Introduction
Make an effort to gain quality rather than quantity links. Determine which websites within your field are trustworthy and which ones are related to the material you will be posting on the platform. Make it a point to directly contact the site owners and bloggers with some engaging guest posting ideas that would be relevant to the readers. Approach them with a proposal for creating and submitting articles for them to post complete with a link that fits naturally.
The next point is to set targets on the number of times you are going to send out the outreach messages per week and the response rate that you are likely to get to help you adjust as you go.
Key Takeaways
- Develop content that is genuinely useful, interesting and helpful
- Build up the combinations of an outreach, guest posts, earned media, influencer, etc
- Ensure you place emphasis on relations and not just a one-way engagement with the target audience
- Keep track of the links that you have developed
- Keep track of the referral domains, organic traffic, conversions and other data
Track new links using the analytics available and prioritize the efforts based on those link sources that produce the most valuable visits and conversions in the long run. It is vital to make sure that one is not linking the site or web pages to a specific site or platform only but always switch between them.
Guide To manage link building campaigns
Here are few steps to follow for managing link building efforts:
Determine Link Building Goals
However, if you are going to do any form of outreach, there are some fundamental questions that you should answer first on your links.
Some common link building goals include:
- Extend a positive influence over domain and page authority scores
- Enhance overall web presence on target terms
- Increase the traffic coming from referrer sites to critical site pages
- Obtain backlinks from web pages that are affiliated with quality domain.
Understanding your objectives will guide the kind of links you seek and the right companies to attend to. It is therefore important to ensure that one obtains quality backlinks in order to increase the site’s ranking amongst the search engines and also generate more traffic through the links. However, link building is known to be a little more complicated and tiresome in terms of management.
How to Search for Websites that Will Allow You to Pitch
Getting backlinks from sites that will be of benefit to users and hence semantically related is the success of link building.
Here are some ways to identify quality sites to pitch for links:
Find linking opportunities with the help of SEMrush
- When researching a competitor using SEMrush, enter a URL and look at their top linking domains report
- This shows websites that already link to competitors, which can be suitable for your content as well
- Filter the links based on the domain authority of the website, relevance of the site to the original site’s niche and quality of the anchor text.
Search Manually in Google
- Search words that are related to the content of the page, for example: “dog training. ”
- Then go through the web pages of the website and see the top results and the organic search results.
- Look for ways to search for websites that would appear to be experts in the field
- This will require you to evaluate their domain authority, and the link profile they currently possess.
Explore Related Linking Resources
- Then using a tool such as BuzzSumo, you could search for articles that have been shared most on your topic.
- Contact the authors to potentially share links
- These are the commonly used engine parts, and it is obvious that they are linked to popular sites, so the task is to identify and filter them.
Assessing Potential Linking Sites
However, before approaching websites for this purpose, it is important to conduct a link analysis on every domain to see whether or not links will be useful in meeting your objectives.
Gather Key Data Points
- Domain and page authority are the two measurements of the websites’ credibility.
- This could be through SimilarWeb or SEMrush to get the organic traffic stats.
- Present link and content existing situation
- How it relates to your site, your industry, your niche, and your topics
I do this for each link target on a spreadsheet with the signal being the value of the link. I screen out the bad sites and earmark the sites that can offer the highest added value.
Link Risk Factors Resources & Risk Factors
While assessing targets, I also analyze certain risk factors surrounding potential linking sites:
- Prior history of selling links, paid posts or any form of advertorial content
- Link Building Anchor Text Links That Are Over Optimized
- Below average users’ interaction and visitors
- Chances of using manual or an algorithm as a penalty.
To enhance long-term SEO benefits and reduce the probability of penalties, one ought to evade high-risk linking domains.
No More Guesswork: How to Automate Your Link Prospecting Process
For achieving link building results efficiently, it is crucial to have a system of how the outreaches are going to be processed.
I structure my process in stages:
Prospect Research Stage
- The first step of the identification of topics was purely manual, and the following tools were used in the process:
- To look for more searches related to the article, explore the competitors and to discover most similar contents.
- Create master list of link opportunities in hundreds of link prospects in xls.
Vetting and Prioritization
- Evaluate the potential success measures or quantitative values for each site as described above
- Categorize prospects: Priority targets are usually high ranking and well known companies (A-list), second are moderately known and ranked companies (B-list), and last is long shot companies (C-list).
- Now, refine your spreadsheet to covering only 50-75 of your ideal target customers.
Personalized Outreach
For my top tier prospect list, I conduct customized and detailed outreach:
- Use the method of searching for individual contacts and writers of each site
- Incorporate content that has been shared in emails in the cold email follow up while addressing them as individuals.
- Follow up with prospects that failed to reply
- Ensure the communication is not pushy but offer profound solutions to the recipient’s problems.
This hands-on approach results in the higher number of successful linkages as compared to other approaches. BUT, it is more intensive and results in the establishment of close links with other influential sites.
Automated Link Prospecting
For my secondary tier of linker prospects, I leverage automation to boost efficiency:
- You should hire BuzzStream or Pitchbox to assist in the management and monitoring of the emails.
- Develop the kinds of automated messages that can be sent via email and include merge fields for personalizing the messages.
- To ensure that follow-ups are done multiple times, establish an auto follow-up protocol.
- Further expand outreach volume quickly while experimenting with the message.
- Analyze Link Building Results
Although open and response rates are generally lower than those of direct mail, automation doubles my prospect list and is a good secondary strategy.
Monitoring the Measurable Outcomes and Scaling Up the Initiatives
As with most marketing strategies, link building campaign evaluation and assessing the ROI of a campaign is always important for the future endeavors.
Some key metrics I track include:
- Number of links acquired from the actual number of contacts made, for instance 30 links from 600 companies.
- Some examples of a number of page and domain metric changes after links include
- Change of keyword rankings from the previous week against the selected terms
- Site traffic benefits from new sources of traffic headed to the site on a monthly basis
In other words, if I get excellent results from a website or publisher, I research other sites of the same type and try to identify more link outreach prospects. To illustrate, I evaluate what types of content, anchor text, and pages provided the greatest outcomes and adjust subsequent pitching.
Conclusion
Thus, link building is more of a continuous process that involves constant testing, data analysis, and further link building activities to popular and quality sites. The tangible targets for link earning success make it possible for me to fine-tune the process and instill better practices. I hope this guide helps you understand how link building works and offers a glimpse of how to plan the campaign effectively! If there are any other questions that you feel I could help answer, please do not hesitate to inform me.
