Our Complete Link Building Process
Why are Backlinks Important?
Before we talk about how we build links, let's briefly discuss why in the world do we need backlinks. Well, according to various recent studies by SEO tools like semrush, ahrefs etc and industry’s thought leader Brian Dean, Backlinks/Referring Domains are the number One ranking factor in Google.
ROI on Link Building
My Goal as a Linkbuilding agency owner is to generate a 5X ROI for our clients in a 6-12 month period.
From the numerous campaigns we have executed so far, we have observed 3 factors that guarantee a massive ROI on the link building campaign.
ROI on Link Building is phenomenal given:
- Your Business’ Foundation is solid: The products or services that you sell, well how do I say it politely, should not suck. If the business sucks, no SEO or link building company can save it.
- Your Site is optimized for Conversions - The goal of SEO is to bring targeted traffic to your site but if the site is not optimized for conversion, the ROI is not going to be that great. Investing in SEO and not investing in a good website design is like putting Rocket fuel in a car. The car might run a little faster but not as fast as you would like it to be.
- Willingness to play the Long Game - You need to wait at least 2-3 months before you start to see results from Link Building. White Hat Link Building is the safest way to build Links, hence it takes longer to execute and show results. Black Hat SEO gurus will promise instant ranking with their Links but what they don’t tell you is the risk of Google Penalty and Losing all your existing Google Rankings.
The Complete Process
If you are reading this, you probably already know that Backlinks are the most important ranking factor in Google. Unlike the good ol’ days when one could fire up a software like GSA search engine ranker and build hundreds of backlinks in a matter of hours, you can’t do it anymore now thanks to Google’s Penguin and Panda updates.
Now you need to do manual outreach to relevant site owners to promote your awesome content. But it is a very time intensive( and sometimes tedious ) process.
To be completely transparent with you, I have laid down my whole process to get links for you to read and copy ( if you wish to do it yourself )
Or you could hire us to do it & increase your revenue!
First Off I get to know more about your business by talking to you.Things that I usually want to discover are:
- Who is target audience
- Where do they like and dislike
- What is the LTV of your customers
- Which keywords do you wish to rank for
- What is your expectation from Link Building in 3 months and 6 month timelines.
Then I will analyse Your website Traffic, Keywords and Backlinks
Website Traffic
I first analyse the traffic you are getting, how they navigate around your site, where do they spend the most time on your site etc. You will need to give me access to your Google search console and google analytics for this.
Keywords
After analyzing your traffic, I figure out the following:
- The keywords that are bringing you traffic
- The keywords that CAN bring you traffic and are easy to rank for.
- The keywords you are ranking for on page 2 which have great potential. With some push, they can break into Page 1.
Link and anchor text Audit
In this step, I go through the following:
- Figure out your anchor text ratios for important Pages
- Compute the correct anchor text ratios those important pages must have
- Find the kind of links you already have.
- Find any Links that can Lead to a penalty to your site
Competitor Backlink Analysis
You may hate your evil, greedy and downright Ugly competitors, but we can still learn a thing or two from them by analyzing their sites.
- Any Link Building Opportunities that we may not know about
- Level of SEO difficulty in your industry which will help us gauge How long should we run link building campaigns for.
- Related industries that could link to your Helpful pieces of Content.
Content Audit
Quality content that helps your audience is one of the most reliable ways to get Backlinks from other sites in your industry. However, all content is not created equal. Many a times Business owners jump on the content marketing bandwagon without complete knowledge which results in 500 words cookie cutter articles on the blog. Sorry but those won’t get you the links.
In the content Audit I analyse:
- Number of Content Assets (Longform prefered) you have
- Their Linkability quotient
- Your Willingness to invest in Content
If your site passes all the three criterias above, we can start the link building campaign otherwise we will need to develop some great Linkable assets first to work with. You can hire a content creator yourself or I can hire one for you and manage him or her too. Please note that you need to have a content budget so that the link building campaign keeps going smoothly.
Project Management
Once I have all the information, I will setup a project management sheet to plan the link building campaign for the coming months. Both you and my team members will have access to it. We like to do it this way because we believe in keeping things transparent with our clients.
