Link Building
Do you want to improve the authority of your site and, in addition, gain relevance in search results? Try betting on a good Link Building strategy!
Link Building is all about getting backlinks, that is, links on other sites pointing to your site naturally or not. The objective is to achieve relevance and popularity in search engines, generating more traffic and getting better positions in their ranking.
When you think about link building, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Let me try to guess: a tangle of links, like a “cat’s bed”? A dangerous strategy? Something that only works for consolidated sites and with a certain domain authority? Thing from the past? Google penalty?
If you thought any of these things (or all), know that I sympathize a lot, because I thought so too.
It turns out that link building is not that seven-headed bug. Unfortunately, many companies end up missing out on great opportunities to get quality links out of sheer lack of knowledge.
This can happen due to several factors, such as fear of doing something wrong and being penalized by Google, not seeing the true value that link building can generate, not knowing how to measure possible results, among others.
However, among all this, “I don’t know where to start” ends up being the main obstacle to the execution of a link building strategy. That’s why I wrote this article, to help you get out of scratch right into your first link campaign! Come on?
Table of Contents
Before we get into the concepts and strategies of link building, it is important to understand how everything came about and what transformations brought us to the way of getting links in 2020.
In the early days of the internet, search engines used only the content of pages and keywords to rank sites. Then, in 1997, Google came up with something innovative: using links as a criterion to understand the importance, relevance and reliability of a website.
Google saw the links as “recommendations”. Thus, the more links a site had pointing to it, the more “recommended it was”, and for Google it ended up becoming more relevant. These links on other sites are called backlinks.
Unfortunately, as well as handling content, techniques have also emerged to promote websites and content in an inorganic way – that is, by marketing links.
With that, once again, the content that was displayed on the first page of results was not always the best and most complete on the subject, but the one with the most backlinks, and guess who got hurt in the middle of it all? That’s right, the user.
As one of Google’s biggest goals is to offer the best content (the best answers) for users’ queries (questions), in 2012 he launched the first version of Penguin . This update in its algorithm that caused low quality content and many unnatural links to plummet many rankings.
Since then “artificial link generation”, such as purchasing links and PBN, has been seen as an attempt at manipulating Google. Also known as black hat , it is punishable.
Therefore, currently the number of links that point to the site is not as significant as the quality, relevance and naturalness of the links that are pointed to it.
Link building is a set of tactics that aim to acquire qualified and relevant links from other sites. From this it is possible to increase the authority and reputation of the website in search engines, improving organic positioning, increasing rankings and traffic.
As seen previously, links play an essential role for search engines, because from them it is possible to find a page and determine its authority based on the quantity and quality of links received. In addition, they are a ranking factor on Google.
Therefore, more important than a large number of links pointing to your page, is the quality of those links. This is related to domain authority . That is, the greater the authority of a website that is linking to yours, the greater the weight of your site’s “recommendation” to Google.
In addition, an important point is that the website that is linking your content must have some relationship with your business. For example, a cake recipe website, even if it has a high domain authority, having a link to a website that talks about video games doesn’t sound very natural, right? So be careful with links on sites that have nothing to do with your content, as Google may penalize you.
Having referral domains that are well ranked and have a good reputation mentioning your content is great for your link building strategy. That’s because, when they link to your page, they transfer some of your authority, as the following topic explains.
Link Juice
When a page mentions another page in its content, it ends up transferring a little authority. An example of this: imagine that in an article on Inbound Marketing, we mentioned that Digital Marketing is important for this strategy. By inserting a link in the “ Digital Marketing ” section to the page that we consider the most complete on this subject, we are telling Google that this page is the reference, and so we are giving our “vote of confidence” – that is, going over of our authority for her.
See how it looks in practice with the image below:
This “vote of confidence” passed through links is called Link Juice.
As previously seen, links are one of Google’s ranking factors and are directly linked to the placement of pages . For this reason, link building ends up becoming an important task within SEO tactics. Only if not done carefully, it can ruin the entire performance of search engine optimization.
It is important that the focus is on getting natural links from sites with a good reputation. In addition, links need to be obtained continuously to have an impact on the visibility of your site with Google.
