When link building is returning little success, what is a good plan b?
-
I know that in an ideal world you would be able to create an amazing site with great content that every one would link to. But what if you're not able to so this, what if you the market you're in is very competitive and you're struggling to find good link partners. I know I can submit to directories and article/press sites but surely this isn't enough to get me any where near my desired goal!
I guess I'm asking: is gaining reciprocal links the be and end all of Serps, am I missing any other SEO techniques to get my site higher up the rankings?
-
Hello James It is getting harder. Certainly, speed isn't easy in a competitive market If your site is local there are many options If national or global it is harder. Try finding a few related blogs and offer a guest post that has a single relevant link to your site. Also do one press release each week, about something you are doing. Try to write something groundbreaking on your blog and then write a press release about it, then go to twitter and Facebook and other bookmarking sites and do a good post there. Find related blogs that allow comments, with a related post and comment on the story. Find strong related blogs that you can find contact details for, and email or (gasp)phone them to see if they are interested in collaborating and might link to your great story. Also ask them what floats their boat, so you can write other stories they will link to. That's a little bit more than being stuck with reciprocal links This should work for any site, if you have great content
-
Who are the target audience of the translating services? I'd start by looking at blogs that spoke to this target market. For example are they students, small businesses, people in the legal profession?
Who needs the services your client offers, and where do they congregate. If you can get a blog post in front of these eye-balls then not only do you get a link... but you're also talking to potential customers. You might get some referrals traffic too.
-
Thanks for the help.
I've looked at their competitors, links etc and I was shocked to see that one in particular had a article on Mashable, thats impressive! The majority of rest just had links in high paid directories,articles and press releases.
I've havent' really done much guest blogging or reviews, do you normally search for keyword related blogs or..?
The niche my client is in is translating services
Thanks again!
-
What are your competitors doing? A good first step is to take a look at what your competitors are doing, how they're building links, what content are they creating and who are they targeting (customers/market).
Using open site explorer you can reverse engineer their links. (If sites link to your competitors they may link to you - although I would suggest you dig deep and understand why they are linking to you competition. You may need to provide better content or a unique opinion. You can look at their top pages and see what other people are linking to.
Reciprocal links aren't the be all and end all. Ideally you want to get inbound links for reasons other than offering them a link back. Google are well aware of the practice and excessive reciprocal links are going to look a little unnatural. Can you think of ways you can earn links from authoritative sites in your niche?
What do your customers need? How well do your understand the customers of the site? Can you provide some great content that satisfies their needs/problems?
What about guest blogging? Give-aways, reviews?
What's the niche the site is operating in? If you can provide more details then maybe you can get some more specific advice.
Hope this helps.
-
Build some industry specific info graphics or jump on a meme that you could tailor to your industry.
A good post on creating info graphics
A great post on utilising memes
Have you considered Social networks as a way to get your content out there and build links, whilst also engaging your target audience?
Share links to your great content on twitter with relevant hashtags, check out http://hashtags.org and build a following. Though its not enough to simply blast out links to your followers, you'll need to engage them too.
Check out the white board friday video on building links with twitter
Also, theres facebook which you could use to grab your audience and potentially build links
Linked in if your industry isn't facebook prone.
Flickr and deviantart if your idustry is so inclined.
Create a tumblr blog to highlight your content (one of my favourites)
Pinterest,oh what did I do without it? yes pin some relevant, cool images of stuff you may sell or relevant to your industry and if its good enough people will share it.
There are other ways too but, I could literally go on all day.
Check this out http://www.seomoz.org/article/social-media-marketing-tactics
Theres a lot to digest, but its not rocket science.
Best of luck and if you get stuck, come back and ask some more
Regards
Aran
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
-
India and Link Building
A client of mine has decided to work all Link Building through an India team that she's used for a few years. The problem that I'm having with this situation is that the link building list below contains quite a few 0/10 PR websites, spam websites, and websites that have no direct relation to the client's industry. Am I wrong in thinking that link building should be done to high PR, authoritative sites that are related the the client's industry? The link below will take you to the Google Doc that contains all links built for this client. I would love it if someone could take a look at that list and tell me what they think. Is this recipe for disaster or great link building? https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B4a0JOKKFu0SUFZRbFRBNUZJekE Thank you so much!!!
Link Building | | Linwright0 -
Link building timescale and results in serps
From starting an ongoing monthly link building campaign how long is it before you should start seeing results in serps
Link Building | | shauny350 -
What are good companies to buy links from?
