You've probably seen the extremely comprehensive
noob guide to online marketing by Oli Gardner, or the companion
noob guide to link building from Mike King, you've also likely seen one of the many posts or presentations on SEO for startups (
here,
here and
here)
- suffice to say there is plenty of reading material for building new
web properties but what about link building for an established website?
There are an abundance of link opportunities (and challenges) that are pretty unique to an established website.
I decided to compile
a public Trello board which is based on some of our internal boards for clients to help you to visualise the process I am about to run through.
Please bear in mind that this is not a six-month SEO plan so we won't
be covering site audits or keyword research for example (although you
should
read this post if you are planning to conduct an SEO audit), I will be focusing on the acquisition and optimisation of links and content for links.
This is how we approach established websites where we are given a full
link building brief. I welcome any feedback and additions to this plan.
In any case, this is simply the "ideal" scenario, so we don't do ALL of
this with every single client because each situation is different and
because realistically we might not have the budget or even the project
scope to implement all this. That being said I do hope that this post
will give you some avenues to explore. The idea behind the Trello board
was that so anyone could copy it and then edit as they see fit, dragging
and dropping the various elements and scaling up or contracting the
task list as appropriate. I have divided the elements into the following
four areas:
-
Content Tasks
-
Research Tasks
-
Link Tasks
-
Other Tasks
On the Trello board, I have put them into our recommended order but as I
say, the reason for doing this as a public board is so that you can
move elements around as you see fit.
Remember to copy the board before you can start making it your own!
Quick links:
By month
Month 1
Link Profile Audit
The ideal way to start any link building campaign for an established website is to take stock of the existing link profile.
At this point, we're not even drawing comparisons between competitor
link profiles and our own but merely understanding what we have and how
closely that aligns with A) the clients goals and B) recommended best
practices. I'm not going to get into a white hat/grey hat debate here,
when I say best practices, I am talking about what is generally accepted
within an educated audience as 'sensible'.
A blissfully unaware client, and a website with a closet full of forum
profile spam for example is something that you need to be aware of (and
make the client aware of) before any further work can be carried out.
You are not nit-picking at the work of the previous agency but from here
on out you are likely to be responsible for the performance of that
website in the search engines (and links making up a big part of that
performance) and it would be pretty hard to explain to a client with any
amount of credibility why their website has dropped off the face of the
planet three months into your engagement if you didn't bring issues
like this to their attention. It may well have been links acquired in
days gone by, but the client is probably going to blame you to a certain
extent.
What to look for?
-
Type of link
-
Anchor text
-
Clusters of similar IPs
-
Link position on the page
-
Quality (defensibility) of the site link originates from
-
Is the page where the link originates actually indexed?
-
Asses internal link structure as well
Some of the above can be automated and that should help you to reduce the number of links that you need to audit by hand.
Action steps:
-
Talk to the client - get previous reports, lists of links developed and understand what has been done up until now
-
Listen to the client - to understand their goals and their current appetite for risk
-
Fire up your favourite link analysis tool
Some recommended tools for the job
Recommended reading
Market Landscape Analysis
This is far less "corporate" than the name suggests. Essentially there are two elements:
-
Competitor Link Profile Analysis
-
Opportunity Mapping (link opportunities and topic areas)
Competitor Link Profile Analysis
You should follow near enough the same process for analysing your key
competitors' link profiles as you did for your own. Not because you want
to help them identify their bad links but rather because it enables you
to spot their weaknesses, steal anything they have been doing well and
frankly, see who is probably
swimming naked when the tide goes out.
If a competitor ranks above you but their link profile turns up
something which is considered less than 'best practice' by all means
take this into account but don't take it as gospel that it will work for
the website you are working on.
The key to using your competitor link research to identify opportunity
is to think in terms of direct and indirect opportunity. For example, if
you spot a strong link that you're competitor has acquired that you
could potentially also earn then this would be a direct opportunity. If,
for example, you identify one or a set of links from a particular type
of site or niche then this could be considered an indirect link because
it might open your eyes to other potential link opportunities from
corners of the web you and the client have never been before.
Sometimes though, analysing a competitor's link profile brings up next
to nothing useful that's fine, just demonstrates that you have the
opportunity to stand out in the market long term by doing things the
right way.
