E1098: Breaking down a link building case study about what to do when your business is so niche that "perfectly relevant" backlink opportunities barely exist.
The example comes from a petrochemical / chemical manufacturing startup trying to rank against much larger competitors.
At first, they tried the obvious approach:
- Create content around their exact niche
- Place links inside that content
- Get those links published on relevant websites
- Focus on websites in the right country
- Prioritize traffic, quality, and metrics
The problem was simple:
There just were not enough chemical manufacturing blogs or websites to keep building links at scale.
So they made a pivot.
Instead of only targeting hyper-specific chemical manufacturing sites, they moved broader.
They started getting links from engineering, industrial, and manufacturing-adjacent websites. The sites were not perfectly about the client's exact product, but the content still included a relevant section about chemical engineering, with the keyword naturally worked in.
After two more months, they ranked for a difficult keyword ahead of major chemical manufacturing competitors.
That is the lesson of this episode.
Perfect relevance matters, but in extremely niche industries, perfect relevance can become a bottleneck.
Sometimes the better link building move is to target broader industry websites while keeping the content angle tight, believable, and relevant enough.
In this episode, I cover:
- Why ultra-niche businesses struggle to build relevant backlinks
- How "perfect relevance" can slow down link building
- Why broader industry sites can still work when the content angle makes sense
- How a startup used engineering and industrial sites to compete with larger manufacturers
- Why link quality is about more than domain metrics
- Why the content around the backlink still matters
- Why indexed backlinks are more valuable than links sitting on pages Google ignores
- How to think about relevance without becoming too rigid
- Why slightly off-niche websites can still support rankings
- How to make broader link placements feel natural
- Why this strategy works best when the surrounding content is unique, well-written, and genuinely useful
I also talk through two related link building methods:
- Adjacent industry placements, where you look one step outside the exact niche
- Expert quote submissions, where a founder or subject-matter expert becomes the reason the link makes sense
The key is not to ignore relevance.
The key is to understand that relevance can come from the page, the section, the angle, the expert, and the context - not only from the entire website being about your exact niche.
This is especially important for startups and B2B companies in industries where there are not hundreds of obvious blogs to pitch.
If you only chase perfect-fit websites, you may run out of opportunities fast.
But if you know how to stretch into related industries while keeping the content useful and believable, you can keep building links without making the placements look forced.
⭐️ Move From Super Defined Content To Generic - https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/12ihay2/link_building_in_2023_strategies_that_have_worked/
💎 Compact Keywords - My SEO Course - Get paying customers through SEO - Clear step-by-step video breakdowns - SEO templates to be copied and adapted for your products and services: https://compactkeywords.com/
00:00 Ultra Niche Link Building
00:34 Why Content Quality Wins
01:24 Indexed Links Matter
01:59 Case Study Niche Expansion
03:13 Relevance Without Bottlenecks
04:07 Adjacent Industry Placements
04:41 Expert Quotes and Founder Branding
06:14 Wrap Up
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/
#linkbuilding #backlinks #searchengineoptimization #seo