I am sure that asking such a question on SEOMoz will bring the world down on my head, but let's be honest, sometimes buying links, especially high quality links from reputable sources does give a nice boost to go along with the rest of the onsite and offsite SEO practices. So, those of you who are so anti-link buying that the very mention of it is anathema, please put some duct tape over your mouths or on your typing fingers and allow people who get my point to respond... I bet there are some really good link sellers on the web - but i do not know who they are. All of them claim to have the fantastic and best way to give me 1000's of wonderful links - but who the heck really delivers? if there is really no one trustworthy and the only way to build is by way of what I am already doing (mid-quality SEO), feel free to tell me. But if there are 3 or 4 amazing companies out there, please give your reasons and testimonials. I would so appreciate it. And apologies to the SEO purists - but my clients do not understand algorithmic changes and slow/steady movements...and i don't blame them. but to all - love, love, love thanks for the advice ben
Link Building | | creativeguy0 -
Your opinion of link building strategy
Hi all, I just started working on the optimization of highly competitive keywords on one website. I already started posting articles in reputable directories, but as you know, more quality links are needed. To do that I created the following strategy: (see the uploaded image or http://i.imgur.com/9HCiM.png) The idea is to buy new domain and build page rank to this domain by other 3,4 domains that I will buy with PR3. Those 3 domains will contain low quality text generated by spinner just to keep that PR. Then those 3 domains will give PR to the newly created website which will contain only professionally written information and sometimes will give links to me. At the end I will get high quality links. I know it's hard work, but posting PR articles will not be enough. I will continue to spy the competition via SEOMoz OSE but for now that is the idea that I have for quality links. Share your opinion 🙂 9HCiM.png
Link Building | | VasilTasev0 -
Link Building Strategy
Hello Everyone, We have about 15 clients who we need to do link building for but I am at a loss on how to even begin. Does anybody have any tips or tricks to achieving quality back links in a short amount of time? Any help is appreciated!
Link Building | | imageworks-2612900 -
Any Tips for Link Building for Boring Topics/Businesses?
I have a number of clients that own businesses in 'boring' sectors, such as: Toxic Waste Removal Steel Erecting Household Plumbing (Boilers, etc...) Link building for these sites is quite difficult. Creating compelling content and 'link bait' is particularly tricky. I found a good post from Michael Gray on the subject, but I don't think food (or McDonalds in this case)is a particularly difficult subject to write about. Any more tips on how to approach this would be appreciated. Thanks
Link Building | | cmaddison0 -
Link Building: Feel like ive hit a wall
Hi, I have been doing SEO on my business website for about 4 years now. And it ranks #1-3 for my desired keywords and i always try to add new backlinks and keep uploading new content to a blog on the site as this is where nearly 100% of our customers come from so its important to me to rank high for the keywords related to my industry. However the last few months a competitor has taken over me for a certain keyword, i have researched their backlinks and site and from what i can see they have less content, and less backlinks, onpage seo isnt that great, and alot of the backlinks arent even related where all mine are in the same industry and i always research my backlinks to make sure that site has good backlinks also (i currently have about 48 root domain and 12,000 page backlinks for various pages of my website). The only thing they have over me is domain age, their domain is about 10 years old. I am also trying to target another hard to get keyword that im currently on Page 3 for, im sure over time i will rise to the top and its something i have to keep working at however i feel i wont get to where i want to be because im running out of ideas on where to get backlinks. After 4 years of building backlinks i feel like i have hit a brick wall, i started out by directory submission, then just links from other related sites, then i did a few article submissions and then i started finding it hard to get links so i started buying related links, however i seem to just keep buying and buying because im running out of ideas and it feels easier just to buy them, the only problem is its getting expensive and im now probably spending $80/month on paid backlinks! Although considering im not paying an SEO company its still a lot cheaper! I have gotten to the point where im researching sites that arent even in my industry (however still automotive related) and getting links on sites their on which was going really well, but now even that feels like its coming to an end and im back to submitting to directories their on. So other then directories, paid links, articles etc. what else could i be doing to build quality backlinks? I stopped doing articles because they were so time consuming and i felt like i was only getting backlinks from them that were worthless and held no authority. I have about 4 blogs (all on different IPs) would it be worth blogging on them and building content and dropping links from those to mine or is it not worth the effort when i could just submit articles to article websites?
Link Building | | defyet0