The location where the link is inserted also influences the authority that is passed on to the page that is linking. For example: a link inserted right at the beginning of a content has more weight than a link in the footer or in the sidebar area.
Before starting any link building strategy, it is important to know the current panorama of your site in relation to the links that point to it. To do this, you need to do the following:
To obtain this information you will need a tool. Some that can help you with this are: Ahrefs, SEMrush, MajesticSEO, Moz and Google Search Console .
With this data in hand, make an analysis of your pages that received backlinks. Check what position they are on Google and, if they are not first, analyze the pages at the top and see what their content is different from yours.
After identifying possible content gaps, analyze the sites that are linking to yours. Are they new or consolidated sites? Are they client sites or the mainstream media? Do you have any relationship with these sites?
Look at the broken links and see who is linking to you, but with a 404 error link. Requesting a broken link to be updated to the correct one can be a quick and easy lever for generating backlinks.
Make a brief comparison between your current backlinks and your competitors. Analyze the sites that link to your competitors, but don’t link to yours. See which pages and content categories of your competitor receives the most links, this can give you ideas for new content and formats.
Analyze how many links your site receives per month and compare with the number of links your competitor received in the same period. This can be one of the factors for your competitor to be able to position better than you for some keywords, even with similar content.
After doing all the necessary analysis, it’s time to think about the link building strategy. For this, we can think of two ways of working together that can generate links to your site: specific link building campaigns and recurring actions.
Each is interdependent with the other, but both are fundamental to maintaining the necessary pace of acquiring backlinks.
Link building campaigns are done in a timely manner and for specific pages. For example: for the launch of a tool, a survey and even an infographic, campaigns can be carried out to acquire links directly to the pages of this special content.
It can also be done to retrieve or gain placement for an important page. They have a stipulated duration of one to two months, are very objective, with defined goals and usually offer something in exchange for the link
But be careful, no exchange of links between the sites, as this can lead to penalties – we will discuss these points below.
To do a link building campaign, you first need to set a goal. There is no exact recipe for how many links are needed for a campaign to be successful.
When defining a goal, it is essential to analyze some individual aspects of each site, such as the famous saying “each case is a case”. To set this goal, start by noting the following:
After all these analyzes, set a goal based on your normal pace and how this campaign can increase it, considering the pace that your competitor gets backlinks.
Everyone knows that in order to have quality backlinks, the content produced needs to be of quality as well. But the question remains: can a blogpost with more than 2,000 words be considered good content for backlinks?
The answer is: it depends! It is not enough to be extensive, the content must be current, bring data, images, media and especially be attractive.
For a link building campaign, innovative content that adds value to those who consume it (research, tools, etc.) tends to perform better than blog posts. Below, a list of the contents that can generate more links to you:
Creating surveys related to your market and current moment, and disseminating your results in a creative, explanatory way, generating insights for the reader, is a great way to generate backlinks.
As an example, I leave the research that RD has recently developed on Covid-19 and its impact on micro and small companies . From it we were able to achieve backlinks on sites with great domain authority.
By having rich and very complete content, guides can be a good bet for generating links. Choose a current topic that is of interest to search (to know that Google Trends and the Google ADS Keyword Planner can be your allies) and create an intuitive content, with many practical examples and that is easy to read.
Some examples of guides that results Digital has produced and that can inspire you: Guide Personas , SEO Guide and Media Guide pays .
Because it helps the community effectively, they are very conducive to attracting quality backlinks from established websites. In addition, they can be a great option to increase your lead base.
Here are some examples of tools that we have created in the Digital Results: Personas Generator , Signature Generator email and ROI calculator .
You can present the experiments that you ran in your own company and the lessons that they generated, infographics about the business, trends that you perceive from your database and even cases of success of your customers related to the product / service that you offer.
For inspiration, check out some cases published by Resultados Digitais and related to the use of RD Station: Case from DARYUS , Case from Evolution Nutrition and Case from Medway . We also recently published on our blog a learning about how we are working on internal communication in the pandemic .
