Structured Approach To Link Building
For SEO Agencies & Marketers
For SEO Agencies & Marketers
RankJacker came into being after an illustrative stint on multiple marketplaces, with an array of DFY SEO Services for a good amount of time. We have served thousand of clients over the last 6 years, delivered tens of thousand successful gigs and placed links for clients without a count.
The move to establishing ourselves as a White Label Agency has been gradual and well thought out, given our experience of serving large number of SEO Agencies on marketplaces around the globe. This is worth mentioning that some of our services have been recommended by leading SEO bloggers like Matt Diggitty, Kotton Grammer, Chris Walker and a few others on their agency blogs.
Through this guide, we endeavor to help fellow SEOs understand link requirements of any campaign at a glance, the identification of anchors and choice of link target on the go and be in complete control of all offpage for their clients
The idea is to simplify the whole link building process viz-a-viz the nature of links, their types of links, the right timing of building them and expected impact on your SEO Campaign. These are the latest strategies broken into stages for a more structured implementation and to ensure an effective yield. Not to forget that we use the exact same process for our own Managed SEO Clients as well as our in-house projects and these have stood the test of times.
Amit Kumar
Link Building remains one of the most crucial aspects of any website’s success in gaining organic rankings and traffic exposure. But it’s an equally complex and an exhausting exercise which requires a deep understanding to gauge the need of backlinks, choice of anchors and ability to source potential link targets to place links.
This is especially important for SEO Agencies and Digital Marketers who look after a number of Offpage campaigns and majority of their budgets spent towards Link Building. While buying backlinks is most feasible, time intensive and in fact most effective exercise to build authority of you web resources, still buying links doesn’t always guarantee success as most buyers tend to indulge in impulse buying rather than a thoughtful, planned and competent link building strategy.
With our experience of working with SEOs, Agencies and businesses across the globe, we’ve been able to devise this process of safe link building, something which is unalienable to any SEO effort. The process is specially designed and important for Agencies working on multiple campaigns with a limitation to handhold each campaign due to paucity of time and lack of efficient manpower.
This
will help you understand the key aspects of link building and give a clear idea
of use and importance of a structured link building strategy and ensure success
without any risks of penalties.
Co-Founder
Frankly speaking, if you have the skills and trained manpower to build links, you can do it in house, but that will still have a limitation on your capacity to work on no. of projects. But if you can use your team to keep track of your off page and simply focus on timely delivery with quality being intact, I think any agency have a far better business development prospects. So, instead of solving this dilemma, learning key skills for ensuring the health, worth and overall quality of the links can fetch you instant and lasting results.
Most of the people blindly following the trends, don’t actually understand the basic idea behind link building, unfortunately, at least that is what I’ve come to know with my experience dealing in DFY SEO Services over the years.
So let’s put it straight, with Off page SEO, you are literally creating referrals on other web resources.
Now with each backlink created, things that work to your advantage are the authority of website to pass the link juice to your site and the potential to generate long term traffic. But to extract the maximum leverage, the timing of the backlink created and the type of resource you’re building the link plays a crucial role in leveraging the maximum impact out of the back link.
Lets get in some more detail for a clear understanding followed by the categorization of backlinks based on their types and the perfect timing to create them. The purpose of the whole of Off page SEO can be broken down in three categories as mentioned below; mind you these are sequential.
Explained with their Relevance & Stage of Application in a Website Life Cycle
1. Brand Building
2. Trust Building
3. Authority Building
Its an open secret that the SERPs love the brands and there's no better way than to start off as the real brands do. While building a brand actually takes time but by building your Brand Pages on popular media and getting your Brand mentioned on a number of independent web resources is the right step forward. Simply speaking it’s like creating some noise for your business/website online & the SERPs are designed to take note of it and certainly offer due attention as well later.
There are numerous websites that offer an opportunity to post free article on their website or are open to share placement for round up reviews with a do-follow links. Ahrefs has a pretty good video training for sourcing guest post opportunities. Resource Page Links can help get your site gain the momentum and authority right at the start of website journey and is a good way to start building your brand image at the outset.