Finding Opportunities
There are ton of ways one can find Link Building Opportunities, but we use the following usually:
- Google search operators - Each piece of content requires a different kind of Link building tactic and each tactic requires a different Google search operator. What is search operator you may ask? Well it is search query which we put in google to force google to show most likely link building opportunities.
For example if you are looking for guest post opportunities and you are in the travel niche let's say, you can search for
Travel + intitle:”write for us”
Here are some other examples of Google search operators.
- Using Ahrefs - We also use one of the leading SEO tools on market - Ahrefs to spy on your competitors to find out prospects who are likely to link to you as well.
- Buzzstream - Another well known SEO and outreach Tool. With Buzzstream, we are able to find Influeners in your industry who can amplify your content promotion. Although Influencers are harder to convince to link out to your content, but if they do agree, you will get links which bring you a lot of SEO juice and Targeted traffic.
- Manual Prospecting - Linkbuilding involves a lot of back and forth communication and until Google’s Duplex becomes smart enough to write emails for you, we will have to rely on Humans to do it. And to be able to communicate the right thing to the right people, we need human assistance.
Outreach
Now that we have the content and Link Building Prospects ready, we start the outreach Process.
The outreach Process looks something like this:
- Finding the contact information and Names of the people associated with the websites we have to reach out to.
- Writing a personalised email to each explaining why it makes sense for them to link to your piece of content.
- Answering any questions they reply back with until they give us the link or decline our request.
- Following up multiple times with people who don’t respond. As they say in Sales - Either you follow up or fold up.
We record all the Links achieved and all the prospects in the project management sheet so that our clients have full transparency on the work we have done.
Results and Link Expectations
You want more traffic and you also know links are the number one way to achieve that. We measure these with the following three metrics:
- Keyword Positions Growth - The Keywords that you want to rank for will increase as a result of links we build.
- Organic traffic Growth - You will be getting more targeted traffic from Google who are looking for products and services you sell. Moreover, as we build more high quality links, your site’s authority increases in Google making it even easier for you to rank for Keywords you target in the future.
- Referral Traffic Growth - Since the links are built on relevant and high authority sites where your target audience hangs out, potential buyers will click on those links and land on your site thereby resulting in an increase in referral traffic.
Link Expectations
This completely depends on the niche you are in, the quality of content assets you already have, and how do the prospects react to the outreach.
As a general rule of thumb, we typically build between 15-25 links per month for our mid-tier clients. The situation varies – we have some clients where we’ve regularly surpassed 50, and some extremely difficult clients where we generate 5 or 6.
The more you’re willing to work with me in creating linkable content assets for our link building strategies, the more links we can generate.
Reporting
Every Client gets access to the following:
Project Management Sheet - This is shared project management sheet where you will be able see what we are doing on your campaign on a day to day basis.
Monthly Call - We will have a monthly call to discuss how the campaign went, what could be improved next time, answer any questions you may have, the future course of action etc.
End of month Report - This report will contain the resultant increase in Organic traffic, Keyword positions growth, referral traffic growth and a general overview of how well the campaign went.
Pricing
I work with a maximum of 6 clients at a time. Right Now, I have 2 slots open.
I have a very simple pricing structure: The starting package costs $2000 for 200 targets. I guarantee a minimum of 10 links per 200 emails I send but clients usually get much more than 10.
Please note that this is a monthly service, I am not looking for one-off Clients.
Use the link below to schedule a call. Let's see if there is a fit.
Keep Reading if you would like to know which Link Building Tactics we use to build Kickass Links for our Clients!
Link Building strategies we Use
Our next step is to build kickass links to your website. Let me explain the link building strategies we use for our clients. The ones we will use for you depends on your niche, content assets and a few other factors:
Link Roundups
Link roundups are posts where bloggers and site owners curate their favorite articles from the past week or month. We use advanced Google search operators like the following to find these opportunities and show them your content so that they (hopefully) Include it in the post.
Resource Pages
These are pages where passionate and helpful site owners curate links to resources around a topic in their industry. For example if that topic is Linkbuilding, the resources that may be included are linkbuilding tactics, linkbuilding benefits, linkbuilding for newbies, linkbuilding tactics to avoid etc.
