Six Enterprise Link Building Strategies

by Venchito Tampon Jr | Last Updated on July 1, 2023

What is enterprise link building?

Enterprise link building refers to a set of strategies tailored for promoting large and complex websites. It involves leveraging brand equity, valuable content, and a positive reputation to establish strong backlinks and drive organic traffic. These strategies are essential for enhancing the online visibility and authority of enterprise websites.

 

To the person on the outside looking in, doing SEO for a big corporation sounds dreamy. Large enterprises have significant budgets, established brand names, and sites that land on your lap carrying a good amount of link equity.

What a lot of people don’t see is the fact that big websites usually face equally big challenges. Massive site audits, deep page hierarchies, and organizational bureaucracy can get your SEO wheels stuck. Building up a competitive link profile in the big leagues is the same way: if you don’t use your time and resources, you can expect your competitors to bury you while trying to figure out what’s happening.

When a high-DR site faces DR90 competitors, you better come to the ring carrying dynamite in your fists. Scoring several links from a few guest posts per month doesn’t cut it in this arena. Getting widespread brand mentions, coverage from premier sites, and getting links from the most reputable domains are the keys to securing a dominant position in search results for highly competitive keywords.

Early in my career, I was lucky to have worked with two Fortune 500 companies running successful organic search campaigns. These organizations taught me that to win big. You have to think big without falling into the black hat SEO pit. It’s a fine line to straddle, especially if you’ve got the resources to do as you please with your campaign.

Discipline, integrity, and a desire to win the right way are the keys to successful enterprise link building service. Here are six of the go-to methods I use when handling client or employer sites engaged in billion-dollar verticals:

 

Six Enterprise Link Building Strategies

Press Release Distribution

It may sound elementary, but issuing a press release and having it carried by news wires is the fastest and easiest way to earn backlinks for reputable enterprises. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, a press release is an official statement by the company targeting news and media outlets.

Press releases often carry detailed information on newsworthy announcements that people in your industry will want to know about.

At Emerson Electric, we routinely release press statements during product launches, appearances at major events, or major organizational developments. These stories get covered by media sites such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. We also get media mileage from industry-specific online media outlets like Data Center Knowledge and Computer Weekly for our IT manufacturing news.

Sometimes, they publish stories with live links to us; sometimes, they don’t. However, even when we don’t get live links, we get SEO-boosting brand mentions, and more importantly, we raise awareness about our activities among members of our target demographic.

News coverage from the New York Times

And from the Wall Street Journal, too!

If you’re running an SEO campaign for a medium or large enterprise, make it a habit to write press releases when you have something important to say. Invest in services such as PRWeb and let them distribute your news release to hundreds of sites. You’d be surprised by how much coverage you can get for little effort.

You can probably learn to do it yourself if you don’t have a dedicated writer to compose a news release. Writing a press release isn’t exactly rocket science, so go for it and see how it works. Here’s a nice guide to follow if you’re just starting out.

 

Thought Leadership Campaigns

A thought leader is an individual or organization recognized as an authority in a field of knowledge. The advice of thought leaders is constantly sought out and rewarded with everything from simple praises to financial compensation. If you’re running a big website owned by a major enterprise, there’s a good chance your company and some of its employees are already recognized as thought leaders in your industry.

Leverage this cache by translating it into content and campaigns that get you more traffic and links. Work closely with product marketing and ask them about hot trends in your business. Get their thoughts on customer needs and wants. From there, you should be able to list a set of themes and topics to drive your content and target it to the right people.

Effective enterprise link builders and content developers can create whitepapers, blog posts, videos, and SlideShare presentations from collaborations between the content team, product marketing teams, product development departments, and your sales force.

McDonalds with another great thought leadership campaign

 

Here’s a good example of an effective thought leadership campaign: McDonald’s is aware that North Americans are becoming increasingly careful about their food. Fast food enterprises are feeling the hit because nutrition experts have hammered into the public that fast food is unhealthy. In response, McDonald’s uses transparency to bolster trust and regain lost mindshare.

In Canada, the company launched the Our Food, Your Questions campaign, allowing anyone to raise a query that an official McDonald’s representative answers. More than 16,000 questions have been raised from the first day to now, and countless links have been earned. From a single campaign that ran for what appears to be marginal costs, McDonald’s was able to reap returns in the public relations, content creation, thought leadership, and SEO arenas.

None of its competitors has anything similar, so Ronald and his friends have stayed atop the American food industry for a long time.

 

Tool Creation

We often think of blog posts, infographics, and videos regarding linkable assets. One of the areas that we forget about as a potential link magnet is a good functionality. People don’t go online just to find information and interact with people via social media platforms. We also go online to find solutions to our problems. One of the easiest ways to provide a solution is by providing a tool that users can enjoy on your webpage or download and install on their devices.

In 2014, getting apps developed for PCs and mobile devices was cheaper than ever. The payoffs can be huge, as simple games, productivity tools, and information software can take your branding and link acquisition efforts a very long way. If you’re looking for examples, you don’t have to look outside the SEO industry.

