Venchito Tampon Jr

Link Building For Apartments

Apartment absorption (the rate at which new units are rented out) is now at the highest level in three years according to the U.S. Census. With that, more opportunities are getting into the hands of apartment professionals.

While the demand is extremely high, one must be able to cope it up with solid rental marketing that includes a proper SEO framework and a set of link acquisition tactics.

In this post, we'll focus on how you can capitalize on effective link building techniques for apartment websites.

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GET RESOURCE LINKS FROM SUMMER/OFF-CAMPUS HOUSING CITY PAGES 

This is my first in the list given that there are bulk opportunities in this link market. Basically, summer housing/off-campus housing pages are resource lists of available housing options for both students and interns in a local area.

Edu websites have these valuable pages for current and potential students with links to trusted apartment sites.

If you are hyper-local at this stage, building inbound links from this type of resource page benefits your site from a relevance signal.

National apartment sites with available cities catering to clients can also take advantage of summer housing links pages.

You can find off-campus housing city pages from Google search using any of these search phrases below:

• site:.edu "Off-campus” housing [CITY] “resources"
• site:.edu "Student housing” [CITY] “resources"
• site:.edu "Internship housing” [CITY] “resources"
• site:.edu "On-campus” housing" [CITY] “resources"
• site:.edu "residential" "housing resources" [CITY]
• site:.edu area rental websites [CITY]
• "Off-campus” housing [CITY] “resources"
• "Student housing” [CITY] “resources"
• "Internship housing” [CITY] “resources"
• "On-campus” housing" [CITY] “resources"
• "residential" "housing resources" [CITY]

Make a list of qualified housing city pages in a spreadsheet along with appropriate contact details. You can check out this guide on finding email addresses on websites.

Furthermore, if you want to collect more link opportunities, you may run some of the links pages through LinkMiner to find if there are any broken apartment sites.

A plug to this favorite link checker tool can help find any broken domains or links. It also provides the number of unique referring domains for each external link (see image below)

Here is an apartment site that hasn't been existent for years, but has attracted a good number of referring domains (75+) including inbound links from .edu websites. It's a low-hanging fruit, if you may, that will give very quickly summer housing pages that can be added to your list of link opportunities.

Finally, craft a solid email copy to be sent to your local outreach prospects - summer housing pages. Then acquire a link if you properly do these initiatives.

LEVERAGE EMPLOYEE DISCOUNTS

University websites have their human resources sections available to their staff employees - which include benefits like discounted apartment services using coupons.

Having this in mind, you may search for any available perks program pages of university sites and try to acquire links through a simple discount code outreach.

Start your search using any of these keyphrases:

• [CITY] site:.edu "employee perks"
• [CITY] site:.edu "employee benefits"
• [CITY] site:.edu "employee discounts"

Collect all local link opportunities with contact information for each website.

For outreach, you can use this email template below to acquire resource links from employee discount pages.

Subject: Employee Discount for [University Name] Employees

Hey [First Name],

I noticed that you have a list of businesses offering employee discounts:

[employee discount page]

I just want to let you know that we are offering a [discount%] on all our [category] products exclusively for [University] employees.

They can also use this promo code [insert promo code] when they purchase on our online store.

Let me know if there’s any other information you would need from us.

Thanks, [First Name].

[Your Name]

MAXIMIZE VALUE-ADDED VISUAL CONTENT 

Visual content pieces like infographics still work in 2019. The difference between an outreach campaign with optimal results and one that flopped in link performance can best be understood in any of these factors:

• Validity and credibility of data source
• Targeted audience's needs
• Contextual relevance of outreach emails (not just personalization)

Many times, link builders would try to produce several infographics at once, publish them on a blog and promote it massively to publishers. It doesn't work that rush.

There are visual content suited for a rental apartment industry like charts, maps and slideshow-type of piece.

A. CHARTS

B. MAPS

C. SLIDESHOW

RENTCafe beautifully created visual content on a regular basis. This led them to acquire both authority manually-built and organic links for their apartment SEO campaign.

This type of content campaign may need strong buy-in from the management in case of marketing budget - but can surely bring return on investment if done correctly. If you are into doing link building for apartment sites, you're not just concerned with the quantity of deliverables, but of possible conversions brought from doing the linkable content campaign properly.

LINK BUILDING FOR APARTMENTS

Pursuing discount pages, summer housing city pages, and creating visual content pieces are some of the methods to get relevant authority links for apartment websites.

While there are other link building approaches, it can be discovered by looking at what top niche apartment publishers are doing in terms of content creation.

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by Venchito Tampon Jr

Link Building For Moving Companies

We've written a series of link building guides for different industries - from car rental, hotels, dentists, drug rehab centers, and even to a certain type of web properties like .edu websites.

Today, we look at how to get backlinks for moving companies. As you know, moving to a new place can be a stressful process, so individuals, families, and businesses today are hiring qualified movers to ensure their possessions are being handled properly.

If you own a moving company or have a client with a moving comparison site, this guide will help you find targeted content creation and link building tips.

 

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INVEST IN CONTENT FORMATS SPECIFIC FOR MOVING CUSTOMERS  

Understanding what content formats will resonate a specific group of audience can help you initiate the content creation process without apprehension. There is a good probability of gaining traction from a targeted audience if the content format given to them fits their content consumption needs.

Let me give you some examples of content formats that resonate well in the moving industry.

A. Checklist

People can forget things. A nice format of content to give to your moving customers is a good moving checklist.