I've used them repeatedly for my off-page and I'd recommend to start building these links if you haven't been earlier. I'd strictly built these links using brand anchors or naked URLs as we are still in nascent stage, but I keep on building these links every now and then to keep my anchor profile pretty round up.
Web 2.0s have been quite popular and helpful in building the trust and relevance for money sites, they still work well, provided you maintain them properly to leverage their traffic to get the right exposure for your content. I prefer using generic, naked and brand anchors and stress upon the titles of the posts to create relevance, attract attention and strategically refer traffic to money site for deeper insights. These are also important to create a Social Presence and locking your brand name on most popular web 2.0s like Wordpress, Tumblr, Medium etc. as it help build strong brand appeal.
Local Business website are a bit different and so is their requirements with respect to links. The two most important link types for local websites are :
Almost out of fashion, but they still work in the local business niches. Press Releases are a strong medium to let the word out for your business at scale. However the choice and the nature of the topic along with the choice of properties being used for PR is crucial to get maximum attention, exposure and engagement which in turn prove fruitful for each PR outreach.
For a Local Business Website, Directory Citations are almost indispensable. Having you business listed on local directories give your business the much required exposure to local audience as well as crucial backlinks that make Google discover your overall presence of your business. Not to mention, having a consistent Business Name, Address and Phone number on all such platforms is crucial.
Essentially used to create presence and awareness for your brand on popular mediums of traffic and generate your niche followers in the long run. These links help your website warm up for the future off page efforts, right at the outset and also offer your website a pretty varied anchor profile that will help you be aggressive with your KW anchors at a later stage of power link building.
These links work best at the start of any project for they are helpful in getting the initial push and gain authority along with the brand image initially. Though one can keep on building these links later as well to spread out at different junctures of your project depending upon one’s requirements, building them at initial stages is something indispensable as they create a strong foundation for your link building efforts over the course of time.
Backlinks, essentially, are meant to send referrals to a website which happens only if the incoming link is placed on a page which has the traffic and the traffic belongs to the similar niche of your website, for, that will increase the potential of a referral traffic. E.g. Let’s say I have a website on Pets Grooming Products, its far more beneficial for me to have backlinks from site pertaining to pet grooming salons, pet training schools or even animal lovers blog rather than a finance or technology related website. The more links you have from similar niche website, the more long term prospects of gaining traffic through such links which helps your site gain higher rankings in SERPs as well.
While outreach links and niche edits are the most authoritative forms of backlinks to have, the importance of Comment links and forum links still hold good, provided you make them on niche relevant topics, forums and discussion boards that are live, have a decent engagement and you genuinely try to solve the problem in question with a reference to a relevant topic on your site.
Guest post links are quite popular and can be really helpful in gaining some quick jumps in rankings. I normally start with a up to 5 links spread over a month and then gradually increasing the link velocity over time as per requirement. Keeping the niche of GP sites as close as possible to the money site being the priority but having some links from general niche isn’t that bad either. The choice of anchors plays a vital role in getting the maximum leverage, ideally one should avoid using the keyword anchors as long as possible, for it keeps your off page secure in the long range, however, I'd wouldn't shy away using them if I have the desired KW lower down the page 1.
No amount of backlinks can replace the effects of a referral traffic coming through different sources on to your money site or a blog in general. For me the traffic is the most potent force that lets the SERPs understand the value that your content holds. It holds equally good for your own website traffic as well as seeking referrals from other websites. Before going for building links on external resources, I’d recommend to identify if you have any pages on your money site which have an active traffic and build internal links if they are relevant to any of the money pages.
Typically I prefer to building forum, comment links right after the money page goes live and wait till I have some rankings on Page 2. If the movement of keywords is brisk, I generally allow them to take enough time and move around top of page 2 and then start building some guest post links with varied anchors and not necessarily the money anchors. I’ve specific reason to wait here as the site is still languishing on page 2 and presumably ain’t having much traffic movement which can make Google suspicious of link spamming which can attract penalty. In an ideal world, links are supposed to be built naturally by visiting traffic and not by the blogger himself.
