We don’t do link building. But we do earn really good links.
An organic link building case study, of sorts.
I really dislike the term “link building”.
I’ve worked in SEO long enough to remember the dark days of bulk directory submissions, article spinning, comment spam, and just about every other cheap tactic for acquiring backlinks in the name of rankings.
Thankfully, most of that is behind us. But you still do not have to look very hard to find agencies selling guest posts dressed up as digital PR. Just ask my LinkedIn inbox - DA 57 dofollow link, anyone?
Rightly or wrongly, that is still what comes to mind when I hear the phrase link building. In my mind it’s a slightly grubby corner of the industry, and it is one I have never particularly loved.
That’s a big part of why we have never really pushed link building as a service at Bound.
Beyond the grubbiness, I have also never liked the unpredictability of traditional link building campaigns. Unless you are buying links or effectively guaranteeing placements through relentless outreach, it can be a difficult service to sell with confidence.
And to be crystal clear, this is not me saying links don’t matter. They do. But as a pure marketing investment, I think most businesses have better ways to spend their budget than buying guest posts on sites no one ever visits.
So, we don’t do link building.
We attract good links.
The term link building implies an intentional act: actively trying to secure (build) links through cold outreach, guest posts, paid placements, PR campaigns, or pure graft in the hope that links eventually materialise.
Our approach is less about building links and more about attracting them organically, by creating content that deserves to be cited in the first place.
And when this works best, it is not happening in isolation. It’s part of a wider content strategy, where a piece of content has a clear role beyond link generation alone.
From market insights and industry trends to statistics pages and reference-style resources, this kind of content often has a natural place higher up the funnel. It can expand topical authority, attract new audiences, and give a site something genuinely worth being found for.
That matters, because the best link-earning content should not exist purely to “get links”. It should have a clear strategic purpose in its own right.
When it does, the links can follow naturally.
An organic link building case study.
This is not something we have done just once. It is an approach we have used across multiple clients where it made strategic sense to do so. But PolicyBee, a small business insurance broker, is probably the clearest example of how it can work given the attention it deserves.
The objective.
The goal was not to run a standalone link building campaign (we don’t do link building)
It was to support the wider SEO strategy already in place. Alongside the content and on-page SEO work, we wanted to strengthen off-page signals too, but in a way that was ethical, sustainable and entirely justifiable.
The approach.
For PolicyBee, that meant creating industry and small business-adjacent insight pages designed to do more than simply attract backlinks.
These pages were built to be genuinely helpful resources for readers, aligned with topics PolicyBee’s target audience actually cares about and actively searches for - structured in a way that gave them the best chance of ranking consistently in search results.
That last point is key. Because when a journalist, blogger, researcher or publisher is writing about a given topic and needs a relevant stat or source to reference, they are not usually waiting for an outreach email. They are searching for it.
Our job was to make sure PolicyBee had content worth finding.
The detail.
The difference is that we do not just publish generic stats dumps and hope for the best.
We focus on making the content more useful than what already exists by adding an extra layer of value. So, as well as pulling out the most relevant insights, surfacing the strongest takeaways early, and shaping the page around what people are actually likely to need, we focus on telling a clear story too - not just presenting data, but making it engaging.
We also keep the pages updated, so they stay relevant over time. And by auditing the links these pages attract, we can see which facts and angles are driving citations, then make sure those points are surfaced clearly near the top of the page. Simple, but highly effective.
That matters because this kind of content tends to compound. The more consistently a page ranks and gets cited, the more visibility it gains. And the more visibility it gains, the more likely it is to keep attracting links.
The results
Hundreds of links and counting. Enough, frankly, that the headline number matters less than the calibre of the sites linking.
Why we love this approach.
The links are great, obviously. But that is not the only reason we keep coming back to this model.
For clients, it’s relatively low-touch once the right assets are in place. It is also typically far more budget-friendly than a full-blown digital PR or outreach-led link building campaign.
And rather than links arriving in short-lived flurries, they tend to trickle in naturally over time as the content continues to rank, get discovered and get cited.
That makes the approach more sustainable, more scalable, and typically a much better long-term investment.
We don’t guarantee a set number of links. We don’t obsess over DA or DR scores. And we don’t run outreach campaigns. We don’t do link building.
But we do earn really good links.
