As SEO professionals, we operate in a highly technical industry, and our use of jargon can often leave clients needing clarification. To help them understand, we break down our projects into business metrics that are more easily digestible, such as keyword rankings, website traffic, leads, and revenue. However, some clients still want to know more.
To address these clients’ concerns, we involve them more in our process. We explain our strategies to build their website authority, which includes manual outreach for link building. By quantifying link building as a measurable benchmark, they can expect each month clients better understand the work we do and how it impacts their website’s ranking.
Our focus on transparency extends to all of our marketing campaigns, and we aim to help clients understand how we are increasing their rankings. This article will detail our step-by-step link-building process and how we make it more transparent for our clients.
The Art of Link Building: How to Identify Your Link Targets
To launch a successful link-building campaign, it is crucial to begin with, a robust list of link targets. We rely on several methods to locate targets based on the types of links we aim to secure. However, this article will focus on one of our primary link-building approaches – identifying competitor links.
A straightforward method to identify potential links is to conduct a backlink analysis of a competitor in your industry. Here, we will outline our strategy and share some essential tips for constructing your link target list.
Unleashing Your Competitors
When selecting competitors to analyse, you must focus on those that rank high for keywords with substantial search volume, which you also aim to rank for. In addition, these competitors usually have more intriguing link profiles worth examining.
It can be helpful for local businesses to analyse both local competitors and competitors in the same industry but in different markets. This approach generates a more comprehensive list of potential links than only analysing local competitors. In many cases, competitors in other cities have already discovered excellent link opportunities that local competitors have yet to explore. Therefore, it is vital to allow yourself to direct competitors only.
Turning Link-Building Ideas into Reality
At this stage, competitive research begins, and we rely heavily on Ahrefs for identifying and analysing links.
We use the link intersect tool to identify significant link opportunities. Next, I explore a competitor’s links using the domain explorer feature.
Once the links are identified, I export a list of competitor backlinks and carefully analyse each link to determine its worthiness and feasibility as a potential opportunity for our link-building campaign. Of course, not all links are equal, so I filter out low-quality links based on UR & DR metrics.
Outreach can be time-consuming, finding contact information and sending emails. Therefore, focusing only on the top opportunities is crucial, and filtering out the noise is a vital step in this process.
The Art of Link-Building Outreach
Effective link-building campaigns require SEO skills and organizational and relationship management skills. Once you have identified your target links, the next step is to locate the contact information of the website owner or content manager and initiate outreach.
To maximize the success of your outreach, keep your pitches short and concise, limiting them to 1-2 sentences at most. Avoid excessive flattery, as it can come across as insincere and unnecessarily inflate the length of your emails. Instead, have something interesting to say that adds value to the recipient, such as proposing a unique topic for a guest post.
Remember the ABCs (Always Be Closing) principle of sales and ensure that you ask the right closing questions in every email. Creating a personalized outreach template that suits your agency’s style can help streamline the process and allow scalability. Develop a strategy for finding contact information, creating an outreach template, and following up consistently to ensure success with every new client.
Watchful Eye and Report
Once you initiate outreach to a potential link, it is added to the backlink manager tool under the “Unpublished Links” section, enabling you to keep track of your outreach efforts for clients. As soon as the links are published, you can move them to the “Published” section and show off your hard work to your clients. The “Published” section also displays the Page and Domain authority, indicating you build high-quality links.
To save you valuable time, automate your SEO reports with us. Our reports include dedicated sections that show clients the sites you’ve reached out to, along with the links that have been published and some details about their domain authority. As a marketer, you can analyse the report to determine the websites you need to reach out to generate a specific number of good-quality links. The same report can also monitor traffic growth and other business metrics discussed earlier.
Transparency with clients and accurate measurement of results have been critical in winning new clients and growing our agency. Check out our informative article to learn more about measuring digital marketing performance. For instance, we used our tactics for one of our clients last month, generating interest in a data protection infographic we created. Our efforts resulted in 40 new referring domains, moving them to the top spots for several keywords and spiking their website traffic. In addition, our monthly SEO packages offer clients insight into our work for them, providing complete transparency in link building and accountability.
