Venchito Tampon Jr

8 eCommerce Link Building Strategies That Really Work

The promising ecommerce sites are emerging in various industries today, which gives tight to the competition as years are passing by. Marketers from these online shopping sites are finding ways to be better at servicing their target audiences, building strongly their own brands and ensuring they’re getting ahead of others in online search.

What strategies ecommerce sites require from marketers to make these properties optimized for search are as difficult as tactics required to generate links for these sites’ important pages - considering the low linkability nature of product and category pages.

In this post, I’ll be sharing to you 8 link building strategies for ecommerce sites – some are common to you but I guarantee you’ll still get some new tactics here.

Let’s get started.

1. NETWORK-FOCUSED LINK BUIDING

The low-hanging fruits of links will come from those people you are connected with. They can either be your manufacturers, dealers, retailers, suppliers, service providers, sponsorship partners, event organizers and other networks you engaged with up until today for any kind of business reasons.

To get started, if you are a reseller or retailer of products:

STEP 1: Grab a list of all goods you are licensed to sell and from there, you start looking for available “where to buy” / retailers / dealers on their sites. You can use Ahrefs to export an inventory of products you are selling online, then create a list of websites where these products came from.

STEP 2: Once done with the list, search individually in each site for any available partner list pages. You can use the search operator, “site:domain.com” plus any of the following keywords:

• Preferred retailers
• Related Links
• Partners
• Authorized Dealers
• Where to buy
• Online retailers
• Online dealers
• Find our products
• Additional retailers
• Internet resellers

For example, if you are reseller of Cocalo, then you can do a simple search on the site and grab their where to buy page.

STEP 3: Collect contact information from target link opportunities and reach out to them. You can use this email template below:

Hi [Name],

I’m Venchito from [eCommerce brand], an online shopping site on [niche]. We started selling [BRANDX] on our website since [date].

I saw your “where to buy page” [LINK1] and wondering if we can also be listed as one of the resellers.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Thanks!

MORE ECOMMERCE RESOURCES:

• The Guide to Local Marketing with Sponsorships
• Backlinko's eCommerce Link Building Strategy

2. IMAGE-BASED LINK ACQUISITION

Images have formed a huge part of the web for the past decade, seeing its very importance in visual experience and in defining basic information or data online.

True enough, if you started maximizing your visual assets on the web, it couldn’t just help your site build a better site user experience, but also in assisting your site’s link acquisition process.

If you’ve been working on image-heavy industries, it’ll be advantageous for you to explore link opportunities from blogs that need help in curating high-quality images. After all, who doesn’t want original high-resolution images for their content assets – i.e. blog posts?

How to maximize your site’s images?

Step 1: Go to your image database and look for visual assets that can be distributed to bloggers. You can use the image Google search, type in site:domain.com and click on the Images tab.

Step 2: Curate a list of bloggers that you think will highly benefit from your images – use your preferred metrics to gauge blogs’ authority (Ahrefs Rank, Domain Authority), but I much prefer SEMRush traffic as a valuable metric for this link building strategy, since you also want to look for valuable estimated organic traffic that you can drive referral visits to your website.

Step 3:  Reach out to your listed blogs and offer your high-quality images. Pro tip: use exclusivity as part of your initial pitch (we exclusively offer these images to you..)

Hi [Name],

I was looking through your website and noticed that you have a lot of great content about caring for babies, parenting and maternity. Just wanted to let you know that I can offer you high-quality images that you can use for your existing and new blog posts. These are all FREE and EXCLUSIVE for your blog.

Let me know if you’re interested and I’ll send the images right away.

Thank you,

Venchito

Step 4 (optional): Track blogs that acquired your images but haven’t credited you as their sources. Given that your visuals will be featured on other blogs, there are high chances that their readers can also get your images.

3. HORIZONTAL/VERTICAL COMPETITOR LINK ANALYSIS

One basic yet undervalued skill in link building is the ability to identify the right competitors. You may be thinking of all pages/sites that are ranking on the first page of search results for your target keyword as your direct competitors – but this is just beneath the surface.

If you see Amazon is on the top spot, it isn’t smart to go find all pages linking to this big website.

How you can identify your direct competitors and build links from pages they recently acquired from?

Step 1: Go to DMOZ and use it to find competitors based on horizontal and vertical niche levels. Let’s say you are selling handcrafted furnitures, your horizontal-based competitors are sites in this list. Make a list of these direct competitors.

Step 2:  Add to your list vertically-related sites by going a higher level in the Breadcrumb and finding sub-niches aside from Handcrafted. You’ll then see sites that sell different types of furniture – home furnishing, traditional, modern, so and so forth. These sites may offer products to similar target audience and you can guarantee that they acquire links from same types of websites.

Note: You still have to qualify them, but overall, you’ll get some big opportunities you haven’t found yet.

Step 3: Once you’re done list, plug in each of your direct competitor site (horizontal and vertical levels) and see their newest (recently acquired links) – see New Backlinks section.

 

Step 4 (optional): You can look for more new backlinks by showing 30 or 60 days view of recently added links.

Step 5: Once you've gathered and qualified potential link targets, you may now reach out to them and ask if you can be added to their links/resource page. There is a higher link acquisition rate using this link building tactic since bloggers and webmasters are still in the process of updating their pages/sites.

Hi [Name].

I came across your [“list of manufacturers”] page and I noticed that you recently included [COMPETITOR BRAND] in your list.

We are also a manufacturer of [niche] products for local audiences in the US. I wanted to reach out to you directly to see if this would be a good fit for your [resource page]. You can see our recent products here:

Thanks,

Venchito

4. GENERAL ECOMMERCE LINK OPPORTUNITIES

There are a few gold mines that most eCommerce link builders aren’t capitalizing on, but can actually provide real link value to their websites. That is pursuing links in eCommerce and retail industries (general).

If your site or your client is open for publicity, then this link building strategy best fits for them. How to do it?

