In this post we discuss the common question of “what types of link building are there?”. We’ve rounded up a few resources that will expedite your learning process.
Link Building Strategies on Steroids: How To Get Backlinks FAST!
[Video Transcript]
In this video, I’m going to show you how to turn your backlink analysis into actionable
link building strategies…
fast.
Stay tuned.
[Music]
Hey everyone, Sam Oh here with Ahrefs.
This is the last video in our 3 part series on backlink analysis and link building using
just Ahrefs’ Site Explorer tool.
Now, in the first two videos, we went pretty deep into link prospecting and competitor analysis.
But today, you and I we’re going to be focusing on link building efficiency and cover 5 tactics
that you can execute quickly from just a single site analysis.
If you haven’t watched the first two videos, then I highly recommend going back to those
right now so that you can get the most out of this baller tutorial.
Some of these strategies that I’ll be covering may be very familiar while others may be completely new.
And I’ve got some cool link building tactics in here for everyone, no matter what stage
you’re at.
I am absolutely pumped, so let’s jump right in.
First, I want to set some context.
So throughout this tutorial, let’s imagine that I have a new and upcoming content marketing
blog called Content Marketing Hackers and I’m looking to build links to it.
So with that said, let’s get started with link building strategy #1:
Piggyback off of your competitors’ homepage links.
Here’s the skinny:
When you’re analyzing a home page’s backlinks, you’re going to find that the majority of
links will have an anchor text to the company’s brand name, the domain name, or the founder’s
name, even.
And with branded anchors like this, it’s usually a general mention of the company.
So by looking through these ‘general mentions’, your job is going to be two-fold:
First, we need to find out why your competitor was mentioned and you weren’t.
And the second thing we need to do is, we need to find out how to squeeze your way into
that post.
So let me show you a few examples:
So I’ll go to Site Explorer and enter in contentmarketinginstitute.com here and I’ll
set this setting to the exact URL.
Now, if we scroll down to the bottom of the overview page, you’ll see that over 80%
of their backlinks have branded anchor phrases.
Now, let’s scroll back up and look at the backlinks report for CMI’s homepage to see
where these links are coming from.
First, I’ll set one filter here for now to just the dofollow links.
Now, if you look at the first batch of links, you’ll notice that some of these sites have
linked to CMI’s homepage thousands of times.
This to me, looks like site wide links, so we’ll skip over these for now.
And as we scroll down, we’ll come down to this post from Social Media Examiner:
“20 Social Media Marketing Tips From the Pros.”
In the referring page column, you can see that it was an expert roundup from the title.
Then looking to the anchors and surrounding text column, you can see that the anchor text
is on Joe Pulizzi, the founder of CMI.
Just a little bit below that, you’ll see this link that CMI got from Top Rank Blog’s
“BIGLIST of Marketing Blogs.”
Now the question boils down to this:
Why did they link to Content Marketing Institute, but not Content Marketing Hackers, which again
is my imaginary blog that I need to build links to?
So, in many cases, it’s because they don’t know that my awesome and imaginary blog exists.
So as an example, I could reach out to Top Rank Blog and be like… “Hey!
Noticed your big list of marketing sites doesn’t include Content Marketing Hackers, but we
seem to fit all of your requirements.
Mind vetting our blog and adding us to your list?”
Now, as you continue to filter through this list, you’re going to find all sorts of
other opportunities that could be easy and big wins for you.
So check out this example.
You can see from the anchor and surrounding text that they interviewed Joe where he spoke
about generating revenue with content.
So I could reach out to this site and ask to be interviewed in a future podcast episode,
assuming I have something unique and valuable to offer.
To help narrow down your search, you could scroll back to the top and then look for specific
keywords.
So if I wanted to get interviewed more, I could look for keywords like “podcast”
or “interview” in the search bar here.
A few other common types of links that you might find by analyzing a competitor’s home
page are testimonials, quotes, and guest posting opportunities, since the author box almost
always has a link pointing to the writer’s home page.
Once you’ve filtered through the list, you could start sending your own pitches to these
site owners to have your brand mentioned alongside your competitor’s.
Okay!
Onto the second link building strategy:
build links to your existing pages that need the extra boost.
Now, there’s a good chance that both you and your competitors have pages with similar
content, products or services.
And that’s probably what makes them a competitor in the first place, right?
So here’s the skinny on this tactic.
This is a simple 3-step process.
Step 1: pick a page on your site that you want to build backlinks to.
Step 2: Find a competing page and analyze the backlink profile to find relevant link prospects.
And step 3: send a unique pitch that shows how your content, product, or service is different
than the one mentioned.
So let’s say that I have a great post on my blog about link building, but it’s not
getting the attention it needs.
First, I would change this URL search to a full domain search.
Next, I’ll click on the “best by links report” in the sidebar to see the most linked
to pages across the domain.
Lastly, I’ll use the search bar and look for a relevant keyword.
So I’ll type in “link” and then run the search.
Right away, you’ll see some hyper-relevant posts that have a solid number of unique linking
domains.
