Link building isn’t easy, but it is an important way of improving your SEO. If you have high-quality relevant links coming to your site, Google will reward you for that effort.
Cold hard fact of marketing, link building is one of the hardest tasks that you will come across. But it isn’t all bad news, we have some tips to help you get started on your promotional campaign for your client.
Once you have pulled your campaign together, a great way to start to work out which websites you want to target, is by using a link score tool such as Buzzsumo. Simply search for a keyword that relates to your client or content.
From here you can see which other websites created similar content and how well they did on social media by checking their social score and how many shares it got in total. You can use this as an idea to either tweak your content, if it has already been done by someone else, or as a starting point to see what websites have taken content around this topic. It would also give you the opportunity to make a note of the journalists who publish similar stories and gather their email addresses for contacting.
Let’s be clear we don’t mean polarising content that will offend anyone. However making content that divides opinion can be a great way to get shares, especially on social.
A perfect example of this would be the Roman Originals dress from a couple of years ago, where hundreds of thousands of people debated whether the dress was white and gold or blue and black.
If you have statistical data, there are two routes you can take. You can create an infographic, providing you have an in-house designer, or you can check the data to see if you have stand-out stats that could be seen as controversial.
These often make great clickbait headlines for journalists to use, who will be more inclined to read over your copy if you have included a similar headline in the subject line of your email.
Nostalgic content doesn’t have to be from 50 years ago. In fact, some of the best content is more recent. This works especially well for video content. It doesn’t have to be complicated either. Anniversaries are usually a good way to start.
For example if you had a campaign for a video game retailer you could create a simple ‘here are 10 video games that turn 20-years-old this year’. It’s surprising how effective a piece of content like this can be. The reason it works is it resonates with that community, while also promoting the client you’re working for.
Yes it may be soul crushing. But if you have little to no budget and are struggling with creative ideas, this may be the route you have to go down. This isn’t likely to get you a link on a national newspaper website, but there are plenty of other websites, which get arguably better traffic and a higher social score.
Sites like BuzzFeed may not be your first choice, but if you create an engaging piece of content, it could generate a lot of views and eyes on your client.
There are so many creative and fun ways to gain links for your client and these are just a few tips to help guide you on your journey to make your campaign reach as many people as possible.
Link building is difficult and you won’t come up with a brilliant campaign idea every time and you are not always going to be making headlines around the world. But the above tips are a fantastic way of hitting second and even third tier sites, which can be just as effective if you target the right websites for your niche audiences.
