Link building- Point us in the right direction
-
We are currently fixing crawl errors and other on page issues and have taken on board that 'content is king' and have invested a lot of time and resources into writing unique content on each of the several hundred pages on our ecommerce site (not just to avoid duplicate content but add researched content that will hopefully enhance the user experience and allow them to make the best choice of products) and earlier this year started blog writing regular content about updates, industry trends and current events e.g. Euro 2012 (all content relevant to our sector and/or products).
So we are actively working to improve our SEO (and also have regularly updated social media accounts with healthy number of followers) but the problem is link building as we work in a sector where the content isn't really all that exciting so getting link backs from sharing our written content is rare and also doing an infographic and/or guest blogs would not bring anything exciting.
So how do we go about building white hat links? The only thing I can see is maybe doing press release submissions but from research there is mixed feelings about this.
Any advice that could point us in the right direction would be appreciated.
-
In my experience small SEO agencies sometimes have a more personal approach. Maybe it's a good idea to invite 2-3 agencies and you begin straight away with your questions. I have found myself in the same spot with a company who didn't want to tell about their methods and 3-6 months later they went out of business because they bought old authoritative domains and transformed them into blog networks/linkwheels. Nowadays when we want to hire a certain company we go to smaller agencies and tell them we don't want bla bla but easy answers in normal language and feedback. Good luck with your business.
-
Yep you're totally right - we didn't go with them but while considering their proposal got thinking about what they would do differently to what we are already doing. Maybe in the near future we will approach a seo company ourselves and pose the questions in this thread but for now we're still confused. Thanks for all the help thus far.
-
Thanks for the advice. But like I commented below we will still be a long way away from catching up with other companies in the sector. We are tempted at times to sign up to a SEO agency but find it hard to understand what they would do additional to the quality content work we spend time doing already.
-
They probably have a big network of sites they can put on links I guess. I don't know your site and don't know the keyword so I don't have a good answer to your question. But if they didn't want to be specific on what they are doing different it probably isn't the partner you look for to do your SEO. In my opinion sharing knowledge and building good relationships with customers is key, ofcourse you won't tell all the secrets but if an agency can't help you by answering your questions then why would you hire them?
-
Have you tried looking at where these links to your competitors are coming from? It may be that whoever is linking to them may link to you with a little encouragement.
-
It's a good question. Google blabs non stop about natural links and ranks websites based on links (big part of ranking anyway), however how are those of us that can not get lots of natural BL's compete against those who have obviously bought thousands of links?
Google is very retarded at times as it seems to reward websites doing the wrong thing over the ones who are doing the right things.
When you find out, let me know.
-
P.s this question came about after a SEO company visited our offices looking to sign us up. We told the representative that using the (amazing!) help of seomoz tool we are sorting out onpage errors ourself and do regular content writing on blogs and regular differentiated posts on a range of social platforms. And the representative then offered to increase the ranking of one of our main keywords by us signing up to £XXX a month.
This is where we got confused- and maybe you guys can help us out (without giving away any industry secrets :p), we could not understand what the seo company would do different from what we were doing ourselves (and they wouldn't really go into detail either).
-
Thanks EGOL for the suggestions. Great points - this is exactly the sort of points we cover in our blogs.
The general frustration is that some websites in the industry have 5-10x more links than us (some even started business after us) and we are finding it hard to think of ways to increase our linkbuilding organically.
-
Thank you Pr0mosZ- we publish out all our fresh content to social media platforms and thanks for the article and the guest blog suggestion- I have looked into this before and was finding it hard to locate a good quality blog that allowed guest posting but will continue this search.
-
I don't know what niche you're in, but can you exploit the "real-life" relationships the business has? Are there opportunities to build links to suppliers, partners, customers, trade associations, sponsorship etc?
It's often overlooked, but where there's already a business relationship you may find it significantly easier to build meaningful authentic links than if you're starting from scratch.
-
I don't know what you are selling, but I would consider writing SuperExpert content about the products that you sell.
