results.

Correlation measures how often two factors go together, on a scale from -1 to 1 (or sometimes -100% to 100%), but it can’t tell you whether one factor causes the other, if they share a common cause, or if “chance” is responsible for the correlation. Even so, correlations are a good place to start if you are looking for possible causal connections to look into.

For that reason and more, people in the SEO community find these kinds of correlation studies very useful.

But analysis of this kind is useful outside of the SEO community as well.

One site that has produced a lot of this type of content is the dating site o…

[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]