And if we were to add up these referring domains, you could potentially find hundreds of link
prospects almost instantaneously from just this single competitor.
Next, we can click on the corresponding number under the “dofollow” column and open up
the individual backlink reports.
Now, we would perform a backlink analysis, exactly the same way we did in the second
video in this series and send our pitch to the various site owners.
It’s important to note that when you’re pitching these sites, you should provide some
kind of unique value in your pitch.
So in this case with link building, are you sharing new tactics that no one’s talking about?
Do you have a unique case study with your results or a creative process that you follow?
Do you have unique data or insights you can provide that the page that they’re currently
linking to doesn’t?
Basically, you need to ask yourself this question:
Why should they take their time, just to add your link to their post?
And if your only answer is, “out of the goodness of their hearts,” then you may
want to rework your pitch.
One thing to note is that when you’re looking through your competitor’s best by links
report, you can look for older outdated posts.
In general, it’s easier to steal your competitor’s backlinks when you have brand new content
with information that’s relevant today.
In our example, CMI happens to include the dates in their URL, so it’s really easy
to identify outdated posts with a quick scan.
There are a couple other ways that you can find competing pages.
The first is to go to Google and type in a keyword phrase that you want to rank for.
So in this case, if it was “link building”, then I could go through the top 10 results,
copy and paste each URL into Site Explorer and analyze the individual backlink profiles
to create an even bigger list of prospects.
Now, the great thing about this tactic is that it’s not limited to just blog posts.
The exact same logic and principles apply for product and service pages.
For example, if we were to create a marketing automation software, then I could simply take
one of my competitors’, so let’s say Mailchimp’s feature page and then paste the URL into Site Explorer.
And from here, you can see that this URL has 615 referring domains linking to this page.
Now, I can click on the backlinks profile here in the left sidebar, and then look through
the list of people who are linking to this product page.
Looking at this result here, the anchor and surrounding text tells us a lot.
It says, “tools such as Mailchimp’s marketing automation software can help with personalization.”
So the question that comes to mind, is why aren’t they mentioning my marketing automation software?
And the most probable answer again?
Is that they don’t know it exists.
So in my outreach email, I could offer them a free account and show them unique value
in how my tool is superior, easier, and better than Mailchimp’s.
Alright, onto one of my favorite tactics and that’s because it is one that is easily scaleable.
Seriously! Easily scaleable.
Tactic #3 is broken link building.
Here’s the skinny on broken link building.
You find a dead 404 page from a competitor’s website that has backlinks.
Next, you recreate that page with your own twist.
And then you email everyone who is still linking to the broken page and ask them to replace
the dead link with yours.
There are a few ways to find broken pages with backlinks using Site Explorer.
The quickest way to do it from a domain level search is again in the “best by links” report.
The only thing we need to change here is this one filter to find only the 404 – not found pages.
And boom!
We now have a list of over 23,000 broken pages from our competitor’s site that has backlinks.
From here, you can click on the referring domains column to sort the list in descending order.
You can see right here that their .aspx version of the site was never redirected properly.
And this broken link here on “what is content marketing” has earned over 400 Dofollow
backlinks from 188 unique websites!
The one below, seems to be a list post of the top 42 content marketing blogs which has
91 referring domains!
And the one below that…
drum roll please…
[Drum roll]
Is the same post without a proper redirect, so that 91 referring domains, now turns into
157 unique linking websites.
A.K.A. 157 new link prospects!
Now, if you already have a solid replacement, then it’s just a matter of pitching the
owners, editors, and webmasters with your piece.
And you can use the search filter here again to look for topics that are similar to ones
that you’ve already published.
So let’s say that I have a great post on content marketing tools.
I can search for the keyword “tool”, and you’ll see all of the relevant broken pages
with the keyword in the URL.
But if you haven’t created the post yet, then you can do something cool right here
within this report.
First, I’ll clear the search filter.
And now, let’s look at one of these pages that seems to lack context.
This one here has a URL permalink that reads: “repurpose one video” and has 32 unique
linking websites.
What you can do is click on the caret here and if there are any records inside of Archive.org,
which is a free service that lets you see what pages looked like in the past, then you’ll
see a shortcut link here.
Click on the link and it will load up the page and show you what the page looked like
when it was live.
Now we know that this post is a case study done on their podcast where they repurposed
one video and got X results.
So if you have a similar case study on repurposing content, then it might be worth creating.
After your content is pitch-ready, you can click on the number in the dofollow column,
which will open up the backlinks report with the dofollow filter set.
Now, you can see all of the pages that have linked to this broken page.
Now, it’s just a matter of reaching out to each site owner, editor, or webmaster to
let them know about the broken link and to pitch your post as a replacement.
One side note that I want to make is regarding outreach.
When you’re pitching the different site owners, you want to make sure that your replacement
article is actually relevant to the context of why they linked to the broken link.
For example, if we look at this broken page’s backlink profile, which is on content marketing
spend, then you can see from the anchors/surrounding text column that the context of these links
is largely because of stats.
So if you were recreating a similar page to this one, you should be prepared to use your
new and up to date data as part of your pitch.