Step 1: Do a Google search for any of the following search phrases:

• eCommerce events OR seminars [city] OR [national]
• eCommerce “guest post” (example)
• eCommerce “gift guide” (example)
• eCommerce holiday guide

Step 2: Make a list of all possible link opportunities from sites/pages you prospected on.

Step 3: Strategize how you can acquire links from those eCommerce-specific sites. You can either do a guest post on their blogs, attend to their local or national events where you can build relationships with the organizers, or simply asking them if they conduct interviews with eCommerce site owners or marketers.

5. GET LINKS FROM CATEGORY-SPECIFIC COMPETITORS

Resource page link building is one of the classic link building strategies that you can maximize for eCommerce websites. There are, in fact, hundreds of links or lists pages intended for updates – corrections and additions on a regular basis.

If you always take time to find broken links and suggest webmasters with relevant resources (including your content), then it’s a value added proposition you can offer in manual outreach. However, this is not a necessity in eCommerce resource page link building. If you follow the next steps, you can certainly acquire links to your eCommerce target page(s) from relevant resource pages, even without the broken link UVP.

Step 1: Identify what page(s) you’d like to target to funnel your link equity through. I always recommend targeting some highly converting category pages to pass its link authority down to its products pages – they are also more linkable than individual product pages (assuming these category pages have clean layout and design).

Step 2: Look for sites that solely sell a product in your category. Let’s say, for orthodontic supplies, find sites that sell retractors and disposables. A simple Google search for where to buy” [ product ] will provide you these product-specific competitors.

 

Step 3 (optional): If you can’t find any sites that just sell very specific products, you can find category-specific competitors. In our example, you may look for websites that sell orthodontic instruments or dental websites that have orthodontics category page.

Step 4: Once you have a list of product and category specific competitors, you can plug them into Ahrefs to find resource pages they’ve been linked to. For category pages, make sure to use the Exact URL option for search link bar.

https://www.forceint.com/resources

http://www.orthonj.com/links.html

Step 5: Make a list of possible resource page link opportunities in Google Spreadsheet. You’ll most likely get two types of resource pages: one that linked out to just one/two products (e.g. retractors) and another page with all external links related to orthodontic supplies.

Step 6: Hunt for the email addresses of your link prospects and send them emails. If you see a page that has an instruction as to what email address you should be directing your email to or that tells you what kind of resources they’ll only consider for resource inclusion – it would be wise to make use of it as your introductory sentence in your initial pitch. This will dramatically increase your response and link acquisition rates from pages with direct instructions about corrections and additions of resources.

i.e. “I noticed your note at the top of your exhibit resource page about corrections & additions, so…

6. TARGET MONEY-SAVING AUDIENCES

Coupons and discount pages are enticing offers online customers will certainly avail – taking advantage of people who are trying to save a buck is a link building opportunity for those in the eCommerce space.

Having said that, here’s how you can benefit from coupon-based link acquisition campaign:

Step 1: Create a dedicated landing page for deals or coupons. Well-designed page targeted to specific audiences will perform better in acquiring niche relevant links than plainly having a general deals page. Here is one example of a website that regularly publishes deals pages mainly targeting gadgets and technology equipments.

Pro tip: Use this as your angle when pitching bloggers (I’ve created a dedicated deals page for your readers…)

Step 2: Find both niche-specific and general coupon blogs by doing a Google search for intitle:coupon “blog”. You will then see a list of coupon sites who are targeting the same audience: people trying to save money. Here are a few general coupon blogs you can initially pitch:

• http://thekrazycouponlady.com/blog/
• http://couponnannie.ca/
• http://www.mrsjanuary.com/

Step 3: Invest in building relationship with these coupon bloggers by giving them offers they can’t resist. One way is to use the dedicated page as your unique proposition, another is to get them as partners, so when you release a new deals page (only applicable if you sell different types/brands of products), you can make initial exposures from your offers.

7. IMPROVED GUEST BLOGGING TECHNIQUE

Guest posts are external web properties considered to be valuable assets for a company or website – given that it has so many benefits anyone can took advantage of, such as:

• It helps attract new social followers to your brand’s social profile accounts (these people may have read your guest articles on other blogs), which can semi-automate the distribution process of your existing and/or future content assets hosted on your site.
• It helps bring new converting visitors to your page/site – who can become potential email subscribers and customers of your brand.
• It helps build brand awareness and authority in your niche, especially if hosted sites are top-notch blogs in the industry since you are tapping into new groups of target audiences.

If you are still not convinced how powerful guest blogging is, you can check out more of these resources.

For eCommerce brands, guest blogging still works but not to the extent of using it solely for link acquisition – a balance between guest blogging and broken link building is a good example.

I had a client in the coupon ecommerce space that targets audiences in the parenting, relationship and mommy verticals. By using guest blogging strategy plus other link building tactics, we’ve helped the site gain organic increase on a month to month basis.

Giving Assistant's SEMRush

A few examples of contributed content articles are here, here and here.

Let’s learn how to use guest blogging campaign for eCommerce sites.

Step 1: List down category pages of your site that you are trying to rank for in search and have history of high conversion gains – it’s much easier to see monthly improvements from converting categories than random allotment of category pages.

Step 2: Track sites that have been in your networks already. Look for blogs that shared your recent or top-notch content using Buzzsumo (you’ll have higher chances of landing guest posts on their blogs).

For starters, use inurl:blog “niche” OR inurl:write-for-us “keyword” to make an initial list of guest blogs.

Step 3: Pitch with content ideas not being covered in their blogs (you are likely to get more responses using this approach since you are giving more value than other publishers just trying to land a coverage with general content topics).

You can find existing posts from industry-related news sites for rewrite or recreation and use them as an angle for guest blogging pitch.

You can also contact book authors, experts and influencers in your niche and ask if you can do an interview with them – use the output interview as the finalized guest content.

Pro tip: Make sure to add internal links to guest blog’s other content in your guest posts – it will help increase the chances of getting your posts approved by publishers.

8. TRIPLE-FOLD LINKBAIT PROCESS

Linkbaiting is a form of viral content marketing aims to attract links from linkeratis – coined term for people who might give links to a content.

