What is a linkable asset?

Creating content that deserves to be linked, no matter what format that content may take, basically comes down to two things; quality control and research efforts. Quality control of aspects such as tone, grammar, spelling, and physical presentation does matter when it comes to your linkability. Providing a site with not only a mutually beneficial, but a well-crafted piece of content communicates that you are authoritative, and reflects well on both you and the site you’re hoping to link to. 

Being well-researched about your topic also impacts your linkability. In order to write content that is linkable, you must first understand who you’re writing content for, what purpose this content will fill, and how best can you reach your desired audience. Answering these questions in the creation stage can help you craft content that satisfies searcher intent, and holds informational value for your audience. 

What Keeps Content From Being Linkable?

If your linkable assets aren’t performing as well as you’d like, it can be due to a lack of market research or improperly prioritizing sales pages.

As mentioned above, research is key to creating successful linkable assets — it’s not enough to write about topics that you think are valuable, your linkable assets should be an answer to a pre-existing pain point felt by an existing, clearly defined audience. This means that you should know the pitfalls and areas of interest of your market or niche well-enough to understand and provide content that is relevant to those problems and interests, not just your commercial intent.

As a business owner, sales and conversions are what keep your business alive, so they are an obvious top priority. For this reason, many site owners try to focus their link building to their converting page, which is their most valuable asset. But sales pages are limited in their actual inherent value — if you're not the person profiting from the sale, or you aren’t looking to buy, there isn’t much value to a searcher in your average conversion page. This is why it’s important to think like a searcher, not just a site owner, when you’re link building.

Linkable Content Best Practices

Here are a few ways that you can improve your linkable content creation:

• Keyword Research: Keyword research can help you understand the current interests, trends, and pain points of searchers in your niche. Well-executed keyword content can be a seriously linkable asset by providing clear, concise, and actionable answers to high-volume searches that a variety of pages can use as a resource. Just remember that the goal of your research is to provide value to searchers — not push them toward converting pages or spam them with self-promotion.
• Competitor Analysis: It’s not a bad thing to take a look at how your competitors are handling their linkable assets —  in fact, it can be really beneficial. Comparing your content to your competitors can help you identify and build out areas in need of more coverage and avoid covering the same topic in the same way, which can distinguish your content and signal to other sites that your content is a valuable resource not because of who wrote it, but how. 
• Focus on Evergreen Content: Evergreen content is content that continues to be relevant to a group or topic long-term. Evergreen content can be a great linkable asset because of its ability to provide helpful information or insights that are not subject to the current news cycle, and does not require cultural or time-sensitive context, and therefore can be widely applicable. 
• Focus on the Human User: We say all the time that websites don't link to websites; people link to people. If you want a link, you have to offer value to humans using your page. A good example of a page that is valuable to searchers is a comprehensive and organized article on common queries or pain points in your industry, that isn’t centered around buying or selling. This is a post that searchers — and other writers on the web — can come back to again and again. It’s important to remember that you can't expect to get links just because you need them for SEO — you have to do the work to earn links by offering value to other users on the web.

Links are a two-way street between site owners that signal authority and value to the audience; you simply can't earn links if you only focus on what’s valuable to you. This is why understanding what makes something deserving of links, and creating well-crafted content with reciprocal value is key to unlocking all the benefits of becoming linkable.