And if you don’t have the data, then don’t recreate the post.
Alright, on to link building strategy #4, which I don’t think many people are using.
And that’s link building from irrelevant 301 redirects.
Here’s the skinny:
When a website decides that they want to consolidate content, meaning, they’re going to take some
of their less popular posts and then redirect to ones they want to rank for.
And the result is going to be completely irrelevant redirects that you can capitalize on.
Within this same report, which is the best by links report, we can change the 404 filter
to “301 moved permanently.”
And you can see that they have over 6,700 articles that have been permanently redirected.
The one that stands out to me is the blog post here.
It looks like they’ve redirected a post on headline click through rate to their headline
tips and tools post.
This might seem like they’re completely relevant, but if we click through to the tips
and tools article and then search for the word “click”, you’ll see that there
are only 3 occurrences.
The first shows “cheesy click-bait headlines”.
The second reads, “The winner gets the clicks”.
And the third says “most clicks.”
Looking at the archive.org page, you can see that the original topic was on tips to improve
your headline click-through rate, which the new article clearly doesn’t help with.
From here, you would go to the backlinks report, skim through the anchors and surrounding text
column to see the context of the backlink.
And here, we can see that the majority of links are coming from a stat that was mentioned
related to click-through rate.
And if you look at this one here, it says that the stat comes from “the folks at Outbrain”
which you could also link to in your post so that your article is relevant when you’re
pitching these sites.
Pretty neat twist to 404 link building, right?
Alrighty, link building strategy #5:
Guest blogging on sites where your competitors are posting (with a twist).
And the method that I’m about to show you is a pretty creative one that I haven’t
seen anyone talk about.
But first, the skinny on guest posting.
First, you find a website you want to write for, you pitch them with some topic ideas,
and if accepted, write a post that will most likely lead to a link back to your site.
And I’ve covered a lot of effective ways to find guest posting sites in my Content
Explorer video.
So if you’re using or plan to use guest posting as a promotion strategy, then I highly
recommend watching that video.
Now, before I teach you this new tactic, let me start with a story.
[Dreamy music]
It was a dark and stormy night and I was just sitting at home reading through some of my
favorite blogs, minding my own business.
And for whatever reason, blog after blog after blog after blog…
This guy’s name and face kept popping up on my screen.
Ryan Stewart.
He seemed to be on some kind of relentless guest posting blitz.
So I followed him on Twitter and literally binge read everything he had written.
[Slow clap]
Well done Ryan…well done.
Here’s the thing: if I was noticing him everywhere, so were others.
And when it comes to anything online, there are always footprints.
The main one footprint for guest posts is the author bio.
And in it, you’ll normally get a link to your website and some links to your social profiles.
So what you can do to find guest posting opportunities is to open up Site Explorer and search for
a popular guest blogger’s Twitter profile URL.
I’ll put in Ryan’s twitter URL and click submit.
And you’ll see that 128 unique domains have linked to his twitter profile.
Let’s look at the backlink profile.
If you skim through the referring page as well as the “anchor and backlink” column,
then you can almost instantly see why they got a backlink.
For example, this one from an amazing blog that I absolutely adore was an expert roundup
which you can see from the title.
Then you’ll see this one here on local-seo that looks like a naked URL.
And if we click through to that article, you’ll see that Ryan was the guest author.
Now where does this link come from?
Right here.
So you could skim through this column and look for naked urls, empty anchors, or even
links from images, which often suggests that it was a guest post.
By using these 5 link building tactics that I just showed you, you should be able to build
a large enough list of prospects and get backlinks to get your pages ranking with the big boys.
And that’s it for this SEO tutorial and actually this entire backlink analysis and
link building series!
If you haven’t watched the other videos, then I highly recommend going back and working
through these videos at your own pace.
Make sure to hit the thumbs up button and subscribe for more actionable SEO tutorials.
In fact, let me know in the comments if there’s anything that we haven’t covered that you
would like to see in action right here on YouTube.
Now, I’ve got some links that need to be built and I’m sure you do too.
So until the next video, keep grinding away SEO friends and I’ll see you soon.
19 Link Building Techniques
[Video Transcript]
In this video I’m going to show you 19 link building
techniques that will help you land tons of new high quality
backlinks so you can increase your rankings and traffic.
In fact, I’ve used these exact techniques you’re about to
learn to grow organic search traffic by 93%, 100%, and
even 254%.
I’m Nathan Gotch the founder of Gotch SEO,
which is where entrepreneurs come to learn how to get
more free traffic from search engines.
And today, I’m going to show you my go to link building
techniques that will help you land amazing
backlinks in any niche.
Any make sure you watch until the end,
because we’ll be sharing some proven outreach templates
you can swipe and use for yourself.
Let’s jump in.
(energetic instrumental music)
So the first thing that you need to do is focus on trying
to grow your website authority without getting
any new backlinks.
Now, I know that this may sound counterintuitive,
but there are many actions you can take to grow
your websites authority without needing any more backlinks.
But before I show you what methods you can use,
you need to first understand why we’re even putting in
effort to acquire backlinks in the first place.
