Asking dealers for links if they sell your products:
-
Should you ask your dealers for links back to you?
For example, if you are a laminate flooring manufacturer, should you ask all your retailers to link to you?
If so, how do you go about it? Emails? A form letter?
Should I create a page on the site for banners and let them grab the code?
Any creative ideas would help.
-
My client only sells to their dealers, not to the public. So, if I were a dealer, I would gladly link to the manufacturer who is working hard to provide better information about the products.
I am going to approach them about making a form letter to either mail out or email out and we can link them to a private page to get the badges.... see what happens.
I will most likely report my findings on SEOmoz
-
If you're a manufacturer that sells products, I'm not going to link to you no matter how good your content and how many bells and whistles you've got for promotions. However, if you don't sell products and you've got better content than I can provide on my site, I will link to you. I link to manufacturer sites when they have authoritative information that is beyond the scope of information I provide. For example, flame resistant clothing or fire rating information. If I want to cover my bases (ass) and make sure the customer has access to deep level information that is beyond the scope of what is necessary for a purchase I will link to it on a case by case basis.
-
What can you do for the dealers that will make this a situation where you, the dealer and the customer all win?
How about fantastic product support PDFs that they can post on their website which contain a link to the manufacturer.
=======================
I think that you have a good opportunity here. Putting myself in the position of your dealers... do you sell retail and compete against them? If the answer is yes then your request for all of them to link to you might not be appreciated.
I am a dealer and none of my suppliers ask me to link to them. Instead they are linking to me to support my efforts - even when I also sell their competitor's products. They link to the page on my site that features their product.
-
I was thinking this would be a good source for linkbuilding since the dealers already usethe product and are dealers, they should want to show it off... I would think.
So, if there are 1,000 dealers and I could get half of them to link to the manufacturers site, that could be a nice boost for my linkbuilding efforts.
They are already dealers, so we don't need any affiliate tracking, but I guess I could track it in analytics to see how well it works too.
-
We did something similar to what you are asking for a client of ours that had a venue to promote. We set it up so that various customers could sign up as afilates and then place a custom link on their site. Everytime someone clicked on that link and came to the site and ordered tickets a small amount of the proceeds was kicked back to them.
You could possibly do something similiar but rather then money you could do some sort of top dealer program where you track incoming from each link on the retailers site and then either pay a small amount of money to the top 3 or rank them by Bronze, Silver and Gold and then send them certificates that they can display in their lobby at the end of the year. This would encourage them to link from more then one page and in more visible locations. I know your probably, mostly after the links but this would make it easier for them to swallow cause they would feel like they got more to gain.
Another thought would be to give the top three links off your home page. Turn it into a bit of a competition. You could change these links out each month based on the traffic that the retailers send back to you. If you used a small graphic as part of the link this would be great for promoting the brand and the competition would tend to push your link placement to the top of these retailers pages. That equals more brand recognition.
-
You could create a nice badge for each retail website "Certified retailer of [...]".
The idea of having a page on your website with multiple types of badges would also be good, as the sites will be different so may need a different size/orientation of badge.By providing the code you also control the link text and the link destination to some extent.
The decision of whether to choose letter/email will really depend on the industry. I'd guess that if you're targeting the tech industry, they'd prefer an email...
I'm working on something similar at the moment - it's tricky! Good luck.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Disavowing Links
I need some advice... I've noticed our link profile has increased with many comments links --- something I certainly have not pursued manually. I'm new to disavowing links. However, before I go ahead and disavow them, I'd like to ask how harmful these links are and would you recommend this is something I can do myself (relatively novice SEO) or if you'd recommend someone who could do this for a reasonable cost. In one instance, the link from this comment thread is with the anchor text, "porn"... Certainly not something we want to rank for, haha! I look forward to your advice
Link Building | | LukeBTDT0 -
Would it be a valid "link building' strategy to pay youtube video owners, to link to our company website in the decription of a certain video. ( For popular video's that are relevant )
I was wondering if it would it be a valid "link building' strategy to pay / work out a deal with youtube video owners, to link to our company website in the decription of a certain video they posted? ( For popular video's that are relevant to our business. ) Anyone have any thoughts on this? Thanks in advance! Steven
Link Building | | RockyMountainFlyboard0 -
Link from a directory
Hi, im submitting a clients website to some directories. They are a dental practice and I'm adding them to this website http://goo.gl/Tvyabd Once i added the business to its directory it asked me to add a link (in so many words) back to its website from my clients website. Is this ok to do or is it seen as spam? Im confused about this as sometimes directories are free and sometimes they ask for a fee for it to be fast tracked to put it on the website. I always check the Domain authority of the websites and make sure they are relevant to the industry that I'm working in but again not sure if this would be seen as "paying" for links. Thanks Ade
Link Building | | popcreativeltd0 -
I am getting links on people's wordpress blogs but are not showing up on the just discovered tool. Is it true that wordpress links are no-follow links that do give off any link-juice?
A blogger told me that "wordpress.com does not allow blogs to show advertisements or use links to sites that sell merchandise of any kind" is this true? Am i wasting my outreach time trying to get links from wordpress operated blogs?
Link Building | | odegi0 -
Obtaining External Links
What is the best way to obtain External Links for a website? I have seen using the Open Site Explorer that my url is ahead of most of the competitors in all areas except this one. What is the best method of generating these links, outside of emailing 20K people and asking for a back link? Any suggstions?
Link Building | | jgmayes0 -
Link Building: No linked to content in industry
Hello, I'm doing link buidling for a small ecommerce niche. There's no resource content in the niche (looking at OSE Top Content) that has attracted backlinks (on any sites) How should this effect what resource content I should create. Thanks!
Link Building | | BobGW0 -
Link Churn - where have all my links gone?
I am sure most of you have asked yourself the question I'm asking right now.. Where have all my links gone? I am starting to get twitchy now. I would estimate we have lost around 60% of our links in the past 3 weeks. Does anyone have any comeback stories? Feel like I am back to the start again. I have made a number of changes on the site not least removing a reciprical link page.. that had over 200 links on it but from reading one of Rand's tweets is it true that linking out could be good again?
Link Building | | robertrRSwalters0 -
Internal linking
I 'am using a seo component (sh404sef) for a joomla website, for the time being, any internal linking is organized. I've been said the sitelinkx is not advised (a component dedicated to build internal links) with sh404sef... How could i manage to set it up fastly ? Tks a lot..
Link Building | | mozllo0