Link Building Campaigns

There are various components of a link building campaign — some will be crucial to success, and others will be helpful but not necessarily essential. Much will depend on a combination of your available assets and resources.

In this chapter, we’ll give you the key elements that you need to consider and some examples of what to include in your planning. It’s important to remember that this may take time and that’s a good thing, the more time you put in now, the more likely you are to hit your goals.

Link building is a form of online marketing, and with any form of marketing, you should start with goals. Knowing the goals of your campaign right at the start helps to ensure that you create a strategy that gives you the best possible chance of success. You also need to ensure that the goals of your link building campaign tie in closely with the overall goals of your business. For example, "build 10 links" is not a good goal to hit if building 10 links doesn’t have any impact on the overall success of the business.

Here, we encounter a slight issue. We learned earlier that links are a strong part of the search engine ranking algorithms. So, wouldn't hitting a goal of more links help with rankings? Helping with rankings helps drive more traffic and this helps bring more customers, right? All of this is true, but the problem is that it can sometimes take time for the links you've built to start having an overall positive effect on rankings. It isn't as simple as build links one day and see improvements the next. This is particularly true in competitive industries.

This poses a problem for SEOs because it can be hard to show that a link building campaign is successful, even if it hits certain goals. This can be even more of a problem if you have other activity in progress such as:

• Technical SEO changes and improvements

• New content being added to the website

• Brand campaigns such as display advertising or TV ads

For this reason, it’s very important to not only set realistic goals, but to make sure that the goals you set are more intelligent than "build X links." The goals need to tie into real organizational goals and ultimately have a positive impact on the bottom line of your business. For example, you may want to increase organic search traffic in order to drive more sales. At the same time, you need to educate those around you that SEO and link building doesn't succeed overnight and that results are not instantaneous. Like any good marketing, the focus should be on long-term gains, not overnight quick-wins.

While it’s hard to show that building X number of links had Y impact on revenue, knowing that increasing revenue is the goal can shape and guide your link building approach.

As mentioned above, it can take time for link building to have a positive effect on the rankings of your website. The length of time can vary greatly and depend on a number of factors:

• The competitiveness of your industry as a whole

• How competitive your target keywords are

• The activity of your competitors, e.g. if they’re actively building links, too

• The types of links you're building

• The history and strength of your domain

All of these factors can mean that it can take from several days to several months before an increase in ranking is achieved. This should be factored into your goals and expectations and all parties should be made aware that instant improvement is unlikely.

Before you get started, it's worth making note of where you currently rank for your most important keywords, as well as how those ranks change once your link building work really gets underway. Depending on how many keywords you're tracking and across what time frame, using a tool like Moz Pro for rank tracking is likely to make things much easier and allows you to easily report to others within the business.

A realistic expectation to set is that you’ll see an increase in traffic if you are constantly working on improving your website, business, and online activity. You should try to not think of link building as a one-off activity, because you may be disappointed by the results. Instead, link building should be a constant stream of activity coupled with other initiatives such as content creation, great customer service, and social media. Combined, all of this activity can lead to an increase in traffic and an increase in revenue for your business. It’s the combination and a consistent drive towards the goal that can make this more likely to happen quickly.

Not to mention that this mindset means you’re building toward that link building nirvana of making your website naturally link-worthy and getting links that you didn’t ask for.

At the heart of any link building campaign is the asset that you're going to use in order to attract and earn links. This can also be known as the "hook" that will make people care about what you have to offer, and will entice them into linking to you. Assets will vary from business to business and you need to identify which assets your business has that will be of interest to others and can be used in link building.

Examples of assets may be:

• Content

• Data

• Products

• Services

• People

It’s possible that you may have one or more of these already. For example, you may have someone on your team who is a great spokesperson for the business and doesn’t mind sharing their opinions with the press. Connecting this person with relevant journalists can be a great way of building links and relationships. Another example may be that your company commissions industry research once a year and publishes a report on the results. If this has never been leveraged for link building, you may have an opportunity to do so without having to commission research from scratch.

If you don’t have anything already, then you don’t need to worry. You have a blank canvas and can start to think about what you need in order to give yourself an angle for link building.

When defining the strategy for your link building campaign, you’ll need to think about the types of links you need to get. There are various types to consider:

• Links to your homepage

• Links to "deep" pages (such as product or category pages)

• Links containing your brand/company name

• Links containing the keywords you're targeting

Additionally, there are combinations of the above, such as a branded link to a deep page. Identifying what types of links you need will start with a detailed link analysis of your current website as well as a look at how you rank for certain keywords in comparison to your competitors.

To perform this type of analysis, you can use a link research tool such as Link Explorer to find out what links your site already has, as well as compare yourself to competitors to understand what types of links you might need. For example, here's a link profile comparison for three different pages trying to rank for the keyword "SEO" and all their various link metrics:

It's also often helpful to see exactly where a site's links are coming from, and the anchor text they’re using to link. For example, a link from The New York Times may be more valuable than a link from your cousin Jo's Tumblr blog. Likewise, links with specific anchor text may help you (or your competitors) rank for more targeted terms.

The analysis will show you opportunities for improvement. For example, you may see that you're not ranking for one of your main keywords. After doing some link analysis, you find that you have no links pointing to your website that contain this keyword, or, you find that the most relevant deep page has no links at all pointing at it. If you identify something like this, you have a tangible problem that you can work to resolve. In this case, it may mean that your strategy includes trying to build links to the deep page that currently doesn't have any links and doesn't rank for your target keywords.