Images might just be my favourite way to build links (don’t tell broken link building).
You can get some insane links from image link building – and quite often you can have complete control over the anchor text, the placement, and the visibility of the link too (more on that later).
But first, let’s talk about how you can get started acquiring links from images.
You could be sitting on a mountain of opportunities.
If you’re working for an established brand and they have a good amount of original imagery (even if it is just product imagery), the best place to start is by seeing if any of their images are currently being used elsewhere on the internet. The good news is that if they are, you could be sitting on a link goldmine.
Stick your site into a tool like Ahrefs, take a look at the backlinks tab and filter by ‘one link per domain’. You’ll find a list of sites linking to your site – from here, type ‘.jpg’ into the ‘include’ search bar and you’ll find a list of domains linking directly to your image files – therefore, passing no value to the main site. Your job is to find the links to images from good sites, and get them updated to include a relevant link directly to a page on your site.
This can be a bit of a slog, but it’s a worthwhile slog – once you’ve narrowed the links down to a nice list of prospects, now is the time to send them the perfect outreach email. I’d shoot for something like:
“Hello,
This is Sam from X, I’m writing regarding this page – https://theirpage.com/this-page/
The image of the X that you’ve used (above the 5th paragraph) is actually an original image that we produced ourselves, therefore we’d ask that attribution is given. If you could please add the following to the page so readers know the source of the image:
Image courtesy of X (https://x.com/money-page)
We would really appreciate this update.
Thanks,
Sam”
Easy enough right? But what if you aren’t sitting on a mountain of opportunities? Well, maybe you need better original imagery. Or:
Creating the opportunities.
Bloggers, news publications, official websites – they all desperately need imagery to use within their content. They need the images to be free to use and nice looking. Often they’ll just pick the first image they see on Google Images without properly doing their research.
Luckily for you, this means there is a great link building opportunity here. Let me show you how:
Google images
Start by taking a look on Google Images for images of things that you have original imagery of – say you’re a brewery and you have a nice picture of some beer taps. I’d jump onto GI and look for the following:
Notice how the 2nd image is from Flickr? That’s great for us, because typically Flickr users will specify that their images are under the Creative Commons license. What that means is that it’s fine for sites to use the image, as long as they provide attribution. And guess what? More often than not, they don’t. Right click on the image and click “Search with Google lens”, and you’ll quickly see what I mean (sometimes that doesn’t work, you can use ChatGPT for this instead). Any time you find this image used without proper attribution, this is an opportunity.
You’re probably thinking – big whoop, how does this get me links? How about you try this:
- Reach out to this website and tell them they’re using an image which requires attribution to be used legally (without telling them the proper attribution to use, they should know about this if they’re using an image from the internet. Bad webmaster)
- Offer them your image of beer taps as a replacement (this is where you get your client to take a nice image)
- Tell them what attribution you want (Image courtesy of X client – https://yoursite.com/money-page)
- Link goes live, high 5 yourself.
The brilliant thing about this tactic is that once one attribution link goes live, it gives your pitch even more credibility and makes it even more likely that other sites will include your image as a replacement. You can cut to the chase with your outreach, referring them to the article with your image and link and getting them to do the same as everyone else. It can even spread organically if you get enough placements live.
Planting the seeds to autopilot this.
You might be thinking – this is great, but it sounds like a lot of work. If you feel that way then maybe link building isn’t the game for you. However, there is way to automate link acquisition from images somewhat – upload your original imagery to Flickr and list it as CC with attribution, specifying that people need to link to your chosen URL.
The great thing about uploading images to Flickr is that it helps them to rank in Google Images, so even more people will find your image. Once you’ve got a few images on Flickr you can just do a monthly search to look for any websites who haven’t provided any attribution when using your link. Easy as that,
