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Hi. I'm Devin Asaro, SEO content strategist at iAcquire. Today, we're going to do another
chapter from Paddy Moogan's "The Link Building Book." This one is "Planning and Executing
Link Building Campaigns." It's actually the longest chapter in the book, and I recommend
if you're going to only read one chapter, really read this one because it goes in depth
about how to actually do an actual link building campaign from the very beginning, pretty much
to the very end. There's a lot of information. I'm really only going to be giving you little
bits of it, but I really recommend reading it.
So, he starts with the planning phase. Basically, how do you go about actually selling a link
building campaign? One of the things that he really highlights is that when you're selling
a link building campaign, you shouldn't really just be selling links. It's not about just
selling 20 links, but you actually want to focus on the metrics that matter to your client.
So, you might think about ROI or the sort of things that you'd actually want your link
building campaign to accomplish, because if you, say, build 20 links, and then you go
into meet with the client, and they ask what you've accomplished, and you say you built
20 links, but you didn't increase traffic, they're not going to be too happy. So, rather
than focusing on just selling a set number of links and just trying to make the client
happy, focus on the actual things that matter to their business. Try to use your link building
campaign to actually achieve those goals.
The second step, once you've sold your link building campaign or are in the process of
selling it, you want to be collecting your link building assets. So, if you're dealing
with a client or if it's your own company, or if you're in-house, you really want to
look at what your company actually has to offer in terms of link building, because the
link building relationship is always about what can you offer the people that are going
to be linking to you. So, you want to be in collecting those. The first one, obviously,
is content. What content do you have that is link-worthy? That's sort of tied up in
content audit. Right? You begin to think about what's link-worthy and what's not. What people
do you have? Like, do you have any high profile people in your industry? Do you have connections
to people outside of the industry who are also influential? If you have somebody in
your company, for instance, that speaks at a lot of conferences, that's a great linking
opportunity.
And again, products discounts, especially for e-com sites. If you have specific products
that you know are really popular or really shareable... For instance, Nike does a lot
of this with their customizable shoes. It's just a great way to get links, and if you
can offer discounts as well, that's another way to get links. Next is to start analyzing
your own backlink portfolio, and then analyzing your competitors as well.
So, when you're looking at your own, you really want to be discovering the problems with it.
For instance, are there links to dead pages that need to be redirected to active pages,
so that you can hang on to the link equity? Or are you getting tons of links from spammy
sites that may actually be hurting your rankings? Then, you want to look at your competitor's
back link portfolios so that you can replicate their successes. When you're doing both of
those things, the key link metrics that you want to look at are anchor text, linking root
domains, site wide links, PageRanks, and no-follow attributes. Anchor text, you want to see...
For instance, if you have the highest number of anchor text to your site are non-branded
keywords, like for instance, cheap credit cards or discount tires, and none of the top
anchor text actually are branded and have your company's name, which is what you'd expect
to see in a search or in an actual link. So, if you have a lot of that, it's probably telling
Google that you have a pretty spammy backlink portfolio. So, that's something that you really
want to balance out.
Next is linking root domains. So, how many unique linking root domains do you have? And
what sites are they? For instance, if you're getting most of your linking root domains
from sites that are either unrelated to your vertical or just aren't very trustworthy,
then that's not really going to help you. If you have tons of site wide links, that's
also a clue to Google that it might be spammy because these are the ones you sort of see
on spammy sites that are essentially just a blog roll on the side of the website that
have a bunch of obvious SEO keywords, like, again, 'discount tires', things like that.
PageRank. Again, you want to pay attention to the PageRank of all of your linking root
domains. If you've got a high PageRank coming in from most of your top linking root domains,
that's a good sign. If you're getting lots of twos and threes, then you really want to
focus on changing your link targets. Then, no-follow attribute. Are you getting links
from pages that have the no-follow attribute, which basically tells Google to pass any link
equity over? Because if you're getting tons of those, chances are they're coming from
the comment sections on blogs and things like that, which are more blackhat techniques.
Publishers have kind of caught onto that and are now putting no-follow attributes on those
pages. So, they're not actually passing any link equity over to the site they're linking
to.
Next step is actually executing. So, the question that he asks, especially when looking at your
content and when you begin creating content that you want to use for a link building campaign
is expletive. Because when you're creating content, a lot of times you'll get really
excited about an idea, and everybody on your team will get really excited about the idea
as well, and that can create a false sense that you've actually come up with a good idea.
But really, it's just something that may appeal to you and all the people that are in a similar
environment to you. So, you really want to take a step back and begin to think about
who it's actually going to appeal to, and whether or not anybody's going to want to
link to it.
After that, you want to begin finding link targets. He highlights a lot of tools that
you can use. For instance, FollowerWonk, which is really great for finding people who are
influencers and who are interested in whatever subject you're writing about. So, if it's
people that are interested in fitness, you'll put 'fitness' into FollowerWonk and find people
that have that listed in their descriptions on their profiles. So, it's a great way to
sort of narrow those down, and then begin pulling reports on the people so you can sort
of conduct targeted outreach in specific areas where you know these people already care about
this subject.
He also suggests the SEOMoz Competitive Link Finder, BuzzStream's Link Prospector, and
using the Scrape Similar tool for Chrome to actually scrape SERPs and begin using those
results for targeting links.
Then, the last step, obviously, is conducting outreach. So, he recommends when conducting
outreach, and it's been my experience that this works well, that every outreach email
that you use should involve some level of personalization, should highlight what you're
actually offering to the link prospect, and a call to action. So, personalization is as
basic as including the person's name in the emails or actually doing the research to find
the name or making a specific comment about the site. Talk about an article you liked,
or ask a question about something the other person has recently written to show that you're
actually interested in the space. Then, you want to immediately highlight the offering.
What are you actually giving the person? If it's a great piece of content, it's a great
piece of content. If it's a link back, whatever it is, you want to highlight that. Then, a
call to action. What do you need the person that you're reaching out to to do for you?
So, it may seem obvious that you're reaching out for a link, but you really want to highlight
that very clearly. Specifically, what do you want? What is the anchor text you're looking
for? Anything you can offer to the prospect.
And again, you want to follow up because a lot of times, the first time you reach out,
it might not be the right time. Then, that email just gets buried in their inbox. So,
even if you don't hear anything back from them, follow up with another email because
it might be the right time. They may have just forgotten about the first one. So that's
it, in short. There's a whole lot more, and I really recommend reading the whole chapter.
That's it, and we'll see you next week. [music].