However, it should not be just another checklist, but rather a very specific one for your audience and their location. Depending on your services, you may create checklists for any of these readers:

• People who are moving to a new house
• People who are moving to a new business center
• People who are moving house from CityA to CityB

For the latter, it is best to use some local city names if it is what your brand mostly targets. A Moving From Los Angeles to Seattle Checklist is a highly specific content. It may include tips and reminders that considers city location distance, best days and time to move (according to traffic), and other pertinent details for those two locations.

Most moving checklists you'll see that are published have preparation time frames at hand (8 weeks to go, 6 weeks to go…). The key point here is to ensure it is the most estimated week frame - does it actually take you 8 weeks to move from CityA to CityB? Having good research for these small details gives you an edge to how much value your content is to your target customers.

You can create a graphic design for the checklist so your readers can save it, bookmark, print, and bring it wherever they are.

B. 101 or Beginners’' Guide

In the search marketing community, there is a lot of beginners' guide content published everywhere. There are different versions of it such as Comprehensive, Definitive, Ultimate, or Complete guides. While you can do this similar approach on your moving blog, it may not resonate well in other industries.

In the moving niche, for example, you don't have to create your own guide that just curates all tips from different blogs on the topic - a Complete Guide on [TOPIC] will not make sense, as people have different needs and things to move. Complete Guides may be found to be incomplete by some people.

What resonates most is 101 type of content that gives information to people who are new to the scene. You will mostly find there's no advanced side of moving, unless an individual moves very frequently from one location to another, and then to another location.

You can create 101 guides or posts on any of these topics:

• packing
• moving across a COUNTRY
• rules and regulations for CITY
• taking furniture apart
• loading a bed

Packing 101

Move Calendar

C. Things to Do

You may tangentially create topics that can be of interest to your target audience. Examples of these are things to do topics. It may not be solely for moving customers, but for people who are interested in travel that might compose a portion of your customer audience in the future.

Here are a few things to do topics that can generate traffic to your blog:

• things to do in [city]
• things to do in [state]
• things to do in [city] this weekend
• things to do in [state] this weekend
• fun things to do in [place]
• free things to do in [place]

D. Questions

Another format to create in content is question kind that people are asking for. So, if you can determine popular queries that your demographical audience is looking for, you may not be running out of content opportunities.

Address these questions on your blog and get a good portion of traffic to your blog. Here are some topics you may find worth discussing:

• where to buy moving boxes
• what do I need for moving day?
• what happens when a moving company breaks my furniture?
• how do moving companies ensure that your stuff is safe?
• how to pack for moving
• how much does a moving company cost? (for moving comparison site)
• how to pack clothes for moving
• how to pack books for moving?
• how to pack a tv for moving
• how to stay in the same school after moving

To find more moving-related questions to write posts about, you can use Ahrefs' Keyword Explorer, search for any moving phrases. Then filter keyphrases to only Questions.

TAP LINKABLE AUDIENCES

I'm a big fan of Garett French's linkable audiences (there is no doubt with that). If you're not yet familiar with linkable audiences, basically these linkable audiences are proven to have the intent of linking to a website from their webpages. Therefore, creating content for them increases the probability that the content we produce can acquire high-quality links.

For example, you can tap job seekers who are working in a city or country you're targeting as a brand. Here is a good example of a moving comparison site doing well with this type of targeting.

Work in NZ: Jobs in the Fastest Growing Industries in New Zealand

Another linkable audience that is receptive for linking are environmentalists or people in the nature space ("going green"). You can publish content assets that value green thinking.

Going Green

LINK BUILDING FOR MOVING COMPANIES

There are a lot of other ways to build high-quality backlinks for a moving site aside from what was mentioned in this post. Invest time in checking backlink profiles of top competitors and see where they get most of their inbound links.

Being listed on popular directories like Yelp and Merchant Circle still holds great weight in relevant inbound linking, but don't let your efforts stop there. Find other creative means to get the ball rolling in link building.

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by Venchito Tampon Jr

Seasonal and Holiday Link Building Campaigns

Seasonal link building campaigns can serve as a massive traffic driver for one's business.

Holidays, celebrations, and other special calendar events, if leveraged properly, can help acquire relevant links for a website.

However, given that many businesses are also vouching for the same opportunity to maximize seasons for their sites' link building opportunities, how do you ensure you're on top of what they do and are maximizing what's out in the market?

Today, we'll cover tips to effectively execute seasonal link building campaigns — some of which may include some tweaking in your own processes.

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TAKE ADVANTAGE OF SEASONAL EVENTS, NOT JUST HOLIDAYS 

It is important to think beyond just special holidays like Christmas and Valentine’s day. There are a lot of seasonal events that will be more directly relevant to your target audience. These seasonal events include the following:

• Back to school days (for students)
• High school students choosing their college courses
• ISA deadlines
• Your country's annual festivals
• Summertime activities (landscaping, gardening, etc..)
• Business' and professionals' tax season
• Starting or renewal of businesses' permits in January
• Allocation of budgeting for businesses
• Cyber Monday deals

You can make a list of all seasonal events in your industry and select the ones that fit your brand.

Once you have chosen an event to focus your seasonal link building campaign on, you can follow this basic process.

Step 1: Create a hubpage for seasonal resources

A good recommendation for a seasonal link building campaign is to consolidate your all various pages or resources into one hub —by making a category.

Instead of creating individual pages with URLs like domain.com/seasonal-product-page/, domain.com/seasonal-buy-gift-guide/ and domain.com/seasonal-special-offer/, you can start with a category domain.com/season/, then structure other pages under this category, for example:

• domain.com/season/special-offer/
• domain.com/season/product-page/
• domain.com/season/buy-gift-guide/

As you move closer to the period or date of the season, you now have available pages for promotion.

