Asking dealers for links if they sell your products:
-
Should you ask your dealers for links back to you?
For example, if you are a laminate flooring manufacturer, should you ask all your retailers to link to you?
If so, how do you go about it? Emails? A form letter?
Should I create a page on the site for banners and let them grab the code?
Any creative ideas would help.
-
My client only sells to their dealers, not to the public. So, if I were a dealer, I would gladly link to the manufacturer who is working hard to provide better information about the products.
I am going to approach them about making a form letter to either mail out or email out and we can link them to a private page to get the badges.... see what happens.
I will most likely report my findings on SEOmoz
-
If you're a manufacturer that sells products, I'm not going to link to you no matter how good your content and how many bells and whistles you've got for promotions. However, if you don't sell products and you've got better content than I can provide on my site, I will link to you. I link to manufacturer sites when they have authoritative information that is beyond the scope of information I provide. For example, flame resistant clothing or fire rating information. If I want to cover my bases (ass) and make sure the customer has access to deep level information that is beyond the scope of what is necessary for a purchase I will link to it on a case by case basis.
-
What can you do for the dealers that will make this a situation where you, the dealer and the customer all win?
How about fantastic product support PDFs that they can post on their website which contain a link to the manufacturer.
=======================
I think that you have a good opportunity here. Putting myself in the position of your dealers... do you sell retail and compete against them? If the answer is yes then your request for all of them to link to you might not be appreciated.
I am a dealer and none of my suppliers ask me to link to them. Instead they are linking to me to support my efforts - even when I also sell their competitor's products. They link to the page on my site that features their product.
-
I was thinking this would be a good source for linkbuilding since the dealers already usethe product and are dealers, they should want to show it off... I would think.
So, if there are 1,000 dealers and I could get half of them to link to the manufacturers site, that could be a nice boost for my linkbuilding efforts.
They are already dealers, so we don't need any affiliate tracking, but I guess I could track it in analytics to see how well it works too.
-
We did something similar to what you are asking for a client of ours that had a venue to promote. We set it up so that various customers could sign up as afilates and then place a custom link on their site. Everytime someone clicked on that link and came to the site and ordered tickets a small amount of the proceeds was kicked back to them.
You could possibly do something similiar but rather then money you could do some sort of top dealer program where you track incoming from each link on the retailers site and then either pay a small amount of money to the top 3 or rank them by Bronze, Silver and Gold and then send them certificates that they can display in their lobby at the end of the year. This would encourage them to link from more then one page and in more visible locations. I know your probably, mostly after the links but this would make it easier for them to swallow cause they would feel like they got more to gain.
Another thought would be to give the top three links off your home page. Turn it into a bit of a competition. You could change these links out each month based on the traffic that the retailers send back to you. If you used a small graphic as part of the link this would be great for promoting the brand and the competition would tend to push your link placement to the top of these retailers pages. That equals more brand recognition.
-
You could create a nice badge for each retail website "Certified retailer of [...]".
The idea of having a page on your website with multiple types of badges would also be good, as the sites will be different so may need a different size/orientation of badge.By providing the code you also control the link text and the link destination to some extent.
The decision of whether to choose letter/email will really depend on the industry. I'd guess that if you're targeting the tech industry, they'd prefer an email...
I'm working on something similar at the moment - it's tricky! 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
-
Linking Between Sites
Hi everyone, Hope you are all doing well. If a company owns several different websites that are supposed to be different brands but are part of the same niche/sector is it OK to link between them? Or would this be seen as violation? Thanks
Link Building | | National-Homebuyers0 -
Internal links
hey guys, these days should internal links within your site carry no-follow tags? or does it really matter? thanks!!
Link Building | | tm46150 -
Bearshare links?
I am doing competitor link research and so far 4 of the 4 have had links from search.bearshare.net What kind of site is this? I am sure it isn't valuable but I can't figure out how it is getting crawled.
Link Building | | EcommerceSite0 -
Outbound links
Hi there, i know inbound links are what hold the main value in terms of link building but if i have an inbound link from a big company such as ITV or BBC and they have put an article on their site linking back to mine, would it be beneficial if i made a comment on my site and then link back to their article or will this not really help? Sorry as you can tell im very new to seo! thanks anthony
Link Building | | anthonybriant0 -
Back Links
Hi there, I have been guest posting on blogs trying to build some back-links into my website, which so far is going not too bad, however I was wondering when writing these guest posts should I limit my post to let's say 2 back-links per guest post? If 2 back-links are going to different pages on my website, does the first back-links in the guest post have more value than the 2nd back-link? Kind Regards,
Link Building | | Paul780 -
Asking a repoter for a link.
A customer of mine had a new channel come to their place of business today in regards to valentines day (they are florists). They shot a video and wrote an article. Only problem is they only mentioned the business name and no link to the website. Has anyone had experience with reaching out to reporters and asking for a link in this type of a situation. Is a telephone call or email better?
Link Building | | waqid1 -
Where are all the sites that are linking to me?
I need to compile a list of all the siters linking to my site, but my open site explorer analysis shows very few links. I know for certain that there are many many more sites linking to it (it's an academic site and there are links to it from a lot of academic directories). What am I doing wrong?
Link Building | | michalseo0 -
Link Ratio
Does Google (or other search engines) penalize websites if they have a too many inbound links from a single domain? (Say for instance, I have 500 inbound links, and 400 of them are from one root domain.)
Link Building | | EricVallee340