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Still a major practice today is the act of Link Building. We have this on our strategy quarter after quarter and have so for over 16 years. Why? Because it is simply one of the most impactful ways to increase rankings across the board.

While it’s extremely impactful, it’s equally difficult to get links that match to workload. We put together a few tips to help you start your journey. This is a peek behind the scenes at how we do outreach for links. Not all links are created equal, and for the best ones for our clients, we reach deep.

Find Your Industry Leaders

This one is simple. Start doing Google Searches on topics that you cover with your products & services. For instance, if you own a Barbershop, then fashion magazines, bloggers, and forums are a great place to start. You want to find people who have a lot of followers in social, comments on blogs and articles going out regularly.

For many, a handful to several hundred bloggers are out there talking about your industry. Create a spreadsheet that has their URL, point of contact name, email address, and a few columns for when you are doing outreach, whether you were successful in connecting or not and what the outcome was.

Prepare Something Worth Sharing

Yes, it’ll be harder than just sending an email asking for a link. You’ll need to provide value to the industry expert. The bigger and more competitive the industry, the more unique and impressive your offer will need to be.

Whether it’s a free eBook download for their users on how to do x, a style guide for 2019, a budget calculator tool, or a graphic that will help their users, it needs to be unique, and valuable enough they’ll want to put their stamp of approval on it.

Make the Outreach Personal

Don’t start outreach with an email blast to everyone in your spreadsheet. This will hit spam, get deleted, or just plain be ignored. They get 1000s of these a week if they’re industry leaders. So you’ve got to stand out.

We typically start by sending an invite on LinkedIn explaining we have common ground in the industry and would love to connect. We follow this up by scheduling a 10 minute call with the to explain what we’d like to do, if they’re happy with what they hear, we typically keep talking or schedule a time to speak more on our subject.

Notice I didn’t say email them and personalize the email? It just doesn’t work anymore. Too noisy. We use this method if we cannot get them on LinkedIn, but it’s typically not answered and our spreadsheet for those contacts don’t move very quickly.

Get Started with Link Building

This is a very difficult process but there is no better time than now to get started. We have seen companies grow exponentially year over year and the primary source is content that is spread through the web by these industry experts.

Author John Keller

Cultivating proper SEO tactics along with building sites with excellent User Experience since 2003.

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