How to use Reverse Image Search to build more Backlinks.

Here Is How You Can Use Reverse Image Search to Build More Backlinks to Your Blog

High-quality backlinks demonstrate that a website’s content is both visually appealing and user-friendly.

An enormous number of photographs are posted and shared online every day. They can be copied and spread without attribution. Reverse image search makes it easy to uncover unclaimed backlinks. Here’s how to do it.

What is reverse image search?

All marketing images on your website, social media platforms, and elsewhere are protected by your intellectual property (IP) rights. Perform a reverse image search to see whether your photographs are being used without your consent.

Reverse image search lets you look for information on the internet by using images instead of words. Share an image with your search engine and it will locate related photos, versions, and pages that include it. This can help you identify where your visuals appear online and what they’re associated with. You’re not limited to keywords—images can also be used to find what you need. After searching, you’ll discover a lot about how and where a particular image is used.

Google stores image data such as:

• File type
• Image size
• Other sizes of the same image
• Pages the image appears on
• Related images
• Pages with matching images

Why use reverse image search?

To uncover relevant information, popular photos, and online photo sources, you can utilize Google’s reverse image search. You can get much more out of reverse image search. Here are sensible reasons to use it to get more backlinks to your blog or site.

Measuring the impact of your content marketing

Imitation is high praise, and the use of your images shows your content resonates with your audience.

Identify backlinking opportunities

Use reverse image search to locate sites that have used your image without your permission. When another site attributes the image, you gain a link to your site. Ensure sources give proper credit. If not, send a polite email requesting a link.

Protect your intellectual property

This tool helps you find websites that have used your photographs. You may see near-duplicates or altered versions. This happens when someone takes your image and adds their logo to make it appear to be theirs. That infringes on your rights.

Stand out from your competitors

Nothing is more frustrating than paying for stock images only to find competitors using the same ones. Searching for websites that use your images can help you avoid this trap.

Context

Review other websites with similar images to avoid drawing the wrong kinds of links. For example, the way you promote a vegetarian café shouldn’t mirror how a burger joint does it.

Identify copyright violations

Reverse image search makes it easier to identify images that lack proper licensing or attribution.

Reclaim your backlinks

You can often find your images on other sites and request a credit link by using reverse image search.

Pages that mention you but don’t link to your website are common. Set up a Google Alert to notify you when your brand is referenced, then check whether a backlink was included.

Images, though often overlooked, can produce backlinks. Use Google’s reverse image search to identify websites that use your visuals.

Look for photographs, infographics, GIFs, and even your logo to find backlink opportunities for your company’s website.

Which sites should you go after?

Tactical thinking is usually superior to trying everything at once. Don’t employ too many methods at the same time.

Keywords must be properly optimized for SEO to work. If you focus only on keyword optimization, your campaign won’t perform as well as it could.

The same applies to reverse image search. This has ramifications for backlinks in general.

It’s important not to waste time visiting every webpage.

Some links are better than others. Target the right links to climb the SERPs.

What factors significantly impact how well a website performs on search engine results pages?

A criterion of site’s high authority

A site with strong authority has a DA score of at least 70. A site with more authority may not follow the same norms as a site with less authority in particular industries.

Because the pet industry has fewer websites than the business or marketing industries, a pet website with a domain authority of more than 55 is regarded as high authority.

On the DA75 websites, there is a lot of mediocrity. Even if a website has a high DA, it does not automatically imply that it is excellent.

Because it is difficult to get close to stakeholders at powerful sites, businesses that build relationships may charge high fees. Before making a decision, investigate link-building services.

Landing high-quality backlinks

Guest Posting

This is still one of the most reliable ways to get incredible backlinks from respected websites. When we talk about guest posting for high-authority links, we mean exceptionally high-quality content.

For example, in a past campaign we did a legitimate guest post on HubSpot (a high-DA website) for our client in the real estate space.

We pitched genuinely strong ideas and explained what the article would cover. We also used our client’s own persona for outreach, so we had social proof and credibility behind us.

We consider this a fair trade—HubSpot received 100% free content from us, and one of our best writers spent over 10 hours carefully crafting the content, researching sources, and creating images.

That guest post now has dozens of sites linking to it, and it ranks #1 on Google for “real estate business” and “starting a real estate business.” To be honest, landing this guest post would easily be worth $10,000.

You just can’t actively achieve these links any other way unless you get lucky and a writer decides to cite your source without your knowing.

Where 99% of people’s guest posting fails is in their approach. They use sloppy outreach and create generic listicle-style content.

We come up with strong content ideas using keyword analysis, and our content is created by excellent writers. We create a no-brainer proposition for websites by completing the whole content creation process to a very high standard.

Of course, in many instances, the website is going to respond by asking for money. If that happens, consider whether buying backlinks is the right option for you. You can reach out if you want to dig into this more.

HARO

HARO (Help a Reporter Out) is a platform that connects journalists with sources.

Writers from big publications like GQ, Business Insider, and Vice are active on the HARO platform.

The process is simple—journalists share what insights they’re looking for, and you email them your insights.

