LINKBUILDING
Highlighting Industry Success & Trends
1 Hello,
Cory Collins here with Page One Power. As a business, we’ve specialized in building links for the last five years.
We’ve lived at the bleeding edge, experiencing the trends, evolutions, and changes firsthand.
But we’re not the only ones within the SEO field— far from it. The industry is graced with a wonderful community that continually shares best practices, case studies, and data. We don’t believe a single group can represent the whole of the industry.
To that end, each year we ask our friends across the digital marketing industry to share a story that highlights a campaign that led to successful, valuable links. Even better if they can share a repeatable process or tactic which they’ve used to help clients secure the links they deserve.
These stories are dual-purpose:
1. Highlight successes and positive stories within our industry. 2. Understand where SEOs, content marketers, digital marketers, PR, and even in-house marketers have had success in link acquisition.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Every campaign will need to be customized to the client, industry, audience, and unique value proposition. But gather enough stories and trends will emerge.
This year, I recognized five types of campaigns digital marketers leveraged to secure links, visibility, and marketing success for their clients:
1. Content Promotion 2. Relationships 3. Publicity and Mentions 4. Innovation and Creative Approach 5. Business Development.
In this eBook, you’ll find stories relating to each category, as well as an explanation from myself on the general concept of how these strategies work.
I hope you enjoy, learn something new, and walk away with an understanding of how digital marketers secure meaningful links for clients.
2 Why focus on links? Why ask digital marketers, content marketers, SEOs, and PR experts about links?
Links are vital to the web as a whole – which is why Google uses links as a strong ranking signal. Without links, the internet wouldn’t work. And as long as links continue to serve this fundamental role in connecting the web, links are going to be valuable online.
This hasn’t changed over the last five years — what has changed is Google’s ability to detect manipulation.
Links need to be placed on relevant sites with an engaged audience. They need to be editorially created, and function as the endorsement they’re intended to be.
Links aren’t easy to secure. They don’t happen naturally.
In a recent partnered study BuzzSumo and Moz analyzed the shares and links of 1,000,000 articles. 750,000 of the articles were chosen specifically because they received on average over 4,000 shares — yet despite these thousands of shares, 50% of the well-shared articles still had zero links (src: https://moz.com/blog/content-shares-and- links-insights-from-analyzing-1-million-articles).
If you’re going to invest your time online, why not promote your work strategically? Why not market the good work you do to the humans your business is designed to serve?
We believe in links created by humans, for humans. We’ve seen over and over again the reward for this work. There are no shortcuts, and precious few quick wins. But the wins we experience last.
If you’re interested in optimizing your performance online – and securing the links you deserve – this eBook is designed to help you understand how to secure links that matter.
3 LINKS NEED TO BE VALUABLE, IN 3WAYS
1 2 3
The link should be The link should be The link should valuable to the site valuable to the site be valuable to the linking, as it directs being linked, as the humans clicking their audience to a link is a citation from the link, as they’re worthwhile, relevant a worthwhile website taken to a page that page. and passes potential adds value to their referral traffic. experience online.
4 CONTENT PROMOTION
If links are the fundamental connection between websites, then content is the fundamental substance of websites.
Content marketing has been around practically since humans WAYS first created text. The digital age has only empowered this form of marketing, creating a more robust distribution and hosting center.
Content creation, promotion, and marketing is often tied to link acquisition – for good reason. Links represent an endorsement, a vote of confidence, from a site to their audience. This means if you want to earn worthwhile links, you need to be worthy of a citation from another reputable site.
A standard method to earn citations from other websites is to create an informative piece of content popular amongst your (and their) audience. In the joint study by BuzzSumo and Moz, Steve Rayson determined the content most likely to secure links is research-backed content and authoritative, opinion-forming journalism.
Content promotion starts with content worth promoting. THE FOLLOWING SUCCESS STORIES ILLUSTRATE THE VALUE OF CONTENT. ENJOY.
5 My favorite campaign from 2015 was when we tried to push ourselves beyond our comfort zone.
At NeoMam we have been sticking to the static infographic for a long time mainly because it works so well.
But in the second half of 2015, we moved into video and saw some great results. So with this campaign we did for BuddyLoans we decided to try something new with the video DANNY format. We followed our usual ideas process and came up with an idea.
ASHTON The plan was an infographic plus video but with this project we decided to use live video, in combination with the animation style we had done many times before.
With that in mind, we got in touch with personal trainer and swimming coach Alistair Mills and asked whether he would be our expert and model for the video.
