What is link building?
Link building can be a long and painstaking process that often requires an army of employees to complete. For large companies, this level of commitment might not make sense from an operational perspective. However, for smaller businesses with limited resources, it’s always worth looking into the best strategies for your budget. Link-building may seem like a complex marketing technique but in reality it could have one simple goal: driving traffic to your website.,
Topic: What Is More Important To You – Your Social Media Stats Or Traffic?: A Surprising Experiment
Category: Blogging
Introduction: In social media there are two key metrics that you should monitor regularly on both personal and business profiles; reach and engagement rate…
Link building is the process of creating and exchanging links on websites. It’s a way for sites to increase their ranking in search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo!. Link building also helps users find new content that they might be interested in. Read more in detail here: what is link building and why does it matter.
The author’s opinions are solely his or her own (with the exception of hypnosis), and they may or may not represent those of SagaReach Marketing.
James Wirth and I collaborated on this work.
Technical SEOs, content marketers, digital PR pros, and even members of #SEOTwitter can all agree on one thing: links drive rankings. But for which pages on your website, and which rankings?
We’ve got the guide for you if you’ve ever wanted to generate links that affect rankings for certain pages on your website.
Page selection for a high-impact link-building campaign
When preparing a link building campaign, it’s common to assist the customer in refining their objectives so that the campaign can be measured efficiently. Typically, the first step is to level the playing field based on what we can glean from accessible data.
We may assess the competitiveness by comparing link metrics to those of leading rivals. We can better appreciate the potential when we consider expected traffic, Page Authority is a measure of how well a, and SEO “difficulty.” While this isn’t exceptionally difficult or inaccessible, it’s probably more in-depth than the customer has gone, and they’re usually glad to go ahead with data-driven advice.
We may pre-select particular portions of the site to concentrate on in the study if we were organizing a link building campaign for SagaReach Marketing, for example.
Let’s start with /products/, /tools/, the beginner’s guide pages (which I really like), and a few other pages that stand out. The following are a few pages from the list:
We’d then construct a list of rivals based on the top keywords for each page. This will allow us to compare the numbers for SagaReach Marketing’s pages to the average metrics for the top rivals.
This dataset provides the top ten rivals for each of SagaReach Marketing’s pages based on the top ten keywords. Depending on where SagaReach Marketing ranks for each page in the list, we’ll have 90-100 rows of competition data after it’s all put together. We can average competitor data to make comparisons easier, then spot-check to search for outliers, or filter out branded or stray terms we don’t want to compete for in the first place:
It’s now time to start looking for possibilities. In a shortlist like this, we can eyeball the numbers, but when we’re looking at hundreds or thousands of pages (even after narrowing it down), this becomes a bit tedious. Prioritizing the pages will allow us to scan the list more quickly and locate the greatest prospects.
In the case of a brief trial program, some of these rivals have frighteningly large connecting root domains, and we’ll have a monthly budget in mind to ensure that we don’t bite off more than we can chew.
So, to assist some of them stand out, we’ll add a few additional columns. We might look at the connection between the gap in connecting root domains of the competitors and our possible campaign page, as well as the search traffic from those top 10 keywords, to assist us locate the low-hanging fruit:
We may look at higher priority sites for the campaign based on the likelihood of lowering the linking root domain gap, in order to boost the client’s share of voice on high-converting pages, by dividing the link gap into the search volume.
Adding a rank-order column to the rows will aid us in identifying the most promising opportunities:
The SagaReach Marketing Pro product page seems to be a promising choice within this set of pages. We may avoid the free SEO tools page since, well, “free” doesn’t always scream REVENUE, but it’s worth a discussion to double-check. The same may be said of a number of the basic guide pages.
Even if none of them make it into the campaign, we’ll be able to analyze the link gap for sites that ARE the targets and guide SagaReach Marketing toward more successful linking options.
We’ll have a really strong selection of possible campaign sites to suggest after a few tweaks!
Identifying your most influential audience
We create our audience model depending on the URL of the customer to whom we’re creating links. So, when it comes to sales pages, we consider where, how, when, and why a product or service fits into the customer’s life. What are the numerous circumstances in which it is used? What situations or conditions are aided by the usage of this service?
