Broken link building works because you're doing the site owner a favor. Dead links waste crawl budget, frustrate users, and signal poor maintenance. When you offer a working replacement, you solve a real problem and earn a contextual link in return. Start by finding targets in your niche. Use Ahrefs Site Explorer or Screaming Frog to crawl competitor backlink profiles or resource pages in your industry. Filter for 404 responses or check the Wayback Machine to see what content used to exist. Look for editorial pages—listicles, resource directories, industry roundups—not comment sections or low-authority forums. A page with 15 outbound links and two broken ones is a better prospect than a page with one dead link buried in footer boilerplate. Next, recreate or identify your replacement asset. If the dead page was a statistics post, build a better one with updated data. If it was a tool that shut down, your SaaS might fit. If it was a how-to guide, write a more comprehensive version. The key is relevance and quality—don't pitch a generic blog post to replace a niche dataset. Outreach is where most people fail. Email the site owner or editor with a short, specific message: mention the broken link by anchor text or URL, show you understand their audience, and offer your replacement as a no-obligation suggestion. Avoid templates that sound like mass mail. Personalize the first sentence with something about their site or a recent update. Response rates vary—expect 5–15% success on cold outreach, higher if you have an existing relationship or brand recognition. At Ottawa SEO, we run broken link campaigns for clients in finance, legal, and SaaS verticals where editorial links move the needle. We prioritize domains with DR 40+ and actual traffic, not vanity metrics. The method works best when you already have strong content assets; if you're building from scratch just to chase a broken link, the ROI rarely justifies the effort. Focus on pages where you can genuinely add value, and the links follow naturally.