The end result looked great. NEOMAM And thankfully the results matched the extra time we invested to make this project extra special: STUDIOS Number of editorial features: 80+ Estimated coverage views: 2.39M+ Social media shares: 20.6K+
If you’re interested in learning more about this campaign we wrote a blog post about it: http://neomam.com/blog/neomam- hall-of-fame-how-much-energy-you-need-to-burn-off-8-junk- foods/
6 Right at the beginning of the year, I ran a big ‘content blitz’ campaign on behalf of my parents’ IT recruitment agency - they were celebrating their 25th anniversary so we published 25 posts in one month to mark the occasion. I had high hopes, as we put a lot of work and thought into what to publish, there were a few interesting examples that led to additional linking opportunities and also performed well outside of SEO (e.g. via social media):
1) The Coworking Spaces of South Wales Coworking is becoming a popular trend at the moment, and we STEVE realised that no one had created a resource showing the locations of all the spaces locally - so we made our own. In addition to listing them all alphabetically with info and photos, we created a custom Google MORGAN Map with colour-coded markers corresponding with each space’s branding. Even though we ran this content campaign in January 2015, we are continually updating it on an on-going basis.
In addition to being shared a lot on social media (especially Twitter), which we tweet every time we update it (letting the coworking spaces know that they’ve been added - often resulting in them RTing it), we were asked to guest blog about it from Cardiff’s main entrepreneurship community’s website. Said community is very strict on self-promotion in their dedicated Facebook group, but a few of its members have shared it a few times - and they’ve even encouraged me to share it myself! It’s also been added to a coworking wiki. It’s genuinely been considered a handy resource by many people, and considered a go-to MORGAN resource for some folks - some of whom might be potential clients or candidates for the business. ONLINE 2) What Do 16 South Wales IT Employers Look For in an Employee? Outside our industry I’ve barely seen expert roundups used at all. Also, whereas SEOs would ask other SEOs for their opinion, what’s stopping MARKETING people from asking past/current clients and even potential future clients? So in our case, instead of asking other recruiters (i.e. potential competitors) to contribute, we asked IT employers (i.e. potential clients) instead. The result was great.
Many of them tweeted it, a few of them shared it from their sites/blogs, and one contributor actually came on-board as a client (“thanks for asking me to contribute... oh by the way, I actually need help recruiting someone...”)
We tried the other way around as well (What Do South Wales IT Employees Look For in an Employer?) but we had fewer responses, probably because people weren’t motivated to contribute and maybe even because they were worried about their current employer’s reaction if they saw it - but the employer side worked a treat. It’s got me thinking about doing more of these, but just being careful not asking dozens or even 100+ people, which might be considered overkill.
7 As I mentioned with last year’s example we typically try to focus on link building campaigns that will be repeatable and customizable across different industries, so that we can“fail proof” and mitigate risk for content assets. We also try to have assets that have keywords a client (or our own site) would want to rank for, so that the document itself drives organic traffic and the links will tend to be more on-topic.
That’s a tricky combination of boxes to tick off :), but one type TOM of asset we used quite a bit in the past year was “State of X” types of industry reports (with X being a whole industry, or possibly a sub-set of an industry – you’ll want to do some DEMERS research into who, if anyone, has done this kind of work previously and where the “white space” and most interesting data can be found).
Ideally, these would contain some proprietary, anonymized data that you can provide, but even if not you can usually hire a writer/researcher to pull the data from a variety of different sources and come up with something unique and interesting. From there you want to focus on a few areas: CORNERSTONE 1. Pull a list of any reporters who have covered your niche (even if it’s things like funding events for companies in your niche, trend stories about publicly traded companies CONTENT in your area, etc.).
2. Distill your report into a few really interesting and intriguing data points that you can use in a pitch email to the journalists who may be interested.
3. Create a nice, concise, sharable data visualization that can be easily shared and embedded into posts (your report will have a bunch of visualizations, hopefully, but this would be an additional infographic that you and other bloggers can include as an overview in short posts summarizing the study).
4. Line up a few guest post contributions (a la guestographics) to talk about specific aspects of the report in depth. If you have three really attention-grabbing bullets that will be interesting to folks in your niche, each of those can probably be teased out into a full post based on the data from your report.