Step 2: Get initial links approaching the event

The velocity of link acquisition plays a big part in how your pages will rank for seasonal terms. If you can start early in the process of building links to your category page, you'll send a signal to Google that there are a lot of people vouching for your website. 

You would have a better chance to do this if you collect a list of bloggers and webmasters in sub-niches that you can easily contact for early promotion.

Do a quick analysis of your website to identify any internal link opportunities that might help your seasonal pages get some link juice in the pre-seasonal event stage. 

Step 3: Setup exposure for your seasonal hubpage

You can add exposure to your seasonal event and refer visitors to the hubpage by making some changes on your homepage.

A link into the main navigation pointing to your seasonal hubpage or putting a featured box on your homepage highlighting your seasonal event page are some ways to bring awareness to your regular and non-regular visitors about your campaign.

Step 4: Assess your campaign

The campaign might suppose to end at the date of the season, but there'll be a lot of link opportunities still coming in as a result of the promotion you've done throughout the period. Use Monitor Backlinks and Ahrefs Alerts feature to find those unlinked and linked mentions that relate to any of your seasonal page. See this link reclamation guide. 

This entire process may require proper planning and strategy, so make sure to set a timeline for the whole campaign. Set back-up plans for any delays of execution in any part of the process. For example, you may find that designing individual pages and publishing them may entail some technical difficulties on the part of your web development team — having a week or two week allowance is a good recommendation.

The next points are details to take advantage of seasonal events — specific techniques in a seasonal link building campaign.

PUBLISH THEMED BLOG POSTS FOR SEASONAL EVENTS 

On your blog, you can publish articles themed for seasonal events. These blog posts are targeted to specific customer personas. For example, you can write posts about preparation tips busy moms need to do early on for their kids going to school.

You can use Buzzsumo to find content topics that will be relevant to any of your preferred seasonal events.

Those blog posts can interlink to each other and individually link out to seasonal pages you've created. Maximize the internal link opportunity as much as possible.

LEVERAGE HOLIDAY EDITION PRODUCTS FOR UNLINKED MENTIONS

You can mostly find holiday editions of products a month or weeks before the special event. While this gets the most attention in the market in terms of purchase, there is a good chance you can also leverage these items for link acquisition.

There are unlinked mentions of holiday edition products (e.g. knit Christmas sweaters) you may have overlooked if you're not aware of them. Discover those mentions using BrandMentions or Ahrefs Alerts tools, go over their contact details, and reach out to reclaim those links.

GIVE GIFTS TO INDUSTRY PARTNERS 

Holidays and seasonal events are best times to do traditional initiatives like direct email outreach or giving gifts to company partners and content publishers. The expectancy of receiving times at particular seasonal dates is normal and would result in any natural mentions.

Here is a good post by James Norquay that shows how effective this traditional method is in gaining organic links for a website.

AHEAD OF THE SEASON 

The process and basic techniques to apply an effective seasonal link building campaign require a good resource allocation strategy. If you can place resources (content pages, outreach list, tangible content) ahead of the season date, you can focus more of your efforts on the outreach side of the campaign. 

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by Venchito Tampon Jr

How to Run a Sustainable Link Building Campaign

Links remain to be a ranking factor in 2019 and still going strong.

No doubt that people who invest their time, money, and resources to put a link building strategy in action will do experience a greater gap in the search competition.

However, one should highly consider the sustainability of the campaign.

Personally, I don't believe much with short-term thinking in link building — like a season to start and stop. Given the strength of competition in any industry where any upcoming brand can dive into the game and start dominating through a solid link acquisition campaign, it is unwise to think short-term.

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So, how can you sustain your link building campaign? How can you ensure that you're producing the right types of links for your website? Can you guarantee consistency of production in link building?

1. ALIGNMENT OF ONLINE AUDIENCE 

One important factor to scale and sustain your link building campaign is to understand your audience online. Not every business has available high authority links that can match to their targets. So if you're thinking of only qualifying link prospects that are DA70 and above, you are limiting your opportunities.

The way to assess a good range of metrics is to do a quick reverse engineering of your competitors, even most the top ones in your space. Check the average DAs of their linking domains, and set a good range of metrics that correspond to the market you're in.

By doing that, you now have a good benchmark of metrics that fit your audience market and not a generic standard metric range for all industries - because again, every industry's link environment is different.

When you go through your research, start asking, are there enough publications in my space that regularly produces content primarily targeting my audience? What are their average metrics (Moz' DA, Ahrefs' DR)?

2. LINKING PARTNERS 

Not only finding a good range of qualifiers for your link metrics, but also searching for a list of regular linking partners. This would sustain your link acquisition process, as you are able to build links from the same referring domains.

Of course, the idea of only choosing the right linking partners based on their capacity to drive readers to your blog and/or to bring potential customers to your business is a must. But more than that, you seek for a good number of linking partners (potentially 5 to 10) where your brand will regularly contribute content with contextual links pointing to your content assets.

Strong relationships with industry content publishers would help you sustain a link acquisition process for your site.

You can go over to starting low-authority blogs in your niche. By partnership, you're seeking not just high-authority blogs, especially in a tightly-audience setup where you can't seek much quantity of publications.

3. CONTENT RESOURCES 

This part that is mostly overlooked by business owners is just concerned about the investment budget (monthly) for a link building campaign.