It is a combination of efforts focusing on three main elements: usability, evergreen and unexpected hook (source).

Knowing which type of content are useful for a specific type of audience, identifying how long a particular content can benefit its target audience and adding information and data to the web asset not yet discovered on other external sources are main ingredients towards a successful linkbait strategy.

There are various forms of linkbait content now being used by marketers, business owners and agencies including extensive/comprehensive tutorials/guides/resources, visual data/information (data sources both internal and external) and expert advices/tips on a subject matter.

Each of these types can consistently provide results to your brand – i.e. bringing more specifically targeted leads and driving more traffic (organic/direct/referral) to your website and upgrading your blog/content readership.

One example of a linkbait content that is often used in different industries is round-up post. You can see this type of content even in the most specific niche and common vertical.

Unfortunately though, most link builders don’t have a concrete plan of using round-up posts – obtaining low number of shares and links on a content with 100+ contributors.

A few reasons why it isn’t effective for some marketers:

• There is an initial intent of just building links and the primary reason why it was built – leaving no doubt that it got only a few shares from contributors.
• Not all tips are valuable – asking questions to general practitioners, not actually an expert on a subject matter would result to low-par information.
• Setting minimum number of works in answers when pitching potential contributors results to sub-par content output.

Here is how to leverage linkbait content like round-up post to acquire high-quality links to your website:

STEP 1: Create a top niche experts to follow content to initiate conversations with industry influencers. The pure intent of publishing the content is to build relationships with possible contributors.

Hi [ NAME ],

I’m Venchito Tampon from [ BRAND NAME ]. We recently published a post featuring the top [ NICHE EXPERTS]. I’m so happy to tell you that you made our list because we’ve found your blog very useful to the community.  

We also included a link to your website which can help you get some visitors or readers back to your blog. Feel free to comment or share the post.

Thank you,

STEP 2: Once content is published, let those people you’ve included in your post know about it. Send them an email.

STEP 3: After two weeks, send pitches to influencers/experts asking for their expert advices on one subject matter (e.g. advice to beginner interior design experts).

Hi [NAME],

I’m doing an expert round-up on my blog and I think many people who are new to [ TOPIC ] would love to know your answer to this question:

[ QUESTION ]

If you could send your response back by [ DATE ] as I plan to publish it on [ DATE ], that would be great. Let me know to which website you’d like us to link to.

Hoping to hear a feedback from you.

Thanks,

Venchito

STEP 4: Let your contributors know about the published crowdsourced content.

Hi [ Name ],

Hope you’re having a great week! I wanted to let you know that I just published the round-up post. Here’s the link: [ LINK ]

Feel free to share it to your friends or readers.

Thanks for contributing!

STEP 5: Create an infographic out of the expert advice content. This gives you another content asset that you can use for outreach.

STEP 6: Promote it as much as you can, only to possible linkers – bloggers and webmasters.

Hi [ NAME ],

I came across your [ POST ]. [ TELL SOMETHING ABOUT IT]

We actually created an infographic called [ TOPIC HYPERLINKED TO THE INFOGRAPHIC PAGE ] which your readers might find it useful. [ MORE DETAILS ABOUT THE INFOGRAPHIC ].

Here are some of the findings we’d included:

[ FINDING 1]

[ FINDING 2 ]

[ FINDING 3 ]

If this finds you very interesting, I can send you a customized embed code that you can copy and paste for your blog.

I’d appreciate your feedback.

Thank you,

STEP 7: Track unlinked mentions of your content assets – x experts to follow content, round-up post and the infographic.

Hi [ NAME ],

I’m Venchito Tampon from [ BRAND NAME ] . I saw that you embedded the infographic on [ STE NAME ].

I’m reaching out to you because I couldn’t find any credit to our page or website. We actually have a copywright page for this. I’m requesting you to add a link somewhere in your introductory post or below the infographic.

Thank you,

OTHER USEFUL ECOMMERCE RESOURCES:

• Shopify blog
• Hubspot’s eCommerce blog
• Ahrefs’ post on eCommerce SEO
• 37 M-commerce Statistics & Trends in 2019

If you liked this post, you can subscribe to the email opt-in at the top or at the right sidebar and follow me on Twitter @venchito14.

 

Have We Been Helpful?

Want to take your eCommerce link building to the next level – — but don’t know where to start, and are feeling overwhelmed by this post.

We are here to help you. SharpRocket is a team of link building specialists who love building high quality links.

To learn more about how we can help, take a look at the services we offer and results we got for our clients.

 

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by Venchito Tampon Jr

How to Speed Link Prospecting Through Observations

There are many viable guides and how-to’s in link prospecting from different SEO experts. Some techniques are learned simply through your own observations from campaigns that you have handled. We, at SharpRocket, incorporate those observations from our own personal experiences which helped us be more productive in building links.

LISTING DOWN LINK SIMILARITIES

Most bloggers use the same terms in creating links for their pages. For example, in creating a resource page, the commonly used terms are domain.com/niche-resources; domain.com/resources.php; domain.com/links.html. Therefore, we can use google queries such as inurl:niche-resources or inurl:links.html. The search engine result will give us a list of resource pages according to the niche we are looking for.  Below are other search queries you can use to find additional prospects for your client which we personally use:

• resources/links
• resource-guide
• useful-links
• useful-resources
• niche-resources
• recommended-resources

Though not all search qeries such as resources.php, links.html, or useful-links, provide resources that are relevant to the client’s industry, it is advisable to add a distinction which is based on the client’s niche to narrow down the results in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), e.g. inurl:useful-links “niche”. Google will then provide you results based on the keyword you used which is more applicable to your campaign.

Pro Tip: Just be creative with the words you use along with being observant. If you have a hunch or an idea which you think can be helpful, it wouldn’t hurt to try experimenting on it.  Who knows, you might even be able to discover other useful techniques you can use to further enhance your link building skills. Don’t forget to check out the links on the resource page you found, for it may redirect you to a new prospect opportunity which you have not seen through the list that Google displayed.

