How to Start a Link Building Campaign
How to Start a Link Building Campaign
A link building campaign is the process of actively trying to increase links to your website, usually accompanied by some kind of overarching objective. It will use assets belonging to the website in order to acquire those links, and an asset can be anything from content and news to products and services
Structuring a Link Building Campaign
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.
Setting GoalsLink 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 does not have any impact on the overall success of the business.“You also need to ensure that the goals of your link building campaign tie in closely with the overall goals of your 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. For this reason, it is 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.
Finding Your AssetsAt 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.One other asset that black-hat SEOs still use is money. Obviously, all assets will probably require an investment of some kind, but these SEOs approach link acquisition as a pure cash transaction. Buying links is strictly against Google’s guidelines, and if a website is caught engaging in this practice, it can mean a heavy penalty and loss of traffic. Buying links is risky and usually the risks will outweigh the potential loss, so we strongly recommend against it.
You’ll also need to make sure that the assets you create are relevant to the audience you’d like to attract. Aleyda Solis put together an in-depth walk-through that’s worth a look.