Linking for multiple clients
-
We own a small web design company that both creates the sites and then does the seo marketing for them once they are created. The business has grown to have over 100 customers. However, as we sell more sites we find our SEO team is somewhat short staffed. So far, the area that suffers the most is the link building aspect of SEO.
The sites we build are for dentists and usually only contain 10 to 20 pages. Enough to list the services they offer and where they are located. Here is my question:
We need to get the most effective links possible for over 100 sites with just a couple of employees. What would be the most effective links to try for. We cant chase down every stray link for our doctors. And, we don't have time to do in-depth research for each client each month as we are already pushing ourselves to the limit. In time, we will have more employees to help share the SEO load. But for now, where should we be spending our time most effectively? We can usually only budget one or two hours per client each month for linking.
Thanks for any advice you can offer.
-
Have you considered hiring a contractor? If you're in a position where you can't afford to hire more staff but can afford to spend a bit, I would suggest hiring a freelancer to increase the number of hours spent monthly.
If you can't do this, you are really limited to Daniels suggestions (minus the blog comments bit) and possibly some generic press release and article work - keep it clean and unspammy.
-
Thanks for the input. We have an employee that only does Google places right now. They contact our doctors and make sure the PINs are done correctly, as well as uploading pictures and video.
I will be sure that we are getting the most out of directories as we can. As for the guest commenting on other blogs, we train the doctors to do that. However, most don't have time. It is difficult for us to find blogs all over the country for different dentists and put a link on each one. I will give it a shot though. Thanks for all the feedback, and if anyone else has a thought I would be happy to hear their ideas.
-
Right that's what I'm concerned about. Needing to be extremely careful in how the work is done. I pity the person having to be responsible for that if they're not aware of these issues. That's all I was trying to get across.
-
Oh I see what you mean, like getting links on one blog to all 100 sites? I don't know if that is how I would go about it. I would spend 2 hours browsing around different blogs and leaving comments for one guy, then the next 2 hours doing it for the next guy, etc. I don't know that I would repeat a lot of blogs or posts. It would be pretty tedious but if you only have 2 hours a month and won't do Google Places work, then it beats writing a single article or submitting to spammy free directories or making hundreds of bookmarks.
-
Agreed Daniel. I'm just looking at the scale of it. 100 sites. All from the same source. The amount of time involved to do that just doesn't seem to be a wise use of productivity to me at that scale.
-
Well I would hope no one would smell a rat and report spam because I would hope they would leave real comments as real people with real names. I agree, blog comments are pretty insignificant, but in bulk they are quite helpful for local non-competitive phrases. You just have to do it right, which a lot of people can't seem to do for some reason.
-
I have to agree with Daniel's first suggestion, and at the same time, caution that the 2nd suggestion could rapidly backfire because just one link from one blog is very insignificant in the long run. Multiply that by multiple doctors - how long do you think you'd be able to get away with the blog comment path before someone smelled a rat and reported it as spam? In the blink of an eye.
Local citations, local directories, and local listings and Yelp, CitySearch and the rest. Coupled with high quality unique content on each site where you seed location info into the on-site optimization.
-
If all you have is two hours per client then there are two options you could be doing:
1. The most effective thing you could do would be to build citations and listings in local directories. These links will help immensely because they will also push up the dentists site in Google Places as well.
2. If you aren't concerned with Google Places, then in only an hour or two each month I would comment on as many dental/health related blogs as you can with a real name and not spammy comment. This is the fastest way to create a halfway decent link.
Good luck!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Asking a site to remove a "nofollow" on a link to our client
Hello, We created a good infographic for a client of ours and a large tech site (DA 86) picked up and ran a story on it. We didn't contact this company asking them to feature it, they have just picked it up through other shares around the Web. I understand that, at the end of the day, it's their prerogative whether to "nofollow" their links or not, but surely they should be giving our client some credit as they have clearly deemed the graphic newsworthy and felt that it would appeal to their readership. I've emailed said tech site, but to no avail. Does anyone have any advice on this? Or is it just a case of they can do what the heck they want? I know that our client will still benefit from the additional referral traffic, but a follow link would have been nicer! Cheers, Lewis
Link Building | | PeaSoupDigital1 -
Spammy Links in MOZ but when I go to the external link I can't find a link to us
I was going to try to contact webmasters to see if they would remove some of our spammy links. I see alot of them in MOZ but when you go to the site our anchor text is not there. Is this good? How often does MOZ refresh external links. Please see: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.totalvac.com None of the links for the anchor text <a class="clickable title link-pivot" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text." data-text="vacuum cleaner parts vacuum parts vacuum bags vacuum cleaner bags" data-id="46391436859">vacuum cleaner parts vacuum part...</a> in MOZ exist? We got hit extremely hard by Penguin in May
Link Building | | totalvac0 -
What is a good ratio of total links to linking root domains?
Is 100 total links for every linking domain too high? I suppose I could also look at ratios of sites that are doing well in the rankings.
Link Building | | ProjectLabs0 -
My website has no links to it at all :(
I paid good money for a company to build me a website, I just put my domain into open site explorer and I have no links at all, how do I get links to other domains etc ? Thanks for any help -James
Link Building | | Stoz0 -
Does the twitter link shortening service reduce link value (strength).
We have many SEO team members that use Twitters link shortening service, will this reduce the strength or value of the page to be indexed? I ask this cause the displayed URL isn't the actual page it is going to and would like to make appropriate changes to improve our company's SEO For example: http://t.co/zHu8vIcjPx is going to page http://4wheelonline.com/atv/QuadBoss.107503 Thank you for your assistance.
Link Building | | WebRiverGroup0 -
Link Building by Phone?
Is it worth going to the trouble to contact webmasters in person by phone rather than just using email? If so, what has been your approach to link building by phone?
Link Building | | eli.boda0 -
Links from erotic domains
hi.. I have purchased several domains which have had a lot of backlinks.. a lot of these backlinks are still active but mainly from pornsites.. do those backlinks affect the websites i links to from the domain? fx. lets say i have the domain abc.com which has a link from sex.com.. Now i want to link from abc.com to def.com - will the link from sex.com affect def.com in any way?
Link Building | | AdForce10 -
Links from any country?
My site is aimed primarily at the UK, 90% of the traffic is from the UK and most of my links are from other UK based and UK targetted websites. The content is actually fairly international (apart from certain terms like Plasterboard instead of Drywall, etc). My question is: Should I concentrate on gathering links from the UK, or should I widen my search and try to get links from US and European websites? Are there any particular advantages or disadvantages to keeping links "local"?
Link Building | | Jingo010