Spreading out your budget for a series of months to get a consistent number of links from an agency or your in-house link building team is good, but look into how you can also maximize existing resources you've produced on your blog.

Are there any formats your content pieces haven't turned into? Visual to video? Text to video? A few of the resources you do have can be maxed out to be distributed on platforms that can help your brand be more visible in your online community.

4. SPEEDING UP PROCESSES 

One of the primary concerns of any agency and business owner in executing link building campaigns is the cost of the entire activity - from content production to outreach overhead costs. Any of these things demand a price but can unknowingly be minimized if a good in-house team or agency can evaluate their own processes.

The process that is focused on results will produce more than a traditional process that strictly based on time period (i.e. two weeks link prospecting and two weeks outreach setup).

Can you use a consolidated platform in outreach that will give you a more streamlined process than using several spreadsheets for different clients? Spreadsheets for organizing link targets is efficient if it's been monitored regularly and protocols for adding inputs to the spreadsheets (link details and contact numbers) are the same for all link prospects and outreach specialists.

Another thing you can add to your process is fitting content pieces to linkable audiences. There are 601 audiences accumulated by Citation Labs. Depending on brand relevance, one can pursue as many audiences as possible as long as they are perceived as potential customers.

In tools, the conjunction of team members, a flow of tasks from one person to another, and any inclusive factors in the process need to be evaluated and re-evaluated to check gaps and fix them, close longer loops for faster results and

EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL 

To expect sustainability of a link building campaign, you must look at the internal considerations (your link building team's processes, tools, resources) and external ones, such as available linkable audiences, a range of link metrics suitable in your audience market and a good grasp of potential linking partners in your space.

Every industry and every business is different. You must make due diligence in research for context and timing in your niche's link market.

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by Venchito Tampon Jr

Take Advantage of Podcasting for Link Opportunities

The number of podcast listeners grew by multiple folds from year 2014 to 2019 and will grow furthermore for the next three years.

With this demand, any brand today cannot simply overlook this popular form of media. There are a variety of industries where many podcasts are now flourishing, ranging from health, technology, and even link building.

Before jumping into the execution of the campaign, it's very important to know the "whys" before you can do properly your strategy.

There are a lot of reasons why a brand should integrate podcasting in their marketing plan. Here are a few of these reasons:

• Provides opportunities to directly connect to a target audience using the voice of a brand personality.
• Builds authority for subject matter experts and brand ambassadors that are value-driven and community-oriented
• Increases trust and confidence with prospective ideal customers
• Absorbs audience from the brand hosting the show (for a podcast guest) 
• Helps acquire contextual links from websites hosting the podcasts

In podcasting, there are two approaches you can choose: either start or host a podcast show in your niche or become a guest for niche podcasts.

The first option requires different resources to begin a podcast show that is worth listening to. These may include budget for podcast tools, and contact lists for possible guests of the show.

If you're planning to start your own podcast, here are a few good resources I've found to be helpful:

• Pat’s Complete Step-By-Step Podcasting Tutorial
• How to Start a Successful Podcast (For Under $100)

Meanwhile, becoming a guest for niche podcasts is cost-efficient. Production of the podcast show is covered by the host; the guest would only need to prepare for the interview and promote the output audio content to his followers.

However, there is still some legwork one has to be prepared for.

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PROSPECTING FOR BLOGS HOSTING PODCASTS

Finding a podcast where you'll become a guest is crucial as you don't want to be associated with any communities that aren't aligned with your brand goals.

If you're in the cooking niche and are reaching out to a podcast host that guests any subject matter experts from different industries, you are deviating from the true value of podcast guesting - getting more visibility and brand awareness for your target customers.

You've got to find hosting podcasts that are within your industry and/or targeting your audience.

There are many platforms where you can find enough podcast shows. A few of the popular ones are listed below:

iTunes

A Google-like related search in iTunes can help you discover categorized podcasts. Given that iTunes has strict approval guidelines for audio content shows, you'll be able to ensure that some industry podcasts located in it are worth reaching out to.

Google Search

You can use an advanced search operator: inurl to quickly find podcasts related in your niche.

Podcast Directories

You may also find podcast directories valuable in expanding your search for niche podcasts. Be sure to check podcasts if they have regular shows and have a substantial number of subscribers/audience. A few directories that are worth using for your research are:

• Blubrry
• Spreaker

ORGANIZING YOUR LIST

When doing a research, it is best to have a spreadsheet at hand so you can collect the details of the podcast, which include the name of the show and host, and contact information (i.e. contact form on the website).

You also have to make a note if the podcast has entertained guests in its show, which gives you an idea if it's worth pitching to.

If the website hosting the podcast specifies an estimated number of listeners, you can include this small detail in your Remarks column.

Remember to find contact information of the podcast, preferably contact details of the person hosting it.

CHOOSING A PODCAST SHOW TO PITCH AS A GUEST 

Identifying which podcast you want to become a guest for interview certainly depends on factors you'll personally consider.

Besides relevance of the podcast to your brand which should be the topmost priority,  you should consider other factors (primarily link building factors).

The hosting blog or website of the podcast. For link building purposes, podcast shows should be published on the hosting website with links to external sources.

Wide range of topics being covered on the show. Topics that are too narrow or too broad  may be misfit to your branding.

Visible promotion for the show. You can easily check how they market their podcast episodes by looking at the hosting website. Do they have links to social media websites, references and websites of guests either below their audio files or embedded on transcripts?

Quantity of influence on social and email subscribers. These factors may require efforts to discover, but if they've been checked can help you prioritize highly influenced podcast shows.