5. Make the meat of the report easy to access (possibly as a full HTML page) but have a walled version of your report where you can collect emails. It may just be a simple difference of the PDF version being behind an email gate, or you may want to offer some additional
8 bonuses (e.g. the raw data from your survey if applicable, a video interview with your researcher or someone at TOM your company talking about the findings and DEMERS methodology, etc.) Even if you swing and miss at some of the bigger press outlets, by making contributions at relevant blogs you’ll have a few guaranteed links lined up, and with additional outreach, sharing the study with your list and social followers, and potentially doing some strategic paid social advertising for the asset you can get a lot of run out of a single asset while potentially having the same piece of content drive leads, get links, and rank for valuable organic terms in its own right. CORNERSTONE CONTENT
9 We worked with AccuRanker on creating Google Grump: https://www.accuranker.com/grump/
AccuRanker’s Google Grump rating is based on a unique algorithm, built to calculate the average number of rank changes, across the top 100 results per keyword. KRYSTIAN AccuRanker’s Google Grump monitors 28,000 randomly selected keywords split 50/50 between mobile and desktop. SZASTOK
ROCKETMILL
When the ranking changes increase the index jumps up and changes the mood. In the screenshot above Google’s mood is cautious, which indicates there is some activity, but nothing indicating a possible Google update.
We’ve then promoted the tool and have daily alerts to build the audience for AccuRanker, but also to gain coverage and links.
At the time of writing there are 46 unique referring domains pointing at the page according to Majestic. Majority of which are natural coverage in the SEO community.
All of these links are relevant and many are high quality, which would usually take a lot of time and effort to acquire.
10 I think the most successful (and fun) link building tactic I’ve worked on this past year was for Modernize. Basically we built out several of these large data driven articles, which have multiple accompanying graphics. They’re somewhere in between infographics and articles, but not quite one or the other.
Here’s an example: PETER https://modernize.com/home-ideas/18126/the-sun-on-social ATTIA 1 ROCKETMILL MODERNIZE
Basically, after we build them out (but before we publish them), we pitch them to top tier sites and offer them exclusivity in announcing them. Their version is not an exact duplicate of our own, but instead uses some of our assets and mentions us as the original source. Once someone agrees to publish it, we then make the post public on our own post.
Not only does this get us a link from large publications, but also several other syndicates that follow these sites to repurpose their posts. This has landed us on several top tier sites with a domain authority of 80+, including Mashable, Metro, and Daily Dot.
11 INDUSTRY RELATIONSHIPS
Marketing is about crafting messages and forming a relationship with your audience.
Links are a strong key performance indicator (KPI) in search and online marketing because links have a high barrier to entry.
To secure a link on a worthwhile site requires a strong value proposition. A link is an implied relationship — the site is essentially recommending your site to their audience.
If you’re working to secure links within your industry, you need to be working to form relationships with influencers, communities, publishers, and resource sites within your niche.
The stories below cover the power of relationships, especially in creating online connections and links.
Effective link acquisition should be integrated and collaborative with other marketing activities. If you’re actively working to form relationships online, don’t overlook link opportunities. THE FOLLOWING SUCCESS STORIES ILLUSTRATE THE VALUE OF RELATIONSHIPS. ENJOY.
12 Ironically, ever since we launched our SEO tool, we haven’t built a single link. Fortunately for us, other people have been building them for us.
PATRICK RELATIONSHIPS HATHAWAY
Whilst we haven’t spent a great deal of time actively ‘engaging influencers’, whenever a high profile name in the industry took an interest in our tool, we offered them as much help as we could and often gave them free licenses.
Mike King was one of the first people we gave a license to, and he has since mentioned us in dozens of conference talks and blog posts. Some of his ideas even take our product to new URL levels. PROFILER
Aleyda Solis is somewhat of a tool aficionado (she does runThe Marketer Toolbox, after all), and she showed a lot of interest when we reached out to her. Having Aleyda as a fan of URL Profiler has been a big win for us, as she does presentations all over the world, and blogs constantly.
Since she often blogs about tools and how to use them, she regularly mentions our product :)
13 We supported Matthew Barby when his excellent blog was just gaining traction. 18 months later he’s working for Hubspot. Guess who he links to in his first blog post.
PATRICK HATHAWAY I also reached out to Glenn Gabe to see if he’d be interested in checking out our tool, and gave him a 1-on-1 demo to show him what it could do. He’s since mentioned us numerous times on his own site and various others, including this post on Search Engine Land: URL PROFILER
The best thing about these links is that they are just a pleasant consequence of an otherwise worthwhile business relationship. These ‘influencers’ are both our exact target market and highly experienced in the field, which means the feedback they give us is just as valuable as any links.
