Howdy SEOmozzers I’m Paddy Moogan I work for Distilled in the UK office. This is my first SEOmoz post, hope you find it useful and I look forward to your feedback.
How this post came together...
A few weeks ago we decided to try to help people who do link building in industries where links are not always easy to come by. We created a form which asked people two questions -
- What industry do you work in that you believe it is very hard to get links for?
- If you could get a link from one website in your industry, what would it be?
We've received loads of great replies and I'm going to cover as many as possible here. The second question was optional and didn't have to be related to the industry. Any websites not related to an industry will be covered at the end of the post. I'm hoping to do another post soon which will cover the rest of the submissions.
My Approach
My usual approach to link building is based on the site itself and identifying what makes that website link worthy, obviously I can't use that approach in this situation! Instead I'm going to suggest asking yourself four questions -
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Important Note: Please do not bypass "Why will they link to me?". This is probably the hardest question to answer and will require work to get right. Link building is hard work mainly because you need to spend time creating content that someone wants to link to, if you put time and resource into this part of the process, the rest isn't as difficult.
I'm going to follow this process for some of the sites on this list so that even if non of these sites are in your industry, you can still use the same process to identify link building opportunities for yourself. The rest of the sites will have some quick tips and ideas for getting links.
Industries that are Tough to get Links for
Here are some of the suggestions we had submitted for tough industries to get links for.
Veterinarians
Who you want a link from:
Any person who owns a pet and a website
How you are going to get their attention:
There are lots and lots of forums and online communities out there based around various types of pets. Joining some of these and posting a few bits of free veterinary advice would certainly get their attention.
How you are going to get a link:
- Start a Q&A section where users can submit a question and receive free advice from one of your expert vets. Capture a persons Twitter, Facebook or website address when they ask a question. Then prioritise questions by those who have a website and answer those first. Ask them to share the answer on their website as a thank you
- Add a Jobs Board to your site, if you have a Wordpress blog here is a method on how to do it. Allow other Veterinarians to post job vacancies to your site and encourage them to promote it on their own site.
- Ask users to submit photos of their animals and award a prize for the cutest - design a badge for them to use on their website with their pets picture on it - link this to the competition page. SEOs seem to love cats so I had to include a least one picture!
Quick Link Targets:
- Veterinarian Business websites, this search of Dmoz gives you a few good sites to contact
Jewelry Ecommerce
Who you want a link from: A jewelry making website or blog
How you are going to get their attention: There are lots of active forums in this industry where you can make contacts and provide good information. This Twitter list search also provides you with lots of people to contact and interact with.
How you are going to get a link:
- Run a competition and ask designers and students to design a piece of jewelry which you will feature on your website. Put all the entries on your website and encourage the entrants to share the link and get their friends to vote for them
- Create a page on your website that calculates the current price of gold, allow it to be shared easily and embedded on other websites. You can approach pawnbrokers and see if they want to use the calculator on their own website and credit you with a link
- Link bait ideas - Men are notoriously bad at buying jewelry and always need help figuring out what to buy and in particular what size ring to buy. A Mens Guide to Buying Jewelry would work quite well. Another idea would be to name the top x ways of proposing to your girlfriend. I wonder if this would make the list :)
- A bit of a combination of the previous ideas - create a calculator that will tell a guy how much he should spend on an engagement ring
Quick Link Target:
- Bonus ecommerce tip for all sites which have offline stores - find out if any of them are within a shopping centre or complex. If the complex has a website listing all of its shops, ask them for a link. Here is an example of a shop doing this from the Bullring Shopping Centre in the UK -
iPhone Apps for the SEO Industry
I have to admit, this was one of the easiest ones on the list, SEOs love to link to cool apps especially SEO ones!
Ideal person to get a link from: An Experienced SEO Blogger with a Large Following
How to get their attention: The SEO industry is very active on Twitter, start following your link target and RT them, ask them questions and generally be nice!
How you are going to get a link:
- If it is a paid app, give out free copies to top SEO bloggers for them to review
- If the app is not yet public, give them super secret behind the scenes access to it so they can test it - in exchange for a review
- If the app is already public, when you add a new feature, ask SEO bloggers to beta test it for you.