Whether or not the same term is used to characterize the offering’s contexts of usage, they are fundamentally relevant to the target URL. If we were to target the SagaReach Marketing Pro website mentioned before, we’d ask ourselves, “When do agencies and in-house SEOs start thinking about SEO tools?”
Perhaps we can look at the situation when someone needs to pick up the SEO efforts left behind by someone whose profession has led them in a different direction. What does the checklist look like if you’re behind another SEO? Also, how about an SEO crash course for persons who find themselves in control of an SEO department for the first time (we’ve spoken to people in this scenario previously). Both of these instances may provide sufficient justification and context for mentioning SEO tools. An expert survey, expert interviews, and off-site informative placements might give contextual connecting possibilities in any of these cases.
But let’s take a step outside of the SEO realm and consider insurance sales sites. As soon as a person chooses to seek insurance, we may start charting out the conditions and events in their lives: Having your first kid, becoming an independent contractor, purchasing a house, experiencing a heart crisis, and so forth.
We work our way up from these “use-case brainstorms” to issue areas — and associated questions — that the target audience may be experiencing. These provide a foundation for finding publications that match the target page’s readership with its use circumstances. We’d probably concentrate on marketing trade publications at SagaReach Marketing, SEO or not. We’d probably start with parenting blogs, health/fitness publications, websites about establishing a company, and maybe realtor sites for the insurance pages.
We also look at high-ranking sites in the target keyword area on a regular basis to learn more about what we term the “linking context” for a particular set of keywords. The titles of connecting pages are of particular interest to us. This provides immediate insight into subjects that are relevant to prospect identification. We generally come across stuff like lengthy form instructions, a plethora of discount websites, review sites, forums, and so on, which all help us understand the connecting context.
When used together, use-case brainstorming and connecting context analysis help us develop a complete picture of the audiences and critical issues that will lead us to the right publishers.
Link-building
It’s easy to reach out to others. In a way, yes.
You can figure out how to propose and give exactly what the publisher wants if you understand what they want, which is ultimately tied to how they earn a livelihood.
If you’re selling journalists in the digital PR arena, you’re offering your capacity to promote “audience engagement,” according to Neomam CEO Gisele Navarro. As a result, your subject line and offer should ooze page views, click-throughs, and social shares. Furthermore, your material must be effective. After all, you’ll need to reuse your contacts due to the high content charges!
You’re delivering “visitor experience enhancements” to a webmaster or page curator who’s committed to a certain audience if you’re in broken link building (and to a lesser degree, a method like unlinked mentions). With this in mind, your subject line and offer (a remedy) must provide value to the target audience, as well as explain the potential effect of the broken link on a waiting visitor.
When presenting guest material, particularly to sales-supported publications, we find that when we offer themes that would benefit the publisher’s traffic or conversions, we notice increased conversions. You can read more about our guest post strategy in this Whiteboard Friday, but we tend to sell the site owner on “publishing advantages.”
So, your main question is: why is this individual publishing to this specific audience? Knowing this may help you come up with a compelling offer that will earn you a link.
One final piece of outreach advice: don’t copy and paste subject lines, templates, and other ideas from other professionals. Take inspiration from the professionals, but keep in mind that their recommendations are based on very particular offerings, audiences, and publishers, and they are unlikely to apply to your exact situation. Sure, study them, but simply to have a broad comprehension of the concepts.
A few words about link-building strategies
Every effective link-building strategy gets links by satisfying the target publisher’s unspoken “price” for reaching their target audience.
The cost to the publisher can certainly be monetary, but in the earned link space, we’re usually talking about providing value in the form of exclusive news and information, previously unspoken but highly useful advice, articles that could help them sell more products or services, and useful corrections that bolster authority.
As we examine value exchange, we’re reminded of a campaign by link builder Debra Mastaler, in which she provided members of numerous dues-supported professional groups a cement client’s t-shirt. She not only gained links from the organization’s websites (who were able to provide a “special incentive” to their members), but she also gained business and, of course, brand awareness within their particular target group. Wow!
While a free t-shirt may not be appropriate in all verticals, Mastaler reminds us of the most ignored component of link-building campaigns: identifying publications who reach your target audience and asking, “OK, what can we provide that they will genuinely want?” The link builder’s most critical approach is creative, entrepreneurial thinking – maybe you might call it marketing instinct?