But having these guys out there flying our flag, dropping links, shares and mentions all over the place, is extremely valuable for our brand and our business. And there’s not a link request email in sight.
14 At the end of 2015 I started working with a company called RoverPass (think Kayak for places to stay in the RV industry). They were struggling because nobody knew who they were and in the RV industry people hesitate to link to anyone they don’t know.
So I came up with a strategy to create a list of the best RV blogs and a badge (pictured below) for the bloggers mentioned so they could show off the badge on their site. BENJAMIN BECK
BENJAMINBECK.COM
Strategy Goals Get noticed and build relationships within the industry. Check! Build authority - who can pass up getting links? Check! Results 1. Post now ranks on the first page of Google 2. 12 Badges placed so far, which helps RoverPass’s backlink profile 3. 500+ blog post shares 4. 45 comments - mostly people wanting to be added to the post 5. Greatly increased our referral traffic from industry blogs
15 Out of sheer good fortune, we picked up links in the past year by giving product feedback and testimonials to companies whose tools or software we use.
For example we made suggestions to Pitchbox on improving the platform, not only did they implement them they codenamed the product update after our company - The ‘Kaizen’ update - PETE complete with a linkback. Go reach out to your partners and if they have a case study or testimonial page be proactive and ask if you can be listed with a CAMPBELL link back. Everybody wins.
KAIZEN You’re a winner! Hey, thanks!
16 Relationships and Content MKTG. Relationship building plays a key role for us when it comes to link building for our clients. Some of the strongest links and citations we secured last year, from sites including itv.com, thedivorcemagazine.co.uk, and a wealth of local and national news sites, came as a result of having strong relationships with editors, authors, and bloggers.
We’ve secured some great links, citations, and social shares from high profile sites, brands, and influencers in a number EMMA of industries through personalised, targeted outreach, and relationships. But not just strong links that provide “link juice”; links that deliver valuable referral visitors who then further NORTH engage with the brand or go on to convert.
One of the main ways we secure valuable links is through quality content marketing, ranging from guest content to high-end interactive content. Like most reputable agencies in modern SEO, we don’t waste time with low quality link building techniques, or anything that could be considered black or grey hat. With the results we’ve seen from our content marketing and outreach over the last two years, leaving old tactics in the past where they belong is a real no-brainer. KOOZAI Measurable Goals Another big shift we’ve seen over the last two years is the importance of goals and attribution when it comes to content and links.
Every piece of content, every outreach email, even every tweet we put out needs to have a specific goal that we can then measure. Otherwise, how can we call a top-quality piece of content a success? Are we looking for links, social shares, referral traffic, engagement, or conversions? Everything we do is closely tied to measureable goals that fit with the client’s needs and expectations.
We’ve stopped focusing on “link building” and started focusing on delivering the right results for our clients and our own site too.
We’ve made a conscious shift on our own blog from posting daily, to posting twice a week, to now posting when we have something of real value to deliver. That might mean we don’t post a new blog post this week, or it might mean we post two or three. But what we do know with much greater confidence is that when we do put up a new post, we will promote it to the right audiences and it will draw more eyeballs than a regular, twice-weekly post is likely to.
For me, link building in 2016 is about a continued shift in mentality that started maybe two or three years ago. It might sound tired, but it’s the truth; focus on quality content, measurable goals, and overall project strategy.
17 TYLER TAFELSKY
The greatest success I have had with link acquisition surrounds outreach and establishing real and meaningful connections.
BETTER In an effort to acquire links to my triathlon coaching and training website, Better Triathlete, I conducted much of TRIATHLETE my outreach by using Google to search queries like:
“triathlon inurl:blog” or “triathlon inurl:links”
This enabled me to pinpoint related sites that had a blog or links page - two primary sources of acquiring new backlinks.
After drilling down in the search results, reaching out to webmasters and site owners, and establishing connections, I have formed lasting guest blogging relationships as well as acquired several new static links from topically-relevant sources. In addition to acquiring new and valuable links to my site, I have also cultivated real relationships with influencers in the sport. This has helped to magnify Better Triathlete’s social outreach, as well as provide a number of different blogs and online publishing sites willing to host my content.
It should be an exciting 2016, to say the least.
18 PUBLICITY MENTIONS
Good links don’t happen in a vacuum.
Within marketing campaigns, if someone isn’t specifically tasked with the responsibility of securing links, links will be overlooked. This leads to valuable opportunities going to waste.
