Link Building and backlinking for your site is one of the most difficult aspects of SEO. In this week’s Surge Session we cover the topic of backlinks and the backlinking strategies that actually work in 2019. We also talk about both free and paid tools you can leverage yourself. In Our CEO Duran Inci is joined by our Director of Marketing, Joseph Hassun.
Backlinking is one of the most difficult elements of search engine optimization and ranking on Google. Content is a big part of this. We often speak about the quality of the content and that the Google algorithm is a lot better at identifying what types of content are actually quality content. But nothing happens without backlinks.
In the past few months, what we have seen that nothing happens without deep backlinks. You could have millions of backlinks to your homepage, and it still doesn’t mean anything. You have to build deep backlinks into your website, to the content on your website.
The first requirement for this is you have to have great content. Now when we talk about great content, that means no filler sentences and no “BS” statements. You need to get to the point and describe your service or your product in a concise manner. It helps a lot to put it in a guide format.
For example, on the optimum7.com blog, you’ll see a lot of different types of articles, and you’ll see that we share a lot of statistics. We cite our sources and we actually put a flow on this type of content.
Now, that’s the first requirement, having good content. If you don’t have the content, the backlink is not going to help much. However, if you don’t have the backlink, you can have the best content and it’s not going to do much. You have to have a decent balance between the two.
Moving on to free backlinks, there are a couple of different platforms that you can utilize to get free backlinks. There’s Medium, LinkedIn Pulse, & SlideShare, to name a few. These are tools that are free to use. What you want to do is you want to take a snippet of the content that you’re producing and publish it on these sites with a link pointing back to your site (of course, with the proper anchor text).
Since this process is a little time consuming, it doesn’t really make sense to do it for every single blog posts that you create. Focus on maybe your priority blog posts, on the ones you really want to rank. For the most part, these are going to be no-follow links but they are coming from sites with high domain authority, so they do carry some juice.
We have to be realistic about what an average small business or medium-sized business can do with backlinking. Not every product or every service has the appeal to be shareable. If I’m doing accounting services, how am I going to create link bait? And creating link bait is very, very expensive.
We want to be realistic about backlinking and link building. So our suggestion is to leverage competitor research next. Now, there are many tools that can help you with this.
Ahrefs is a great tool to analyze competitor backlinks, as well as Moz. With Ahrefs you can actually set up alerts so that you get alerted any time a competitor starts to come up for a specific keyword. When that happens, you can go in and analyze and see if they got any backlinks, where they got them from, and try to possibly go after the same sources that they acquired those backlinks from. This is true for paid backlinks as well as free backlinks. You can also see where your competitors are doing paid guests post, which are a big part of link building now.
Always check Moz as well. You can view your competitor’s top pages and see what strategies and content structure is working for them. Then you can apply those same tactics to your own site and your own backlinking strategies. It’s always good to see what type of content is really producing and helping with rank.
Another thing we want to mention is infographics. People undermine infographics, you would be surprised at how many people are not leveraging this properly.
The way we do infographics is first we look at Google Trends. We look at the search volume or specific terms, and we look at what’s really popular on Google search.
Let’s say if we are to create an infographic of our marketing, we look at what people are searching for, and then we create PDF and PNG versions of this and we upload them to Pinterest as well as to our site. That alone gets so many backlinks
What infographics give you the ability to do is to take really boring content and kind of give it a facelift, give it a really nice aesthetic and make it easy to read so that it becomes more shareable than what it would have been in text.
A lot of times these infographics, answer the question directly. They make it very easy for users to obtain the knowledge that they’re looking for in a matter of seconds. So what this does is it makes the content become shareable. It becomes content that is easily understood and potentially shared.
The last thing we cover is guest blogging, but we’re going to talk about paying backlinks. You need to purchase them from the right person, the right company.
Paid backlinks give you the ability to have quality content written with your desired anchor text implemented on a site that’s relevant to your company or to the page that you’re trying to rank for and that potentially has a high domain authority. So pretty much you’re getting the cream of the crop when it comes to these backlinks.
It is expensive so you’re not going to be able to do this for every single page or every single keyword that you’re trying to rank for. But it’s extremely valuable. But most of the time, four or five good backlinks is enough to push one of your deep pages to page one.
So a lot of people don’t recognize this, and Google will not tell you this, but deep backlinks are still the most essential element in the ranking of a specific website or a web page for a specific term. We are actually working on a tool for this, we mentioned this last week, called Backlink Patrol.
The cost of backlinks all depends on the domain authority of the site. If the domain authorities in the 30s, I would say you’re looking at around $150 to $200. If it’s domain authority is 40 or above, the cost could be upwards of $200 to $300 for a backlink, so it can be expensive.
If you don’t want to spend a lot of money on backlinks, there’s a couple of things you can do. You could do a link exchange where you offer some sort of incentive that’s a non-monetary incentive, it could either be “I will share something for you on social media if you do a blog post for me,” or some sort of brand mention. There are multiple ways that you can leverage link exchanges.
You could also do link bait. You can say, “I created this tool. I’ll give it to you for free if you link to it.” But you have to always offer something of value. If you don’t have something of value, you need to pay for it. It’s just like anything else in life.
Google makes link exchanges look very bad, but in reality, you don’t get penalized for them and it actually has the same effect as long as it’s related and targeted. There always needs to be a purpose for the link exchange.
Need help backlinking? Have any questions on how to execute a link-building strategy? Contact us. We’re here to help.