So the main objectives of acquiring backlinks are to
A, increase your individual keyword rankings,
B, increase your organic search traffic,
and C, to increase your overall website authority.
And one other perk of acquiring quality backlinks is
it can help you get relevant qualified referral traffic.
But point C, which is grow your overall website authority
is the most important objective of link building
in my opinion.
Because when your website is more authoritative,
it becomes easier to rank.
That means you won’t need as many backlinks to rank.
And you can see proof of this when a website like Forbes,
publishes a new article and ranks on the second or first
page Google, without any backlinks at all.
This is the power of website authority.
And since you don’t need as many backlinks to rank,
you will actually reduce your overall SEO cost overtime,
because link building is one of the most capital and time
intensive parts of a SEO campaign.
So with that said, I want to show you some techniques
you can use, to grow your websites authority without
needing any new backlinks.
So the first method is to fix redirect chains.
A redirect chain occurs when a redirect is
redirecting to a redirect.
And the problem with this is that page B is acting
as a buffer between page A and the final destination
which is page C.
This technical issue is robbing page C
of it’s potential authority.
So to fix this,
you need to 301 redirect page A to page C.
And by fixing a redirect chain,
you’ll send authority
and link equity directly to the page that you want.
And this is far more effective than making the link
equity pass through a buffer.
Now here’s how you can find redirect chains using
Screaming Frog SEO Spider.
Open up Screaming Frog.
Enter your domain and start the analysis.
Then click on “Reports” in the navigation,
and select “Redirect & Canonical Chains”.
The second method to grow your website authority is
to fix 302 redirects.
Now there is some debate on whether or not PageRank passes
through 302 redirects.
And for many years, SEO’s including myself have always
stated that you should change 302’s to 301’s.
This is still my stance.
However, here’s what Gary whose last name I won’t try to
pronounce recently said,
“30x redirects don’t lose PageRank anymore”.
Now is Gary telling the truth?
Probably, but I still don’t think it’s worth the risk.
Because out of the 100’s of SEO’s audits,
my team and I have conducted.
I’ve only seen a few websites using 302’s for their actual
purpose, which is a temporary redirect.
That means that in most cases,
302’s are nothing more than accidental.
So with that said,
it’s my personal preference to change 302’s to 301’s
if they aren’t being used for the actual purpose.
Now to find 302 redirects, just open up Screaming Frog and
click on the “Response Codes” tab.
Click on the “Filter Dropdown”.
And select “Redirection 3XX”.
The third method you should use
to grow your website authority is to leverage pages
that have existing authority.
This is particularly effective when you publish a new page
you want to rank in google.
That’s because these internal links
will send equity to the new page.
Which will give it a nice authority boost out of the gate.
So here’s the process, I personally use.
Open up Ahrefs.
Enter your domain.
And click on “Best Buy links” under pages.
Then start going down the list adding internal links
to these pages where it makes sense.
I also recommend tracking what anchor text you used
and the day you added the internal link.
That way you can back track and quantify your actions.
As far as anchor text,
you should mainly use exact match
or partial match for your internal links.
And I also recommend auditing your
existing internal link anchor text,
because many websites do not use internal links effectively.
And my personal favorite way to audit internal anchors,
to no surprise is to use Screaming Frog SEO Spider.
All you need to do is click on “End links” at the bottom
and you’ll be able to see all the internal linking
information including the firn URL’s and anchor text.
Go through and optimize these for better performance.
Once again, track your changes.
The fourth method to grow your website authority is
to reclaim lost link equity by fixing 404 errors.
You can either use Google search console or Screaming Frog
SEO Spider to find 404 errors.
For Google search console, just go to the crawl section,
click on “Crawl Errors” and select “Not found”.
To find 404’s in Screaming Frog,
just click on “Response Codes”.
Click the “Filter” dropdown
and select “Climb Error 4XX”.
Then what you need to do is copy all of the 404 errors,
open up Ahrefs.
Click “More” in the navigation.
Click “Batch Analysis”.
Enter your URL’s and start the analysis.
If you find 404 pages with existing backlinks,
you should 301 redirect them to a
relevant page on your site or to the home page if a relevant
page doesn’t exist.
The fifth method for growing your website authority,
is to consolidate similar pages.
One of the biggest SEO content mistakes is creating multiple
assets around very similar keyword phrases.
This is what leads to keyword cannibalization
and generally makes your SEO campaign
harder than it needs to be.
And that’s when the Cake Technique comes into play.
In short, the cake technique is the process of consolidating
similar content assets into a single mother asset.
Going through this process has a wide aray of benefits.
Such as number 1, Increased word count.
Consolidating assets, will naturally
increase your word count.
Which is often correlated to better rankings in Google.
Number two, deeper content.
Spreading your knowledge across multiple post,
usually produces thin content.
Consolidating assets will produce the opposite affect.
Number three, it eliminates keyword cannibalization issues.
Keyword cannibalization which is when two or more pages
target very similar keywords.
Forces Google to choose, which one is best.