These opportunities can take a variety of forms:
• Online mentions • Proprietary image use • Testimonials • Interviews • Press coverage • Scholarships • Event participation/hosting • Unique research.
The goal is to find opportunities created by behavior you or your client is already engaging in, and make sure they’re leading to the links they deserve.
Links support other marketing initiatives, and other marketing – and publicity – can support link acquisition. If you or your client are regularly being mentioned, referenced, or featured in some way, you should ensure they’re being linked to as well. THE FOLLOWING SUCCESS STORIES ILLUSTRATE THE VALUE OF PUBLICITY AND MENTIONS. ENJOY.
19 Due to the signal/noise ratio in the SEO space, I tend to keep my contributions to private groups these days. If I notice something new in SERPs or strategies that scale, I’m inclined to share it KYLE TAKESHI with the private groups I’m in first and wait for someone else to break the news/changes to the public. SANDERS YOUNG I’ll check keywords in verticals Google has moved into relatively frequently to keep an eye on what they’re doing. In late November, I noticed a new auto loan calculator showing for a few keywords, ran it by some friends—who’d also never seen it—so, I decided to tweet it out to the major SEO news breakers. Ended up getting a linked mention on Search Engine Land OPTIMIZELY alongside Dr. Pete. Sweet. COMPLETE WEB RESOURCES
20 If you work for a brand that generates organic mentions, looking for unlinked brand mentions can be a quick way to gain TAKESHI some great backlinks. At my current role at Optimizely, I have the fortune of working YOUNG for the market leader in the A/B testing space, and our company regularly gets mentioned in news articles and blogs talking about the technology. However, bloggers don’t always link to our website when they mention us in their articles, so link building is often as simple as reaching out to the writer via e-mail and politely asking for a link to us. Last year we were able to obtain several high authority links this way, and it only took OPTIMIZELY minutes to send the e-mails.
The two services that I use to look for unlinked mentions are Google Alerts and Mention. Both are free services that search the web daily for keywords that you specify (in our case, our brand name) and send you an e-mail when they find new mentions of your keyword. Through these services I get a daily digest of all the sites that have mentioned our brand name, and I go through them weekly to identify linking opportunities.
Some blogs and websites have policies against external links, but it never hurts to ask. Even if they decide not to link to you, reaching out to bloggers can get a conversation started which can lead to other opportunities such as guest blogging and co-promotion, which has happened to us on a number of occasions.
21 Over Christmas 2015, we had a lot of positive experiences with press outreach and trying to get some of our clients’ products and services in front of journalists. LEWIS A good example of this was for a client of ours (The Discovery Store - http://www.thediscoverystore.co.uk). They sell a wide SELLERS selection of gifts, gadgets and accessories which are fun, innovative and usually quite quirky.
Christmas time is perfect for outreach for them, so we used journalist services such as HARO, Gorkana, and Response Source to receive enquiries from people all over the world looking for Christmas guides. Usually, the journalists were looking for ideas for colourful gifts, or gifts for ‘the man who has everything’ etc., so we’d send back a response with high PINPOINT resolution images, a bit of content about the products, the company itself, and we’ve had brilliant success with responses. DESIGNS Over Christmas, we achieved coverage from companies such as Sky Scanner, The Daily Mail, The Guardian, We Buy Any Car, etc.
Now, this doesn’t work with every single client you bring on board, because some products are very hard to achieve links for. That being said, earlier in the year, we achieved links via press services for companies who sell gardening equipment, luxury jewelery, and greetings cards - it’s really just a case of looking at your clients and seeing what their seasonal trends are.
For relatively little cost, you can gain some really valuable links which not only improve the backlink profile of the site, but also bring in referral traffic to generate natural sales!
22 One of the most challenging industries I’ve done link building ANNALISA for is industrial manufacturing. Ironically, in 2015 I had 4 industrial manufacturing clients. After HILLIARD struggling to find link opportunities in the same way I had for other clients, I had to take a different approach.
My first attempt was to find industrial magazines that fit each client’s niche and build partnerships that would hopefully result in links via content submission. This was working, but progress was very slow given the amount of input needed from each client. Industrial manufacturing tends to be very technical, so my client’s expertise was always needed to create valuable content. Since this approach required a lot of time and POLE resources, which used up a large portion of the client’s budget, I POSITION had to find something else. Someone on our team suggested HARO, which I had heard of before, but never used. We registered our clients and MARKETING started monitoring requests that were relevant to each client’s industry. This has been a great success and has saved us time in prospecting. If we get a request from HARO that fits our client, we send to them and they submit their pitch. In order to take this approach to the next level, we began utilizing tools like BuzzStream and Mention to monitor for additional opportunities.