PITCHING TO BECOME AN INTERVIEW GUEST  

The best way to approach the host of a podcast is to first ask yourself value you can give to their audience.

Value includes your industry expertise and credibility that can definitely bring substance to the show. You may indicate the list of specific topics (not more than three) that you want to cover.

Another value may include your own set of influence, a good array of email subscribers and social followers readily available to promote their podcast show.

These details can be highlighted in your outreach pitch to make it more appealing to host recipients and to increase the chances of becoming a interview guest.

Here is a sample outreach email template from SEJ"s post on podcasting:

Hey there, Danny

I love the new brand image for Search Engine Nerds! I was recently listening to Loren Baker on his link building strategies and noticed he gave me a shout out. Thanks! Would you be interested in featuring me in an upcoming podcast?

Here are some topic ideas:

How to Conduct a Technical SEO Audit

How to Perform a Content Audit

How to do SEO for a Podcast

I’d be happy to send additional topics. I would really love an opportunity to work together.

Please email me back if you’re interested in collaborating. Thanks, Danny!

Warmly,

Anna Banana

PROMOTING A GUESTED PODCAST SHOW

It's not just enough to become a guest on the show and wait for the hosting party to promote it by themselves.

Take considerable effort to promote it your way. You may, for example, repurpose the podcast episode (audio file) into other content markets. You can write about the experience, include additional insights and experiences and publish it as your own blog post.

Share the audio output in your social networks, email subscribers and followers.

TAKE ADVANTAGE

In thinking of a new link building strategy for your client or your website, it's important to be aware of industry trends and in digital marketing, in general. When you take advantage of huge jumps in opportunities, it' would help you scale manually-built links and organic backlinks for your website.

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by Venchito Tampon Jr

How to Find Backlinks Using Free and Paid Methodologies

Learning how to find backlinks shouldn't be too difficult for those people who are starting out in the SEO (link building) industry.

Given that there are proven ways to source pages that you can potentially earn or build links from, you only have to discover these methods, apply it to your own link building campaign and collect a solid list of available link opportunities.

The hardest part is not really finding backlinks, but the actual pursuit of them in outreach. So why give yourself too much difficulty? Get a quick headstart in looking for backlinks.

In this post, we'll cover primary methodologies in finding these backlinks that are easy to use. Follow each process carefully and get the most number of link opportunities in your space.

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The Use of Link Building Tools

Just by taking a Google search for the keyphrase, "link building tools", you'll find all sorts of articles that curate quote and quote the best SEO software. Some of these tools are designed just for link building while others aid you with every activity in the SEO process.

Note: You may want to check out my own curation of recommended link building tools.

Going back, what I highly recommended is to check and try out tools that are designed just for link building. The reason behind is that they have the best features, or are best at delivering value in terms of speed, flexibility and results for a certain link building activity.

Let's start with the most-loved link building tool - Ahrefs.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is one of my go-to product in having a quick look at the best backlinks of a website. Whether it's a website of a competitor, a non-competing blog that produces high-quality content assets for similar topics our client also covers about or just by monitoring similar content production trends of websites from other industries, Ahrefs can provide with a solid view of backlinks.

In finding backlinks, Ahrefs can help in:

1. Viewing the best backlinks of a competitor.

Note: What we refer as competitors are local and/or niche brands or companies you're competing with for a specific offering (either products or services) that have their own websites and maybe are also pursuing organic growth for their business through SEO. If the competitor you know doesn't have its own website, you don't have to consider them as a search competitor.

In a case you don't who are your competitors are, try this out. Do a quick Google search for your primary keyword.

All websites ranking in the first top spots of page 1 are possibly your search direct competitors. Of course, some may just be in a retail business having one page ranking for your target keyword and may not be the exact competitors you're looking for. Other pages maybe a curated list of products/services — so it's very important that you manually check each one of them and see if they are actually direct competitors of your offering.

Another method to find search direct competitors is to use Ahrefs competing domains feature.

Simply enter your domain in Ahrefs' Site Explorer and click Competing Domains. This will give you a rundown of domains competing with your website.

Once you already have a list of competitors, you can follow these steps to view all backlinks of their websites:

1. Copy the domain of the website.
2. Paste it on the Ahrefs' Site Explorer box for domain URL.
3. Click the search button.
4. Click on Backlinks under the Backlink profile (located at the upper left section).

Note: If you are looking for backlinks for a specific page, not the entire website, use the URL option of Ahrefs' Site Explorer. But in the case of a category or blog section, you should choose their Prefix option.

2. Getting the data of backlinks.

Ahrefs provides backlink data, which are components of backlinks that will give you hints of when and how links were built or earned. These data include:

• Referring page (the exact website or page where the links was found)
• Anchor text (the words or phrases that link to a target page)
• Backlink (which page of the website has been linked to)
• First seen or lost (when Ahrefs saw the link)

By looking at the first set of backlinks and their respective backlink data, you'll have a preview understanding of how natural backlinks were built.

For example, if you see that most of the top backlinks have branded anchor texts, meaning that the title or brand of the website are the clickable words and of which are pointing to content (informational page) of the website, it might signal that backlink building were naturally or customly made, and not fully manipulated. That's not absolute, but can overall give you an idea of how they approach link building in general.

3. Filtering and sorting backlinks.

Part of finding backlinks is the ability to make high use of you what you've found or collected. In doing that, you need to filter your backlinks. Filtering helps you get the most out of your backlink prospecting, as you'll be able to separate the wheat from the chaff and do so much with your high-quality prospects.