Opportunity Mapping
Work 'outwards' from core customer groups to try to identify key
opportunities and niches to target both with the content that you are
going to be producing as well as the outreach and promotion you have
planned. Communication with the client is key at this stage because it
can help you to really understand their various customer segments and
branch out from there.
You are aiming to:
-
Find link opportunities/identify the niches
-
Discover topic areas
My favourite tool for this is
Mindmeister
which is a nice, easy-to-use, web-based mind-mapping software. The
reason we prefer mind-mapping to say a spreadsheet is because it allows
us to visualise the client and then explore different branches, connect
niches and even help them to identify new market segments.
Action steps
-
Understand who your competitors really are (not necessarily the businesses your client thinks they compete against).
-
Analyse competitor link profiles - using the methodology described in the previous exercise
-
Benchmark your link profile versus competitors - does your profile
stand out in comparison to average figures based on competitors?
-
Identify key opportunities based on competitor link profiles (direct and indirect)
Strategy Development
This is where you turn the MLA into something actionable. Set the
course of the rest of the campaign with a clear and focused link
building strategy which takes into account your identified weaknesses
(i.e. closing the natural search gap) and exploits the obvious
opportunities both internal and external. I'm not one (in fact we're not
a company for...) 500 page strategy documents.
A concise set of actions and time-frames that fit onto one A4 sheet of paper is generally how we work.
Never base your strategy entirely on competitor actions; 1) It just
isn't good business sense to be clinging to the tailcoat of the
competition because usually that's where you'll remain and 2) Just
because it worked for them, does not mean it is going to be effective
for you.
That's it for month 1 - it might seem like an awful lot of planning and not much doing but remember that
PPPPPP
so it will be time well invested. If you have additional time and
budget of course you could always bring some activities, scheduled for
month 2, forward.
Month 2
Link Removals & Updates
There are two schools of thought here; some say that although certain
links might be harming your website you can outweigh the negative impact
by focusing on developing good quality ones.
The other school of thought says that you should focus on getting rid
of your bad links before you even contemplate acquiring new ones.
Whichever side of the fence you sit on comes down to your opinions and
experiences but I personally feel that in a number of situations, a
round of link removals and profile pruning is a wise way to spend your
time because there is little doubt that some links and in particular
those really artificial and spammy links may well be holding a website
back - with no amount of good karma going to shift those misdemeanours
of the past.
If you are going to embark on a spot of profile pruning and/or link
un-building then luckily there are quite a few tools out there to help
you. What kinds of things are you going to want to change or update? The
anchor text is a common one but consider also URL destination (is there
a more natural page that this could link to?). If however you feel the
link just doesn't align with your strategy moving forward then a removal
may be a more suitable option.
Tools for the job
-
Link Management Tool from The Link Auditors
- free software, makes it really easy to manage your progress,
automatically checks the status of links so no need to send a chaser
email to see if a link has been removed. All round fantastic tool and my
favourite.
-
SEOgadget - Data Gathering Tool
-
Remove'em - self-service link removal
-
rmoov - the backlink removal tool
Content Asset Identification
New websites require new content but the beauty of established websites
is that very often they have a catalogue of content assets at your
disposal. With a bit of tweaking, repurposing or even just using as they
are, the existing content assets can be put to work attracting links
naturally (and almost passively) over time and as a reason for
proactively contacting webmasters, bloggers and journalists. What kinds
of things are you looking for?
-
Whitepapers
-
Long-form blog posts
-
Mobile Apps & tools
-
Free resources & downloads
-
Guides
Think about the customer groups and refer back to your opportunity map.
If it is a very large website it can sometimes be worth using Google to
perform a site search in order to find an asset which perhaps even the
client themselves has forgotten they produced (we've done this a few
times and turned up something which the client would then say "Oh yeah
that old thing...").
This is a largely manual process but we've found
Social Crawlytics
to be quite useful at identifying content assets which perhaps got 'a
bit of love' but not really the amount the content deserved. These would
be prime examples of assets in need of a facelift or just an update
because they are outdated. In essence you are looking for content assets
to use 'as they are', as well as assets that just need a bit of
improvement to get them up to scratch. Identifying content assets rather
than just creating new ones obviously saves you some time and the
client some budget (since you are optimising what they have) which means
other activities can be carried out.