As much as I’ve been a firm believer in the manual approach to building links, these tools have helped tremendously in finding relevant resources that would have taken me many hours to find, if I found them at all. Link building may be more challenging than in the past, but there are tools available to increase efficiency while uncovering quality opportunities to help meet that challenge with success.
23 One of my clients has a very prominent CEO, the type that is regularly featured on television and mentioned in articles around the web. Turning these name mentions into links was a ANTHONY goal but it can be a challenge to get some websites to link to a commercial site. NELSON Northside SEO advised the client to create an “Official Biography” for the CEO on their site. The goal of this page was to be informational and not overly commercial, and therefore linkworthy.
Once the official biography was published link building became easy. I would simply refine the search window to the past week, export the Google Search results for his name and upload them into BuzzStream. Outreach messages were generic and mostly NORTHSIDE non-personalized but the links consistently came in because our pitch made sense. In essence it was, “Please link this name to this official bio.” SEO
Using this technique we secured over 60 new LRDs to this new page with minimal time and investment and the client saw organic traffic and rankings significantly increase.
24 INNOVATIONCREATIVITY
The best campaigns are always guided by human creativity and the push to innovate.
Creative thinking and innovation – based upon experience and care – is the most powerful marketing tool in the world. The human mind is capable of creativity, ingenuity, and foresight that no technology can match.
Link building often boils down to sweat plus creativity. If you’re going to pursue links online, you need four things:
1. A product or company worth promoting. 2. Quality content. 3. Collaboration and integration. 4. Creativity.
That’s the entire model. Experience should guide processes, approach, campaign structure, and scope. But without creativity and innovation from invested humans, no campaign can reach its apex.
Creativity has to be encouraged on all fronts: from content creation, to outreach, persuasive pitches, to new tactics and campaign direction. THE FOLLOWING SUCCESS STORIES ILLUSTRATE THE VALUE OF INNOVATION AND CREATIVITY. ENJOY.
25 I was working on a link building campaign for a local business in Austin, TX. I found a great site that was relevant both topically and locally, and it just so happened they had an article that briefly mentioned our client. JACOB I reached out to the site, thanking them for mentioning our client and asked if they would be willing to link to us. And I heard nothing… I was not surprised by the lack of response. MCEWEN After all, it was a brief mention. Just for posterity, I followed up with them trying to confirm that they had received my email. And again, I heard nothing.
At this point we were moving on with our project, so I decided to call it a day and try to find some better opportunities elsewhere. A couple days later, out of the blue, I get an email PAGE from the site: “I’m not sure why we would do this without ONE incentive. Motivate me.” Often during our campaigns we receive requests for POWER compensation in exchange for link placement or article publication. However, that falls outside of our best practices so we often have to pass on these opportunities. But it was the end of the day and I was feeling bold so I sent him this:
I got the link.
26 Last year I talked about a piece of content that we made that had virtually zip all promotion that went on to do quite well. We have had a few successes this year but none that had the straight up luck that that one did. So I sat around and had a think about what my contribution WAYNE would be this year. Would it be one of those off the wall pieces we did that we fought the client to get made and then went on to be viewed by a couple of million people (estimated ;))? BARKER Would it be the continued coverage we have been getting in the national press in the last year (blows the trumpet that is widely considered to be owned by me)? Nah.
Some of the most pleasing things for me in the last year has been celebrating firsts: 1. The first time that a new colleague gets coverage and a link on a big site (and it is followed). BOOM 2. The first link that we get for a brand new client that just happens to be on The Huffington Post (and not one of those crappy community posts). ONLINE 3. Because the firsts are what set you off. They are the ones that gives you that hit. They start that chain of events that lead you to make cooler stuff, more engaging MARKETING stuff, more exciting stuff, more detailed stuff, to improve your targeting and your outreach and much more. They drive a lot in this business.
We may get lost in the bigger things sometimes, but we all remember the first.
And just to balance it out, I remember the excitement last year when we appeared on the planet’s highest viewed breakfast show with something we had made. That was a buzz. Alas. Didn’t get a link. Also the mention was sooooo temporal. Humph. I suppose there is always the prestige…
27 Use Social Media to Build Great Links.
One strategy which has been working quite well is when we use company social media assets to assist with acquiring links.
