Help with a Link Building Audit
-
A customer wants to have a better position with a keyword (he has already a great position, but he wants more...). So he need a bit of extra link building to have better position in serp(this niche is very competitive so on page is not sufficient).
He asked me to do a Link Building Analysis to find good link opportunities.
How can i structure a good report? I need something like a Seo Audit for link building.That's my idea:
Identify what are the business objectives
Identify the brand strenghts and weakness
Find the strongest competitors and understand their tactics
See what are the top links that they have
Copy their best strategies
Find new strategies not used by the competitors
What else i can do for my link building audit? -
Thank you Calin! Great answer!
-
Great stuff Calin!!!
-
Hi Maximillian21,
I am going to echo much of what Patrick has already shared, I believe he provided excellent resources for you to follow. However, I wanted to address the three points in your second message.
-
I think any SEO consultant can attest to the fact that a large part of our job is education. If your client believes building a bunch of links is the only solution to building better rankings I would suggest taking a moment to educate him/her. Believe me when I say this will save you the headache down the road if the singular link building strategy doesn't have the desired result.
-
Earning links in any niche is difficult, especially today. As a service provider, it's a challenge to tie your services directly to the quantity of links you acquire. It's also, in my opinion, not the best long term strategy for you or the client. Link building is fickle. In some cases, a few directory submissions can have a positive impact on your rankings. In other case, even the most authoritative links seemingly do very little.
As Patrick alluded to, by layering other services, such as content marketing and social, you provide additional exposure for the business, traffic to the website and value in the services you provide. It's a challenge to be sure, however, I would be hesitant to initiate an SEO campaign that is focused purely on rankings, without at least considering content and social.
In this day and age, most people on the Q & A forum will recommend a holistic approach to an SEO campaign.
- I believe your original list and the additional details provided by Patrick will serve you well.
A few additional questions I would include:
- What differentiates your business from your competitors (you may find a few gold nuggets you can use in content)
- Do you have resources, media, graphics, etc (can you quickly build resources from existing content).
- What are your customer's main pain points (can you build something to solve this problem).
- Do you have any partnerships, sponsorships or memberships that could provide a backlink (this tends to be low hanging fruit)?
- Where do your customers hang out online? (are there popular forums where you could distribute your content).
These are just a few additional ideas. Best of luck with your project.
-
-
Thank you Patrick! Your advice is very helpful! I need some explanations, if you can help me you will have my eternal gratitude
My issues with that strategy is this:
-
My customer know very little about Seo, he thinks that having a bunch of extra link is sufficient to boost the rankings...the strategy that you proposed need other persons (a social media manager, a content marketer etc.) and i'm sure that he are mentally ready to pay so much
-
My niche is particular (=is a niche of automotive). It's not easy to earn natural links for this niche. Because the majority of blogs of rental in my country is owned by competitors, and i suspect that many customers pay also to have their brand mentioned on the autoritative sites of our indutry to pay to have your brand mentioned in automotive blogs...so you can image that is not easy to create a link earning strategy.
-
So i need to interview my customer to gain information. What information i have to know from him?
-
-
Hi there
I only say this because I don't want you banking on acquiring links as the only way to boost ratings - there is SO much more that goes into increasing rankings than acquiring links - ultimately those tactics acquire links themselves. I put my thoughts below.
Your process should be:
-
Identify business goals and objectives
-
Align with customer and target audience goals (build a Venn Diagram)
-
What unique value do you provide?
-
Now, how do you best relay that value?
-
Identify industry trends
-
News
-
Seasonalities
-
Conferences
-
etc.
-
Identify content / content types that get the most traction
-
Topics & variations
-
Videos
-
Images
-
Guides
-
How tos
-
Blog
-
etc.
-
Create an online experience that caters to your target audience needs & goals
-
Create an online experience that is dconsistent with your business voice and tone
-
Distribute content where your audience is
-
Social
-
Partnership opportunities
-
Business listings
-
Email
-
Blogs
-
Set benchmarks to track progress
-
Landing pages
-
Time on site
-
Bounce rates
-
CTR
-
Rankings
-
Impressions
-
Conversion rates
-
Check OSE, GWT, and Majestic to track links acquired
-
Use Moz Analytics and GWT to track rankings
-
Rinse and repeat
I understand the desire to acquire links and boost your rankings, but you have to acquire links in a natural and organic process. You also have to remember that your website is completely different than your competitors. If you copy their strategies and links, are you really separating your yourself from them and offering unique value? Remember, you don't want to be the best, you want to be the ONLY. Everyone can claim to be the "best", but copying strategies don't get you there.
The only way you can find new strategies is by learning who you are as a company, who your audience is, building & distributing content that speaks to your targets, and measuring & tweaking your process to more fully fulfil needs and goals.
I would read the following resources as well**:**
- Content Audit - https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/content-audit-tutorial
- Link Audit - http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2207168/how-to-conduct-a-link-audit
- Link Removals & Risk Mitigation - https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/link-audit-guide-for-effective-link-removals-risk-mitigation
- Competitive Analysis - https://mza.seotoolninja.com/blog/illustrated-seo-competitive-analysis-workflow
Find where the industry and competitors are missing the mark and hit it yourself. Fill the gaps and the links will come to you!