By offering this type of content and sharing your experiences, you will be helping the market as a whole and, of course, you will be able to attract more links.
Of course, well-positioned content on Google is more likely to receive backlinks over time. That’s because more and more people will continue to discover it through the results page, when they enter a related keyword and the search engines present it in the first places.
So, don’t forget to always do the good old SEO On-page , because in addition to the link building campaign, if you are well ranked you can receive links without so much effort.
After setting the goal for links and choosing the content that will “head” your campaign, it’s time to start prospecting for backlinks. First, consider where this content you have chosen can be useful to people. What does it help? What are the readers’ pains that he can heal?
Make a list of problems that your tool, guide, research or any other type of content you have chosen can solve. This list will help you find keywords that will take you to articles that talk about solving these problems, and that, perhaps, can add a link to your content.
But before you go wildly contacting God and the world, at this point it is important to make it clear that your customers, partners and friends are more likely to link to your material. So, start prospecting for them.
Thinking in a practical and hypothetical way, imagine that an acquaintance arrives at you and asks for an indication of the confectionery that has the best pie in town. You would probably recommend a bakery that you have already shopped for, know the product and know its quality, right?
For the generation of backlinks something similar happens. People who already know your product / service and legitimize it, who already follow its contents and make use of its tools, and / or who already have a certain relationship will be much less resistant to inserting a link on their page than strangers who don’t know their work.
So, my tip is: start your prospecting for backlinks for someone you already have a relationship or connection with. It’s time for you to go through your CRM and see who can help you with this campaign.
Create a spreadsheet of all the personal and professional contacts that could link to you, put a website, name, email, page that could link to your material, domain authority and status.
After creating this list, get in touch with them, talk about the new content, research or tool you launched and how it could add value to your readers if inserted in the text. Indicate what would be the best place to insert your link and offer help to create a suitable paragraph or phrase to fit your link in the content they already have.
Personal connections are great for creating backlinks, but if you don’t have a large network of contacts or people to link your content to, don’t despair. Below, we’ve separated out another way to prospect links that can help your campaign.
Basically, it is about finding pages that contain content related to your research, tool and / or guide, getting in touch with who wrote the article and checking the possibility of inserting the link.
It seems like a quiet thing to do. However, it can be a bit of a hassle if you don’t use any tools and are typing keyword by keyword in the Google search field, filtering the results and playing to a spreadsheet.
If you choose to do it manually, you can be sure that you will spend a good few hours finding the pages to link to your content, listing the name and email of who wrote the article, inserting the DA (Domain Authority) page by page and , then send each email.
The good news is that there are tools that can help you in this process, saving you time. The bad news is that they are paid and usually in dollars.
Some of these tools are Ahrefs Content Explorer, BuzzStream and SEMrush. Here at Resultados Digitais we use SEMrush, which allows you to create link building campaigns within the tool itself .
You can create a campaign indicating the keywords that the content should have, preferably using the list of problems that your content solves. The tool already presents you with the article, the website and the page’s DA. So, just check if it makes sense or not to prospect a link in these articles.
Print from the SEMrush tool, to get there just follow the path: control panel> projects> “name of your project”> link building> Overview> Search for prospects in mentions> find new prospects
Print from SEMrush tool, to get there just follow the path: control panel> projects> “name of your project”> link building> Prospects
After separating the list of sites that have content related to the keywords and pain you have set in the tool (or in your spreadsheet, if you are doing it manually), it is important to observe some signs before requesting backlinks. This is to prevent you from wasting your time and / or asking for links from sites that do not make sense for your strategy. I made a list of them that you can check below:
After using these signs as a prospecting criterion, your list may contain the following fields:
Sometimes, the articles on which we want to place backlinks do not have the author’s name. This is an important fact, since the ideal is that, when prospecting, the email is directed to a specific person. That’s because emails that go to a “generic” inbox, like (contact @ … or marketing @ …) are less likely to be answered.
In those cases, an alternative I found was to go to LinkedIn search and search for people who work for the company. According to the results, I filter who would be more likely to have written that content or who could answer my contact, if necessary forwarding it to the person in charge.