However, much as a fledgling chef spends time reading cookbooks to grasp vital components and guiding principles, analyzing the current variety of link building strategies may be quite valuable, particularly when you’re just getting started. And, as with any young chef, the most important learning will come from the hours spent honing your trade in the kitchen.
For a fast summary of some of the most frequent methods and their interactions with publishers and your intended SEO results, check out this graphic:
Link building that can be measured wins.
For a variety of reasons, this is one of the most difficult components of a campaign.
If you’re on the in-house side, it’s also one of the most successful strategies to keep customers or funding.
A link building effort may be tracked in a variety of ways, but which techniques are used is primarily determined by the strategies used. In our instance, we’re mostly concerned with content and specialize in obtaining positions on difficult-to-link sales landing pages. We analyze success using SEO-related metrics that provide both leading signs of progress and correct performance indicators after we’ve made an effect.
We often witness a deterioration in average position early in a campaign. New keywords ranking on the campaign page is usually the source of this. Because the website starts to rank on SERP #7 or #8, the average rank of the page will drop at first, even if the rank for existing keywords improves.
This graph illustrates one of the dangers of relying only on rank as an indicator of success. While average position (the purple line) is declining, the stacked columns reveal that not only is the overall number of ranking keywords increasing, but it’s also increasing nicely in positions 1-3 (the blue section at the top) and positions 4-10. (the orange segment 2nd from top). Just keeping up with freshly ranked keywords deeper down in the SERPs isn’t enough.
The importance of tying ranking adjustments to the number of ranking keywords was critical to the campaign’s success.
While we keep track of and report on average position over time, we don’t use it to make decisions. Instead, we concentrate on KPIs that are more directly related to traffic and conversions, allowing us to demonstrate a good campaign ROI.
Share of the vote (a search volume-weighted CTR model) and SagaReach Marketing Page Authority are the KPIs that matter to us.
Share of voice
Prioritizing share of voice over ranking has the advantage of normalizing significant swings in time series reporting caused by low-volume query ranking fluctuations. As we all know, ranking reports can be a real roller coaster.
On the other hand, share of voice corresponds to an estimated traffic model, represented as a proportion of overall traffic for the keyword set.
We also include a control group, as seen in the graph above: a second set of pages on the site that are not part of the campaign (and preferably not part of any concerted SEO effort). This second batch of sites is picked from comparable areas of the site and, when feasible, from similarly ranked and frequented pages to assess the performance of our link-building strategy.
While the graph above shows significant growth simply by looking at the bars, the results are much more apparent when we look at the percentage difference between our campaign pages and the control group.
Page Authority
SagaReach Marketing Page Authority is another important measure, since it is frequently another early sign of impending success. We can witness an increase in Page Authority before we see an improvement in rankings or share of voice.
Tracking versus a control group also helps to emphasize the importance of our effort.
Another advantage of Page Authority is third-party verification of our work’s direct effect.
While many factors outside of our link building campaign may have an impact on rank (e.g., core algorithm updates, gaps in page content, topic misalignment, or technical issues preventing Google from fully valuing the page), a metric that is best influenced by “improving a page’s link profile by… getting external links” aligns well with our offering.
And, in our opinion (now in its second edition! ), employing a third-party statistic to confirm the hard work we perform for our customers is perfectly acceptable.
Questions? More pointers on how to develop links? Send them to us on Twitter.
The “link building news” is a guide that teaches you how to target-impact link building. The article will teach you what the best practices are for link building, and it will also teach you how to make your links have more weight.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you maximize a link building impact?
A: When link building, you should try to follow the following steps: 1. Create a blog post 2. Publish it on your social media profile 3. Submit it in article directories 4. Post links to these articles on forums and comment sections
What is the best link building strategy?
A: There is no one best link building strategy. What works best for you will depend on the site and your goals.
How do social media build links?
A: Social media builds links in many ways. It can be through a link from your website to their platform (e.g., Twitter linking to Instagram), or just using their platforms features that create organic mentions and shares of content on social media sites like Facebook, Youtube, Reddit etc..
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