Action steps
-
Talk to the client to understand any content production they have done in the past
-
Dig through the archives of the site (use site: search in Google)
-
Look for pages on the site which have a fair number of links (and ask if it could perform better after a bit of TLC?)
-
Try Social Crawlytics to uncover hidden assets
Gap Analysis of Content Assets
This is one of the simplest analysis methods at your disposal (
read how to perform a Gap Analysis)
but it is also very effective in forcing you to consider where the
asset currently is, what you want to achieve and the specific way you
are going to get it there.
For example, you may have uncovered a guide to 'growing an email
newsletter database' for your email marketing software client. The guide
is about 1000 words long and includes some fairly generic tips. They
created it because their previous agency told them they needed "great
content" on their website, the problem is that "great" means much more
than just spelled correctly.
Anyway, the bigger issue is that it doesn't align with the client's
brand of being a market leader in the space and a competitor has
produced a far more comprehensive guide, not amazing but still leading
the way currently. Your content asset needs a reason for existence; if
you're not aiming to make the content asset the category killer then you
may as well not bother. Go big or go home I'm afraid.
So we now have "the future state" and "the current state" - how do we
fill in the gap? We identify all the ways we could lead the market with
the asset e.g. enhancing our guide to make it more detailed, paginated
for better user experience, add videos, action steps, screenshots and
templates that clients can use.
You're not aiming to match your competitor's content assets, you need
to surpass them. I'm not so naive to believe that you can create this
"awesome content" and then Google will rank it where you'd like but
having a solid reason to rank is definitely a required starting point.
It will also help you answer the question "why would someone link to
this?" - it's pretty hard to answer that when you have the second or
third best resource in the market...
Internal Link Optimisation
Arguably this would come under the remit of whoever is performing the
site audit but more often than not we will discover opportunities to
optimise internal links simply by performing a link profile audit. It
could be that every page has a link to itself within the body copy using
the keywords the page is trying to target.
From our experience, the SEO benefit of including a keyword link from
the page right back at the page is almost non-existent and in most cases
it can harm the user experience as a visitor lands on that page looking
for something around that keyword phrase, they will likely click on a
highlighted link containing the keywords only to find themselves
confused when the same page reloads.
In fact you could even argue that
stuffing keywords into internal links is going to harm your search engine performance.
Update old guest posts
Only applicable if your client has previously embarked on guest
blogging. Identify any guest posts that currently drive referral traffic
then look at whether these could do with updating or enhancing.
Remember that if a guest post worked well for the client the first time
it was published, there is a strong chance it will be well-received by
the audience a second time, particularly if the post is quite old or
outdated. It is a good idea to include old guest posts in your plan
because updating these can help to preserve your brand reputation should
a prospective customer find your website via this post - you don't want
them to think your ideas and expertise are outdated (even if there is a
date on the blog post!).
Pro tip - look at ways to promote old guest posts that perform well.
See here for more on second tier link building.
Link reclamation
The theory here is that over the years as domains change, staff come
and go, site structure evolves, there are very often hundreds if not
thousands of pages that get left behind without a redirect.
Many of these have links pointing at them which now that your page 404s
are likely to be doing very little for your website. Link reclamation
involves you taking back that link equity, no real extra effort
required, you are just making the most of what you already (in theory)
have. Still don't believe me that established websites offer incredible
link opportunities?
Garrett French covers this process spectacularly in his
7 ways to find your long lost links.
As Eric Ward rightly
points out, the bigger and older the site, the more opportunities for link reclamation there are likely to be.
Month 3
At the half-way point in the plan, now it's time to get on to the really fun stuff. It is going to be a busy four weeks...
Take control of social
This may not be a possibility with some larger clients as many will
have either a dedicated agency or in-house department that looks after
social but link building and social media are becoming more and more
intertwined so the need to have access to a usable social media account
is essential.
In some situations we are able to utilise the main social media account
of the client, and where this isn't possible, we'll establish a
sub-account usually based around an individual within the business who
we are working closely with - they're going to become the public face of
the business for the campaign.
It is important to have access to some form of social presence (ideally
Twitter) because it enables authentic communication with the
higher-value link prospects that might need warming up before the email
outreach. It also gives a further avenue to push out blog content and
promote guest posts so that as time goes by you have an extra carrot to
dangle in front of link prospects in the form of social traffic to their
website.
