N Shiva Guru

An Average Joe’s Guide to Link Building – Part 1 Link building is a quintessential aspect of SEO. Yet, both experienced marketers and bloggers still seem to drop the ball on this. They think that writing excellent content alone will get the job done. While the quality of content is one thing, its relevance on the Internet is a completely different animal. And, who decides what’s relevant and what isn’t? That’s right, Google! And how do you get Google to consider your content as relevant and help your website to a better ranking? SEO, of course! And the first milestone on the long road to SEO is, you guessed it, Link Building! Now that we’ve established the why, let’s progress to the how. In this article, I’m going to share 9 ways to implement link building. Drumroll please… Okay, without further ado, here they are: 1-Asking your previous customers for a review This is the simplest technique of the lot. You reach out to your customers requesting them to publish a review of their experience in doing business with you. You could request them to send it across to you before publishing so that you could check if the testimonial contains keywords your site ranks for. You could then send them the edited version of the review. Once the customer uploads the testimonial and updates his website, Googlebot crawls these new pages and adds it to the Google index. Benefits Search engines will associate your brand name (and website) with the said relevant keywords and phrases The entire process helps in improving domain authority The process Step 1: Make a list of relevant customers in the niche that your business serves. For e.g., if your firm is into editing tools, reach out to content agencies that have used your tool. Include those who have used the trial version. Step 2: Once the customer publishes the review, share the links to them on Social media and tag the customers you reached out to. Step 3: Make sure each testimonial is unique; if possible, see if long tailed keywords emerge from these reviews, for which you can later rank your website. 2-Asking suppliers for links If you are a business selling a product/service, you probably have a healthy relationship with your suppliers. Most suppliers are happy to lend an ear to your requests. This technique is just like reaching out to your customers: only, there is a little more work involved: Step 1: See if the firm can use backlinks leading to your web pages in the existing content on their website or blog or both. Suggest the changes to your supplier. Step 2: If there are only a few backlinks possible with the existing content, suggest the creation of a page that reveals your journey with the supplier: you can make provide the content and the images for the same. Bottlenecks There is a case where suppliers in a few industries outsource their IT support system. Hence, they would not be able to help you directly. In this case, the best thing for you to do would be: Step 1: Get the name of the firm handling their IT support system Step 2: Get in touch with the said firm. Have a written confirmation from your supplier (an e-mail will do) which you will reference when you request the IT firm for a backlink. 3-Brand Mentions Brand mentions are like tattoos. You have to ensure they stay on the person (a website in your case) for the world to see. So, what do you do? Get linked (It rhymed with ‘inked’, see?), of course! In other words, your job is to use your brand mention as a backlink to your site. You can use Ahrefs (see what I did there? This is a linked brand mention) or more specifically, the Ahrefs Content Explorer (This brand mention is unlinked; if Ahrefs were to see this in my post, they’d reach out to me. If you’re thinking ‘Fat chance!’ you’d be right but you know where I’m coming from) to help you locate these brand mentions. After you make a final list, reach out to the owner of these blogs/websites to link the brand mention to a URL that is most relevant, not necessarily the homepage. For example, there could be blogs written with the excerpts of an interview with the CEO or the VP Marketing of your firm. It may look something like this: You have to make sure the brand mention becomes a backlink. This could be a relevant URL like the product listing web page, the pricing page, or the page, which mentions the launch of a new product or service. The benefits that you get from linked brand mentions are the same as the other two techniques used for link building. However, there is the challenge of scalability. Every time there is an unlinked brand mention, you have to reach out and ensure there is a backlink. This process is manual and it will take a long time to scale. However, you cannot miss this opportunity and so having fortnightly checks or monthly checks to get your list of websites to reach out for brand mentions. 4-Broken link Building This mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find broken backlinks and replace them with backlinks of your own. As always, there is a series of steps involved: Step 1: Find links in your niche because you are going to recreate a page on the same topic as the broken link. To locate these links, all you have to do is insert a keyword from your niche in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and search for it. Step 2: You get a list of pages with backlinks. Then use HTTP code 404 to look for broken links. Step 3: Order the list by the number of referring domains in descending order. Now, you’ll get an idea of the topics you have to recreate. Step 4: If you’re not sure about the keywords, enter your domain. Then, go to the Competing Domains report. You will see the sites that rank in the Top 10 for the same keywords as your target domain. Ideally, you should have many common keywords with your target domain. Step 5: Now pick up each of these domain, feed their names in the search bar and repeat Step 2 and Step 3. Step 6: Check if the pages with the broken links are a good match for your site. E-mailing the list of top 10 or top 20 domains without checking this will result in you wasting time and effort. Step 7: Set up an outreach campaign of sorts where you will: A-Collect the mail ids of your prospects B-Design your mail C-Maintain a Google sheet to keep track of progress. 5-Building free tools or apps While you can build a free mobile app through app-building tools, I would strictly advise against it. Link building is not an individual exercise; you should use any excuse to partner up. The following are ways to leverage building free tools or apps to help your link building exercise: a-Building together gets you back3.links The wise man wasn’t kidding when he said, ‘The more you get together, the appier you’ll be!’ Without throwing that open to interpretations, let me tell you upfront that you should definitely partner up with app developers when you go about this exercise. Doing this not only helps reduce your app development cost and the cost of subsequent launch on the Google Play Store or the Apple Store but also helps in link building. How? Through some genuine link building opportunities: Getting the testimonials published We discussed how testimonials and reviews contribute to link building. Now, both the app developer and your website can write testimonials with backlinks to each other. These prove to be mutually beneficial.  Creating ‘the making of…’ videos and blog posts Any app building exercise takes considerable time and effort. The app-building team also has to see off some stiff challenges. This makes for juicy pieces of content, both videos and blog posts. You can post this in your blog, the developer’s blog, start a YouTube channel and post it there and share everything on social media. How many backlinks did you count? Do the math! PR exercise during the launch The launch of an app usually involves a PR exercise where there are digital news bytes to be put out there. If there are four publications involved, both your firm and your partner’s firm get brand mentions. You just have one job: ensure they are linked ones.  b-Have one target platform Before even partnering up, brainstorm and narrow down on just one platform. This helps focused targeting and reduces the turnaround time. Once you’ve reached a consensus on the Apple or Android debate, you can move forward by getting in touch with the best app developers on the given platform. Then, you could agree on a date of launch and rally your link building campaign around the event.  c-Make the app related to your product/services  The whole idea for app development is to let the world take notice of your product/services. So, if you’re a firm providing SEO services, you can build an Android app helping a user check domain authority. That makes much more sense than building a scheduler or sticky notes.  6-Building a paid tool/app The part where you have to partner up and build together remains the same. If you’re building a paid app, it is better to put your eggs in multiple baskets: i.e. have an Android and iOS version of it. You could even have like a freemium model: offer basic features for free and charge a premium for every extra feature. The additional advantage here is that you can help break even with the development costs of the app. (The other link building advantages that apply to free app building apply here as well) As usual, there is a catch here: you need a much more detailed and well-mapped marketing plan (4Ps of marketing, etc need to be figured out) needed if you are going to go ahead with a paid tool. Because the cost of developing premium features are definitely going to be greater than the cost associated with developing one free of cost.  7-Buying an established website or blog Buying a domain is not cheap; however, when done right it can be very profitable. But only when done right! Buying and selling blogs and/or websites is a hot business these days. As usual, this business comes with its set of ifs and buts: a-SEO Value It is most obvious that when you buy a website or a blog to help link building, it should have good, no great SEO value. This means that not only should the site should not only have a good ranking for its keywords but also have a good ranking for keywords relevant to the buyer’s (your) website. The ideal scenario is if this set of keywords augments the keywords that your website ranks for. You should obviously check domain authority as well. You can obviously use multiple tools including but not restricted to Ahrefs, SEOquake, SEMrush, etc.  b-Profitability This criterion is as important as SEO Value. If the website/blog is bleeding money, then obviously you are not going to buy it. But how do you check this? Hire an auditor and an accountant to ensure your investment is not food sent into the Ogre’s stomach pit.  c-A Sister Website If you are a firm into horticulture, a website that reviews lawn movers can be a great sister website. Likewise, you have to check if the website you buy can feed links and encourage cross-promotional selling on your site.  There are two ways of linking content from the website you buy: 301 re-direct Here, there is the possibility of losing some Page Rank. Funneling good link equity There are no redirects here. You keep the content intact and ensure there are backlinks wherever possible. You are completely in control here and you help your website rank better for new keywords.  8-Buying links This method of link building borders on being a black hat technique. The risks outweigh the benefits by far because if Google finds out that you bought your links, your organic traffic is done for. JCPenney and Overstock found this out the hard way. I’d hate for you to find out one morning that months of hard work just disappeared overnight. There’s no better way to put this: ‘And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.’ (Matthew 6:13)  So, I’m just informing you that this technique exists but I am dissuading you from taking this plunge. 9-Creating a wacky product Creating wacky products is a link bait technique. Depending on the niche that you’re in, the definition of a ‘wacky product’ might differ. For example, if you’re a software firm based out of New York, designing a tool detecting the pollution level of the city is wacky. This would encourage consumers and enthusiasts alike to share your social media messages like crazy. If your product is, say, shared 10,000 times those many backlinks are being added effortlessly. Here are some of the zany products which have gathered hundreds or thousands of backlinks: a-Search Ranking Factors from Moz The promotion of the product here was done by contributors. This is a downloadable guide to better SEO   b- 101 Popularity Tips from SEOBook This is a downloadable list and everybody likes How-tos and it is little surprise that this post saw so many downloads.  c-WUIW’s Water Conservation Tip Did you know there were 112 ways to conserve water? Nobody did till WUIW’s product got people’s attention and the list of effortless ways to do the same.  Besides the above products, there are scores of examples. If you would like your link bait to be shared thousands of times, you have to have a product with one value proposition that is unique and before you know it, you will have hundreds of backlinks.  We are now done with 9 techniques to help you with link building. That draws the Part 1 of the article to a close. Please stay tuned for Part 2 of the article, Cheers!