Quick Link Targets:
Submit your App to all of these, they give you a link back form your App page
- https://www.apple.com/webapps/
- https://www.igoapps.com/
- https://www.appstorehq.com/developers
- https://appshopper.com/
Electric Bikes
Who you want a link from:
A blogger who loves anything eco-friendly, ideally they will have a bicycle of their own at the moment
How you are going to get their attention:
There are several online communities that you could leverage for outreach. These include cycling activists and associations, many of whom are active on Twitter such as https://twitter.com/CTC_Cyclists. There is also the "green" community who encourage the use of eco-friendly products.
How you are going to get a link:
- Create a calculator which tells someone how much they currently spend on a petrol car or bike along with how much damage this does to the environment. Make this shareable and send it to bloggers who talk about environmental issues
- Setup a classifieds section of the website where users can sell their old bikes, you can then ask them to include a link from the British Cycling website if they are a member of the association
Quick Links:
- https://www.swindonclimate.org.uk/ElectricBikes - there are lots of sites like this in other areas
- https://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/Resources/Product-reviews/Nigel-s-eco-product-reviews - get a product review
- https://www.atob.org.uk/Electric_price_tag.html#h7 - sorry I know that one is a nofollow!
- https://www.ecobusinesslinks.com/electric_vehicles_bikes_conversion_parts.htm
Sound Masking
Link bait idea - overheard office conversations. This has the potential to be a funny piece of content but with a serious end to it - the need for sound masking in an open plan office. A good example may be the Head of the HR department speaking about employees in an office which has no sound masking, this could lead to a title such as "Office Conversations you wish you hadn't heard" etc.
These guys have created a few graphics to help people understand what sound masking is. This could be executed and presented in a much better way. You could create a "before and after" graphic of a sound masking installation to show the effect it has on the workplace. This could even be tied in with some nice stats and graphs on how it improves efficiency as well. Eg after sound masking you can expect an x% increase in efficiency.
Business Training - Business NLP
There is an active forum here - https://nlp-experts.org/forum.php which seems to have a small Twitter following as well. The guy who runs this seems to have some authority in the area and a network of websites which help promote his main business. If you do a backlink check on the forum you'll find some of these as well as other NLP sites you could get links from.
Classifieds/Online Marketplace
Here I'd focus on certain sections of the site, for example if you have a section with classified ads for used cars. Focus on this sector and how to get links, one idea would be to go out to car enthusiast websites and offer them a widget or feed which displays a few of the classified ads on their website. This would work well if you found a site with a focus on a certain make such as BMW. You could just give them a feed for this section so that it will be of interest to their users.
Here is an example of how Auto Trader are doing this on the Guardian website -
If you have a pets section, you could also use the ideas outlined above in the Veterinarians section.
Fashion Shopping Portal
Ecommerce websites are often seen as difficult to get links for, I can see why as it's hard to attract links to a product page or category page. The solution is to think about the industry as a whole and what content you can add to other parts of your website to get links flowing in. There are other methods which I talk about in the next section.
I'm going to cheat here and repeat a tip - add a jobs board which lets fashion students see an updated list of jobs. The reason I'm repeating this tip is that you can try to get links from high value pages such as this and this.
Another approach would be to write a guide on How to Get a Job in the Fashion Industry, if you can make this a good guide then you will appeal to loads of websites including this one.
Link Building to an Ecommerce Site with thousands of Products
The challenge here is finding a solution that is scalable, manually building links to thousands of individual pages isn't very practical. Here is a great article written by Rob which gives you a few starting points. There is also this article which contains some head-smacking tips from Rand - these are very scalable no matter how many products you have, its just a case of automating the follow up email.
I genuinely think that the key to a successful strategy here is to get your customers to do the link building for you. Try to add user generated content to every product page along with making products as easy to share as possible via social media.
Here is an idea of enhancing a standard product page where buyers can leave reviews -
Get customers to upload their videos and photos of their new product to you, then when it has been approved, drop them an email to let them know. Within this email include a line similar to the head smacking tip I've linked to above. Ask the person to blog about the content or share it with friends. Again this is very scalable as it can be automated after the review has been approved.
Gambling
Ok, I'll admit this is a difficult one! I'd take a similar approach to link building for ecommerce sites, there needs to be another angle built into the website to attract links. People are not going to naturally link to a small gambling site without a very good reason.