UTILIZING COUNTRY DOMAIN EXTENSIONS

As you may have noticed, some domains do not always end in .com, .org, or .edu, and other web addresses use different domain extensions depending on the country in which their website is being hosted (e.g. “.au” which is hosted in Australia or “.ca” which is hosted in Canada). By using these domain extensions you can narrow down the results based on your preferred country or target audience. You can use the advance search operator “inurl” followed by the country domain extension that you want to focus on (e.g. inurl:.ca). You can also add a distinction to make the search query more precise. If you are looking for guides or resources you can use to enhance your skills in photography, you can use inurl:.ca/photography-resources. Google will then give you a list of photography resource pages with the country domain of Canada.

Pro Tip: You can use these techniques in any niche or industry you wish to do research on. However, if you don’t have a specific country you would like to focus on, searching for link targets that end with .com first is most recommended because it is the most recognizable and highly used domain extension. You can then use the other country domain extension of your preference to gain new prospect opportunities.

You can visit this Webopedia guide for a complete list of countries and their domain extensions.

IDENTIFY COMPANY BLOGS THROUGH SERPS

By taking notice of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), we can also pinpoint if the link is a company website or a personal blog. Though not all domain names and punctuation marks are 100% accurate, it can somehow lessen our time in checking each link just to see if  it is a company website. Here are some examples:

The above query will display links that have the key words “light” and “bulb” in the title of the article .  One result has the punctuation mark called pipe or vertical bar on the page title. It was followed by the domain name “1000Bulbs.com”. Here, we can be quite sure that it is a company website because the page url was also mentioned in the title.

Clicking the link will redirect you to the webpage.

Another punctuation mark used in identifying a company website is hyphen or dash. As you can see, the domain name which is the brand name of the company is included in the page title after the hyphen. Most of the time, em dash or the long dash is used.

 

Lastly, the punctuation mark colon. The difference of this punctuation mark from the hyphen and vertical bar is that you can instantly notice it at the beginning of the page title. The brand name is cited first followed by the colon and page title of the article.

We can distinguish company websites through these punctuation marks located at the page title. Just a little note, not all sites that uses hyphen, vertical bar, and colon in the page title are companies. Some content creators tend to do that as well.

MORE OBSERVATIONS, FASTER PROSPECTING

Observational learning is a must in link prospecting. It helps us maximize the use of Google queries and lessen our time in clicking unnecessary links. Simple terms, domain names and symbols might have deeper meaning. This is why we have to keep our eyes open and our minds sharp. Noticing terms you don’t usually use but is mentioned in the client’s industry can be used as keywords for a broader research. Checking on how domain names are created by bloggers can give us a better chance at generating a higher number of results. We just have to be adamant about making observation a priority.  

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by Venchito Tampon Jr

How to Make Your Link Building Effective

The value of every marketing practice lies on its ability to generate results. Same goes to link building.

Engagement, social shares, referral visits and assisted conversions are some key results of an effective link building campaign.

However, there are websites that don’t necessarily require links to become major sections of the brand’s deliverables, as those sites could easily gain its own recognition (visits and conversions) using any of the following simple methods:

• Fixing the basic on-page elements of key pages, as this is very beneficial for a site to let Google understand the context or theme of every individual webpage as well as the overall domain.
• Offline marketing activities brought into natural online engagements could drive additional direct visits to the site, particularly if the brand has a huge following in the offline scene (brand sponsorship and appearance in industry seminars/conferences).
• Websites that have diversified sources of visits/conversions (e.g. social, email, etc..) doesn’t require much of link building work, especially if their main visit-driving source isn’t organic.

At SharpRocket, we choose the clients that we work with. Here are some types of potential clients that we don’t usually entertain:

• Clients whose websites that don’t have strong on-page elements won’t see much results in their organic traffic, even if we’ve built multiple links to their pages (improper keyword targeting, usability, coding issues, etc..).
• Clients in industries that have low number of niche blogs and couldn’t tap other sectors because of its narrowed site/brand theme.
• Clients who are primarily interested in building contextual links with commercial-focused anchor texts.
• Clients whose main goal is to solely rank its homepage with no other interests to build links to its non-promotional pages.
• Clients in illegal industries (gambling, porn/adult, etc..).

I firmly believe that link development should be an investment to every company, SEO agency and direct client, as they have to spend at least 6 months in order to see improvements in their organic traffic which will later on translate to conversions.

We’ve been working on several clients coming various industries, some invested in long term. Others just want to test the results for one month.

Below is the screenshot of the organic traffic of one of our clients (we’ve signed an NDA agreement so I can’t share the site’s URL, sorry guys!).

The client is in the beauty niche and had outsourced their link building work to us for 6 months.

Another graph is from a legal client whom we’ve helped to build links to its key pages from customer-based blogs (parenting and finance).

Today, I’ll be sharing to you actionable tips on how to make your link building work more effective for your brand.

1. Set up valuable metrics

With so many big SEO tools out there, most search marketers couldn’t easily identify which metrics are worth looking at, and are worth to use for their site’s or clients’ link building campaigns.

These metrics shouldn’t just help set the benchmark for reporting purposes, but should also bring the real value to the clients.

At SharpRocket, we define metrics that best suit our clients based on what they need as a brand

We’ve realized that we can’t just rely on one metric, as using one SEO tool to qualify a certain link prospect isn’t a wise decision. No SEO tool is perfect.

There are websites in various industries that have high Domain Authority, but receive low search traffic every month (~100 to ~200 organic visits per month).

Journey to Millions (DA 43)

Money Reasons (DA 43)

Take a look at this website (Happy Schools). It has Domain Authority (DA) of 29 but is earning ~20,000 search traffic every month.

It’s up to what you and your client had agreed on the metrics, but as a company, it is better to understand and apply the real metrics that can certainly give real value to your clients.

2. Target practical pages for better ROI in outreach

We’ve been contemplating recently on what made some of our projects perform better than other projects (with respect to the verticals they’re in, as some niches like fashion, travel and finance have higher response rates than others).