There are different filters you can play with in Ahrefs platform, but filters are based on the purpose of your link building campaign - what type of links are you trying to acquire for your website.

If you are trying to improve search performance of a newly published content on your blog, then do-follow editorial links on blogs is the type of link that will suit you best.

To look for these do-follow editorial links in Ahrefs, choose Dofollow as your Link Type, Blogs in Platform and English for Language.

Another example. If you want to know whose .edu websites are linking to your competitors and understand how they (competitor) got these links, you may use filters Educational as Link Type and English for Language.

Now, you have a list of .edu links you can manually check for further understanding of how you could actually replicate them.

Filtering and sorting backlinks isn't only necessarily to get the desired links for a campaign purpose, but also in generating linkable content ideas.

To find these ideas, instead of going through the Backlink Profile section of Ahrefs, you may move to Pages section and click on either Best by Backlinks or Best by Links' Growth.

Through those filters, you will see pages that have the most number of links and referring domains. This will serve you well if you're brainstorming for topics for content that have high chances of earning consistent links in your industry.

Pro Tip: You can sort through your backlink prospects from highest to lowest of potential traffic from linking pages (pages where links are seen). This would help you customize your campaign to get links from valuable pages that would also earn links over time - these may drive more visits to your webpages (which will then possibly multiply to another set of links).

4. Understanding how backlinks were formed.

Ahrefs does not only help you view backlinks of a competitor, get the desired backlink data, filter and sort them through to collect the most valuable links. The said tool can also aid in figuring out what approach has been used to facilitate link placements.

For example, if you will know the recent links built to a website, it will lead you to identify some patterns that may occur, i.e. the common page being targeted by these links.

In Ahrefs, you can filter backlinks based on recency (Ahrefs - Backlinks - Recent).

Take a quick scroll and look at the first page of links. It wouldn't take you longer to see common pages being linked to. In my example below, one of the visible linked-to pages is the scholarship page. That may simply imply that the website may have executed a scholarship program recently.

There are a lot of features Ahrefs can be useful for identifying linkable asset ideas and looking for straight backlink sources. Learn best from their regular tutorials, videos and blog.

Further Resources:

• 9 Backlink Research Tactics Using Ahrefs
• Ahrefs Comprehensive Review

Link Prospector

I have been playing massively with Citation Labs' Link Prospector as a source of semi-qualified link prospects for a client of mine recently.

When I say semi-qualified, prospects exported from reports have been run through some tests already. Relevant link type (e.g. links page), relevance and quantifiable metrics, i.e. Domain Authority that are in place can help sort through multiple pages for a search query.

If you want to try out Citation Labs' Link Prospector, I have covered a short tutorial using that tool on this post.

There are other tutorials Garrett and their team have published over the past years, which are extremely helpful to get the most out of it:

• Getting Started With Link Prospector (series of blog posts)
• Citation Labs Youtube Tutorials (video tutorials)

Search Engines

Not everyone has the luxury to subscribe to link building tools, so let's go over how you can use free means to find backlinks in your space.

The best way to start is through the use of search engines.

It's a no brainer thing for SEO professionals to start with this link search method, but I find it strange when agencies complain about expensive link building tools and yet not utilizing search engines for quality link prospecting.

To get the highest usage of search engines, the first discipline one has to master is strictly understanding how advanced search operators work.

A search engine operator is a character or string of characters used in a search engine query to narrow the focus of the search

It would be a huge hit if there is one perfect formula for combining industry phrases with advanced search operators. Far from the reality, there's no one you can find.

However, you can actually customize your entire search query (niche words and appropriate advanced search operators) based on the type of campaign or campaign audience.

Search queries by campaign type

Campaign type is anywhere from guest blogging, resource page link building, sponsorship or .edu link building campaign. The type of the campaign varies depending on the strategy or tactic being executed to get the links.

A search query for guest blogging is different from the one you use for broken link building. Different search queries cater to different kinds of page.

I've created a resource page that lists down all of search queries categorized by campaign types. I recommend that you download the pdf on the search engine queries cheatsheet and use them even whenever you want.

Search queries by campaign audience

By using a combination of inurl and intitle, you can actually target your search to a particular niche audience.

Examples of these search queries are:

• inurl:"for parents" "savings"
• intitle:"for kids" "science"

You may combine your campaign audience with the niche words to populate better search results. This approach is very helpful to refine your search results pages to just the exact pages for an audience within the industry.

Proper usage of patterns in manual link prospecting

Appropriate usage of search queries for a campaign type is a good way to collect your initial list of link prospects. But expanding your list is the challenge. How do you come up with more new prospects if you use the same search query (of a specific campaign type) over and over again.

The key is to understand patterns that can result into multiple of new pages of the same type (or a different link type all throughout) — where if you are curious enough can brainstorm a new link building strategy that you can test out for your website.

To better understand this, let me give you an example.

In my post about link building for car rental companies, I covered a link prospecting strategy that some of you haven't been using for your link search.

It's the method of identifying niche opportunity phrases on pages unique to those verticals.

For instance, in the transportation niche, you'll find pages with "getting there" or "getting here" as resource titles. If you're in a hurry prospecting, you'll miss out those resource titles and use inurl:resources "transportation" instead.

That pattern or footprint is the opportunity phrase itself, which can lead to multiple lists of qualified pages. Combine these phrases to a variety of advanced search operators and you would find a couple more prospects to quality for.

Another pattern you can check on is the specific common url a page has been built. For example, in most .edu sites, library guides pages are resource-like pages they normally publish. The page curates all research, data, news-worthy and other highly-academic content on a topic.