Remember that CEOs, managers and heads often have a very full inbox. Therefore, your prospect email can get beaten by them. Prefer to contact marketing and content analysts, Inbound Marketing analysts, SEO analysts and blog editors. By filtering through these positions you can reach the right person.
Once you have the person’s name, it’s time to find their email. I indicate two tools that can help you in this work: Hunter and Snov .
Both have an extension for the browser and do a kind of mapping on the site, pulling all emails that are part of that domain. Then you just Ctrl + F and find the name of the person you want to know the email from.
These tools let you pull an “X” domain limit for free. Snov lets you have up to 100 domains within 30 days for free, while Hunter allows you up to 50. If you need a larger number, you need to subscribe.
Well, now that you’ve done all the screening of possible partners for the dissemination of your content and obtaining backlinks, it’s time to create the text of the email that will be sent to them. This is a crucial part of your campaign’s success, so we’ll cover a separate topic below.
Be clear on the subject of the email, talking directly about what content it is about. It is important that you are brief and, at the same time, provide the necessary information in a cordial and respectful manner.
Introduce yourself, say which company you represent, talk about the text the person wrote and how its content could add value to it. Finally, make yourself available to talk more about the subject.
Below, I present an example of Outreach that we use in a campaign here from Digital Results:
The focus of the link building campaign in the email above was to get links to the page that discloses the results of a search. You may notice that, in the subject, we talked directly about what content we wanted to address.
Then, in the text, I call the person by his first name, which I think is more appropriate and less formal. I speak directly about her content and put the link. I present my content as a complementary source, which could add value to her text. I ask what she thinks of this suggestion and, finally, I am available to help in the creation of a text to fit the information into the content.
My email signature goes with my photo, name and department, which helps make the email more humane. And, of course, there is the option for the person to unsubscribe to not receive any more emails from me, which besides being important for my email not to fall into the spam box, also shows respect to the recipient.
It is legal to leave an outreach ready to send a second email if you do not receive a reply within 4-5 days. From the experience we had running Link Building campaigns here in RD, the 2nd email ends up having a greater number of responses than the 1st. Below is an example of the 2nd contact from the same campaign:
Always very important to be honest in your approach, to say exactly why you are contacting us, how you found the email address (if someone has given you that person’s email), and what your content has to add.
Let’s take another example. Imagine that the objective of the campaign is to promote the RD Personas Generator tool:
“Hello [FIRST NAME], how are you?
My name is Rafaella, I am from Marketing at Resultados Digitais and I am working to get more visibility to our Personas Generator .
I saw on your blog the post about Shopping Days , I noticed that you recommended great tools there, and I believe that our Personas Generator can be useful for your content, giving a free option for your reader to create your personas. Would you like to test it and see if it is worth adding to your content?
If you are interested in including the link, we could post your content on our Instagram.
What do you think?
I’m waiting for you!
Att;
Rafaella Tedesco. ”
In some cases you may receive positive responses, thanking you for your contact and interest in making the content richer. Others will say that they cannot insert the link, and some will want something in return for that link, so be prepared and have a bargaining chip up your sleeve.
Never offer a link in exchange for another link! This is frowned upon by Google, and can be considered a malicious tactic (black hat). To better understand, watch the Matt Cutts video:
One idea is to use your currency exchange communication channels. For example: offer to spread this content on one of your social networks , or maybe send it to your contact base in the weekly newsletter? The important thing here is to understand which channel you can use without jeopardizing your marketing strategy and, at the same time, offering something of real value to the partner.
Now you have understood about the importance of outreach, how to create one and have already defined your currency for links, you must be asking yourself: how am I going to send all these emails one by one? The answer is: it doesn’t have to be that way, you can use an automation!
To run link building campaigns here at Results Digital, we use RD Station Marketing itself . To send emails asking for links to mention the brand, for example, we created an internal Landing Page with form. In it, we insert all contact data, post title, links and what content we want to link. You can also import contacts directly from the spreadsheet of the link building dossier that you created.
On the platform, we create all the automation, with the copies of the emails already ready. As soon as we put the data of the prospects on the internal Landing Page, the automation triggers the first email. According to the rules we set up, if our 1st email is not opened, we send a 2nd email within 3-4 days.