One thing we’ve drawn from our data is the higher link ROI in practical pages (how to’s, tips, tricks, strategies and related terms) than theory-based and news type pages (what, when, etc..).

The reason behind this is that bloggers/webmasters could easily insert an additional resources or mention a post in a practical type of page, compared to giving you a link from a “what” or “when” page as it would take more time in contextual editing.

Here’s one sample of data from one of our campaigns (marketing vertical).

So if you’re targeting existing pages/posts of blogs as potential link opportunities, then it would be better for you to find practical themes than simply any type of blog posts.

Practical pages could be any of the following:

• List of “Topic X”
• Getting, attracting, learning “Topic X”
• Ultimate guide, definitive guide or minimalist guide to “Topic X”
• “Topic X” strategy, techniques, tips or tricks
• Solutions to “Topic X”
• Ways to improve, gain or other related terms “Topic X”
• Top 10 “Topic X” resources
• “Topic X” ideas to use

3. Identify linking audiences through topic analysis

When you executed a plan for a site’s link development campaign, you already know its target audience by looking at the site’s products/services pages or simply asking your client/manager/CEO or any person in charge in the overall management of your website.

However, when you use the site’s customer base as your search query, you are not guaranteed that the bloggers/webmasters of pages revealed from that particular keyword phrase are highly linkable audiences.

One of our client projects is working in the online store/sales niche, where we previously targeted verticals: ecommerce and social media.

After one month, we’ve tested another batch of prospects to target a related niche – money making - not primarily the target audience but is still part of the customer base of the brand (and was approved by the client himself).

An increase of 9% in the placement rates from last month’s link acquisition rate of 13%, which we couldn’t achieve if we would be focusing on plain ecommerce and social media topics.

The point here is that as a link developer, you’ve got to strategize not only in thinking of additional search queries for link prospecting and creating email templates for blogger outreach, but in analyzing the right theme/topic/keyword that have high linking potentials.

If you're looking for an agency to outsource your link building work, you can contact us for an inquiry.

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by Venchito Tampon Jr

7 Penguin Proof Link Building Tips

In 2012, after Google released its link-spam filter Penguin, many businesses started cleaning up webspam signals in their backlink profiles to be able to recover from the tragic site demotion by Google (which is just a product of marketers/bloggers’ unnatural link practices).

However, not all businesses had fully recovered from their previous downfall due to logical reasons, such as:

• The website had other technical issues that pulled it down to the bottom of rankings.
• Waiting for Google to refresh/re-ran its algorithm which will release sites that had previous link-related issues but were fixed thoroughly.
• The website’s good rankings are highly dependent on the power of links to move it up to higher rankings – the site is obviously not deserved to rank.

Probably this year Google will release its algorithm refresh, which can help sites that have already cleaned up their link profiles and demote websites with newly discovered spam.

Whether it’s a Google Penguin refresh or update that is coming this month (or probably next month), search marketers, particularly those who are specialists in link development (link builder, link marketing consultants, etc..) should be able to constantly create quality controls in their link building processes/activities/tasks in order to sustain and grow their sites’ backlinks.

Link audit is one example of a necessary quality control process in link development.

The basic foundation of a link audit system, which are also possible elements of Google Penguin filter are the following:

• Link source quality. This is best identified by looking at spammy and irrelevant sites, link networks, sites that contain artificial links and blogs with content that have low user activity.
• Ratio of the number of good vs bad links.
• Thematic relevance of linking sites/domains.
• Amount of links with exact match anchor texts (over optimization of anchor text)
• Positions of links in the linking pages (sitewide or non-sitewide such as contextual)..

Understanding deeply the said link-centric elements could help you properly execute a link audit process and/or build a link building campaign that can stand against any future Google Penguin updates.

In this post, I’ll be sharing to you 7 Penguin-proof link building tips.

1. Proper prospecting with advanced search operators

Link prospecting is the initial phase in link development where you collect a certain amount of link opportunities (blogs, sites, web communities, etc..) based on the industry’s competition level and demand.

One common way to gather a bunch of link targets is by using advanced search operators.

Search operators are phrases that can be added to searches to help narrow down the search results. They are highly useful tools in finding highly targeted domains/pages in search, as you can easily filter the pages based on opportunity types (blogs, .edu, .org, etc..) and based on thematic relevance.

For a full list of advanced search operators, you can check out this resource page on Google Guide.

In link development, there are only certain search operators that can help you pre-qualify backlink prospects in the link prospecting phase and they are as follows:

• intitle
• inurl
• site
• related

Let’s dig into each of these search tools.

intitle

The advanced search operator: intitle helps qualify pages based on thematic relevance.

On-page keywords (“swimming”) would only reveal pages that have the word, “swimming” in the body/context of the page, whereas if the intitle is added to that keyword, you would see topically-relevant pages with meta title “swimming”.

Bloggers or content creators would normally use the main topic of the article as the meta-title - giving us an idea that the whole page is highly relevant to the brand’s page/content.

Proper intitle: usage also helps you find specific audience types (swimmers, fitness instructors, etc..).

inurl

This advanced search operator is primarily used when looking for opportunity type footprints that only occur in the urls of pages.

You would normally see inurl usage in broken link building when finding links/resource pages that are relevant to the site’s content (e.g. inurl:links.html “driving safety” to find backlink prospects for a “senior’s guide to driving” content asset).

site:

Site search operator should basically be used to filter the page results based on TLDs (.us, .edu, .org, .gov, etc.).

This allows you to prioritize types of audience that you’re looking for. For instance, you want an audience of highly respected dentists in your local city, you would want to use site.org to only find dentist organizations.

related:

Related search function leaves you pages that are similar to the word(s) or domain after the colon (e.g. related:digitalphilippines.net).

There are two methods that you can use related search operator:

• Finding similar websites of your brand and of your prospected site.
• Researching for synonyms of search queries/keywords.

Advanced search operators isn’t only useful in filtering pages/content in search results but also in ensuring that prospect backlinks are topically relevant to the brand /site you want to build links to.

