Insights from GetRanking’s Jonathan Bara: Scaling Link Building to Drive Inbound
In today’s global market, standalone link building falls short for growth-focused businesses like yours. Instead, integrate it with SEO, paid campaigns, and PR to boost rankings and conversions.
This guide provides great insights by Jonathan Bara, founder of GetRanking, and trusted strategic partner to Leadsourcing. Our CMO Jackee Wong collaborated with Jonathan at GetRanking (then Close Your Gap) at when Jackee led growth for unicorns ExpressVPN and RedotPay.
Non-English markets like DACH and Eastern Europe are often overlooked, yet they offer untapped growth for companies ready to invest in localized strategies. This piece breaks down proven tactics from market selection to automation, including a campaign that doubled traffic in Europe. Ready to scale internationally and turn backlinks into qualified leads?
Introduction
When it comes to international link building, one thing I’ve learned after a decade in the industry is this: standalone link building no longer wins the game.
The best results come when SEO and link acquisition are fully aligned with every other marketing effort, from paid campaigns to social media and PR. When all channels move in the same direction, your backlinks don’t just boost rankings; they multiply conversions.
1. Starting Smart: Choosing the Right Markets and Foundation
Before any link building starts, the first step is to determine which markets actually make business sense.
We always begin with data, using Ahrefs to identify the most profitable and high-volume regions. Typically, markets like DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) are prime targets because of their strong purchasing power, provided the competition isn’t excessive.
To put this into perspective, Germany’s total purchasing power is projected to exceed €2,558.9 billion in 2025, with an average per capita purchasing power of around €30,555. This makes it one of Europe’s most lucrative digital markets, where high-intent audiences justify larger SEO and link building budgets.
But I always keep an open eye on Eastern Europe, which often turns out to be a hidden gem: solid search demand, lower competition, and more flexible link building environments.
That said, no GEO strategy can compensate for weak SEO fundamentals.
I often compare it to building a house, GEO is the roof, but if your SEO foundation isn’t solid, the entire structure will collapse.
That’s why we never launch international link campaigns without first ensuring:
- On-page SEO and content are fully optimized
- The site’s technical foundation is strong
- TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU pages are strategically identified
High competition markets almost always translate into higher marketing and link acquisition costs. The best strategy is to balance potential demand with feasibility and ROI.
2. Identifying High-Quality GEO-Targeted Sites
When it comes to selecting link partners, quality and relevance beat raw metrics every time.
We stick to the 80/20 rule — 80% of SEO success comes from choosing the right sites.
We evaluate websites based on:
- Real editorial teams and consistent publication activity
- Steady or growing traffic trends (via Ahrefs or SimilarWeb)
- Healthy outbound link profile – no spammy link swaps
- Visibility in AI Overviews (AIO) – a rising signal of topical authority
In recent years, we’ve seen a clear shift: news and media sites are becoming more valuable than purely niche blogs. They’re quoted more frequently in LLMs and AI-generated results, which means they’re now influencing both SEO and AI citation visibility.
3. A Successful International Campaign: The Hostinger Case
A great example is our work with Hostinger, one of the leading global players in the web hosting industry.
Our focus was on Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands, three high-value markets with distinct search behavior and competition levels.
The winning formula combined:
- A solid SEO foundation and consistent marketing alignment
- A clear focus on MOFU and BOFU pages (not just top-of-funnel content)
- Localized keyword research to uncover intent-driven opportunities
- Partnerships with tech, B2B, and marketing websites, including national media outlets
- A priority on sites with strong editorial trust and at least a few hundred first-page rankings
Examples of acquired backlinks include:
- security-insider.de
tag24.de
zdnet.de
ausbildungspark.com - computable.nl
techzine.nl
directvermogen.nl
internetsuccesgids.nl - ratio.it
ilgiornaleditalia.it
Achieved Results (Oct 2024 – Oct 2025, according to Semrush):
- Germany: 50K → 100K average monthly traffic
- Italy: 20K → 80K average monthly traffic
- Netherlands: 30K → 50K average monthly traffic
4. Adapting to Language and Cultural Differences
Cultural nuances matter far more than most realize. In the US, aggressive anchor text strategies can quickly raise flags. But in Romania, for instance, Google tends to be more permissive with exact-match anchors.
That’s why we adapt not just our tactics but also our content style per market.
For example, we might publish:
“5 Best WordPress Hosting Providers in Italy”
rather than reusing a global version of the same article.
Localization adds authenticity, and authenticity drives performance.
5. The Power of Localized Content in Link Building and AI Visibility
Content is still the driving force of effective link building, but in today’s world of AI-generated content, originality and localization are everything.
We make a conscious effort to enrich each article with local data, statistics, or references that reinforce its authority and relevance. When everyone else is publishing recycled AI text, adding credible localized insights makes your content stand out, for both humans and algorithms.
Localized, trustworthy content also has a higher chance of being recognized and cited by LLMs (Large Language Models) like ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overviews. That’s where SEO visibility and AI visibility start to overlap.
6. Brand Mentions & Content Formats
We’ve observed a major shift in how brand mentions influence visibility, both in traditional GEO SEO and within LLM-driven search results.
In about 80% of cases, we now see stronger performance when the brand is mentioned in context and with specificity — for example, “Hostinger AI website builder” instead of just “Hostinger.”
Formats like “Top 10 Hosting Providers in 2025” continue to outperform because they are highly scannable, easy to reference, and naturally attract backlinks.
Another proven format is “X vs Y” content, such as “Hostinger vs Competitor.”
This comparison-style content captures buyer-intent traffic and frequently earns organic citations from other publications, a strong signal for GEO-specific trust and AI-driven topical authority.
The Ahrefs “AI Overview Brand Correlation” study (analyzing 75,000 brands) found:
- Branded web mentions had the strongest correlation (0.664) with brand visibility in AI Overviews, far higher than linking metrics.
- Branded anchors (0.527) and branded search volume (0.392) were also strong correlates.
- In contrast, traditional link metrics like number of backlinks (0.218) or referring domains (0.295) showed much weaker correlation to AI brand visibility.
- The study also demonstrated that brands in the top quartile of web mentions saw up to 10× more AI Overview mentions than those in lower quartiles.
In short: content mentions across the web and descriptive brand anchor usage matter more for AI visibility than purely pulling link metrics.
7. Measuring Success Across SEO and AI Metrics
For traditional SEO, we continue to rely on Ahrefs and Semrush to track:
- Growth in referring domains
- Keyword visibility per country
- Organic traffic
- Tracking AI visibility
When it comes to AI-driven visibility, the field is still evolving.
It’s still early days, but we’re already seeing a correlation between media site links and AI citation frequency.
8. Missed Opportunities for B2B SaaS Companies
Many B2B SaaS companies still treat link building as a standalone SEO tactic , missing its potential to turn SEO and GEO visibility into qualified leads.
With tools like Leadsourcing, teams can identify which companies discover their brand through search visibility and trigger personalized outreach based on that intent.
The biggest missed opportunities are:
- Not aligning link-building with ICP-focused pages
- Overlooking how GEO authority contributes to demand generation
- Failing to connect SEO insights with outbound sales efforts
When visitor intelligence and outreach automation work together, link building becomes more than an SEO metric, it becomes a growth channel.