Link building is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies, and not only for high rankings (even though links still remain the dominant organic ranking factor). Link drives referrals click, and generate leads, making your site less dependent on search and advertising traffic.
But how do you build links these days, now that most self-serving link acquisition tactics have been thwarted by Google and may result in lost search visibility?
Here we know for sure:-
- Link building cannot be truncated
- Link building is not easy or fast
A new approach to link building integrates all types of marketing assets and processes including content marketing, relationship building, and affect outreach.
This blog outlines how to create a truly effective link building campaign.
Link procurement campaign goals:
For your campaign, you want to achieve the following:
- You want the property to be brought into the link.
- You want the property to be ranked (because high-ranking content keeps linking organically as most authors / bloggers search Google to find references).
What Non-spammy non-scaled link building methods do we know?
- Researching and creating linkable content (ie content that attracts backlinks).
- Vanity baiting (ego-battering): featuring the influencing (s) in your content to link back to the published content for them, as well as to attract more links (by name association).
- Relationship building (ie engaging with publishers and journalists on social media for better brand familiarity and hence higher response rate).
- Broken link building (ie reaching out to website owners who offer to link to broken pages and link to your live page instead).
We need to combine all those link acquisition methods into one campaign if we really want to achieve both links and rankings.
Starting a well-rounded link building campaign: Takeaways
- An effective link building campaign comprises most of the effective and legal link acquisition strategies, including linkable content creation, ego-baiting, broken link building, and (social media) relationship management.
- None of the above strategies is a step in the campaign: they all have to inform and direct each other.
- A key to a successful link building campaign is collaboration (with teams as well as niche influencers and experts).
- A major goal behind your linkable content asset is that it has to rank in the top five for a popular query. Once you achieve this, you can stop the active outreach process, as links will start coming in naturally: all bloggers and journalists use Google to find sources for reference.
- An effective link acquisition campaign includes more than one content format. Give your media contacts more reasons to view results, create embeddable content, and link via downloadable assets to take home.
Leave a Comment