Guest posts
This is one of the most famous Tactics as it is relatively easier to execute than other tactics. It is usually used when you don’t have much content on your own site so you reach out to other people in your niche to contribute content to their sites. But relying too much on this tactic leaves a footprint for google in form of the author byline and this can lead links being devalued.
Broken Link Building
It involves finding pages which no longer exist but have a ton of backlinks pointing to them. By reaching out to people who are linking to the now non existent page and showing them our page about the same topic, we can build powerful backlinks to our content piece. Finding such opportunities is tough for most people but when you are super smart like me, it is a piece of cake ( I know I am very humble )
Skyscraper Method
Skyscraper method was popularised by probably the most famous SEO blogger of this decade - Brian Dean of Backlinko. Alright with giving credit where it's due out of the way, let me explain how this tactic works.
We go looking for similar pieces of content like the one you have made, check the backlinks those content pieces have and then reach out to the people linking out to switch links to your article as your article is clearly better right!
This method works best when your article is better than all other similar pieces.
Sponsored posts
Sponsored posts are basically guest posts with an added incentive to the site owner accepting it: Moolah. Yes, we pay them to place your article/link on their website. This tactic is usually used when there are not many linkbuilding opportunities available in your industry. This tactic not only helps you get links but it also helps to establish your brand online as most sponsored posts also mention the name of the sponsor.
Image Link Building
Image link building is a beast in itself involving various tactics to get links with images. Here are some that we use:
a) Find People who stole your images - Using Google’s reverse image search, we find people using your images and then contact them to either remove them from their websites or link to your website as a citation and continue using the image.
b) If you are in niche where images play a big role like wedding niche, Photography niche, Food niche, we can publish some of your unpublished images on Flickr. Flickr is website where webmasters come to find free stock photos. When we publish our images on Flickr, we explicitly tell the webmaster to link to our site if they intend to our images. A lot of quality links can come your way this way.
Brand Mentions
If you are a brand with some kind of online presence already. People must be talking about you around the web. But a lot of times they don’t link out to you while doing so. Bad manners!
So what we do is find such websites with the help of tools like Brandmentions or Awario. Notice how I did not link out to them. Lets see if they reach out to me!
Online PR
Online PR can land you incredibly powerful links from media outlets and Hoards of traffic given that you have a unique story. If you do, then we will track down relevant journalists who are interested in your story and want to write about you.
Sometimes you will need to cough up some money like a couple of hundreds buck, sometimes you won’t however ROI is massive in both the cases.
The best way to find journalists who will interested in writing about your business is by find similar but bigger competitors and put their name in Google news. The resulting news articles will help you find journalists that are interested in your kind of Businesses.
Local Bloggers
If you are a local Business, links from local Bloggers will be especially helpful for your site’s SEO as they increase the local relevance of your site in Google’s eyes.
Local Bloggers are always on the lookout for interesting businesses they can write about. The best way to find such bloggers is through Meetup.com and facebook groups.
Scholarship Links
By creating a real scholarship for students and then reaching out to universities to link out to your scholarship page, you can land some really powerful links.
Infographics
We all love Infographics, right! They help us digest a ton of information so easily.
People are very willing to link out to quality infographics with unique data and we will help you create just that.
Other Link tactics
Dozens of other Link tactics exist and we will use those as and when possible. Some example -
- Competitor Backlink research - Looking for backlink opportunities in Competitor’s Backlink Profile.
- Manufacture links - If you have an ecommerce store, then you can reach out to the manufacturers of the products you sell and ask them to link to you.
- Professional Organization Links- Joining Professional Organisations in your niche can land you some great Backlinks.
- Quora Links - Answering Questions on quora can help you build great Backlinks and drive an insane amount of traffic to your site if you choose which questions to answer smartly!
- Etc Etc Etc
Pricing
I work with a maximum of 6 clients at a time. Right Now, I have 2 slots open.
I have a very simple pricing structure: The starting package costs $2000 for 200 targets. I guarantee a minimum of 10 links per 200 emails I send but clients usually experience much more than 10.
If you want to build even more links, you can order more Blocks of 250 emails for $1997 per block.
Please note that this is a monthly service, I am not looking for one-off Clients.
Use the link below to schedule a call. Let's see if there is a fit.