Guest post
Don’t know what to do on a winter day in Adelaide? Want to get more traffic to your website or just simply want to know a tiny bit more about backlinks (who doesn’t like a bit of nerdy reading).
If you are reading this article, you probably are a bit familiar with the concept of backlinks, but just to be clear, let’s take a step back and cover the basics.
Backlinks, at its core, is your website getting a vote from another website. The vote in this context is the link. It’s like saying “hey this website is trustworthy, and I recommend it”. Ideally you want votes from websites where there is a logical connection to your business.
So for a copywriting business the most obvious recommendation would be getting backlinks from other copywriters. But if we zoom out a little there are more opportunities – startup founders, small business owners, freelancers and marketing managers are just a few. Building backlinks is a long-term strategy but when done ethically and with no “quick wins” methods, it is one of the best ways to boost your SEO rankings and give your business more leads and more revenue.
The goal of this article is not to go into details about the technical aspects and all metrics but instead giving you a more general overview how to approach building backlinks.
Don’t think about links
This is a link building article about backlinks. So the title may seem a bit strange but bear with me. Let’s say you are a Solar Installation company working in Adelaide and you want more business. Your primary instinct would probably not be “I need to hurry and build some backlinks”.
No, you would probably have a few meetings (hopefully not too many of the boring ones) and define your ideal clients: what sort of clients do you want more of? What sort of clients do you want fewer of?
The same goes for geographical areas. Are there any suburbs that are more interesting for your business?
Maybe you see that the jobs you do in North Adelaide are bigger and more profitable than the ones you do in Marion. That is all very important and solid information that will help you when you are implementing a link building strategy.
Getting the foundations right
You can have the best and most relevant links in the world, but if you don’t have your on-page factors in place, they will do very little for your business.
It’s all about getting the foundations right! So after you have done the first step it’s time checking how your own website is doing.
These are some of the things you want to make sure are in place:
- An easy navigation (the user should not have to guess where something is, everything should be in a logical place).
- What the website is actually about (and that it’s not covering one billion different things). It’s all about meeting a user’s intent and (hopefully) giving them the information they were looking for.
- Make it clear who is behind the site.
- Make sure you don’t use stock photos, the pictures should be of yourself and you doing what you are actually doing in your business (as in what you sell to your customers). This is great because you can optimise your pictures with relevant alt text but also you signalise trustworthiness.
- Existing backlinks. Do you have many links in foreign languages? Links hidden in the header area (or in other weird places?), backlinks that are not topically relevant to your website? Is the anchor text ratio clean?
What is working for your competitors?
Whether we are talking about link building, SEO in general or some other business related topic – you should always assess the market and do some market research. So choose three competitors that offer the same products or services as you do and then analyse their backlink profile.
The goal is not to steal their backlinks. Instead, we want to look for patterns. What kind of links are they building? What anchor text are they using? What prospecting angles can you discover?
This is valuable information that you want to take notes on.
Find people you like, not websites with names
Human aspect first!
To get valuable links you have to be able to actually make someone else understand that you not only looked at their website but show them in what way their audience would benefit from the type of link you are trying to pitch.
So before you start emailing someone you need to determine what group (or ideally sub-group) you want to target and really define in what way they make sense to your business (if they don’t make sense to you, they will not make sense to search engines).
Then it’s about finding these real human beings – and there are many ways of going about doing this.
One suggestion is that you identify what specific keywords companies in that group or sub-group would rank for and add search operators such as +inurl: blog or “how to”, or “tips”.
You can also go for an already pre-made list by typing your chosen subgroup and “100 best XXXX”
XXXX being your subgroup. BOOM! 100 prospects right there.
It’s all about being creative and thinking outside that very scary narrow box, because if you write target keyword + “write for us” (if you’re going for guest posts), chances are that thousands of link builders are before you in line and you will most likely have to pay your way forward.
Email them and show who you are (quite literally)
When you finally start doing outreach, make sure you email a real human being – not any info@addresses. You should have a clear plan of what kind of link you are going for, who you are targeting (and why) and what’s in it for the person receiving the email – and their audience.
Let’s say you are going for a guest post, you want to make sure you do some research beforehand and check out what other blog posts the website (ideally the person you are emailing) have published before. Was there something in particular that you actually liked (not fake flattery).
I recommend using a proper outreach tool like Buzzstream but if you are a small business owner you can do it via your normal email, as long as you don’t mass-email thousands of people. Show the person in the first email some suggestions on topics and why these topics would be relevant and helpful for their readers.
Be personable, be prepared to negotiate and always think about the human aspect first.
Summary
In this article I have discussed important steps to get more traffic and more leads from your website. The right types of backlinks are relevant to you and your niche and with that you can become a trustworthy authority.
However, it’s important that you don’t lose the human aspect and never forget to do proper preparation. The foundations have to be in place so you can maximise your chances to actually benefit from the backlinks.
This is a guest post from Linksandmaria.