-
How to select the right one
-
How to use it
-
How to fix it
-
How to get the most out of it
-
Information about vintage products
When people write to you about your products a lot of those messages can be the starting point for a great article on your website.
I try to do the above at a level that is far superior to anything that the manufacturer does.
-
-
You could publish your content on social media platforms or try to write a guestpost on a blog which has a lot of authority within your branch. There's always something thats fun or interesting to read. Maybe write about 10 reasons why your products aren't boring or something like that.
Also read Hannah Smit's post about boring niches creating great content
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
-
What type of links do I need to build in the first month to my website?
What type of links do I need to build in the first month to my website?
Link Building | | Gustavostap0 -
HELP! New Link Building
Any recommendations on where to start with link building for an automotive dealer site? Our ultimate goal is to drive traffic to the inventory pages and increase lead submissions. Should we build links to new and used inventory? Also, any recommendations regarding anchor text would be extremely helpful! Thanks in advance!
Link Building | | AMSI0 -
How to build links for a domain name that is redirected to another url?
I'm helping a friend build links to his site because he recently moved across country. His primary domain isn't very SEO friendly (shef1.com) so he registered another domain (stephenshefrinphotography.com). Shef1.com has been around for awhile and has at least been crawled with a page rank of 1 so we decided to keep shef1.com as the main website and redirect stephenshefrinphotography.com to it. So for SEO sake I know it's best to at least have a keyword in your URL so I have been using the url stephenshefrinphotography.com in my link building efforts for local directories and blog comments. Is this the right way to go about this or should I be using the main url shef1.com? He had virtually no backlinks until I started helping him but the ones I have created over the last month are not showing up on the link analysis in my campaigns. I just want to make sure my efforts aren't in vain. Advice please. Thanks!
Link Building | | mrsmelmitch0 -
SEO Link building from zero in a practical world
Hi, I'm a web developer with good knowledge of SEO friendly web development etc. When it comes to link building Im not quite sure where to start. I have read heaps of articles about building links, but can you guys please tell me how to start building links from 'zero' in a practice world? Im not even sure whether I have anyone who can link to my website or my client's website either 🙂 Thanks heaps.
Link Building | | Uds0 -
Suggestions needed on link building campaign...
Getting links has become very difficult task for me. Recently i have started a website on Depression and Anxiety. My campaign steps: 1)Hired a doctor to write stuff on my website. 2)After that we did 100 more articles for article marketing. 3)Submitted content to top article directories.. All links to only 1 anchor (domainname.com). I haven't promoted my domain with main anchor anywhere. DONT KNOW WHAT TO DO 😞 Can anyone suggest me some link building methods so that i can do Good SEO for my new site?
Link Building | | artemmin0 -
Build links through blogging?
Although my site is a wordpress site it presently has about as many static pages as blog posts. The site has a lot of directory links and is doing pretty good with a PR3 after about a year. When I first put the site up I had a well known blogging expert help me with the permalinks and a couple of other things and he said that with a blog there is no need to build links, it can all be done through natural link acquisition off of the blog posts. I was skeptical at the time because it seemed that a lawyer's site was something not a lot of people would be interested enough in to link to it. Now I am thinking about trying his stragegy, as 1 of my blog posts that I put up on a very topical subject immediately got about 15 backlinks. My questions are: Is it reasonable to try to build links just by posting frequent topical blog posts? If yes, should I have links in the blog posts to my home page, to internal pages, or both? \ Paul
Link Building | | diogenes0 -
Is it important to have a geo modifier for local SEO link building?
If anyone here is familiar with local SEO, you may have noticed that there are different local results for: "city + Keyword" and just the "keyword". When building links will you end up targeting both with a geo modifier in the link, or is it beneficial to build links without the geo modifer for the keyword?
Link Building | | dignan990 -
Do you spend much time on the phone when link building?
When it comes to link building for a client how important is it to get on the phone when chasing links from other sites? Would you say this done all the time, half the time, not at all? Is this the SEO experts responsibility or the clients? Update: Really hoping to get an idea of how important this is to acheive good SEO results. Any chance the SEOMoz employees have any answers here?
Link Building | | iSenseWebSolutions0