|
Once your website is optimized and your content structure is laid out and implemented, you now need to begin driving backlinks to your great content to give your site a final push to the top of the page. Some content can rank on its own just by being extremely thorough however, if you are in a more competitive space, odds are you will need a backlink or two to signal to Google that your content deserves to be placed above your competitors. Backlinks are a great way for Google to comprehend authority which builds trust and allows you to consistently rank. A backlink is essentially a signal to search engines that other sites trust you and therefore the search engine should trust you. We will break down where to find backlinks into 2 categories. Paid and Free. We only promote white-hat link building here at Mad Mango so if you are looking for a quick solution you may want to head over to a pay to play backlink site. If you don’t want to spend hours digging up points of contact to email inquiring about a backlink you can always contact us here at Mad Mango Marketing and we will provide you with lists of backlink opportunities (100 backlink opportunities per list $99) for your site or any of your clients sites. You can then take these lists and send personalized emails, building a relationship with the site owner and eventually that golden backlink!  Free tools to build backlinksKeep in mind that in 2021 there are very few softwares that offer a truly free experience. Many of these suggestions below will offer add ons or restrict your usage without paying. Never-the-less, these tools have free aspects and can certainly be used to boost your site. If you are performing SEO on several sites you may want to pay for these tools or head to the next section of the article. Hunter.ioDo a quick Google search for your industry and the word “blog”. You may find lists of dozens of sites that blog about your space and could be a great place to get links or swap content. Often these sites will hide direct emails and leave you only with a contact form that gets filled out by countless others every day making it almost impossible for you to stand out. Download Hunter.io’s free Chrome Extension and this intelligent tool will scour the site in search of unique email addresses that belong to real people at the site for you to reach out to directly. This tool alone could save you hours of page flipping each month. GroupsWhether it’s Facebook, Discord, Slack, or Clubhouse, groups and group communication are the future of social platforms. All platforms are looking for ways to move the conversation away from timelines and towards private channels and the public has grown old of traditional social media consumption and a push towards privacy is evermore prevalent. Join groups of business or site owners in your space and make some friends! If you are a local trades business the task of building backlinks can seem like a hill too complicated to climb. However, if you can find people who do your exact trade 2,000 miles away, they may be much more willing to give you a backlink with a blog swap or interview because you won’t be taking their plumbing job in California when you’re in Alabama. You can also look for SEO specific groups but beware as there are black hats everywhere looking for a quick link. Google Alerts & HAROWe talk about these two platforms in almost every blog because they are so important for white-hat link building. These two tools give you incredible access to new internet content at critical points. Right before it gets posted (HARO) and right after it gets posted (Google Alerts). Using these two free platforms in tandem, you can know just about every time someone is going to write about your space, or has just published something in your industry. Once you find your first link using one of these two platforms, don't forget to follow up! Email the writer 3 or 6 months later asking if they are working on anything else in your space or know of any colleagues writing anything you can hop on and assist with (all for a link of course). Paid tools to build backlinksPaid tools will always offer more features that make the project of link building that much easier. Many offer tool on top of tool that could make this blog incredibly long. For the sake of brevity we will mention a few key products inside of these paid tools that will out you on the fast track to building links Ahrefs Content ExplorerAhrefs offers tons of tools. None better for backlink building than the “Content Explorer”. Here, you can enter a keyword or term you are trying to rank for and see what others are writing about. This is a great spot not only for finding articles written about your topic but also a great place to get inspired for your next blog topic. You can discover exactly how many backlinks you will need to rank for this term, who ranks first (so you can see what they do and make your content better), and even find articles with broken links in them. The broken link tool is a favorite here at Mad Mango. What you do is, after entering your keyword, set the filter at the top to show “only broken”. This will refresh your page to show you articles written about your topic that have broken links in them. Use Hunter.io to find the author's email and let them know they have a broken link and linking to your site would be a much better option...you know, because your site never breaks. SEMrushAhrefs and SEMrush offer very similar tools so you will find a lot of the same features giving you many more leads to reach out to for backlink building. One tool that we use is the “trending topics” icon when searching for articles that rank in your space. You can use this tool to discover topics that have been getting more traction recently in your industry so you can hone in on that topic in your HARO and Google Alert searches and maybe even write a post so that you can hop on the trend and find that next valuable link. The Mad Mango WayBuilding backlinks is time consuming work and even more time consuming when you do it the right way. White hat link building takes time but once you start to build a few key relationships you will have backlink opportunities coming to you instead of you seeking them out.