If you’re successful, the journalist will mention your comment in their article and link to your website.

It’s a scalable way to build lots of good links to your homepage.

Link Exchanges & Swaps

This is often underrated, and if done correctly it can be incredibly safe. The idea is simple—most established sites have an SEO team that understands the value of links. They already grasp the value proposition of earning them a link.

Why do link exchanges work?

Internal SEO and marketing teams understand the value of link building, and they’re generally happy to link out to you provided your website is genuinely relevant and equally as good as theirs—on the condition that you earn them a link in return. You can either link to them from your own website or get them a link from another website—perhaps a site where you’re planning a guest post.

It’s a straightforward transaction that works. Of course, you need to be smart and creative, because engaging in overt link swap schemes is against Google’s rules.

We’ve talked about link exchange strategy in more detail here, so use this guide if you want to do it effectively.

PR OUTREACH

This is the strategy that everybody idolizes but is exceptionally difficult in practice. It comes under many names and guises—Skyscraper, Data-Driven Content, Journalist Outreach, etc.

But it basically amounts to the same thing—create an incredible piece of content and show it to the right people. We’ve developed a methodology to consistently land PR backlinks, but it’s tough.

One effective strategy is creating curated reports, which is essentially repurposing data that already exists and presenting it in an attractive way.

For example, Fastmetrics put together a list of broadband speeds by country. They use data from other sources on the internet (they mention their sources throughout the article) and the page has hundreds of high-authority links pointing to it. This is a great example of repurposing other people’s data sources.

For more ideas on linkable assets, we’d recommend seeing the comprehensive guides from your SEO team experts. Go after evergreen keywords that journalists are searching for.

The beautiful thing about this strategy is that if you build a few good links to give the page that initial push, the rest of the links can come on autopilot. We only actively built a few links and ended up landing a ton of great links passively because the content started showing up in Google results.

The reason is that these are the types of keywords that journalists and writers look for. Journalists love searching for keywords around statistics and data points in any industry.

In another example, Junto Digital released an article called “SEO statistics”—they use data from other sources on the internet, and the page has thousands of high-authority links pointing to it.

The holy grail of link building is to earn high-authority backlinks without lifting a finger, and this strategy helps to achieve that.

Track every image on your blog or website

This next tip is handy if you have a smaller site and can spend some time researching (or if you want to be extremely thorough).

If you’re an established photographer, one of the things that might keep you awake at night—or worse, have you frantically toiling away on your laptop—is the thought that someone is using your images illegally and making money in the process. Thankfully, there are options to fight this. Photographer Anthony Morganti shares methods to find your stolen images on the internet:

Search your brand or name on Google

The easiest way to find whether someone’s using your images is to Google yourself. Some websites, when they “borrow” a photographer’s images, give credit somewhere.

Periodically searching for your name or website (in case you’re getting linkbacks for the “borrowed” images) can be quite a chore. If you don’t want to get stuck in that loop, Google Alerts is an alternative.

When you set up an alert, Google will periodically scan the internet for your search phrase. If it finds anything relevant it will email you the result. Don’t forget to put quotation marks around your search phrase, otherwise Google will send you results that have any combination of the search words, not necessarily in the order you want.

You can change the frequency of the updates to daily, weekly, or even instantly. Pretty powerful stuff!

Reverse image search

Reverse image search is another very powerful tool.

Go to Google.com and click the Images link in the top right-hand corner. Click on the camera icon beside the search box. There are two ways to search: you can either paste the URL of the image or upload the image to Google.

This is easier in the Chrome browser. Right-click the image and click “Search Google for image.” Google will then return matching results of the image in question along with visually similar images. Doing the reverse image search yourself requires effort and time, but you can always hand this over to someone.

It’s not too expensive to hire someone on Fiverr or other freelancer sites (but make sure whoever you hire has good reviews).

Scale this tactic

Reverse image search link building isn’t just effective and repeatable; it’s also scalable. There are a few ways to increase the volume of backlinks you get from this tactic each month.

Track more images

First, you can create and track more images. Generally speaking, the more images you publish on your site and track with Image Prospector, the more outreach prospects you’re going to find.

If you’re building links for a photography website, you’ll probably always have new images to track. However, if you need help scaling your image creation, you can use an unlimited graphic design service.

Optimize your images

Second, you can optimize your images to rank higher in Google Images. Most sites that copy your images find them there, so gaining visibility will lead to more image credit link opportunities.

Search different types of images

And lastly, don’t forget to search for different kinds of images. Images created for your blog posts are good, but you can also upload your company logo and personal avatars to find interesting link reclamation and marketing opportunities.

Verdict

Images offer a powerful way to build links because they’re embeddable, and their visual nature also makes it easier to explain complex topics. That’s why infographics can work so well.

Just remember that not everything makes sense as an image. You shouldn’t try to force your content into this format just to build links. It won’t work. Countless infographics have failed miserably precisely for that reason.

LEARN MORE: HOW TO USE GOOGLE IMAGE SEARCH FOR GAINING TRAFFIC

Frequently asked questions