So instead of taking a risk, you can just consolidate these
assets to eliminate that possibility altogether.
Number four, it consolidates authority.
You’ll be 301 redirecting your other assets,
which means your mother asset will inherit
all existing backlinks.
That will turn your mother asset
into an authoritative powerhouse.
Number five, it makes content promotion much easier.
It’s easier to acquire backlinks to and to promote a
single content asset.
Plus people are more likely to link to a super valuable
and in depth resource then a fin content asset.
So here are the steps to execute in the Cake Technique.
First, identify content assets that are targeting the
same or closely related keywords.
Second, decide what content asset is going to be
your “Mother” asset.
Third, map out how you’re going to combine these content
assets into a single piece of content.
Fourth, consolidate the content.
Fifth, 301 redirect the supporting assets
to your “Mother” asset.
And sixth, annotate your actions in Google analytics
to measure the performance of your new asset.
And I’ve personally used this exact technique with many
clients, and even on Gotch SEO.
When I consolidated a few different assets around the
topic of backlinks.
I had individual blog posts on What is a
High Quality Backlink.
How to Build Tier One Backlinks.
How to Build Tier Two Backlinks.
How to Build Tier Three Backlinks.
And even how to earn backlinks.
This is borderline keyword cannibalization,
so I decided to consolidate them into a single asset
which is now my backlinks guide.
As a result Gotch SEO floats around number 1
for the term backlinks.
And we’ve grown this pages organic search traffic by
almost 300% since 2016.
And now the final method I want to show you
is to build an effective site architecture.
Developing an intelligent site architecture is the
single best way to get the most bang for your buck
when it comes to link building.
And my personal favorite architecture strategy
is to use a Reverse Silo.
Instead of trying to acquire backlinks
to non linkable pages,
such as homepage, category pages, product pages etc.
The Reverse Silo is built to acquire backlinks
to content rich pages.
Now these maybe blog posts or
individual information driven pages.
This is a more effective approach to link acquisition
because people are much more willing to link to a valuable
piece of information than a sales driven page.
With that said, the ultimate goal of the Reverse Silo is
to distribute link authority page rank from your content
assets to your sales driven pages via internal linking.
And I believe this content centric approach is the safest
way to grow your website authority.
So now that you know what to do
to grow your websites authority,
let me show you my favorite method for acquiring backlinks,
which is to create linkable assets.
I use this simple three step approach
for creating these assets.
Number one, I find linkable asset ideas from competitors.
Number two, I create something better
than what currently exists.
Number three, I promote the linkable asset.
Let’s start with step one.
So the first question is
what is a Linkable Asset?
A Linkable Asset is designed to attract backlinks.
And the truth is some pages are simply not link worthy.
And some examples include home pages, category pages,
and product pages.
Now sure, with some creativity it’s possible to attract
links to these types of pages.
But in most cases, you’ll need to create linkable assets
if you really want to accelerate your SEO performance.
Ensured a linkable asset adds
massive value to your industry.
It helps you earn backlinks in the long run.
So how do you actually create a linkable asset?
I’m going to walk you through how I would create a linkable
asset for a local business because I believe this concept
can be most confusing for local situations.
So let’s pretend I’m working on a local SEO campaign
for a St. Louis financial planner.
And their primary objective is to rank for St. Louis
financial planner.
So the first step of this process is to create the
absolute best page targeting the keyword phrase
St. Louis financial planner.
In most cases I would likely use their homepage,
unless they have locations outside of the state.
And after that page is developed.
I would then begin the process of creating a linkable asset.
Now the trick to accomplishing this on the local level
is to establish the idea, that the company is an
authority in their niche.
And from that perspective, we can create content
that adds value to the financial planning industry
on both the local and national level.
So my go to approach is to analyze competitors and see
what’s already worked.
That way you don’t even have to reinvent the wheel.
What you want to do is just go to Google,
enter a broad phrase.
So in this case, I’ll just search financial planning blogs.
Let’s start with plannerssearch.org.
Copy their URL.
Open up Ahrefs and paste the URL in the site explorer.
After the analysis is complete, click on “Top Pages”
under organic search.
And the goal is to see what keywords have attracted
the most backlinks because then we can reach out to
these same sources with our linkable assets.
And right away we see if there’s a page wrecking for the
keyword phrase, when to retire.
And the page has attracted, 12 linking root domains.
Now, this is nothing super impressive.
But that’s a good sign, because it means there’s
a lot of room for improvement.
So just continue going through your competitors,
and building your list of linkable asset ideas.
Then all you need to do is start
creating your first linkable asset.
Now the goal should be to create something that’s totally
different and 10 X better than what’s currently ranking.
I recommend reading my SEO Content guide to learn more.
I’ll have a link below the video.
After your linkable asset is created,
it’s time to start reaching out and trying to get backlinks.
Since most of the methods I’m going to show
you require outreach.
I’m now going to show you how to find email addresses
and contact information.
The first tool you should use is ViolaNorbert.
Just enter the first and last name and the domain of
the person you’re trying to reach.
In most cases, this tool will be more than enough.