If you think you can handle the outreach part but not the hours spent to find these sites give us a call! We can provide your business or agency with 100% vetted lists of legitimate backlink opportunities for you to open up communication with. And if that all sounds like way too much work even with us doing the research for you, it may be time to bring on an agency to handle this job. Contact the team at Mad Mango Marketing today to get started!
0 Comments
Ironically this is a blog. And blogs are a great vehicle to get keywords to the search engines quickly. However, after a couple years of blogging, if you’re in an industry that’s just not that exciting you may start to hit a wall when it comes to creating content that isn’t saying the same thing over and over again, which can actually hurt your rankings! Some of these suggestions are no brainers, like video, and hopefully they will get more unique for you as you continue to read our list. Creating all this content consistently sounds doable at first but many business owners soon find out that this really is a job best delegated to a specialist. When you’ve hit a creativity wall and want a content refresh, reach out to the SEO experts here at Mad Mango Marketing.  VideoVideo is great because it holds people on your page. With time spent on page being a major ranking factor, you really should be tailoring a large portion of your content to creating videos. There’s a reason all social platforms are video based or trying to find ways to become video based. Put simply, the more time spent on page the higher the value that visit is and search engines will reward you for what they interpret as delivering a quality user-experience. You can also use platforms like Rev to get a cheap transcript of your video and place the transcript under your video to also give the search engines something to read on the page. PDF DeckPDF decks are great because you can use free software like Canva to make professional looking slides in a matter of minutes. They are also really easy for the user to digest! If you have a crafty enough web developer you can even make each slide it’s own page to drive up the page per session count that Google will be tracking. PDF decks allow you to provide content similar to listicles in an engaging way along with flexibility for graphics and other engaging factors because you should have a lot of open space on each slide. MapsWho doesn’t love a BuzzFeed article where you can see which candy bar your state eats the most of!? There are a number of plugins you can use to create an interactive map that allows you to display valuable data. Like I said in the title, no one wants to read a blog, think of what you engage with online, what is fun and easy to understand? Click thru rate matters! If you build something that has info people want to know in an easy to view format, you have a huge head start when it comes to ranking. QuizzesJust like PDF decks you can get a ton of pages per session if this is developed right. Use quizzes to engage your audience and possibly gather emails or phone numbers as well! If you are planning on running targeted Facebook ads one day, an email list is a great place to start and once someone has gone through the effort of completing a quiz it becomes much easier to get an email address. If you have an active social media following, releasing quizzes could generate shares and visits that content in other formats would never garner. Press ReleaseIf your business is coming out with a new offer or service a press release may be a good way to create buzz. Most online PR services are expensive so this option is not for everyone. You can also go the old school route of sending these releases around yourself although you will need to be extraordinarily impressive to get attention on your own. Be careful in the service you choose to publish your press release. Many of the online automated services go to sites no one ever reads and don’t do much of anything for your SEO because they are marked as sponsored or even no-follow links. The best companies for press releases are big businesses or a smaller business with access to a local PR agent. Case StudiesIf you provide a service, having a case study template developed could be a great way to generate free content from doing what you already do every day. Case studies are great because you need to provide real world examples and figures to show how you got the job done and the search engines and users love the detail. The more specifics you divulge will allow your readers and soon to be customers to make better decisions during the buying process and will reward pages like this with a lot of time spent on page. InterviewsRecord your Zoom calls! With everyone’s consent, record and conduct simple interviews with your customers, clients, partners, suppliers, and more. Both platforms will benefit and most likely share on their site and social accounts giving you extra eyes and hopefully a backlink. Reach out to people in your industry who are looking to grow their reach and conduct weekly or monthly interviews. This form of content creation is really low effort on all ends because you’re talking about what you already know and you can also create a transcript to double dip on what was said. ConclusionThere you have it, next time you don’t want to sit down and write another painstaking blog consider one of these options instead! You have to get creative if you want to put out meaningful content. Don’t forget about content refreshers too. Sometimes the best thing you can do is go into an old blog that has always performed and give it an update to further benefit your reader.
|
AuthorAll blogs are written by our incredible staff here at Mad Mango Marketing. Your Connecticut SEO, App Development, and Online Advertising experts. Archives
May 2021
Categories |
RSS Feed