How do you actually earn good backlinks?
You give sites a reason to link and then you ask. The four approaches we use at MDH: digital PR, content partnerships, local citations, and links from the suppliers and clients you already work with.
Digital PR means creating something worth writing about, a study, a tool, a story, and offering it to local and industry press. Regional papers and trade publications need stories every single day, and a business with a genuinely interesting one is doing them a favour, not begging. This is the approach we lean on for our own clients across Yorkshire, and it is the slowest to start and the strongest once it does.
Content partnerships mean writing genuinely useful guest pieces for related businesses, the kind their readers thank them for publishing.
Local citations are the unglamorous directory listings that anchor you to your patch: your industry body, your chamber of commerce, the directories real people actually use. Boring, quick, and quietly effective.
And the supplier and client route is the one everyone forgets. Businesses you already work with will often link to you, a case study here, a "trusted partner" page there, because the relationship is real and so is the relevance.
You have probably earned a dozen of these already and never asked. None of this is quick. All of it compounds.
What should a backlink strategy avoid?
Anything you would not explain to Google with a straight face: paid link schemes, private blog networks, and bulk link spam. When Google catches them, and it is depressingly good at catching them, rankings drop and the recovery takes longer than doing it properly would have.
A private blog network, if you have not met one, is a web of hollow websites that exist only to link to paying customers.
They look like sites the way a film set looks like a town. Google has spent twenty years learning to spot the plywood, and when it does, every site the network points at goes down with it.
The pattern to watch for is any offer where links arrive in hundreds, instantly, for pennies. Real links come one at a time from real editorial decisions. Anyone promising otherwise is selling the bottom rows of the spectrum table.
How do you audit the backlinks you already have?
Run your domain through a backlink tool, list every linking site, and sort them into keep, ignore and disavow. We use Serpstat to audit client backlink profiles, and the first look is always revealing.
Most profiles hold a few good links, a heap of harmless directory noise, and occasionally something toxic from an old campaign nobody remembers buying.
Nobody ever remembers buying it. It is one of the great mysteries of our trade.
The good news is that cleaning up is a one-off job, and once it is done you can measure progress from an honest baseline: linking domains, rankings and organic traffic, checked monthly.