Taking control of social is never easy, we have had situations where we
couldn't tweet a guest post because it was on a site that wasn't owned
by the client!
Improve the content assets
Back in month 2 we conducted a gap analysis to identify any content
assets in need of some attention and more specifically what it is that
we needed to do to bring them up to scratch.
Here we are in month 3 and it is time to get to work. When it comes to
improving the content, consider whether what you are doing is going to
benefit your prospective customers, or whether you are just padding out
an already mediocre piece of content.
I am a big fan of creating content that helps to attract links and
simultaneously helps to support the sales process in some way either
through attracting attention and bringing targeted visitors into the top
of your funnel, or helping a user in a buying state of mind choose
between which printer they need.
Don't add bulk to your assets just for the sake of it. Align closely
with your Gap analysis to ensure your asset is going to be the
indisputable top dog in the space.
Link Repossession
This element can be broken down into three areas:
The overall aim is that we are trying to get the links that are
'rightfully' yours because someone is either 'borrowing' your content,
using images without attribution or mentioning your website or brand
without linking to you (potential missed opportunity).
Images
Using Google's Similar Image Search or the seriously cool
TinEye
you can quickly find other places around the web that use your images.
These may be corporate photography that you paid to be produced or it
could be charts and graphs. Basically another website publisher is using
your image (knowingly or not) and you rightfully deserve an attributing
link. You can work your way through the image collection on the website
(ignoring stock photography that you don't own the rights
to...obviously) and building a list of webmasters that you need to be
contacting.
TinEye also offer a number of products and services for doing this on a larger scale.
We have experienced a fair response rate to our emails simply by being
friendly and explaining that we're glad they've chosen to use our image
but that it would be really great if they could just include a link back
to our website so that people know where it came from. Nothing heavy or
involving legal action...most seem amazed that they have either been
caught out or that this kind of thing is even monitored and in their
state of shock are more than willing to include an attribution link
(hint: don't go for keyword rich anchor text).
Words
You can also employ a similar tactic with all the words on the website, by using
Copyscape
you can quickly identify text from your website that has been
"borrowed" by others. A big, established website with oodles of content
perhaps as a knowledgebase or a series of blog posts will find that a
lot of content has been pinched by others without attribution.
Let me be perfectly clear here, many websites who pinch content are
just doing it to essentially steal your work for their own purposes. A
polite email is unlikely to score an attributing link from them but
there are a small sub-set of content copy and pasters who overlooked
copyright issues and were simply referencing your work to support
something they have written. These are the ones that will likely result
in a link.
To try and prevent this in future consider deploying
Tynt which allows you to automatically add attribution to any chunk of text that is copied from your site and pasted elsewhere.
Mentions
If you are working on the website of a large established brand then
there are likely to be an abundance of opportunities on almost a daily
basis to seek a link when nothing more than the brand name or URL is
mentioned - bloggers and journalists do this all the time.
It's not a guaranteed link of course because some purposefully haven't
included a link and don't forget to be polite because the mere fact they
have mentioned the brand or website is worthy of a thank you :-)
Getting a link in this way can help improve user experience because if
the reader wants to find out more then they would have to Google it or
manually type in the URL - you get the link, the reader gets a better
experience.
To try and prevent this in the future consider setting up Google Alerts
for key brand mentions so that you can strike the prospect whilst they
are warmed up and ask for that link.
Get blogging
This is a link building plan right?! What's blogging got to do with
building links? We see blogging as central to a link building strategy
because from the blog so many opportunities can come:
-
Directly earn links with solid content
-
Establishes credibility to help with outreach
-
Gives you a platform to get the attention of link prospects
When it comes to this particular link building plan, it is a good idea
to co-ordinate your content calendar with your guest blogging targets
for the month ahead. This allows you to include links to any websites
that you might be targeting and also gives you a highly-relevant post
that you can showcase to link prospects if they are unsure of the
calibre of your work. I have produced a fairly comprehensive and
regularly updated
guide to blogging for your business and I would encourage you to have a read of this for more detailed thoughts and advice on corporate blogging.
Acquire direct competitor link opportunities
Back in month 1 you researched and analysed the link profiles of
competitors and now it is time to put into action some of that research.