But if it doesn’t find the contact info you need,
then I recommend using hunter.io.
Which is also super straight forward.
Just log in and enter the domain you’re targeting.
If you don’t find the right emails using
both of these tools,
you’ll need to do a manual check.
Look for authors, go to the contact page, or even check
the who is information.
And if there isn’t a visible author on the page,
you can check the source code.
Just right click on the target page and
click “View Page Source”
and search for author.
You should be able to find an author.
Now that you know how to find emails,
it’s also important to understand how to qualify
and prioritize link opportunities.
You’ll need to go through this qualification process
I’m about to show you,
once you’ve gathered all your link opportunities.
There are four qualifiers you should use for prioritizing
link opportunities.
First, how much brand recognition do you have?
How well known is your company or the person whose
producing your content asset?
If you’re relatively unknown, then you should focus
on the lower hanging fruits.
That’s because super high quality opportunities require
more relationship development.
And that takes time, and if you rush it,
you could hurt your chances of scoring links from
popular industry blogs in the future.
The second qualifier is relevance.
You’re number one link building objective should be
to get backlinks on websites that are relevant to yours.
But don’t take my word for it.
Here’s what a formal member of Google’s search quality team
Andre Weyher said back in 2010.
“Now only this but take PR for example, getting a link
from a high PR page used to always be valuable.
Today it’s more the relevance of the site’s theme
in regards to yours, relevance is the new PR”.
Now this quote is stating something very obvious.
Your link acquisition efforts should begin
with the most relevant opportunities.
But there’s a problem with this approach.
Getting 100% exact relevancy for
every single link is unrealistic.
That’s why I developed the relevancy pyramid framework
for prioritizing your link opportunities.
And the idea is quite simple.
There is a limited supply of
100% relevant link opportunities.
However, as you broaden your research,
there will be many more opportunities to go after.
So the key is to prioritize opportunities at the top of
the pyramid since there the most relevant and then work
your way down the pyramid towards
the less relevant opportunities.
All you need to do is just assign each opportunity a score
of one to five.
With a score of one being the most relevant.
The third qualifier is authority.
The stronger the site, the better the results.
And since Google doesn’t update PageRank anymore
for the public, you have to rely on third party metrics.
Now none of these third party tools are perfect,
but they will do the job.
I recommend you analyze opportunities using
all available options.
And those include Ahrefs, Majestic and Open Site Explorer.
Now the fourth qualifier is traffic.
If you approach link acquisition with the intention
of driving traffic to your website.
It changes your entire mindset.
Your goal should be to get backlinks on websites
with real traffic.
Now this doesn’t mean you’ll get loads of referral traffic,
but it’s a good standard to have.
And since you will never know the exact traffic data
of a site without seeing their analytics, you’ll need
to use SEMrush or Ahrefs.
Now these are the four checks you can use to quickly
qualify and prioritize opportunities.
But if you want to take it up another notch,
you can also vet opportunities based on the actual
quality of their link profile and their editorial standards.
So now that you know how to find contact information and
how to qualify link opportunities.
Let me show you how to actually find these opportunities.
So the first way to promote your linkable asset
is to reach out to the websites
that have linked to your competitor.
The best way to do this is to use Ahrefs.
Open up Ahrefs.
Click on the keyword “Explorer”.
Enter your keyword and then scroll down
to the competitors section.
Then export the link opportunities and
qualify and prioritize the list.
Then all you have to do is send a simple outreach email
saying that you created something similar and
explain the contents unique selling proposition.
Just articulate why the content is important, different,
or better than what their linking too.
I’ll have a sample outreach template in the
description below the video.
Then you can swipe.
Just remember that the goal of this strategy,
isn’t to try to persuade the website to replace
your competitors link.
The goal is to persuade them that your resource
is a good supplement to the content
and that it can add value to their audience.
The next way to promote your linkable asset is to
reach out to people you link to within the post.
All you need to do is open up your publish content asset,
and then install the data miner browser plugin.
After it’s installed, click it and under the
public tab.
There should be an option for generic recipe,
get all links.
If not, just search for it and then click “Run”.
Download the CSV and delete all the unnecessary rows
and then you’ll have a nice list of prospects to
reach out too.
Like I said, I’ll have a template in the description
that you can use.
The next method is to pitch your content asset
to link roundups.
The key to landing links on roundups is to build a
reputation for producing incredible content.
That makes the process much easier.
Once you’ve established that criteria.
All you need to do is prospect for the link roundups
in your industry.
Just go to Google and enter link roundup plus your keyword.
And I’ll share some different search strings below this
video as well.
So in this case, I’ll use link roundup plus finance.
Then just use the data miner browser plugin to export
the Google results.
And like the other methods, you’ll need to qualify
the opportunities and find contact information.
I’ll have a template for reaching out to link roundup
opportunities in the description.
The next step that you should use to promote your
linkable asset is to look for resource pages.
Resource pages are great for two reasons.
First, if your resource is high quality, you can
land a link pretty easily.
And secondly, many resource pages are filled
with broken links.
Which means you can use that as leverage.
