I spent a lot of time working on ideas for content that would generate backlinks to the SLH site. To do this, I looked at what other websites, including news sites, were linking to. I noticed that they often quoted different student loan debt statistics, like the total number of borrowers or average debt per borrower, in stories.

 

However, I noticed that they seemed to have different values and sources, which suggested to me that reporters and writers were having a difficult time finding a trustworthy source that was easy to access.

With this, I came up with the idea of putting a wide array of student loan debt statistics on one page as an easy resource for writers to refer to. I figured it may get a few links and be helpful to some.

 

I published the student loan debt statistics page (see here). I added some internal links to the new page within our content to seed it a bit. Soon enough, the page found its way onto the first page in Google as there was little competition.

 

Then, the backlinks from sites started pouring in from all over the place. We’d see new backlinks added almost daily through our reports, many from noteworthy and authoritative sites like Bloomberg, CNBC, Business Insider, Buzzfeed, PBS.org, and many more.

 

Results:

 

White active, Ahrefs showed over 4,000 referring domains with backlinks to this page. Nearly all these links were generated organically and without outreach and other link building campaigns

 

Not only did this page end up ranking number one for “student loan debt statistics” like I had hoped, but it also ranked in top three for highly-searched terms like “student loan debt.” This resulted in the page generating tens of thousands of visitors to the site each month.