Any opportunities that were labelled "direct" e.g. worthy of you also
acquiring should be acquired at this point in the campaign. There are
all sorts of justifiable business reasons to go after links that your
competitors have, not just because it is a case of "they have it, we
want it" but rather because you don't want to be missing out on referral
and even sales opportunities when your competitors are clearly taking
advantage of them.
Use your best judgement when it comes to acquiring competitor links
because replicating their link profile is unlikely to be a good idea and
more importantly you want to make sure that any links you are
developing are going to align with your current strategy and help to
support the achievement of your goals rather than hold back the site.
Month 4
As we pass the halfway point for this plan, month 4 involves fewer
activities but they are often more involved and require more resources.
Guest blogging
In month 3 the blog published content that was tailored towards a
specific niche (tied back to our opportunity map in month 1) ideally
linking to a few prospects. Now we are looking to push out some guest
posts to bring in some fresh links and boost referral traffic. I have
published quite a few posts and guides around the topic of guest
blogging and so I won't go into too much detail here but essentially you
can break the process down as follows:
-
Identifying link opportunities (use your opportunity map)
-
Sifting and evaluating opportunities
-
Researching prospects
-
Contacting prospects
-
Writing content
-
Facilitating publication
Reading to consider
Yes, these were all written by me (hence why I said "reading to
consider" rather than "recommending reading" - I don't have that big an
ego) and whilst there is other content out there on the topic, most
describe "how to do guest blogging" in a different way and I prefer to
only talk about what I know. Guest blogging makes up quite a large part
of the plan for Month 4 so ideally you will pick your largest and most
opportune topic area from your opportunity map.
Keep blogging
Very simply this is a reminder to keep your blog on the map. Tailor
this month's content calendar to the guest blogging campaign a month
ahead. This will give you the same advantages as before when it comes to
targeting a new topic area in month 5.
Blogger outreach to content asset 1
In month 3 we improved a content asset and with the best will in the
world this takes time so it is only really likely at the start of month 4
that you will be able to start putting the asset to work in the form of
promotion. We typically separate outreach and promotion to bloggers
(and journalists where applicable) and webmasters. We target the former
first as many prefer to talk about fresh topics whereas a webmaster
including a link to your guide will still likely do so as the guide
becomes more established.
Telling a blogger that you launched something three months ago is
unlikely to evoke a feeling that they are important to you. Reaching out
to a blogger to promote a content asset is different to the pitch you
make to secure a guest post spot and in many ways it can be more
challenging. We recommend a two-pronged approach to blogger outreach
-
Social outreach - taking control of the client's social account suddenly seems like a good move :-)
-
Sending emails
It need not be any more complicated than that. The devil is in the
detail though because it is how you do these things which affect the
results that you see.
I think
Mike Essex's contribution to
this post
(see the section on 'push content') is a really solid example of a good
outreach email for this kind of thing. Your social efforts should
follow suit in the sense that it needs to be specific and targeted
towards what the individual is likely to be interested in and how it
helps them. I would add to this that the success comes in selecting your
prospects and developing a relationship over time.
Perhaps connecting the practices of guest blogging and blogger outreach
to make the most of your connections and be specific in all
communication, call to actions are essential if you want to get things
done. Don't leave them wondering why you emailed or what they need to
do.
Additionally, the campaign is made or broken by the targeting, if you
have for example 3 clear niches to approach it encourages the systematic
acquisition of all available links, thinking that your content appeals
to "everyone" is going to result in you poorly targeting everybody.
Month 5
Webmaster promotion to content asset 1
In month 4 we promoted the content asset to bloggers (and potentially
journalists), now we are going to be pushing the asset to other
webmasters with the view to securing permanent links on resource pages
and the like to really cement the asset as an authority resource and
ensure the long-term visibility of it (in the search results) after the
initial buzz and social traffic subsides.
How to find opportunities
Link prospector from Citation Labs
One of our favourite internal tools for identifying link prospects for
further qualification. This tool has a "links pages" report type which
allows you to discover authentic resource pages within your market.