We find out which social media channels the client is willing/ allowed to use and then we reach out to target links using the JAMES following email: NORQUAY “Hello I was searching on Google today and I found [the following landing page].
I was wondering if you would be willing to add X link to this page as it’s relevant and I am sure it will provide value for your audience. I also noticed you were linking to X which is PROSPERITY similar to our business.” This would involve a high value prospect link or competition MEDIA based link. At this point you have two options - the Webmaster will see this and think I am not going to “bother” updating the site, why do I need to? Or you can be more creative!
Add the following line on the email and test the success rate:
“We would be happy to add a post on our Twitter and Facebook pages which have a combined user base of over 20,000 to promote your website/event if you update the landing page X.”
This way you are offering a concrete reason for the website owner to update the site. It’s like saying “scratch my back and I’ll scratch your back.
This strategy is probably not going to work for smaller companies with lower social following or larger brands with very strict social media policies, although it’s 100% worth asking and trying. For mid-sized businesses it can work very well and be a great incentive for site owners to get links live.
In 2015 we made several high value placements with this strategy, so it’s 100% worth testing.
28 Every market presents unique local link building opportunities.
One recent example we can share is about an Orlando client who looked to us to help them establish more connections with community members.
We uncovered scads of local Disney-themed blogs and we MIKE began putting our minds together on what we could do to bridge the gap between a criminal defense law firm and Walt Disney. So we organized a writing contest for local RAMSEY high school students, asking them to answer the question:
“How has Disney been a positive influence in your life?”
In other words, how has Disney helped keep you out of trouble - theft, drugs and other criminal juvenile behavior. We got the contest in front of local high schools and NIFTY before we knew it, short essays started coming in and we eventually selected a winner. The winner came in for a meet and greet where she accepted two complimentary MARKETING tickets to Disney World and granted permission to have her short essay published on the announcement page. Shortly after, we launched our outreach initiative to roughly 750 Disney bloggers, many of which were local. We ran a 34% URL click rate on the email blast and got a ton of positive responses, shares, and some nice backlinks from local IPs. It was a home run and a great experience for the client and us to be part of.
29 BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
The best links directly affect business development.
Brand development and growth are often tied to publicity, community interaction, and audience engagement. And each one of these also represents fantastic new link opportunities.
Business development, particularly for active online companies and audiences, should be tied with link acquisition.
If your business is growing, if you’re tapping into new audiences, if you’re engaged in activities worthy of press coverage, mention, or publication, then you’re likely to see an influx of links.
These are situations when an SEO’s heart grows three sizes. Situations which, with a little optimization, can directly attribute to revenue, business growth, and audience development.
The following stories represent the marriage of business development with link acquisition, and the power these two create when combined.
Sit back, enjoy, and dream big. THE FOLLOWING SUCCESS STORIES ILLUSTRATE THE VALUE OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT. ENJOY.
30 My biggest wins last year were focused more on my entrepreneurship success and online branding for SharpRocket. Things that we’re proud of as a company include:
Growing the team from 2 to 12 members within 5 months VENCHITO of operations – training new hires was coupled with useful resources/processes that were less time-consuming on our end. DEVELOPMENT Getting featured on top inbound marketing community sites TAMPON like Inbound.org Ask Me Anything, which boosts our branding X6 and helps us acquire new sets of clients.
SHARP ROCKET Helping clients increase their websites’ organic traffic within months of building links to their webpages. Here’s a screenshot of the organic traffic data of a client in the career development niche.
We created content assets that serve as extensive guides for specific topics. This targeted content potentially earned editorial links from relevant blogs that helps us build a community of readers in the search industry.
We invested in ethical link building practices for our clients that aren’t just focused on helping them increase monthly links, but on absorbing clicks, readers and potential customers from webpages through editorial link placement and relevant targeting of blogs/sites.
We participated in different content distribution platforms, such as answering questions on roundups and/or commenting strategically on other blogs – as we repeatedly do this, our target audience becomes aware of our expertise and eventually become part of our brand community.
31 2015 was a year of shake-ups and refocusing.
With content creation always being the core of all online marketing and branding, it was important for me to take my personal brand and business to a whole new level. That’s exactly what I was able to accomplish through the launch of my Rise of the Entrepreneur podcast. ZAC Big deal, it’s just another podcast right? Well, not so much...