2. Build 10x content assets to attract editorial links

Rand Fishkin shared the principle of 10x content in one of his Whiteboard Fridays at Moz. He provided actionable tips on how to create or improve a content piece to make it 10 times greater than other brands’ similar pieces.

Here are some of his useful points:

• Examine the quality of content piece based on its relevance to the search query – does your content answers a specific question by the user?
• Improve your content in terms of site speed, mobile friendliness, rendering, layout, navigation and design quality – identify industry benchmarks regarding those technical sides to check the content’s performance on the web.
• Thoroughness and details of the information provided in the content (credible sources, backed up with data, etc..).

There are a few reasons why I believe producing 10x content is a viable tactic in ensuring a Penguin proof link building campaign.

• Data-driven and expertly-made content have higher possibilities of earning editorial links from bloggers and researchers who’ll be referencing useful references in their works (blog content). This will help diversify the site’s link profile, as you would have no control on the elements of the links earned (anchor texts, referring pages, link placements, etc..).
• A 10x content asset produces hard to replicate links from websites/blogs only in primary industry and semi-niches. This maintains the thematic relevance of the site/content towards other pages, as you won’t get any irrelevant mentions/links if they are actually earned.

For the past two years, I’ve been constantly delivering quality content assets (10x content) on my blog that somehow marked my expertise in the link building scene.

Here are a few examples of content pieces that gained some traction in the past even up to now, as they have been ranking highly in search results for multiple keyword phrases.

43 Experts Share Their Most Actionable Link Building Tip

This post from 2013 is a compilation of different link building strategies, tactics, processes and tips coming from the well-known link building experts in the world.

It currently received 45 linking root domains and had been earning several mentions in blog roundups, interviews and forums.

One example of a forum mention is from this blog of Matthew Woodward, where someone had reference the 10x content to support his answer to the user’s question.

One benefit of producing 10x content piece is its ability to amplify links and social shares even after seasonal periods (weeks/months after publication).

The said linkable asset earned an authority link from Neil Patel’s blog in his latest post on building powerful links with images.

Further Reading: 24 Untapped Ways to Get Ideas for Your Next Blog Post

This 2014 blog post caters to the huge audience of blogging (blogging newbies and practitioners) on the topic of blog ideation.

Few weeks after it was published on my website, it earned several contextual links (first tier links) from niche-specific posts of bloggers in the local and international scene.

Given that linking pages have been receiving direct and organic visits, the likelihood of getting potential linkers to mention the linking page from their own content as well as linking to my site’s content piece becomes higher.

Up until now, my blog ideation post is still receiving social shares and high quality backlinks from blogging-centric sites . A good example of this is a referential link from Blogelina, an authoritative website in the blogging industry.

One advantage of a link earning activity of 10x content (or content pillars) is its ability to diversify the site’s link profile based on the location of the links on linking pages (or commonly referred as, “link placement”).

Given that links are earned, there would be a variety of link placements. Some links are located at the bottom of the content. Others would come the footer section of websites or best, links are located on the body of the page – contextual.

Google has an idea of where each backlink is located on the page. This allows them to target a lot of websites that have backlinks from a single page location (e.g. footer or widget links). On other behalf, Google also evaluates links placed higher up in a HTML code as powerful votes to the page it is referring to, for the obvious reason that they are likely editorial and are actually earned by the brand.

Producing 10x content assets on the blog doesn’t just help the site to attract hard to replicate links from niche relevant pages but also ensures that links earned/built are indeed, beneficial to the page’s performance on search (they add value in terms of relevance and authority).

Here are some useful resources on building 10x content assets:

• Content Marketing Data That Moves the Needle
• Testing The Skyscraper Technique [Case Study]
• Creating and Promoting Link Magnet Asset Pages

When you're in active link building campaign it is important to know how and where to put the right anchor text so you won't harm your rankings, read more about it here.

3. Balance recency-based link building tactics

For the past several years, we’ve seen and heard various link building tactics that had been a common toolset for search marketing agencies today.

But the real question stands, is there any link building that would remain effective after a decade of use?

Link diversity is the key in content marketing, even in at using tactics to acquire links from industry sites.

There are two basic types of content based on the recency of the acquisition of links: new content and existing content.

Broken link building is a solid link acquisition tactic that simply involves reaching out to webmasters about broken links identified on their existing pages, with the hope of getting those defunct links replaced with links to the site’s content/page.

Guest blogging, alternatively, is focused on writing new articles with links placed in the, submitted to editors of blogs for publication review and hoping to build links from those content pieces when published in due time.

These two powerful link development tactics have different target pages, broken link building is focused on existing content whereas guest blogging targets new/dynamic pages of the site.

Having a moderated execution on these two tactics gives you a balanced link profile.

You can also use the following link building tactics to diversify your site’s link profile based on the recency of target link pages:

• Reach out to webmasters and content creators who mentioned any content from your brand (images, stories, products/services, content assets, etc..) and ask to give your brand credits from their pages.
• Integrate online marketing activities in your offline events (sponsorship, speaking, participation, etc..) by getting them share your latest content, providing feedback about it and/or covering your activity in their future posts (reference).
• Create a landing page for discounts/coupons/freebies of your products/services and make it visible to your target audience by doing a press release / blogger outreach campaign (reference).

4. Use different footprints for link prospecting

Link prospecting footprints are patterns in search phase that gives Google an idea on the method and progress of the brand’s link development campaign.

Building a database of backlink targets with the same footprint puts the website at an unnecessary risk.

Don’t run a massive link building campaign with the same, common and basic footprints (e.g. inurl:guest-post to overall list of prospects).

You can use other niche search engines to build a spreadsheet of link targets (not just using Google in most cases). Below are some examples.

• Finding industry bloggers on Twitter by simply doing a social search for “industry blog” OR “industry blogger”.
• Using related search operator to easily find similar blogs of your listed link prospect(s).
• Researching for niche blogs from blog search engines like Blogsearchengine.org.