So here’s what you need to do to find resource pages.
Go to Google and enter keyword intitle’ and then resources.
In this case, I’ll use finance intitle resources.
I’ll give you some more search strings below
this video as well.
Open up each opportunity and then I highly
recommend installing the check my links plugin,
because this will allow you to find broken links
on these pages.
And once you’ve installed the plugins, run it and see
if these pages have any existing broken links.
So in this case, there are no broken links.
So you would just send a traditional out reach template,
to get your content featured on this research page.
On the other hand, if this page had broken links,
you would need to use a slightly different outreach
template and I’ll have one below for you.
So those are a few of the methods you can use to
promote your linkable asset, but now I want to show
you some of my favorite, non content dependent
link building techniques.
The first method which is often overlooked,
is to fix backlinks with redirect chains.
In short, you’re going to reach out to websites
that have already linked to you and then ask if they
can change the link to your preferred URL.
All you need to do is open Ahrefs.
Enter your domain and click on “Backlinks”.
And then under backlink profile,
click on the “Link Type” dropdown
and select “With Redirect Chain”.
Then all you need to do is reach out to these websites
and ask if they can change the URL.
The next method is, guest posting.
Which is an old school method, but it’s
still super effective if you do it the right way.
The key is to place your links within the body of
the content as opposed to the author bio.
To find these opportunities, open up Google or
any other search engines like Bing, Yahoo or Duck Duck Go.
And enter some simple search strings like your niche
plus write for us.
Or your niche plus guest post.
You can also find where your competitors have guest posted,
by searching by plus their name minus a reductive query,
their website.com.
After you’ve built a nice list of guest posting prospects.
You just need to qualify and prioritize them,
find the contact information and then send them a pitch.
I always recommend pitching three different topics and
make sure you do your research to make sure the topics
haven’t been written on before.
Or if they have been covered, make sure you’re
bringing something new to the table.
As I mentioned before, you should try to add links to
your content assets within the guest post.
Like I did in this @ SEMrush guest post
I wrote a few years ago.
The next method is help a reporter out or HARO
which isn’t a new link acquisition tactic by any means.
But it’s super effective if you have the
right system in place.
The key is to focus on quality over quantity.
Sending 100’s of thin responses
won’t generate great results.
That’s why you need to put a lot of thought into
your responses and make sure you’re
responding to relevant opportunities.
Here’s an example of a HARO contribution I submitted
for customer think.
Which has a domain rating of 78.
Notice that my response isn’t long,
but I did take the time to craft what I believe
to be a valuable responsible.
The next link building strategy is relatively untapped
and I call it the Merger Technique.
But before I jump into the strategy,
you first must understand what a merger actually is.
Investopedia defines a merger as “The combining of two
or more companies, generally by offering the stockholders
of one company securities in the acquiring company
in exchange for the surrender of their stock.”
Now from a SEO perspective, when a merger occurs,
the old brands website will get 301 redirected
to the acquiring companies website.
In short, the merger technique is the process of 301
redirecting a relevant domain, with a relevant link profile,
to your website.
The ultimate objective is to increase
your websites authority because the stronger website
makes ranking much easier.
This strategy simply imitates the process of a big brand
acquiring another business.
And I came up with the name of this technique because
we executed it with one of our clients
who acquires data centers across the United States.
So every time they acquire a new data center,
we would 301 redirect the acquire brand site,
the most relevant page on their website.
So for example, if they acquired a Dallas data center.
We would redirect that website to their
Dallas data center page.
And within a year, we increased their organic search traffic
by 256%.
Although these results are awesome, I wanted to make sure
it wasn’t an isolated event.
And that’s why I implemented the same exact strategy,
on GOTCH SEO and several other clients sites.
For my site, I took an old marketing website and 301
redirected it to a landing page on my website.
That redirect pushed the target keyword,
to the first page.
I then did the same exact thing for a local website
and grew it’s organic search traffic by 425%.
If you want an example outside of my own experiences,
then I highly recommend that you take a look at
Neil Patel’s link profile.
He’s acquired a few different companies and merged them
with neilpatel.com.
This has absolutely exploded his organic search traffic.
So you get it.
301 redirects work, but let’s wait a second here.
Not all 301 redirects work.
That’s why I didn’t call this 301 redirect strategy.
The key is to find extremely relevant businesses to acquire.
These can either be expired domains or existing businesses.
Let’s start with expired domains.
You can use a tool like DomCop, Expired Domains.net or
Fresh Drop to find and filter through thousands of
expired domains. I have videos on my channel for all three
of these tools so make sure you check those out.
Now finding expired domains is the easy part,
but vetting them is where you need the most skill.
This is incredibly important and not a step to take likely,
because you don’t want to redirect a toxic website to yours.
You want to make sure it’s of the
highest quality imaginable.
So here’s what you need to look for
when vetting expired domains.
Number one, the link profile.
The domain should have high quality links
from relevant websites.
Number two, the anchor text.
The domain shouldn’t have aggressive anchor text use.
Meaning a high usage of keyword rich anchor texts.
