The SEO industry rightly places great emphasis on the value of earning new, high quality backlinks. That's understandable because it's effective in boosting rankings, it's what clients want and it's easily measurable.

And once backlinks are earned, we generally move on to our next campaign.

However, we often fail to appreciate the treasure trove of opportunities to be found in our existing backlinks – and the additional benefits we can get from them. These include:

• Building relationships with sites that already see you in a positive light so that you can provide content tailored to their needs, and earn more backlinks and mentions in the future
• Identifying what types of content attracts quality backlinks
• Identifying market niches that you can target with specific content
• Creating a core group of sites and influencers that you can approach to give a head start to any new backlinks campaigns you run in the future.

Existing Backlinks - an example

Long-term SEN member, Stephan Logan, the owner of Indigo Instruments, has been successful in growing his online business selling scientific equipment. Their lab supplies, glassware and molecular models have been sold to Google, Microsoft, IBM and North America's leading universities. You'd expect then that the website would attract backlinks from a wealth of scientific and academic sources – and it does.

But you probably wouldn't expect backlinks from a leading museum, a garden design magazine, a homebrew academy, a bookseller, even a restaurant business magazine.

Yet all of these are found in Indigo Instrument's backlink profile. And they are all relevant and powerful referring domains which emit a silent but influential call on the Web.

Let's take...