Other useful resources:

• Big Prospecting with Authority Anchors: a Process Guide
• 30 Free SEO Tools and How to Use Them for Link Prospecting

5. Diversify link type through image-based link building

A variety of link types is not a big issue in link diversity. However, you have to get a feel of what your top ranking competitors are at.

If their ratios of image to text links are different from your site’s link profile, then you should be concerned on switching some of your image-based links to text ones, especially if all advertisements are linked through images.

Here are some ways to build image-based links using existing branded content:

• Determine pages that embedded your brand logo as part of other websites’ sponsorship opportunities, media/press activities (e.g. interview) and other offline turned to online marketing activities. Reach out to webmasters and ask to replace those image links with branded text ones.
• Look for industry related blogs that published copies of your infographic/visual content and tell them to link to your page using text-based approach.

Master image-based link building using the following references:

• Easy Link Building With Images
• Ahrefs’ Building Links With Images

6. Create more brand awareness by targeting semi-relevant niches

Building links nowadays from semi-relevant niches is an effective way to improve your domain and brand authority, as you can increase the chances of getting new subscribers and readers as well as followers from other industries aside from your primary target group

For instance, if your company is selling wedding attires, you won’t just aim to target links from wedding blogs but you can also tap relationship and fashion blogs, which are considered semi-relevant niches.

Site relevance is an important factor that Google uses to detect spam websites/blogs that have several links coming from irrelevant verticals.

Aside from spam avoidance, targeting link prospects from semi-relevant niches also bring referral traffic to the site that could potentially convert to customers/clients.

7. Target appropriate pages in outreach

One of the simplest ways to break down your backlinks by target page is through seeing the ratio of home page links to deep links.

As you develop links over time, you don’t want to have all links go to your home page, as it would signal to Google that is the only essential and worthy of ranking page in your site.

Having most of your links point to your deep pages allows you to have a balanced link profile in terms of target page(s).

You can properly diversify your links by measuring via the Deep Link Ratio: # of deep links over # of total links.

You can calculate this by getting the total number of links using your favorite link building tool (I prefer you only look at referring domains instead of seeing the number of total links – since most of them are sitewides). Then get the number of homepage links and subtract it from your total # of referring domains to get the # of deep links.

A few practical tips to increase your number of deep links:

• When performing link acquisition activities, it is best to refer your most relevant deep page to a potential linker as it won’t only balance your Deep Link ratio, but gives more authority/link value to your domain.
• Invest in building branded links through interviews and round-ups that could link to your site’s branded pages (about us/our team, company, services, etc..).
• Create expertly-made content on a regular basis that has unique value proposition and could attract editorial links from industry bloggers.

If you're looking for a link building service for your company, you can contact us for inquiry.

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by Venchito Tampon Jr

Link Building for Agency Level SEO

Links are still an important ranking factor in search algorithm, being considered as the most influential matter in search rankings (on a domain-level and page-level bases).

Alongside the rise for competition in search performance is the increase in demand for high quality links from blogs/sites in relevant industries.

Coming from a link building agency (Hyperlynx Media owned by Jon Cooper) to starting my own link development company (SharpRocket), I’ve seen hundreds of companies from different verticals investing in link building for the sole purpose of seeing an improved organic traffic of their company websites.

A few other reasons why link development is a good investment for businesses (whether they are from small to medium scale or Fortune 500):

• Links serve as a powerful branding tool to make websites more visible on high traffic publication websites.
• Links can drive potential customers and clients to the website – making it as a sustainable lead generation strategy.
• Links can build powerful relationships with both non-competing brands and competitors that can pursue beneficial partnerships on both parties.
• Links are powerful signals for entity relationships that search engines and web users can use to determine if the site is authoritative and trusted (more editorial links from trusted websites could mean your website is also trusted too).

Link Building Process Models

Process model refers to a structure of activity with step by step detailed instructions.

Search marketing agencies use process models to scale search engine optimization campaigns, leading to greater results – more productivity and more output.

The more clients an agency accommodates, the more it will require for the business to improve its process models or create new business processes for additional tasks/activities.

I’ve tried and tested different link building models to earn and build high quality backlinks from blogs/sites in different authority levels and industries.

Among those models are the two processes that I’ll be sharing in this post: Blogger Outreach and Linkable Asset models.

Blogger Outreach Model

Blogger outreach is a process of building connections with niche bloggers and influencers that have subtle social following and considerable authority domain levels.

Blogger outreach’s main core competency from other link building models is its ability to create new relationships without the need for creation of new linkable assets.

How to execute blogger outreach model?

The reason behind contacting bloggers with high presence in social profiles is the idea of amplification. More active and real social followers could mean more exposure for the brand being linked to from new posts.

This exposure can result to additional shares and possible contextual links from industry-specific sites who will read new articles from the blog.

You can use Followerwonk to find bloggers with average amount of social followers.

Filter the list by no relationships to only search for bloggers that don’t have any connections to your Twitter profile.

Another method to find niche bloggers is through Buzzsumo.

Type in any related industry terms in the search bar and click View Shares button to find social shares of the blog.

List all blogs in a spreadsheet and filter the list by Trustflow and Domain Authority (set a benchmark for for these two metrics).

Your next step is to send emails to bloggers and ask if you can invest in their future content assets (blog posts) where you could get a mention(s) from them.

A few examples of link investments are:

• Asking the format of their next content asset and seeing if you can invest in another content format (infographic for a long-form blog post). During publication, you can ask the blogger to mention you as one of their content partners in creating the overall content piece.
• Identifying content promotions of your brand where the blogger could largely benefit from (a link/mention from your round-up email). Eventually, bloggers would naturally link to any of your blog posts.
• Letting a designer from your team help the blogger creates unique design for his/her content piece. A photo credit with a link pointing to your site is the beneficial part in this blogger outreach tactic.
• Asking to proofread their future content work based on high quality standards such as compelling headlines and call to actions at the end of the post. Gratitude with a branded mention (your name) would be the after effect of this strategy.

