Whether you have a new website ready to gain great rankings and new users, or you’ve got a more established website and you want to see traffic improvements and beat out your competitors; having a great link building campaign is essential in seeing positive results online.
Link building helps boost the authority of your website and improve keyword rankings, which inevitably helps boost your overall traffic.
Starting a link building campaign can be tricky and time consuming, but it is something that can be accomplished.
If you’re thinking of starting your own link building campaign you need to start with the basics.
Firstly, we start with your overall business objectives and goals, and then move onto the actual website. Here is a guide to get you started:
Define Your Target Audience
Defining your target audience is important for staying on track. Without a buyer persona or specific niche, your link building campaign will quickly feel overwhelming.
With all the blogs to target and other websites on the world wide web, what types of sites should you target?
What type of influencers will you outreach to? Is it actually working?
You can’t answer these questions properly without a specific audience. Defining your target audience and niche are essential for a good link building campaign, and give your site more purpose.
Check out this guide to building your personal brand.
Define Target Keywords
Without target keywords you won’t make much progress on the search engine result pages.
A keyword is a specific phrase someone uses to find content on the web. The keywords you want to target are defined by how you want to be found.
For example, let’s say you own a local clothing store. What phrases might people use to find your store? “Best clothing stores in X location”,
Now we go into Google Adwords Keyword Planner tool, and see how many people are searching that term per month.
If this keyword has decent search volume, you may want to add it to the keywords you want to focus on. When you’re creating content and building links, you can make sure to use those keywords.
Pro tip- Make sure you don’t go overboard with using the same keywords over and over. Google doesn’t like that.
Audit Your Website
Before starting a link building campaign, you’ll want to run a technical audit to ensure that you’re not building links to a poorly functional website.
Link building to a website that isn’t setup properly is like putting nice rims on a broken down car. Sure, you can make it look nice on the outside, but the car still doesn’t run well and the search engines know that.
If you’re unsure about technical site audits, it may be best to ask the professionals.
Content Is Key
A link building campaign is as only as strong as the content on your website. We can break this into a few categories.
On Page Content
Depending on your niche, providing valuable information on your landing pages will significantly help with your link building. Remember that link building is always about providing value.
The more useful information you can provide on each of your pages, the more people are inclined to link back to you.
There is no specific length to landing page content, but I would suggest it being at least 300 words. This will give substance for your users, and the search engines.
Within this content, you’ll want to include your relevant keywords and links to other pages within your website.
Providing great landing page content also helps with Google’s Panda algorithm, which penalises websites for thin snf useless content.
Linkable Assets
A Linkable asset is a piece of content on your website that’s specifically created to help build links and get shares.
These usually take the form of visual content such as infographics or in-depth guides that others will find useful and want to share.
Creating linkable assets takes some time and research, and here are a few ideas to get started.
Find out what other people are sharing in your niche, and see what’s working.
You can do this by checking social shares, engagement on the posts, and how many backlinks the piece has.
Appeal to your audience with emotion
What kind of content will spark emotion with your audience? This could be something comical, or maybe something a little more serious.
The idea is to create something that is relatable, and sparks emotion, so they feel obliged to share the content.
Provide the best
When we’re looking to provide great guides, we go out and find something that’s currently doing well, and then we ask the question “How can we make this even better?”.
This is often referred to as ‘Skyscraper Content’, where you will go above and beyond any other content currently provided.
Blog Content
Blog content is your opportunity to focus on content that may not be suited for a landing page. This could be short list type pages, such as top 10 or best of’s.
These posts will be for helping rank long tail keywords, as well as give you more options for link building in the future.
Starting
Once you’ve gone through your technical audit and made sure that your content is ready to go, you’re one step closer to starting a killer link building campaign.
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