The ultimate target for any website is to become an authority in its niche, once your site turns in the authority mode, Google simply ranks whatever you publish. One of the main signals for Google to consider your site as an authority site is the no. of backlinks with high no. of referring domains pointing back to them. The more links your website gets from websites with a lot of referring domains, the more authority it’s expected to drive in eyes of SERPs. After all Google consider the backlinks as a kind of votes, so more links from sites with large no. of do follow links, sets the reputation of your website up against your competition.
High quality Editorial Links from resources like Huffington Post, Engadget, Forbes etc. are specifically the kind of links required at this stage. Basically you’ve been able to impress Google so much so that it trusts everything coming out of your website. So, it won't get suspicious about credibility of a few Editorial links and instead it would happily pass on their authority and relevance to your website.
Reaching out to your industry influencer for backlinks is highly recommended as well. Most likely the influencers won’t mind linking your content given the stage of authority your website is in and consideration you offer for link back. This is kind of links work great since the influencers have their own following which can offer additional traffic if you can identify a potential intersecting topic to publish for their audience
We’ve been using the niche edits for long now and they never fail to impress. To have links from already indexed resources have a powerful impact on targeted Keywords as well as the overall link building exercise. Google consider it as an updation on an existing page and is quick to pass on the link juice to the linked property.
A PBN with a decent Domain Authority and Page Rank have always been known for the concluding effect they can pass on your SEO campaigns, but it has been kept a secret by most of the SEOs so far. They are still in great demand and they still work, the only difference being, its really hard to find expired domains these days as they use to in the past. I, personally, prefer using money anchors on the PBNs to extract maximum benefit.
This is the time when you have multiple keywords on position 5-10 or top of page 2, now your website needs some real power to push your luck hard. For me, this is the most opportune time to use KW anchors in moderation, usually mixed with long tail anchors on some high DR domains. You can see instant results with your rankings jumping with each link built. The only thing to be cautious is to not get desperate with excessive link building with KW anchors in pursuit of top slots. At this stage I'd go with High Authority Niche Edits or PBN Links with a decent no. of RDs but using some good niche relevant Guest Post links are also welcome provided have some really good Page & Website Metrics to push the money site's in the long run.
You can place your best bets on PBNs, Niche Edits and Guest Post Links when your targeted KWs are on page 1 already but are still languishing between position 5 and 10. Now you wish to go all guns and capture the top slots, so using homepage PBN links with some good metrics is really opportunist and can work wonders. I don’t even mind building a PBN from scratch if I have a multiple pages ranking on page 1. However the PBNs come with dangers of their own and thus we refrain from using too many of them but rather use them in conjunction with GP links and Niche Edits. At times, we even have the PBN links removed after hey have delivered the impact and we have solid rankings for the targeted pages to keep from getting penalized later on.
Most of the talk so far has been to categorize the different link types, their purpose and the timing to build them. So as an agency owner you have the clear instructions to judge the phase a particular website is in based on traffic, KW rankings and the back link profile. The Agencies and Marketers need to understand the stage at which a website currently standing at, which can be well read using any SEO tool like ahrefs or SEMrush and then start building over from there. You can simply have a look at the top pages and check for the keywords rankings to understand what stage the site in question is, and what type of link building would be the most feasible to start with and then start building from there.
If you have any further query, I’d be more than happy to.
Link Building is definitely an important part of the puzzle when it comes to marketing your business online. There is an entire science to get your link building working correctly for you which has to be aided by careful analysis of your analytics and search console. The KW anchors, link targets and backlink partners should be carefully crafted to match with your goals and strategy. The KW anchor profile and referring topics are equally important, so you can set a baseline and improve things from there. If you think you should delegate these marketing tasks and save more time for you to run your business, you definitely should chat with a professional and get some advice and ensure you don't miss on sales and can continue to nurture your leads.
My team and I can help you create a detailed link building strategy, completely “done for you”. We create the strategy, we do the outreach to bloggers and we build the links and take care of the implementation and delivery. There is a lot that can be done, given the fact we have access to more than 5000 active bloggers to source links in almost every niche. We provide full support for our clients under the monthly retainer plans. We also offer up to 30% discounts to agencies looking to resell our services to make it working for them. All you need is a decent capacity to place order to be eligible for discount.