This makes us gain agility in link building campaigns and also generates data on the performance of the shots. So we can see what is working and learn, and what is going wrong we can adjust. Watch out for some fees to measure the success of your shipments:
After all the work on formulating, disseminating and responding to the campaign’s emails, it’s time to check if it is bringing results or not. With Google Analytics, Google Search Console and SEMrush you can track the following KPIs:
If you want to have this data organized and easy to view, it is worth creating a dashboard using Data Studio and connecting all these data sources.
As mentioned at the beginning of this post, for your work with link building to really make a difference, there must be a cadence – that is, weekly actions and monthly campaigns. Recurring actions are levers ”to get links, usually require much less effort than a monthly campaign and are relatively easier to generate links. The only problem is that these links often do not have as high authority as the monthly link building campaigns can generate.
This is an opportunity to get a link more easily, after all you don’t need to think about specific content and list the articles that could link to it. You will only request the inclusion of links to your website in articles that already mention your brand.
For example: media outlets that mention your brand due to an event, or because of its CEO, or even because of a launch, but did not generate a link to your website, nothing more fair than requesting this backlink, don’t you think?
This action must be done once a week. Thus, as new mentions appear, you will be requesting new links. For those who have never done link building actions on your site, this can be a great option to start, as you will be venturing and encouraging yourself to run the first monthly campaign.
To monitor the mentions of the brand, you can use one of the several link building tools that I already talked about throughout the text, such as BuzzSumo, Ahrefs Content Explorer or Mention.
Here at Digital Results we use SEMrush, which has a specific option for brand mentions . With it, you can see the total mentions, the number of new mentions, the mentions with and without backlinks, the main referral domains that mention your site, the traffic, their authority and the statistics of your mentions.
To have complete reports of brand mention directly in your email, all you have to do is set up a campaign: dashboard> projects> your project name> brand monitoring> + add campaign , as shown in the image below:
Then, just include the keywords you want to monitor, such as the brand, CEO’s name, any event that the brand promotes, or any recent launch. Select the country, and how often you want to receive this email, as shown in the image below:
Thus, every week you will receive a report with all the mentions. Best of all, we already see a preview of the content, title and link of the post, authority of that domain and estimated reach of traffic. This helps us decide whether or not it is worth asking for that link.
Another monitoring option, which can also be complementary to the use of SEMrush, are Google alerts. Each time a page mentions your brand you will receive this information by email. Here’s how to configure this option:
1 – Access https://www.google.com.br/alerts :
2- Put your brand name in the alert field:
3- Go to “show options” and select the frequency, sources, language, region and email you want to receive the alert:
Okay, from now on it will send a mention alert to your email. If you want to delete or change any filter, just do so in the “my alerts” icons:
The text of the link request email in brand mentions is not much of a mystery. The subject of the email can be a thank you. In the copy you introduce yourself, you thank the disclosure of your brand in the article and ask if they can insert the link to your website.
See below an example of the e-mail requesting mentions that I use here in RD:
As with monthly campaigns, we also use RD Station Marketing to automate these emails from the internal Landing Page. The information on the form of this LP supplements the email. As soon as we press “send”, this contact enters the automation flow:
The information to fill in the fields you can find in SEMrush (DA, website, post link, which brand mentioned, which link to include), the author’s name can be directly in the article, or you can use LinkedIn, as I suggested in the excerpt about campaigns. To get the email, you can use one of those browser extensions: Snov and Hunter.
Another action you can take on a weekly basis is to check the broken links report on SEMrush. Just follow this path: control panel> projects> your project name> link building> monitor> monitored domains> broken .
You will then have a list of pages that you can contact and suggest inserting your correct link. This action is usually well received by the person who wrote the content, after all you will be helping to correct a broken link on the page, which can probably be affecting the user experience.
In addition to the monthly campaigns and weekly actions that I mentioned throughout this text, there are other ways to get backlinks to your site. Check out some of them below:
Guest posts are the guest articles. That is, they offer the possibility for you to publish content on blogs other than yours.
