Link Building & Outreach Strategy
If your SEO consultant is any good you’ll have a good content marketing plan and you’ll earn links organically. This is the best way to get your link profile up and running. It’s also the safest way to get your link profile up and running.
If you’re new and need help getting your outreach success off the ground, you need to have a good strategy in place.
The strategy should, of course, focus on getting the most relevant and useful links back to your website.
I like to ask one question when getting a link – will the website I want a backlink from help the user from that referring site. If I sell dog toys and get a link from a website focused purely on cat food, I wouldn’t consider that relevant.
You may get some value from search because it’s in the pet food industry, but the link will look out of place. Why would cat owners click on dog food links?
If you need help with your outreach to enhance your website or apps visibility in search, get in contact with me today. Combine your industry expertise with my outreach knowledge; we’ll be able to craft a strategy together.
My job is not only to get your more traffic, sales and revenue. It’s also to help you be known as the expert and authority in your industry.
If you need more information about link building and outreach services, you should keep reading. I’ll try my best to educate you in the area before we move forward.
What is link building?
I’m going to use a metaphor to explain what a link is. A link in the eyes of search engines is just a vote. The more backlinks you attain, the more popular and authoritative you’ll appear to search algorithms.
When you get a vote (link), you’re getting referenced as a useful resource from another website. If the site referencing you is a well known and authoritative website, your new link can be seen as a super vote!
Search engines are continually changing how they evaluate the popularity of a website, but the link profile of a website is a significant ranking factor.
What are the different types of links?
External Links – These are links from third-party websites that point directly to your website or resource. These are very valuable when relevant and from quality sites. You need to be careful if you’re receiving links from irrelevant or spam websites. Quality external links can enhance and benefit your website. Poor quality links will have the opposite effect and could negatively affect your website’s performance.
Internal Links – Search engines use external links to find relevant third party sources for users. Internal links work almost the same way, but it’s to help your users find the content they’re looking for on your website. Just like external links, the more internal links you point to pages help build up that page internally.
Image Links – You can hyperlink and image. However it’s harder for search engines to determine what the link relates to unless you put in an alt tag. An alt tag signifies to Google what the image refers.
Follow Links – This is a link that search engine spiders will follow. If you receive follow links you’ll also receive the value a link brings to your website.
No-Follow Links – This is a link search engine spiders choose not to follow. Even though a user will see the link and be able to click and follow the link to your website, the search engine spiders will not bring the value from the referring site.
Complicated links – Some search engines have even started looking at new link directives to judge how good a link is. In addition to nofollow links, Google wants to know about links to user-generated content links such as comment sections of blog posts, and if you’re paying for links, Google wants you to use the sponsored links.
You should read this article from SEMrush regarding link attribution. It’s very detailed – https://www.semrush.com/blog/nofollow-sponsored-and-ugc-links-guide/
Link Building & Outreach Strategy Example
Step 1 – Create an Outreach Document
You’ll need to understand that your outreach strategy will take time. You need to start small and focus on developing partnerships that will truly last. You shouldn’t be sending an outreach email asking someone to give you a link from an article straight away.
Instead you should start with a plan. Get your outreach document in order. You need to keep track of all the contacts you’re making and what you’ve spoken about.
Like marketing it takes on average 7 points of contact before some starts to remember who you are.
I’m not saying you should send 7 emails. Have some common sense. It doesn’t work and you’ll just be seen as spam.
Your document should outline your prospects contact details, their topic of interest, the URL & area you’d like a link from, and the number of times you’ve contacted this user.
Step 2 – What’s your value proposition?
When constructing your outreach document you need to remember just like me and you, our prospects have personalities and needs.
You need to really think what will entice your prospect to link to you or your resource.
Ask yourself how will getting a link to your resource help the outreach prospects users.
Your asset or area you want to get a link to should help the prospect so much they are willing to give you a link.
Renumeration shouldn’t be used in exchange for a link although this does happen. Search engine guidelines don’t accept this behaviour as it influences algorithms.
They’ve recently brought out a link attribute for such behaviour called ‘a sponsored link attribute’. Here’s an example:
<a href="http://www.example.com/" rel="sponsored">Link text</a>
Step 3 – Develop a relationship?
We all have a certain number of social profiles right? Why not follow these people online.
Treat every prospect uniquely. Do some research. Do they like dogs? Can you connect with them on any hobbies you share.
One of the best links I ever got for a client was by following a prospect on twitter. I retweeted their content and asked them questions for around 2 months before I mentioned a resource of my client.
A lot of work, right? Yes, but it was very worth it.
Just one link from that high authority website moved us from position 12 under the targeted keyword to position 1.
He also saw a 230% increase in traffic and went from getting no leads to a minimum of 8 a month.
Step 4 – What has your Prospect linked to before?
A huge win for me in any outreach strategy I’ve undertaken was researching previous linking attributes of a prospect or publication.
I used Moz Link Explorer and Ahrefs to see where people have already linked to in the past. Once I know what they’ve done before I know what I should suggest.
I’ve even created new resources in order to seek a referral link.
When you know what people have linked to before you know what they value.
They may value certain topics over others and they may prefer linking to specific assets.
Step 5 – Statistics & Data
One of the best ways to earn links is to conduct research your prospects will love. If you’re willing to put in the effort.