James Taylor

These are my 4 current favourite link building strategies in 2026. I'd love to hear what others are doing on the link building front!

Organic and paid channels working together provide a goldmine of data for each other and, importantly, can help to stress priority actions to decision makers who might not otherwise see a benefit from a standalone organic audit deliverable.

Products happening to mention the right colour are part of the ad mix, but they don’t offer the right experience for the audience at the time (singular product, not a collection that they can browse).

I see this most often with things like bidding on colour variants of products, with no actual indexable colour collections present on the site.

Often, the ad spend versus organic gap element of an audit isn’t always about uncovering opportunities that you wouldn’t already be uncovering. It’s about showing a real monetary value on what’s currently being spent in places that a targeted organic strategy can help to target.

It’s so common to see ecommerce website owners in particular go all in ad spend, without as much of a thought around organic visibility outside of branded searches and what they’re picking up from the existing site structure. And in that case, some get lucky… others don’t.

When doing a site audit (organic), something I always recommend is to get hold of ads data.

It's another source to cross reference with Search Console and GA4 data so that you can understand what type of content split you're already looking at for target audiences, and where you might be lacking (whether that's complete gaps or the wrong type of content altogether).

This is gold, not for chasing AI 'rankings', but for understanding where you're meeting audiences with the content that actually matters across your complete organic spread, starting with your website as a base.

For example, under 'Your Topic Portfolio', you can quickly click into the most relevant topics to see citation counts for your own site, and then opportunity queries alongside it.

The Bing Topic Portfolio is another great way of looking at organic opportunities that rely on context via your actual site data, not external tools that are running off an (often outdated) dataset.

This is huge, and you can use written content efforts to work as a script for video or as a foundation for social content. You're then having these multiple angles of organic brand building working together, not just in a silo. Visibility doesn't start and end with your site.

- Use keyword research and content planning processes to map opportunities across platforms that surface in traditional SERPs, in LLMs, and to align with how users research on the platforms themselves.

- Speaking of gifting campaigns, look for opportunities outside of the SERPs to work with bloggers and influencers active in the spaces where target audiences hang out

- Focus on PR, not just chasing backlinks. Blend the two and start small with platforms like Qwoted, Editorielle and Press Loft, then scale to larger data and gifting campaigns. Link building isn't dead, but you need to move away from traditional metrics only

- Look at review platform averages across top competitors and those used as sources in LLMs. Establish those which actually receive traffic and are used within the sector, and focus on getting reviews to them

- Disregard search volume estimates for making content decisions (focusing instead on relevance and again mapping decisions back to target audience types) - Use Search Console data and sales conversations to look for gaps in existing content

Here's what I'd focus on initially to cover building authority in an era where so many brands are looking for shortcuts: - Map content output to target personas without sticking to just one type of content

I had a call with a startup homeware brand last week and it was interesting to dig through their organic activity to date. 🔍 They'd largely focused on articles and hadn't considered the role of true organic brand visibility.

👀 I see so many website owners jumping from one tactic of the moment to the next, with so many opportunities then just left on the table. Some of examples of findings from recent site audits include: - Websites with a total reliance on AI content, no human vetting or information gain to be seen - Failed migrations with years of authority just left to 404 - No work on outreach to journalists, publishers or partnerships with real influencers or websites relevant to their niche. This includes those being heavily cited in LLMs via YouTube and social content, and it's still being overlooked - Walls of text and nothing else on critical commercial pages. No reviews, unique imagery, questionable FAQ's and no internal links to be seen You obviously have to try new approaches but, don't let it be to the detriment of the opportunities that are waiting for you when it comes to real brand building. For SEO in 2026, you have to look outside of your website and approach this as a real brand, not just through the lens of whatever an automated tools tell you to do. This means: - Your website being just one vehicle for organic brand growth - The content on your website being planned in accordance with opportunities on other properties. For example, any time I write an article on my website, I do so based on what the YouTube and TikTok opportunities also look like (bonus points if this type of content is being cited heavily in LLMs, which it usually is) - Branching outside of typical link building strategies to look at genuine collaboration opportunities with relevant people in your niche, whether that's video content, gifting or even things like podcasts and interviews - Not letting the content that you do have go stale, and having processes in place to audit what you have to get the absolute most out of it. Also, not being afraid to get rid of content that no longer serves a clear audience purpose