And if you're pursuing resource pages, you may use the exact name URL (libguides) to search for relevant libguides.

The search phrase would now be, inurl:libguides. Combine it with the niche (e.g. psychology) and you'll find libguide pages dedicated to psychology.

Experimenting Search Queries

How to identify patterns and experiment search queries so you can produce more lists than your current list of websites?

First, gather your initial set of qualified pages (qualified meaning they've run through the relevance test yourself). You may prospect them with automation but you have to check those individual link targets manually.

Second, you look for patterns in URL. By URL meaning, you find what are the common words that occur in URLs. Aside from URLs, you may also check each individual qualified prospects. Be curious and ask yourself, do they have similar page titles? How about titles of categories or sections?

Lastly, get all similar phrases in URLs or titles, and experiment by combining them with advanced search operators. Start with inurl and intitle and get the ball rolling.

Using search engines for link prospecting may require mastery in picking up words and understanding advanced search operators. But when you have done it a couple of times, you'll get better at knowing which search query will best produce quality and relevant link prospects.

Track Relationships

Continuing your link search will not be effective if you forget to track all relationships of your brand and your website.

Let's first discuss all your brand's offline relationships.

Offline relationships can later turn into links in the online world. By identifying which of your partners have their own websites and which have the necessary means to be able to link to your site, you'll get better prospecting rate and conversion rate in terms of links.

Apparently, the more your brand is familiar with the person you're reaching out to for a link (most especially if you have established trust and relationship), the likelihood of getting the backlink is much higher.

Let's take a look at retail and manufacturing companies. If you have this type of company (or you're working for this kind), get an inventory of all your suppliers, manufacturers/retaillers, delivery service providers and other partners involved in the operations.

Then check if your partners have their own websites and collect all their contact information (may it be email address or phone number).

That similar strategy can also be applied to eCommerce websites. In fact, I've written different methods to maximize relationships for eCommerce brands in my post on eCommerce link building campaign - you may want to check that out.

Besides offline relationships, there are online connections that have started since the brand's website has started running. These connections may be in the form of editorial, promotional affinities or operational terms. Whatever it may be, it's recommended that you track them yourself and organize all the information in a spreadsheet.

If you don't know where to start, consider these questions: have you written any online columns for a publishing website before? Any online interviews of your founders, editors, or other staff members you remember? Have you worked with a group of affiliate bloggers who promoted your product/service years ago?

Links from Recurring Domains

By identifying online and offline connections, you are on the road of either reclaiming lost links or building new backlinks from recurring referring domains.

Lost backlinks are any links (as implies) lost during a technical issue or discretion of the publisher removing the link from the content (where you originally got the link).

Before sending an email and aggressively tell the webmaster to "could you link again to this page - (your page)", consider these things.

Figure out why your link was removed. Is the page (or even the website) hosting the link was deleted? That is one example of a technical link removal.

If it's not and the hosting page is still live and your link was removed, check if it's the only external backlink ejected. Otherwise, there may be issues with your link (or content) alone.

Review your page/content. Is it off-topic this year? If it's outdated and the linking page requires information to be relevant for current times, it's unwise to reach out to the publisher and get the link back immediately.

That is just one example of how you understand why lost links were removed. It's a caution to first look at the possible reason, see what you can make changes with your content, and make possible corrections.

New backlinks from recurring domains, assuming these sites are authoritatve in your space, are beneficial for your website, as it signals trust and authority — which increase the value of your overall domain.

Get back over websites that have linked to you in the past. And see which are editorial in nature, i.e. links coming from publication websites. If you have contributed an article or column for them, why not reach out again and submit another high-quality content?

All of these shouldn't be done casually but rather make it as a continuous (regular) activity for any new connections that will come along the way.

To help you further, we've created a definitive guide that discusses how to get links through link reclamation - it's a good strategy to maximize value from publications who have used your content in the past.

Secondary Linking Pages

Several pages on the web are interlinked to each other. So, if you have a acquired a link from Page A, it's possible that Page A also acquires a link from another page (Page C). This continues as long as Page C remains to be relevant for linking.

On the first section of this link building guide, we covered how to find backlinks by reverse engineering a competitor's domain. By entering the domain URL in Ahrefs, you can quickly find its backlinks.

You can already get the ball rolling with the first list of backlinks you see in Ahrefs Site Explorer.

But if you want more of highly relevant link opportunities, you may consider secondary linking pages.

Secondary linking pages are pages linking to pages that are linked to you. In other words, they are second-level deep.

In Ahrefs, it's easy to spot on these secondary linking pages. The Domains column can help you figure out the number of unique referring domains linking to a referring page.

For example, I've got a good number of backlinks to this link building website (below is a quick overview of this site's backlink profile).

If I want to go deeper and find secondary linking pages, I'd look for the number of Domains column, which as of the time of this writing, Ahrefs as my top linking page has 278 referring domains linking to it.

These 278 referring pages are already second-level deep. If I want to find more backlinks, I'd take a look at them, manually check and see which of these pages are qualified to be additional target blogs for outreach.

Finding secondary pages is a methodology you can execute both for your website and for your competitors' sites. Do it appropriate for your campaign and find more link opportunities.

Testing Out and Doubling on What Works

There is no sure one method of finding backlinks that are good for your site. The reason there are different tools is for you to test them out and see which benefits you the most. Patterns in URLs and titles are also guides to keep you collecting more link opportunities for campaign.