So give them a good reason, one may be -
Holding the licence to a famous brand that has been turned into a game - an example being movies that are turned into slot machine games. You can reach out to the online communities around the brand. Also, many online slot machines started their life as an offline game - try reaching out to users of the offline game and ask them to spread the word that there is actually an online version too
Clothing - No Branded Stuff
I'd target a very specific market here to get links from - fashion students. If you are not selling branded clothing, then you can appeal to young, creative clothing designers who want to make a name for themselves. You can contact Universities and Colleges to ask if students want to contribute designs to your site in exchange for some publicity, they could link to it from the University website to help promote it.
The other angle here is to contact individual fashion students with their own blogs such as this one who may want to take part themselves, then link to their design once it is live on your website. I also found this competition which you could do an online version of.
Web Hosting
A quick win here would be to ask sites who use your service link to you from their website. In the same way a web design firm may receive a link, its something that Fasthosts seem to do as you can see on this website.
Also submitted with this industry was a website that is hard to get links from, the site was https://www.php.net so I'm going to include this here as well.
Here are a few ways to get links from this page:
- Publish a news feed, you can do this by hiring a guest author if you have limited in-house resource
- If you have a member of staff who speaks another language, ask them to start writing a section on your site in that languauge
- Create some cool merchandise - the geekiest the better! A t-shirt which is only funny if you are a PHP coder could work quite well
There is also the possibility of getting a link from https://www.php.net/conferences/ if you run a conference on PHP.
Components for Microsoft Visual Studio
This is quite a big area which can improve the scope of the websites that you can target. I found https://www.mcmsfaq.com/links.asp which links to a number of websites who work with various Microsoft technologies.
Another quick win would be to ask for a link from the companies you work with, especially if you do any work with .NET on their websites or have build various components of their systems.
Websites that people struggle to get links from
Here are a few websites submitted to us that people wanted to get a link from.
This is a Real Estate Investing website, they have a few different forums on various topics. You can have a link in your forum signature but they have a number of rules to follow. Make sure you are contributing to the forum and helping people before you start dropping links, otherwise I doubt the links will stay there for long.
If you are a money lender you also may stand a good chance of getting a link from this page https://www.reiclub.com/hard-money-lenders.php
State Farm is a US based insurance website, there isn't an obvious way to get a link but it is possible if you are an agency. You can get a profile page which includes a link to your website.
This one immediately struck me as being difficult, not just because of the domain name, but because of the page they have in the top right corner called "Linking" which outlines their very strict linking policies!
So lets be creative - get them to tweet a link to your website. Ok this can be difficult but there benefits go way beyond the link itself on this one. Their following is around 3,000 people, a tweet from them could bring you a lot of traffic and links from other sites. You'd also get a link from their homepage as they display the latest tweet from their profile, looking at the frequency of their tweets, this link could be in place for a few days. I'll admit this one is a bit sneaky but it could get you a link from their homepage and bring lots of attention.
Bit of free advice for the Department of Education
As a sidenote, this website is showing at Google Toolbar PR0 which I found strange. Turns out that they recently moved domains which is a valid reason, however their old site - https://www.dcsf.gov.uk/ is using a 302 redirect. Unless they are planning to take the redirect down very soon I would use a 301 instead!
Finally - www.seomoz.org
This was actually the most popular site that people wanted to get links from. This may surprise you but there are a few ways to do this!
- Get your Moz points score above 100 to get a followed link from your profile. Read about how to get Mozpoints here
- Write a good blog post and it could be included on Youmoz along with a link to you
- Put extra special effort into the post and it could be promoted to the main blog - bringing you lots of extra attention, links and readers. This is a great example of how putting extra effort into creating content will benefit you when it comes to getting quality links
Well that is it for now, please let us know what you think and of course if you have any additional tips please add them in the comments. You can also catch me on Twitter if you want.
Thanks Paddy this gives me a lot to think about.
I have just taken on a joinery website and have had the cogs turning about how I'm going to get links and this defiantly has me thinking outside the box.
Also I'm nearly at 100 moz points.
congrats, that thumb up should put you one point closer to your goal!
Had i written this post, the title would be 'How to get links in any industry'. This is becuase the basic approach behind link building remains the same regardless of the industry. I follow a simple formalized process for link building (which is my 'link building pyramid'):
1. Resources- Get resources to acquire domain knowledge,develop/hire subject matter expertise and eventually link baits. Anything which helps in your link building can be a resource. It can be researchers, marketers, PR people,software, hardware, budget or simply time. If you lack resources, you can not develop/hire subject matter expertise. Without subject matter expertise you can't develop relationship with potential linking partners and target audience. Developing authority and getting links from link worthy contents will also remain a distant dream.
