Exchange online link for offline publication? A good linkbuilding strategy?
-
Lets say I own a company that sells bakery-supplies. I would want links from websites with "bakery" as their main topic. So it seems obvious to try and gain links from local backeries.
Next step is: How do I convince them to link me? What is their benefit?
I can't link them back because it would weaken the linkpower. Therefor I was thinking about publicating an offline "Backery Guide" which includes all backeries in the area. Backeries which link us, would get more visibiliy and company information. That would be their benefit and we would get a 1-way link.
Is this an idea which could work? Any remarks are welcome!
-
Hi Cyrus,
Thank you for the response!
I have taken the time to deeply review your comment. You did make some good points.
1. With reciprocal links, I'm not worried about a penalty but it would weaken the linkjuice if it went both ways.
2. I do believe bakeries will see the benefit in a advert in the guide, if only they need to place a link on their website, which is free. I would be amazed if this would been seen as buying links, let alone that Google could track offline publications. But but then again, Google never stops to amaze us :).
3. So many SEO's stress the fact that content should be something which your clients want to link too. I totally agree when your clients are consumers but not always if they are professionals. This market is way smaller and is less social vibrant. In this case I must skip my target audience and concentrate on their clients. Your tips are great. I will try to implement them!
-
Seems like you're starting to think this out in creative ways, so let me add a couple of thoughts:
1. I wouldn't be too worried about linking out to these local bakeries. Reciprocal links are a natural part of the web. When you get in trouble is when you have dedicated "links" pages that exist solely to harvest link juice, or a significant % of your backlink profile comes from reciprocal links.
That said, you're still probably wise not to make this the backbone of your link building strategy.
2. The offline guide seems reasonable to me, but I have a cognitive disconnect between the guide and the motivations for the bakeries to link to you. If you actually require folks to link to you to be in the guide, then this could be considered "buying" links and could lead to a penalty. (although in reality, this is rare)
3. Better yet, I'd really rather see you create online assets that live on your website, that provide motivation for folks to link to you. These might include:
- Reviews
- Top "blank" lists / Ego Bait
- Business profiles
- Awards
- Content Marketing (like "5 Secrets Your SuperMarket Bakery Doesn't Want You To Know" - bad example, but you get the idea.
- A scholarship for local baking students
- A certification program
- A blog
- Charity Fundraising
- Interviews
- Contests / Giveaways
- Discounts
The trick, in my mind, is to give away freely more than you ever expect to get back in return. Never demand a link, but create resources that are actually useful to both the bakeries and their customers, so that they have a natural inclination to link to you.
More link building ideas from Jon Cooper: http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies
-
I would love to digitalize the guide and have it run online. I have thought about before. But then you would get 3-way linking. This isnt very beneficial either.
Good points though... Will have to think on that.
-
You are definitely approaching it right. Like you said, there has to be something in it for them. It seems like a good idea to me, but also seems like some serious work. Getting 'em designed, printed could get pricey...and since it's not digital, how would you modify the bakery listings as time goes on to reflect which bakeries link and which ones don't? Seems like you'd almost need a monthly publication...it's a tough one. If you can somehow digitize this idea I think it'll be a lot easier for you.
-
Well the only way to know is to try it first.
If you can sell the idea to them, then it can work.
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
-
Buy domain, redirect, get all the good links (+link juice) and disavow the spammy ones?
There is a domain for sale that has a quite nice profile and a lot of good backlinks, but also quite a few spammy ones. This domain has a Spam Score of 14% acc. to Moz Link explorer, ours has only 2%. My questions: 1. The domain and the good backlinks are related to or close to our content/keywords. But we are worried whether the "spammy" ones will hurt us. Does anyone has experience with this? 2. Would it help if we disavow the spammy backlinks afterwards? And if so, how do we do that? Add new domain to search console, disavow the bad links and then redirect the entire domain to our domain or redirect the domain first and then disavow from our property? Many thanks for your help!
Link Building | | pissuptours0 -
Internal Link Building and Link Juice Quality
Hi There! I manage the website for a law office that covers many geographical locations. For very specific niche content, we would prefer to create one piece of content and link to the various geographic locations where we would handle that topic instead of posting multiple variations of the same content for each specific geographical area. If we put a button on these pages that has links to each location, will that have the same "link juice" effect to the pages we're linking that linking directly in the text would? (example: the Where can we help you? button on this page : http://www.zdfirm.com/volkswagen-recall/) Thank you!
Link Building | | ZDAdmin0 -
How to choose a third party agency to help with linking building / SEO strategy?
Hi all, we've not been link building for some time now as we are a small team and been concentrating on other things, such as getting our new look site built and implementing Magento etc. We've historically used external companies to help with link building & SEO... some experience has been good, some bad. Does any one have any suggestions on how a small company can try to choose a decent external company that can help with SEO strategies? There are a lot of options, a LOT of rubbish and a lot of very expensive large agencies that are well out side of our budget (or for a "small" fee simply produce a standardised report on "how to improve your SEO" that can basically be read on the net). We've tried local, smaller companies in order to limit our options .... but that didn't go well either. Any suggestions welcomed. Next is where / how to weight our expenditure and / or our SEO time. Should it be 50% gaining external links (be it by what ever means such as social, checking out where competitiors have links and chasing those possibilities etc) and then 50% internal page SEO, blog content creation, internal linking etc? Thanks again.
Link Building | | jasef0 -
Forum links
If you are building links in forums how can you decide which forums to post to? Of course you can have a look at averall traffic in Alexa or mozrank but is there anything else you can look at?
Link Building | | sesertin0 -
Link Building: No linked to content in industry
Hello, I'm doing link buidling for a small ecommerce niche. There's no resource content in the niche (looking at OSE Top Content) that has attracted backlinks (on any sites) How should this effect what resource content I should create. Thanks!
Link Building | | BobGW0 -
Our link building strategy - affiliates and trophies
Hey guys, I just wanted to follow up on Rand's excellent whiteboard Friday: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/preventing-linkbased-penalties-whiteboard-friday It got me worried I think, but I'm not sure. We have a site where we are building up links in 2 ways: We have an affiliate set-up. A search widget in an i-frame, and below the i-frame a followed link pointing to the relevant page.
Link Building | | sichristie
The anchor text varies for each affiliate depending which region the affiliate comes from. We have awarded about 500 of our partners with trophies - i.e. - this partner has best reviews or most sales etc. Our partners are absolutely loving it.
The trophy is an image link which they can embed on their website, with alt text only mentioning our brand - that was an oversight ( I think). I wish the alt had been dynamically generated for each partner.
The trophies link to our partner pages.
So we are getting many links to our deeper pages, which is great.
The links I believe are relevant as they are coming from our partners websites and pointing to their relevant partner page on our website. So burning question is. Would you consider these links dodgy given Rands recent whiteboard friday post, and the recent farmer algorithm change? Many thanks, Croozie0 -
Link building strategy - black hat or white hat?
I have a competitor who always ranks very on alot keywords relevant to our business and using Open Site Explorer I note they have a tremendous amount of links. I also noticed that it appears their web company has gone out and set up numerous websites with relevant content, and then have linked back to the competitors main site. Is this kosher? I ask because before I settled on my current domain name, I purchased several keyword rich domain names; should I be thinking of setting up websites with relevant (and original) content and link back to my main site?
Link Building | | leonenobleseate1