Don't forget, it all comes down to qualifying all your given blogs and websites, whether they come from an export of links using a link building tool, or a manual search through Google or a deep look at secondary pages of a competitor's domain. From whichever source, every potential link opportunity should be checked for quality — so all your next initiatives including outreach activities will be worthwhile.

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by Venchito Tampon Jr

Link Building for Hotels

So far, we have published six link building guides that will help you unlock potential link building ideas for your campaigns. If you haven't seen them yet, you can check out the following links:

• Link Building for Real Estate
• Link Building for Lawyers
• Link Building for Drug Rehab Centers
• Link Building for Fashion
• Link Building for Dentists
• Link Building for .EDU Websites

Today, we'll cover another industry that demands ideas for link building - the hotel industry.

This link building guide is mostly applicable for brands looking to get more visibility on search by properly acquiring links for their hotel SEO campaigns.

Continue reading:

[toc]

NEARBY OR AREA HOTEL PAGES

If there's one hotel link building technique that doesn't require content to be published in order to get links from other sites, it is, leveraging nearby hotels or area hotels resource pages.

Here's an example of that. As you can see in the image below, it's a resource page that lists down hotels within the location - helping visitors get the exact information of nearby hotels from the page, including the address and their booking contact details.

Whether you're in New Jersey, Florida or other cities in the U.S. or in other countries, there are available nearby hotels links pages.

You can do a Google search using any of the following queries to find those link type opportunities:

• site:.edu "nearby hotels" [location]
• "nearby hotels" [location]
• "area hotels" [location]

If offering discounts for customers is part of your marketing campaigns, you can couple your outreach with a customized discount code or any other offerings to get increase the likelihood of getting links from your outreach targets.

PRODUCTS YOU SELL 

In your hotels, you normally have restaurants and bar sections or lounges where you sell popular products such as beers or wines.

You may create a list of all of these products or get a product inventory from your hotel brand. Research and see if manufacturers or sellers of your products have their own websites.

You'll find that they have pages dedicated to how to purchase or finding their [product]. These pages include external links or sources of exact stores where products can be bought.

Curators or webmasters of "how to purchase [product ] pages are receptive to outreach of direct partners/retailers, given it's an added value for their visitors looking for specific products.

How to Purchase

Find Our Product [Location]

You may use any of these Google search queries to find available how to purchase or find our product pages.

• "how to purchase [product]"
• "find our [product]" [location]

This link building strategy is a low-hanging fruit in acquiring links directly to your bar/restaurant page or to your homepage.

HOTEL DISCOUNTS FOR ALUMNI

Earlier, we discussed giving discounts to nearby hotels page curators. Now let's look at another type of hotel discounts.

If you're doing link building for hotels, it is best to come up with a specific campaign that offers discounts for alumni of universities. There are a handful opportunities of this link type that you can leverage to get not just links, but assisted conversions from visitors clicking your links.

For link prospecting sake, here are useful search queries that will benefit you in finding hundreds of hotel discounts pages (lesser number if you're too specific with your location query):

• site:.edu intitle:"hotel discounts"
• site:.edu "hotel discounts"
• site:.edu "hotel discounts" [location]

You may also localize your link search by targeting hotel alumni discount pages from universities and colleges within your region (check the third Google search query above).

HOTELS AND ACCOMMODATIONS PAGES

Aside from hotel discounts, universities, and colleges also have specific pages just for accommodations.

The page is dedicated for families, friends and guests of students looking for nearby accommodations either for regular or for occasions (e.g. graduation).

A lot of these pages are easy to find with a couple of search queries in hand. Below are some of them:

• site:.edu intitle:"accommodations" "hotels"
• site:.edu intitle:"accommodations" "hotels" [location]
• site:.edu "accommodations" "hotels"
• site:.edu "accommodations" "hotels" [location]

One note to make is to qualify pages with section or category title of "preferred hotels". Preferred hotels, as implied are ones picked by the university and may not be receptive to outreach that ask for inclusion of hotels without any prior connections with them.

PLAN YOUR VISIT PAGES 

Travel enthusiasts want easy guides or simple itineraries for their trips. Therefore, a lot of bloggers and link curators started to create pages just for that - plan your visit pages.

One addition to your hotel website's link building plan is to pursue links from these pages. Those link opportunities also have their own categories for hotels, giving you the confidence that they link out to hotel pages.

You can use any of the following search queries to collect a list of "plan your visit" pages:

• intitle:"plan your visit" "hotels" [location]
• inurl:"plan your visit" "hotels" [location]
• "plan your visit" "hotels" [location]

Location matters for this link type so ensure that you only look out for plan your visit pages that are within region scope of your hotel brand.

Once you've scoured the search for this type of link target, find your contact persons, and reach out for link inclusion of your hotel pages.

OTHER USEFUL ASSETS:

Let me give you some more link building ideas for your hotel link building campaign.

Attractions - acquire links by contacting local attractions in your region or city. Local attractions like museums, zoos, and theme parks have their own websites that you can get links and potential assisted conversions (visitors looking to book accommodations in your hotel site).

Pet-friendly hotels pages - Does your hotel welcome pets? Be cited on websites like TakeYourPet.com and BringFido.com plus other resource pages that link out to pet-friendly hotels.

Venues in [Location] - if you provide rental offerings for venues during weddings, birthdays, and other occasions, you can search for listing pages that link out to hotels people that have rental venues.

You can use either of these Google search queries: "event vendors" [location] or intitle:"venues in [location]". where [location] should be replaced by your city served by your hotel brand.

Need help with your outreach campaigns? Check out our link building services here.

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by Venchito Tampon Jr