Plan Your Link Building Campaign
Link building is a search engine optimization (SEO) practice that allows your website to attain backlinks, or hyperlinks, from other websites to drive page clicks and conversions. Essentially, getting other websites to post links that will direct their audience to your page. This process is an important step of marketing as it allows search engines to rank your website against their index to their search engine results pages (SERPs).
We recommend that you incorporate link building into your marketing campaign to improve your website’s credibility as well as visibility and exposure. When users see your information on an authoritative website, they will be encouraged to use your services as it shows your company to be reputable and trustworthy. It will also allow search engines to rank you higher, build site metrics and improve SEO scores which helps to drive organic traffic to your website. This means you will have greater conversions and a better relationship with your target market.
Creating a link-building campaign will allow you to plan and achieve your goals better. Although it can be a time-consuming process, it is definitely worth it in the long run. We have put together a simple guide to help you begin your link-building strategy for your website so that you may become a reputable business in your niche.
How to start your backlink campaign
Preparation
With any marketing strategy, the first and most important step is planning and researching the creation and execution of your campaign. To begin with, you should set some goals. Are you interested in improving your website’s ranking or do you want to drive more traffic? Next, you will want to understand your audience better and identify ways to expand it. The type of questions you will want to ask, and the answer should revolve around what interests them and what information they will want to read about. By doing this, you will be able to easily plan content.
Before going ahead to plan content, we recommend that you do a deep dive into researching your competitor’s backlinks and keywords. There are tools available that can help you to do this which will help you to allocate long or short-tail keywords for your campaign. When analyzing your competitor’s ranking, you can determine the best keywords, low-volume keywords and high-value terms that can be targeted with the right optimization. Basically, find out what is working for your competitors and how they are ranking so well to use this to your advantage.
Planning your content is an important part of preparation. You need to consider the type of topics you will write about, the right headlines and how often you will be posting this content as well as any call to action for each article and your sources. This is the key information that will drive other websites to post your links to their audience which will help you with conversion and sales.
Review your website
Although this can be part of your preparation, we are going to place it as its own step. Reviewing your website is crucial to the strategy of a backlink campaign. This is where you should audit each page and keyword scores to select your target pages based on their value and the keyword opportunity. This is what we call “linkable assets” on your website which is data-rich content that will encourage other websites to share your information with their audience.
This is a good time to analyze your backlink opportunities, which can be done with tools such as Ahrefs or SEMrush to discover any hidden backlink prospects that you can capitalize on. These SEO tools will also inform you of any broken links in your industry, that direct an audience to invalid web pages or expired domains that you could take advantage of. It is worth noting that having too many backlinks can be damaging to your brand, so it is always good to ensure that you are finding the most relevant and authoritative domains to post your backlinks.
Create content
Much of the focus on your link-building campaign should be directed towards creating content. Many of your links may be found through existing customers, influencers and other content creators who will want to share your content and link to it. When you are planning your content, you need to think of your audience and what is relevant to them as well as within your industry.
Common examples of good content can be:
- Blog posts
- Presentation
- Industry reports
- Infographics
Your content should be directed to what your audience wants and what they will share. For example, writing a “why” and “what” article has proven to be more successful than a “how-to” post. Valuable content is what will drive people to share your links. The more your content is shared, the higher you will rank on search engines.
Networking
Now that you’ve published your content, you will need to work on building relationships with people or businesses who will want to share it with their audience. You will need to allocate some time during your week to outreach or promote the content that you have created. This is a good time to determine relevant prospects in your industry who are not competing for websites but will help you with your link-building campaign by sharing your information.
You want to find websites that will fit your content as they will be more likely to share your page. It is important to choose your prospects wisely. There are several ways to contact other websites such as email, but social media can be extremely helpful. When you reach out to your prospects, be sure to personalize your message so that you can build a meaningful connection. Take the time to explain why your content is unique and why it is relevant to them.
Another form of networking for link building is guest blogging. If you can invite other bloggers to create content for you, they will share this on their personal websites which will introduce your website to their audience. Influencers are also valuable for social media but may charge a fee or ask for a free product in return. In the long run, it will definitely pay off.
Track and maintain link performance
Now that you’ve set up your link-building campaign and you have other websites sharing your content, you will want to track and maintain your link performance. You can use SEO tools to find out whether you have an increase in traffic and a link tracker to ensure that your links are still live on other websites. We also recommend that you keep a record of your campaign to get a clear overview of the performance of your strategy and how you could improve.
Link building is an essential tool for marketing and when administered correctly, it can be highly rewarding. Our experts in link building at 2Marketing are here to help you with your link-building campaign.
Contact us today to find out how we can get your business better success with this SEO strategy!
