Proper link building has become something of a lost art these days. The people who used to specialize in it used techniques firmly branded as black hat today. The people who do it today tend to say that good content brings its own links. Good content marketing, they say, is its own reward.
Link building manually still exists today, it’s just difficult. You need to do it right, lest you fall victim to the penalties that come from spam links. HubSpot is a useful tool for this purpose, though much of what you’ll be doing is using it for reporting and competitive research.
Methods for Building Links
Before we get into how to use HubSpot for link reporting, let’s talk about how to build links these days. Once you know the process, you’ll be able to recognize how valuable a tool is in the process.
Process: Blog posting. By maintaining a steady blog, you’re already laying the groundwork for links. Each time a reader with a blog of their own comes across a post of yours they like, they may link to it. No effort on your side necessary.
In addition, you can consider every blog post you make to be an opportunity for a link. The more targets you have for links, the more links you’ll be able to get. At that point, it’s just a matter of numbers.
When you have a successful blog, you can leverage that success into guest posting opportunities. Post on other sites to build brand and name recognition, as well as links back to your site. Keep in mind that Google has tightened its stance on large-scale guest posting purely for link acquisition, so focus on quality placements on genuinely relevant, authoritative sites rather than volume.
It’s also worth noting that Google has continued to refine its ability to credit brand mentions as implied links, even when no explicit link exists. This means that even if a guest post or press mention doesn’t include a direct link to your site, building brand awareness still carries real SEO value.
Process: Producing off-site content. Guest posting falls under this heading as well, but there are additional techniques worth exploring. Writing reviews of books or resources by industry veterans and posting them in relevant communities can earn you links and credibility. Creating data-driven studies or original research is one of the most effective link-earning strategies in 2026, as journalists and bloggers regularly cite original data.
You can also create multimedia content such as videos hosted on YouTube or presentations shared on SlideShare. Podcasts have also become a strong link-building channel - being a guest on industry podcasts typically earns you a link from the show’s episode page. These platforms give you opportunities to post content that links back to your site from high-authority domains.
Process: Digital PR and social interactions. This category has grown significantly in importance. One of the most reliable methods is using a service like HARO (Help a Reporter Out) or its newer alternatives such as Connectively or Qwoted, where you respond to journalist queries in your industry. A reporter working on a story will quote you as an expert, earning you both a mention and often a direct link.
If you write an ebook or publish original research, sending out promotional copies for reviews can generate links from bloggers and content creators in your space.
Relationship-based outreach - networking with bloggers, collaborating on content, or co-authoring resources - remains one of the most sustainable ways to earn links over time. Attention earns you links, whether they come immediately or as an artifact of prolonged interaction.
Using the HubSpot Links Tool
The first thing you need to do is have HubSpot set up for your site. If you haven’t already, head over to HubSpot’s website and get started.
Once you have everything configured, navigate to your analytics or reporting section. HubSpot’s interface has evolved considerably over the years, so the exact path may differ slightly depending on your plan tier, but link and traffic source data is accessible through the Traffic Analytics tools and various SEO-related reports within the platform.
HubSpot will provide you with data on inbound links, including the total number of links pointing to your site, the number of unique linking domains, and domain authority metrics that help you assess the quality of those links. Keep in mind that HubSpot pulls much of its backlink data from third-party sources, so for deeper link analysis, it’s often worth pairing it with a dedicated tool like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz, all of which have become significantly more powerful in recent years.
Within the link data, you can filter by date and domain, see how much referral traffic each linking domain is sending, and get a picture of which links are actually driving visitors versus those that are purely for SEO value.
Note: if you have the domains for your competitors handy, you can look up a similar link report for them as well. This gives you a picture of where you stand compared to your competition.
By looking through the list of domains linking to you and your competitors, you begin to see how spotty coverage actually is. You can use the links your competitors have built to identify sites worth pursuing for your own outreach. Build a list of potential targets and put the strategies above to work.