Competitor analysis
Your asset may well be the market leader now but before it came to
existence there was a competitor earning all those links. Using your
favourite link research tool, you need to track down all the links and
look for direct opportunities as well as the indirect opportunities such
as "this type of website linked to the resource, let's look for more of
this type of website". A key reason we divide outreach rather than do
it all in one sprint is because it allows us to tailor our approach
based on what is working rather than exhaust our prospects right off the
bat.
Guest blogging
As before, but targeting a new segment from your opportunity map.
Blogging
As before, but focusing on the area you intend to target for month 6 with your guest blogging.
Add a new content asset
There are several approaches you can take when it comes to creating a
new content asset and the reason I wanted to include within this link
building plan was because in reality even established websites won't
necessarily have usable content assets at your disposal when you walk in
the door. There are multiple ways to approach this and here are a few
of our preferred methods:
-
Publish content they already have - large established
websites usually have established businesses behind them and frequently
established businesses have mountains of content that they aren't
really putting to good use. In your quest to create linkable assets, you
might decide to repurpose something that they already have - (think optimising what they already have).
-
Look for opportunities in your market centred around customer questions
- if you really are working from scratch then it is advisable to return
to your opportunity map from month 1 and explore each of the market
segments in detail to help build a picture of the type and theme of your
content. (Read HubSpot's excellent guide to creating content centred around buyer personas).
-
Find content assets of competitors that you could really do better
- identify opportunities in your market by looking through the content
your competitors have created, chances are they haven't done it as well
as it could be done then do it better.
-
Look for pages in your competitor's site that 404s but has link equity (from external links) -
this is a long shot and to tell you the truth we have only managed to
do this once. Essentially you perform link reclamation on your
competitor's website but rather than help them with their redirects, you
create your own amazing version of the page that 404s on their site and
reach out to all the webmasters that link to it. It isn't that this
can't work, it is that the opportunities are rare but I felt it still
merited a mention.
-
Outsource something - a content asset could be more
of a linkable asset for example a mobile app, a bit of free software or a
handy tool, if these things fall outside of your expertise then you may
consider hiring someone to take care of it.
Month 6
You made it, six months of link acquisition and link optimisation. By
now you should be really seeing the fruits of your labour paying off.
Just one more month of activity then time to benchmark performance...
Influencer outreach for new content asset
Based on all your activities in the market over the previous half a
year, you should have developed some relationships with influencers such
as bloggers, curators, editors and maybe even journalists. Both they
and the market as a whole should now have a feel for what you or your
client is about and have some sense of goodwill towards you.
This activity is about enhancing this goodwill but also leveraging it
because you will be seeking the help of the influencers you are now
acquainted with to help you launch the shit out of this new content
asset.
There's no template outreach email for this one...subtly interweave some
egobait
into the asset and just ask for people's help. Most (because they now
know you) will probably help spread the word with links, tweets, +1s
etc.
Repeat activities
-
Webmaster Promotion to the new content asset
-
Guest Blogging (to the new content asset) - target a portion of your
guest blogging efforts towards building links and raising awareness for
your new content asset. You can even rework some of the content and
tailor to specific blogs to save time when it comes to writing the guest
posts.
-
Guest Blogging - as before, this time targeting a new niche from your opportunities map.
-
Blogging - once again think ahead in terms of the content you produce, align with any plans you have on the horizon.
What do you think to the plan? Obviously one-size-does-not-fit-all when
it comes to link building but this is just designed to be a loose
template to give you an idea of how we work and also some food for
thought. How would you improve it?
Reference:-http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-6-month-link-building-plan-for-an-established-website
EBriks Infotech:- SEO Company
I was reading the article about “Broken Link Building”
the other day when I realized that there might be a possible extension
to the idea of helping webmasters with keeping theirs sites together.
Since there is a lot of stuff that can go wrong with a website, I
started probing possibilities. Here is what I came up with.
Usually,
if you direct the attention of webmaster to the problem with their
site, they should know what to do about it since they have probably
earned being called "webmasters". Still there are a considerable
percentage of people who take care of their site to some extent without
deep understanding of its mechanics. The site might have been created by
a company for a client who does not know much in this sort of stuff. In
this case, your ability to search for information on the Internet will
enable you to warm up the hearts of mighty number of people who can add
your link on their sites.
The
higher the number of the documents found, the higher the likelihood
that the site owners/editors just do not give a rat’s ass about their
website and won’t probably respond to your message of good intention.
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