As an SEO professional, there might not be a better feeling than seeing a backlink to your site published on a high authority website, particularly when that link is the result of your manual outreach efforts.
The reason securing backlinks is so satisfying is because so much goes into successful link building.
In fact, most of the work that drives link building results happens long before any outreach messages are sent.
Too often, clients and prospects try to jump the gun with link building. These people understand the value of links, but don’t understand what’s involved in sustainably earning links.
Consistently securing worthwhile links and achieving organic search growth requires an upfront investment in:
Today, I want to discuss each of these SEO pillars individually to help you be better prepared to effectively earn links and drive search results.
Link building is most powerful when it’s strategic, and strategic link building is built on sound keyword research.
Link building is time-consuming and difficult. You need to find the opportunities where links can have the most impact.
Proper keyword research will uncover these high-return opportunities and guide link building strategy.
Follow this simplified process to find your best SEO keywords:
Each step of this process is integral to identifying which keywords can drive the best results for search.
Keyword research should start by putting together a list of seed keywords.
Seed keywords are the baseline search terms most important to your business. To build this list, examine these potential sources:
Using these sources you can compile a list of seed keywords that will provide a foundation as you refine your keyword research.
After you’ve built a seed list, you need to analyze the key terms you’ve identified.
This analysis will help you better understand the potential search opportunity associated with each term. Areas for analysis include:
Each of these factors contributes to the overall opportunity associated with your seed keywords.
Once you’ve analyzed the key areas that determine search opportunity, you can prioritize keyword targets to maximize SEO results.
Link building is a long-term strategy and it takes time to see results.
In order to prove efficacy quickly and gain buy-in for the entirety of your project, you want to target the opportunities that yield the most return with the least investment first.
Prioritize your keyword opportunities based on the following criteria:
Evaluating keywords based on these criteria will leave you with a handful of prime opportunities that should inform your link building strategy.
To rank in search, you must deserve to rank in search. You need to have a page that answers searcher intent at least as well as the current ranking pages, and this requires content development.
Content development can either mean improving existing pages or crafting entirely new pages.
New content is not always required. If you already have a page that serves your target keywords, slight improvements to the page and backlinks could be enough to make the difference in terms of organic visibility.
Any page that you designate as a potential target page should already be ranking decently (>50) and have shown a propensity for links. If these attributes are present, small tweaks could increase linkability and better position your page to answer relevant searches.
The best places to draw inspiration for potential changes are the SERPs you are targeting, as these are the pages you want to compete with.
Potential changes that increase linkability include:
Improving existing pages can provide a low-investment option for targeting important keywords.
If you don’t have a page that sufficiently answers the intent behind your target terms, you’ll need to create a page.
Similar to updating existing pages, when you create a new page the first thing you should do is look at ranking pages. As you begin to develop your new page, referencing ranking pages will make styling and formatting decisions easier — you’ll want to create a page similar to the pages that currently rank.
The goal is to craft the best possible page for the keywords you are targeting.
Your two primary considerations when creating these pages should be:
If you build a quality page it will be set up for success from the onset. Furthermore, these strategic assets are well-positioned to earn quality links that boost their search performance even more.
External optimization — link acquisition — is far more powerful when it is supported by on-page optimization.
If you secure worthwhile links but they point to a suboptimal site, you’re leaving equity on the table.
Conversely, when your pages are well-designed and optimized, backlinks can be the tipping point for visibility and traffic.
As you create new pages and audit old sections of your site, be mindful of the following technical issues:
Getting the technical elements right ensures you get the most value out of the links you earn.
Along with these technical elements, internal linking should be a primary consideration. Internal links are vital to link building because they:
Internal links make it possible to siphon link equity to product and category pages that otherwise struggle to earn links. An example diagram of this linking structure would look like:
Third-party linking site > Linkable asset on your site > Important product page
Other site owners are typically hesitant to link to conversion-driven pages. But if you create linkable assets with internal links, you can leverage the value of the links those assets attract for your converting pages.
The biggest part of link building is the manual work of convincing others to link. However, all that hard work is diminished if you don’t account for the other factors that impact link building success.
To ensure you get the most out of your link acquisition:
More Link Building Resources:
Image Credits
Featured & In-Post Images: Created by author, June 2018
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