Hope this all makes sense and helps. Let me know if you have any questions or need any help. Good luck!
-
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
-
302 query - can someone help
If I were to put 302s on several reasonably ranked landing pages to drive more traffic/conversions for a period of one week to a particular page, would the pages with 302s drop from their positions in the SERPS? And is this a bad idea? I want to try and drive some conversions over the next month for a particular page… Thanks for your help!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jacksons_Fencing0 -
On Page #2 of Bing But Nowhere on Google. Please Help !
Hi, community. I have a problem with the ranking of my blog and I hope anyone could help me to solve this problem. I have been trying to rank my blog post for a keyword for almost 6 months but still getting no success. My URL is: this blog post
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Airsionquin
Target keyword: best laptops for college The interesting fact is that the post has been on page #2 of BING but nowhere on google. It was on page #3 of google for about one month, but it's been 1-2 weeks gone(not ranked anymore but it's still well indexed). The post has been replaced by another post of my blog(let's say post A) which doesn't have any link. The Post A is ranking on page #4 right now.
The weird thing is my post which ranks for this keyword frequently changes. One day the Post A was on page#4 then after a few days it changed to the post B. Yesterday I searched on google for a keyword "number one on bing but nowhere on google" and then I
come across to read this article on MOZ community and one of the people here said that it was over optimization issue. I think my post has been suffering for an over optimization penalty algorithm. Just for your information, I have been building backlinks to this URL for the last 5 months(it's 1+ year old). It has backlinks only about 1,5k from 200 domains(according to ahref). I have used the exact match anchor only under +/- 2%. The rest is branded, naked URL and generic anchors.
So, in this case, I thought that I haven't done any over anchor optimization.
I have checked the keyword density and I found it was "safe". One important thing I can remember before the post has gone is I add a backlink from lifehack.org(guest post) with exact match anchor.
I suspect this is really the cause because 2-3 days after doing that then the post is gone(dropped) and replaced by another post of my blog(as I've mentioned before). But it's very strange because the amount of the anchor keyword(including the long tail) is only about 10(from 200 domains) or only 5% which mean it should be safe. I'm so Sorry. It's a long story 🙂 So, What is actually happening to my post? and How to fix this problem... Please..please help me... Any hep is appreciated. By the way, Sorry for my poor english.. 🙂0 -
How to gain links to this site
Hello, How would you suggest I gain backlinks for bobweikel.com in light of all present and future Google updates? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Attacked with spam links.
Our website was hit with the "Pharma hack", "Google Cloaking Hack", or "Blackhat SEO Spam". and Google showed in the results this website may be compromised. After cleaning out the hack from the website I chacked with the Seomoz tool Open Site Explorer and I found that they hacked 1000 of other websites and created links to my website. They were building a few 1000 links to the website with the clickable text "buy cheap online pharmacy". and more like that. This website www.washington23.com has been hacked and gives over 200 links to your website for pharmacy items. And Google considers this from your impotent links as i can see in webmasters. What can I do about it?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Joseph-Green-SEO0 -
Links to partner sites
I have some partnerships in some portals, usually I put the banner of my company with a link to my site on a space partners. How should I proceed? To place the banner no link? To put the link nofollow? Can’t I do it? Don’t I need to worry about it?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | soulmktpro0 -
Link farming and related websites
In my niche I have about 17 sites I have created. They all provide unique content, html, and all have a variety of uses that differ from each other mostly, some repetition but not really. All these sites are related to the same niche. I do link to each other in my sites. I don't go crazy and link every site to every other site or span links on footers. I somewhere in the content link here to there. Not even consistent, just linking to related pages from others. I was wondering if this is something I need to be careful about or could I get hit with link farming?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | cbielich0 -
Should I 301 Redirect a Site with an 'Unnatural Link' Warning?
Hey Fellow Mozzers, I have recently been approached by a new client that has been issued with an 'Unnatural Link' warning and lost almost all of their rankings. Open Site Explorer shows a ton of spammy links all using main keyword anchor text and there are way too many of them to even consider manually getting them removed. There are two glimmers of hope for the client; The first is that the spammy links are dropping off at a rate of about 25 per week; The second is that they own both the .com and the .co.uk domain for their business. I would really appreciate some advice on the best way to handle this, should I :- Wait it out for some of the spammy links to drop off whilst at the same time pushing social media and build some good clean links using the URL and brand as anchor text? Then submit a recosideration request? Switch the website over from the .com domain to the .co.uk domain and carry out a 301 redirect? Switch the website over from the .com to the .co.uk without doing a redirect and start again for the client with a clean slate? I would still register an address change via Webmaster Tools. Add a duplicate site on the .co.uk domain. Leave the .com site in place but rel="canonical" the entire domain over to the .co.uk Any advice would be very much apprecited. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AdeLewis
Ade.0 -
What is the difference between advertizing and a paid link?
I have been told that google frowns on paid links yet I see many site charging for advertizing and the advertizing consists of an anchor text link. What is the difference between a paid link and this type of advertizing?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | casper4340