First of all, podcasting takes a lot of time and effort, it’s not JOHNSON something you can sit down and crank out in 20 minutes like a blog post. Another reason why podcasting is so amazing is because it brings your content and relationship with your audience to life. In my case, I already have a few blogs and I personally write content for a few other partner sites as well. Text content is great, but we all know that the majority of people will never read more than 50% of what we write. This simply isn’t the case with audio and podcasting. ZAC
So how did launching a podcast help with link building and growing my brand? It helped with everything. JOHNSON
For example... just take a look at some of the names I’ve .COM been able to interview through my show. Gary Vaynerchuk, Timothy Sykes, Neil Patel and more than 80 others...
Now consider the value (and cost) of what it would take to have each of these experts send out a link to your site through social media, or to link it from their site. In most cases, if you interview someone and promote them, they are going to help promote it as well.
Throw in the bonus of SEO and additional search rankings based around each of your guests’ names, podcasting just might be the golden goose you were looking for. The good news is even if you aren’t already podcasting or if you hate the idea of listening to your voice, there is still a ton of opportunity with guest blog posting as I had recommended last year!
32 The interesting thing about digital marketing for most companies is how disjointed it can be from the actual business JEREMY in the real world. Bridging the gap between the digital world and the real world led to a really successful link campaign for my client. They’re in a “boring” industry, making steel doors, so RIVERA they have felt like they’re at a disadvantage when it comes to being interesting enough to be link worthy.
After chatting with them for a while, they just casually mentioned they were holding a small event for local contractors on meeting local fire codes. The wheels in my mind immediately started spinning!
JEREMY First I had them create a blog post for the event, loaded with the PDFs, documents and resources they had planned to use and asked them to add that URL to the flyer they had printed. I also RIVERA encouraged them to check and see if their guests had blogs, and to casually mention adding a link to the resources on their SEO blog if possible. Second, I jumped over to Eventbrite & Eventful to create event listings, which ended up propagating out to 4 or 5 additional sites that pick up their syndication feed, along with the followed link in the event description!
Last I looked up Nashville-specific event websites and created profiles to submit their event. There were 4 unique sites just for events in that city.
Phew! Imagine if they’d just gone and run the event, they would have missed out on all of that link building!
33 Last August my team and I started work on a locally-based law client that was battling to maintain position in the local pack, way back in the good ol’ days when the local packs contained between 5-7 positions. Once the local packs were cut to 3 spots, our client’s desire to show up in spot 1,2, or 3 KIMBERLY became the one and only goal. BROWN In order to pave the way for the good links and citations we were going to build, we had to simultaneously perform a backlink audit and disavow over half of the client’s previous backlink portfolio. The client had paid for links, and as a result, the backlink profile was rather abysmal.
Now, with the spammy backlinks cleared out and half a year of consistent citation and organic link building, the client ranks locally for an additional two terms (bringing the local pack ranking total to 3). PAGE
Without first taking care of the toxic backlinks, our current ONE work could have had little to no impact; it’s important not to just do great work, but to be cognizant of any past mistakes that could impact future organic endeavors. POWER
34 In the last months I’ve mainly worked on creating processes, best practices, and bringing SEO culture into my new company. Because of this focus, I can’t really share anything that brilliant in link building, but I have done a few things with my own side projects.
Some of it could be considered a bit greyhat but I’m sharing this tactic because of the value in it, besides the SEO impact.
GIUSEPPE I run an 8 year old website dedicated to crime novels (www. thrillercafe.it) that’s now the place to go for news and reviews PASTORE in the crime genre. Across the years I’ve earned a bunch of good editorial links, even from major sites (including one of the channels of the national Italian radio site – Radio3), but from time to time I secure links by acquiring other websites.
I typically run a crawler (Xenu or Screaming Frog) on culture related magazines and look for outbound links going to sites that are no longer updated.
For example I look for a magazine that no longer exists, and GIUSEPPE subsequently its website is going to be dismissed or parked. Another example would be a publisher taking down the minisite PASTORE of a book, and so on. What I do then is offer to buy the site (or maybe wait to see if it’s .COM domain ownership expires), then move its content onto my own site (or at least the relevant content that makes sense), and then redirecting the domain I’ve bought.
In this way I grow my incoming links through the mergers, like companies do in the financial market. I know it doesn’t apply to every niche, and it requires a bit of cash to buy sites, but being patient often leads to nice bargains, and in the end the strength of your site will thank you.
35 contact
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208.229.7046