The ideal situation is to find domains,
that predominantly have branded anchor text.
Number three, the link stickability.
Links are important, but making sure they actually stick
is even more important.
In general, links within the body of content, are more
likely to stick, but links and footers such as those
you see from web design companies or site wide blog rollings
have a low stickability potential.
Another way to ensure that your links stick,
is how you go about actually
redirecting the acquired website.
If possible, you should try to redirect individual pages,
to the most relevant page on your site.
This is far more affective then a full on site wide
redirect to the home page.
As far as link stickability and even effectiveness.
Number four, the domain usage history.
Use archive.org to see how the domain has been used
throughout it’s history.
In an ideal situation, the domain would’ve only had
one owner and hasn’t been used since it’s expired.
This simple process is what led me to acquire
minternetmarketing.com which had many inbound
marketing relevant links, such as this one from hubspot.
Now the vetting process for an existing inactive business
is nearly identical.
The only difference is how you find these companies.
For example, Brian Dean from backlinko just acquired
John Cooper’s blog Point Blank SEO.
This is a perfect example of a proper merger,
because Point Blank SEO is hyper relevant to backlinko
and it has an incredible link profile.
You need to dig through your industry and create a
list of blogs or companies that aren’t updating their
website or maybe seem to not be doing too well.
Just use simple search queries in Google like
list of topic blogs, or city niche companies.
You’ll need to do a lot of manual analysis to see
how active these blogs are.
And one thing you can do is use the check my links
plugin to see if any of the blogs are dead when
you’re going through these list.
Once you’ve identified some targets
and vetted their websites.
All you need to do, is reach out
engage their interest in acquisition.
The next link building method is a slight iteration of
the merger technique and I call it the White Hat
Alternative to PBNs.
PBNs are still a very popular great out
link building method.
But using them comes with substantial risk.
That’s why I developed this technique.
In short, you’re going to extract the links away from
the expired domains and send them directly to your
website, instead of having to build a risky PBN
or even having to 301 redirect a website.
So with that said, here’s what you need to do
to execute this strategy.
Number one, find an expired domain with
a relevant high-quality link profile.
Number two, scrape its backlinks.
Number three, qualify and prioritize the link opportunities.
Number four, reach out and let the linkers know they
are linking to a dead resource and pitch a relevant
content asset of yours that they can link to instead.
Now to improve your success rate, you should suggest
two to three quality resources including yours.
If you’re willing to put in more effort,
you could also recreate the original content
which would substantially increase your success rate.
Now this is obvious, but the content must be better
than the original.
And it needs to be relevant to your website.
Now if you take this route, all you need to do is reach out
and let the linker know about the new
revised piece of content.
The next method is to leverage list of top blogs.
I mentioned looking through a list of top blogs to
find merger opportunities, but these list are also
generally great link building opportunities as well.
You just need to reach out and see if you can get
on these list.
It’s as simple as that.
Now obviously the pre requisite you’ll need to have,
is a quality blog.
That means you need to be honest with yourself
and compare your blog with those that are actually
on that list.
If you feel that you’re producing similar or better
caliber work, then you should reach out to these lists.
Now to find them, you can just put your competitor into
Ahrefs and click on “Backlinks”.
Then just search top blogs in the search bar.
You can also prospect in Google using search strings
such as top or best niche blogs.
I’ll have a template you can use below this video.
The next method is to land links on expert roundups.
Expert roundups are definitely over played at this point,
but there still an easy way to score
backlinks on relevant blogs.
Now I’ve become a lot more selective about the ones I
personally participate in,
but if you’re just starting out.
You should take every opportunity you can get to
get a quality backlink.
One method you can use which is something I learned
from a friend and fellow SEO Garret Dane,
is to reach out to expert roundups that
have already been published.
This is a super easy way to score backlinks because
these types of content assets are always seeking
more expert insights.
Now the easiest way to find expert roundups is to
run your competitor through Ahrefs,
click on “Backlinks” and search expert roundup
in the search bar.
You can also use Google to find more expert roundup
opportunities by using simple search strings like niche
plus expert roundup.
The next link building technique requires your company
to have a figure head or a known expert.
That’s because you can score easy backlinks through
interviews and podcasts.
All you need to do is spend 30 to 60 minutes of your time
to score a high quality backlink and to get exposure
for your brand.
It’s a win win.
Now you can find these opportunities using general
search queries like niche plus interview width or
you can find opportunities by searching for
interviews that your competitors have done by doing
interview plus competitor name minus their domain.
Just reach out and pitch yourself for the interview.
Now one thing to keep in mind is that you can land
interviews on marketing or business podcast,
just by having unique result to share.
The good news is you don’t have to be guru.
For example, you can be a HVAC company with an awesome
gross story and land some great backlinks from interviews.
Alright guys, so I hope this helped you learn a thing or
two about the various link building techniques
that I used at this point and all you need to do now
is just take action on what you’ve learned.
And if you got value,
please like and share this video because it could
help many others.
Thank you so much for watching
and leave a comment below if you have any
questions whatsoever because I respond to
every single one.
I’ll see you in the next video.