Usually, they are invited to write guest posts that are experts in certain niches and authorities on the subject matter. If done correctly, guest posts can improve your SEO performance, help build your personal brand, and also generate awareness about your product and / or service.
You may be asking yourself “why take the effort to write new content so that it can be published on another blog, not generating traffic or converting to my blog?” The answer is: by publishing guest post you can establish yourself as an authority on that subject and still get great links to your site.
In addition, you will not necessarily need to make every effort to create content from scratch. You can, for example, enjoy some content on your blog by making some adjustments and updates.
It is not a matter of duplicating its contents, even because this creates a penalty for Google. In fact, the content you can use for guest posts is the old content on your blog, recycling them.
In other words, you will get obsolete and outdated content, but talk about a topic that is interesting for your audience, and so you will update it with new data, media, quotes from experts on the subject, in short, everything that can make it current.
Map the old content you have: blogposts, webinar scripts and ebooks, and create a spreadsheet with these materials. Then, with the help of Google Search Console and Google Analytics, make a survey of the traffic, backlinks, clicks and impressions that these contents have generated in the last 6 months.
From there, you can separate the content that least generated traffic, links, clicks and impressions and choose which ones are worth updating to use as a guest post. Give preference to content that does not require a major update, after all this tactic is just to save the effort of having to write an article from scratch.
Do not forget that, after choosing which content to use for the guest post and updating it, it is necessary to remove it from your blog. Depending on the case, make a 301 redirect to other related content. This is important to avoid duplication of content on the web.
Guest posts, as well as other practices mentioned in this text, have already been used maliciously to manipulate the algorithm. In the past, many articles were written just to circumvent search engines, being published on spam sites with a focus on generating backlinks – regardless of their quality.
So some care must be taken, from the production of the content to the blog that you will collaborate with the guest post.
Prospecting for Guest post
As with monthly campaigns and weekly actions, prospecting should start from an organized spreadsheet with: website, domain authority, monthly traffic, name of the person responsible for the editorial, email, what content you want to publish and observations.
After choosing which location you want to publish your guest post, create the outreach of the prospecting email. Do not forget the basic premises: be direct in the subject of the email, start by introducing yourself and talking about which company you represent, tell us why you think his blog / website is interesting, and tell us how you can contribute with content.
Explore the “pains” that your content can heal and offer the dissemination of that content if they accept the guest post.
Directories are another practice that ended up falling into the clutches of those who wished to circumvent the algorithm through shortcuts. Unfortunately, they ended up gaining a bad name in the SEO world. However, we cannot generalize directories, as some are very important until today, especially when it comes to local companies, such as Google My Business.
Most of these large directories, in addition to linking to your pages, help to provide confidence and credibility to your product or service. Therefore, it is important that you create your profile in these directories, bringing useful information about your products and services and conveying trust to users. Below I have listed some great directories that you can register for 100% free:
Here, these are articles that bring together in a list the best products of an industry or niche. Lists are very important to help potential buyers, as they usually make comparisons between products, helping to make a purchase decision.
Being on these lists can improve your SEO performance, as you get a link to your website and a link to your product. In addition, they can help your sales performance because it puts your product in front of users who are already looking for products or services like yours.
To enter lists that are worth linking to your product, do a search on Google, such as “best [niche of your product]”, “main”, and see what the search engines present to you. If you want to do something more targeted, add the city, state or country in the search field.
After locating the lists you want your product to be included in, do the prospecting. Send an email saying that you found the list on Google and present your product w argue why it should be part of that list.
Now that you know what link building is and why it is so important to improve your SEO performance, it’s time to put it into practice! Start with weekly actions, requesting links on websites that mention you and suggesting replacing broken links.
After that, check what can be used in your content to get a guest post on a website / blog with high reputation and authority. Think of tools that can be helpful in solving your customers’ problems, do a keyword study and map those opportunities.
So, when you have high-quality, relevant content that really adds value, go for monthly campaigns. Remember: this is a job that requires cadence and persistence, but I’m sure that if you apply the tips and suggestions in this article, you’ll soon be reaping the rewards!
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