SEO Link-Building

Today, link-building and SEO go hand in hand, but despite its importance, it’s still handled poorly by many businesses. No matter how well-intentioned you are, without structure, you won’t achieve the results you hope for.

We’ve experimented with both- link-building campaigns with as much structure as a bowl of jelly, and others with enough structure it would make engineers proud. And, the latter results in a more efficient campaign every time.

Meanwhile, this efficiency creates better results for clients and in turn better profits. And so, we’re going to break down some steps to take to ensure your link-building campaigns run like a well-oiled machine.

Plan Ahead

You need to approach your campaign with precision. We’ve had clients in the past who’d sign off on detailed marketing plans working towards their goals, and then in a couple weeks decide they want to focus on something else. As you can imagine, this ruined all the initial progress we’d made. Planning is not really a choice, it’s needed to keep both us and our clients on the right path. Think of it as going on a road trip and forgetting the map at home.

You need to create a link-building plan to maximise results. It’s not exclusively a numbers game, so by working out initially what you wish to accomplish and outlining to process to do so, you’ll realise your goals much quicker.

Follow a Strategy

Jumping from activity to activity is a problem, it reduces efficiency and makes measuring and reproducing results difficult. This is why an assembly line process is much more efficient than one person doing the whole thing from beginning to end. When our SEO team builds links, they follow a documented guide that begins with clear and concise planning. They’ll identify a strategic goal, and then work out which topics they’ll need to rank to achieve that goal.

Next, they’ll start planning their topics for the next 4-12 months, including things like home pages and blog posts. Then, they identify the ideal websites to earn links from and compile that information. Lastly, they conduct an outreach, forge relationships and continue to follow up until they’ve earned the links for the client.

Following this process not only helps them produce good results for our clients in better time, it also helps scale SponsoredLinX itself, meaning we can bring new employees on board and get them productive faster.

Document Your Campaigns

Documenting the work you’ve put into link-building makes it easier for teams to collaborate together, as everyone has real time access and a log of all internal and external communications. Even if you’re flying solo, this is still important as it keeps your results consistent.

There are multiple project management systems like Teamwork, and (the one we use) Asana. We also utilise a customer relationship management system called Hubspot, and when integrated with Gmail, we can log every single email without any effort (there are however multiple CRM tools on the market, and it’s worth taking the time in researching what works best for your team and your needs).

This means if our SEO team needs a list of people with whom we have working relationships with, they can quickly pull a list and connect. They’re more likely to earn a link from those they know than they would a cold call email to a stranger, so this can be a huge productivity booster.

However, these tools aren’t solely effective for just existing relationships. Most of the time, your cold call emails will be ignored, but a CRM tool allows you to set follow up reminders. That way, over time, you can develop and nurture connections that make it simpler to eventually earn links from them in the future.

And, once you’ve built those relationships…

Leverage Contacts

After your CRM, you can still leverage those contacts to earn introductions to new ones.

We initially run a crawler on a new website to identify outbound links and then filter the resulting information to identify potential link-building opportunities. From there, it’s a simple matter of asking your contact for an introduction. Over an email, you might try something like this:

“Hey John,

I wanted to ask a quick favour. I noticed you have a link to 123.com—do you know someone over there? If so, could you put a word in for me? Since we cover similar items, I think it would be mutually beneficial to connect.”

It’s prevalent to note this is only effective if you’ve had a dialogue with that contact prior. Ideally, someone who owes you a favour.

After an introduction is made, you can pitch the content you wish them to link to. After looking after that relationship, repeat the process with someone else.

Link-building is a vital cog in the SEO machine, and without it, you’re like a boat with no paddle.

Want to learn more about link-building, get in touch with our SEO team on 1300 859 600 today and let’s start talking!