You can also offer content partnerships to bloggers. This process is doable in many ways:

• Buy content from bloggers in the list who are still starting to build their own brand, since you can get a cheaper price this way than hiring industry experts to write content for you. Publish the post as a content asset on your client’s site. Links would be naturally earned from industry-specific blogs as you can absorb connections from partnered bloggers (social followers, readers and brand evangelists).
• Distribute paid content pieces as guest posts to high traffic publications and content hubs. The likelihood of getting positive approval rate from these authority blogs is high since you’ve hired industry specialists to write quality articles for you.
• Watch out for incoming links to your client’s site and to published guest posts on other relevant blogs as you can build new relationships with newly found linkers in the industry by sending them emails (thank you).

If you can build relationships with five bloggers and get high quality content from them every week, then that would be a total of 20 expertly made blog posts every month submitted to industry-specific blogs, resulting to 20 contextual links.

Linkable Asset Model

Linkable asset is any part of a website or organization that its target audience will genuinely perceive as worth citing/referencing to, as defined by Jason Acidre.

Identifying which website’s content can potentially attract relevant links to the brand can help you create a solid link development campaign for your website, since you can easily use it as forefront proposition in linker outreach.

How to Identify Linkable Assets

Here are some ways to find existing linkable content pieces of the site:

• Use Ahrefs to determine site’s top grossing pages and sort the list from highest to lowest referring domains and social shares. Exclude the homepage and site’s landing/sales pages from your list and only choose blog content as the site’s linkable assets.
• Do a Google search for [brand name] and click on the Images tab. Look at what pops up in the search results. If images are owned by the company (blog photos, logo, team members’ visuals, etc..), then upload them in Reverse Image Search to see how many websites had linked to those visual content. The number of organic websites in the Image Reverse search results is a good indicator of the content’s performance in link acquisition.
• Create a brainstorming session within your team/brand and try to find out new offline events conducted by your company. Identify newsworthy angles from those events and pitch them to high authority publications to be included in one of their news stories.
• Identify brand ambassador(s) in your client’s brand and see if they have established authorities in your niche by looking at existing online interviews, contributions to round-ups and other available media content.
• Use Google Analytics data to track pages with the high user activity (high visits, ave. time duration, etc..).

How to Improve Linkable Assets

Once you’ve identified possible linkable assets in your website, you can now start enhancing these pages for better link acquisition performance. There are many areas in the content/page that you can improve on, such as:

Call to action

One of the elements that keep visitors stay longer on the site, aside from the quality of information the page contains is call to action.

Call to action (CTA) is an instruction to the audience to provoke an immediate response, usually using an imperative verb such as "call now" or “find out more”

Writing compelling call to actions in your content pieces can help you increase the possibility of pages to earn additional social shares and inbound links.

One classic example of this is encouraging readers to embed an infographic code in their blogs to add a visual content in their existing articles.

The more enticing call-to-action (CTA) is, the better chances of earning new contextual links to your linkable asset.

You might want to check out this post by Nick Kolenda about improving copywriting skills.

Social Attraction

Social media plays a vital role in driving targeted traffic to the site’s key pages as well as opening up new link opportunities for the brand.

Linkable assets are more likely to earn new editorial links when shared multiple times on social profiles given that the more social shares a content piece acquires, the more it is perceived as informational and authoritative in a specific theme/topic.

Here are a few actionable tips driven from the statistics listed in Backlinko’s data driven guide to creating viral content:

• Add colorful visuals to your product guide. Data: Xerox found that colorful visuals made people 80% more likely to read a product guide.
• Find professional images and use them as visuals to your content. Data: An Internal Marketing Sherpa study found that pro images received 121% more Facebook shares than semi-professional photos.
• Set a featured image in your linkable asset. Data: Social shares with images get 150% more retweets on Twitter and 53% more likes on Facebook.

Length of content

Long-form content with quality information tends to perform better on search results than a 500-word blog post.

Professor Dr. Jonah Berger found that longer content was 76.8% more likely to be heavily shared (source).

The number of words (length) of content has a great impact on the page’s social performance and on its ability to be referenced by bloggers and researchers who would likely find it in search engines.

Context

Based on Searchmetrics’ ranking factors,  creating more or easy content doesn’t positively affect search rankings. Search engines are moving away from focusing on single keywords to actually diving in to the so-called, “content clusters”.

 

Content clusters are individual topic areas that are based around keywords and industry related terms.

Content assets focused on content clusters have higher chances of getting found on different niche search terms than a keyword-specific content piece.

Since search engines already understand what the content is all about, what topics it could be tapped and industry related terms it could be connected with, there’s no reason to write articles for each and every target keyword.

How to Promote Linkable Assets

Linkable asset promotion is where you actually put all your major efforts into place.

There are a lot of online asset promotion tactics out there, but there’s only a few that are really handy and applies to almost every industry.

Here are some ways to massively promote your linkable assets:

• Become a contributor to niche-specific publications and authority blogs and reference your linkable asset from your work. Make your anchor text a call-to-action (CTA) to encourage readers to click on the link pointing to your asset page.
• Build links from resource pages across your verticals. Find any broken link in those pages and use them as your value proposition in your initial outreach (ask webmasters if they could replace non-active links with a link to your content).
• Use Topsy or Buzzsumo to find active social shares in your niche. Segment the list by the number of social followers to only find brand evangelists with large following. Try to reach out to them and let them know about your linkable asset.
• Reach out to influencers that you’ve mentioned in your content. If they’ve find your linkable asset useful for their readers/followers, they’ll definitely share it or even link to it from their blogs.
• Put more eyeballs to your linkable asset by creating sponsored Facebook ads that are targeted to local audience/interest groups.

Other Useful Resources:

• How to Get Influencers into the Hands of Influencers Who Can Help Amplify It
• Maximizing Evergreen Content to Fuel Business Sales and Marketing
• How to Build a Content Production Calendar for Earning 50 Authority Links Per Month

If you're looking for a link building service for your company, you can contact us for inquiry.

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by Venchito Tampon Jr