Just check out Aaron Wall’s SEOBook website: sure, it has excellent content, but one of the biggest reasons people go to it, share it and link back to it is because of his popular (and free) set of tools. SEO for Firefox and Rank Checker are two of the most downloaded and beloved applications in the search marketing game, and it’s been that way for years now.

 

SEO for Firefox earned Aaron Wall links and then some

 

At Emerson, we are heavily engaged in marketing our data center infrastructure management (DCIM) solution. One of the challenges we faced was showing CIOs, data center managers, and other executives the business value of our offerings before they even buy them. The solution? An ROI calculator that provides potential customers an estimate of how much money they’ll make back if they adopt our DCIM platform.

By developing an ROI calculator tool, we earned links and media coverage

The tool has enjoyed positive feedback so far, and we’ve received a nice amount of links from media outlets that have taken notice of our tool.

 

Interviews

Having industry experts in your company pays off beyond just content development. You can also leverage their authority for interview opportunities that yield quality links. The same news sites and blogs covering your press releases may also be interested in writing features reinforced by the knowledge of respected people in a given industry.

Keep your ears close to the ground when new trends come along, and look for opportunities to hook up your company’s experts with reporters who need a source.

You can do this in one of two ways. First, you can ask your company’s experts for their opinion when the industry has breaking news. You’ll want to run this past your branding officers to ensure you can comment.

If you are, you can do a little outreach and ask the news site if they’ll be interested in interviewing someone with a good perspective. Reporters and editors often appreciate this as they seek opportunities to publish exclusive content.

Help a Reporter is a great way to earn interview opportunities and links

Another way of getting interview opportunities or being sourced by media is by using Help a Reporter. It’s a cool service that facilitates hook-ups between online news writers and potential info sources. SEO expert Jason Acidre recently wrote about it in a blog post, revealing the link acquisition tactics he focuses on. It also works for small and medium-sized businesses, so check it out.

 

Leveraging Corporate Partnerships

Of the many advantages big companies have, one of my favorites is having strong relationships with equally powerful, influential, and non-competing business entities with monster websites. These partnerships don’t work just with the financial aspects of business: they can and should be a synergy for marketing and link acquisition. Collaborating on thought leadership campaigns, content development, and product placement is a great way to get mileage out of a partnership and enjoy the SEO and branding benefits.

Big partnerships gets you noticed by the online press

 

One of the recent partnerships we ran is between Emerson’s IT manufacturing business platform Emerson Network Power, and IT giant IBM. IBM decided to adopt our DCIM solution to work with its Tivoli portfolio. Without getting into the technical details, it would be safe to say that we turned many media heads when we announced the partnership, which drove plenty of quality links from high-profile sites and blogs. Of course, we also got some very valuable backlinks from IBM’s elite-level pages, and so did they from us.

Our IBM partnership yielded mentions and strong links from their website

Site Acquisition

You won’t get to do this every day, but buying a website or a blog can result in huge gains from a link acquisition perspective. A credible blog with an author who enjoys a good following will drive traffic and links to your site for years, giving your pages a nice push in competition for tough keywords.

Pratik Dholakiya wrote about this in his own guide for enterprise-level link building. He recommended moving the content under your own domain and pointing the old pages to it via 301 redirects. He added that convincing the blogger to stay and keep writing is a good move to help the blog’s transition process. Indeed, readers from the blog you acquired are more likely to become readers of your own site when they see a name and a writing style familiar to them.

Conversely, it can also work for you to maintain the blog or site you acquired just as it is and not move it to your domain. This is for cases when you feel that readership will suffer greatly because of the branding and domain shift. You can make it a subtle promotion hub with graphics, brand mentions and links to your pages.

An example of a site acquired and rebuilt into our own domain where it brings in more link equity

 

In Emerson, our business platforms are grown by acquiring top brands in markets we want to enter. Our information architecture is set up so that our websites house rebuilt pages of sites we’ve acquired in the past. We redirect all equivalent pages, effectively telling Google to credit the Emerson site with the link equity of the old one. The site becomes a bigger and ever-expanding ecosystem of content, backlinks, and brand signals. Above is a screenshot of Avocent, one of the brands we acquired, and its own main page within EmersonNetworkPower.com.

Of course, there are many other ways enterprises can facilitate link acquisition. These are just the most common ones I use because of the high ROI we get. If you have other ideas, share them in the comments section below, and I’ll gladly share notes.

This is a guest entry by Glen Dimaandal, a Former Online Marketing Manager at Emerson Network power, an Emerson Electric Co. business platform. He is also the founder and CEO of SearchWorks, a Philippine-based SEO and Content Marketing Agency. 

 

Enterprise Link Building Frequently Asked Questions

What are the three types of link building?

The three types of link building are deep linking, inline linking, and internal linking. Deep linking involves linking directly to a specific page on another website. Inline linking refers to linking to content within another website. Internal linking occurs when you link to content within your own website. These strategies are important for enhancing website navigation and improving search engine rankings.

 

What is the link building method?

The link building method involves creating backlinks to a website to enhance its visibility on search engines. It includes strategies like content marketing, building useful tools, email outreach, broken link building, and public relations. This practice aims to improve search engine rankings and increase organic traffic.