2. Subject Matter Expertise (SME)- You need subject matter expertise to get attention of potential linking partners and target audience. Without SME, your voice will remain unheard on social media like forums,blogs, online communities etc.
3. Network- It is a platform which is used to demonstrate your subject matter expertise. It can be any social medium (like forum, blog, social networking site etc) or industry event (like conferences, workshops, meetups etc). It can be a group of followers, fans, potential linking partners. Without a network you can't demonstrate your subject matter expertise which is necessary to establish your authority. Without network, making link worthy contents go viral is very difficult. In some very tough vertical industries like 'chiropractic' you may not find such networks. So in that case you first need to develop such networks.
4. Authority- You need authority so that your target audience and potential linking partners take your tweets seriously. Show interest in what you say and write. Sending link request,acquring links and making contents go viral become so easy once you have developed authority among your potential linking partners and target audience.
5. Link worthy contents- You need such contents too. Your target audience and potential linking partners wont promote crappy contents no matter how much authoritative you are.
Thanks for the feedback and I'd agree that the title could be changed as essentially these methods can apply to most industries. I tried to show my process for link building at the start with the diagram, so hopefully this will help people who may not work in the industries that I've covered above.
I think that having a good process in place is essential for link building as it is a big area and needs to be kept as simple as possible.
Welcome to the blog, Paddy - great inaugural post!
I'm curious about the hosting/web-dev links. I'm getting the suspicion the last year or two that Google is devaluing links from clients of hosting and development companies. I suspect it's because they're just too easy to get and too easy to spot. There's a fine line between a handful of clients linking back to you and a link farm (especially if you have hundreds of clients).
I can personally confirm your suspicion Peter, as one of my client has seen how those links devaluated over time.
Considering it's an hoster hosting more than 30.000 websites, you can imagine how it can be a problem.
Right now we are developing embeddable tools for webmasters (the company has a quite big web of resellars) and other widgets for "not-professional-web-masters. I hope the company will be able to put them online soon.
This is something of a concern to me as well. One factor is that often all those clients might be sharing the same (or similar) IP addresses, if the web design company sets them up with shared hosting.
It seems as if Google is adding extra factors for this specific situation though?
I think that's often the case. The sites are either on the same IP or C-block, and some dev companies even register their clients' domain names. Add in that these are almost always low-value footer links, and it's not a big boost.
For new sites, it's not a big deal - try it little by little and see what happens. What I worry about is companies who have built their entire SEO strategy on links from clients' sites, as it could come crashing down around them. Diversity is essential.
Yes, that's probably true.
But, I don't know if it's your situation, but that company is also an Icann Acredited Registrar, therefore it has two kind of clients:
1) websites with domain name registered by them but not hosted by them;
2) websites with domain name not registered by them (or registered by them) and hosted in their servers
I would need, and surely going to set up it, a study in order to see how much this difference is reflected in the "weight" of the links. (one is Domain by XYZ and the other Hosting by XYZ).
Cheers Pete!
I'd agree that there is probably some devaluing of these links for various reasons. The main one being that Google will easily be able to spot a load of links from the same area of the page ie the footer and see what is going on. I think they'd be clever enough not to penalize them as bad links but there may be some kind of reduction in the power they give.
Also the comment about IP address is a valid one, again I don't think Google would automatically stop these links from passing value. However they probably reduce the power a bit.
Still definitely worth doing though if you are a web development firm or in a similar field.
Great post, especially for a first-timer.
It all comes back to one point that you make, which is "why would someone link to you?". If you can't answer that question, it is going to be extremely difficult to get links, whether or not you ask for them.
One of the best things that I did for a site once was add an "industry glossary of terms". Every industry should have one, and if your industry doesn't have one that everyone refers to, then you need to create one.
That was the single-most effective tool I used to get competitors to link to a company's website. Normally, they would NOT link to their competitors, but they ended up all linking to the glossary of industry terms.
Hi Bill,
Thanks for the comment and yes that kind of content can work very well. It has been forgotten about really as an SEO method (or at least it hasn't been talked about publicly for a while). It used to be a good method of targeting additional keywords and increasing internal linking etc.
If it is done in the right way though as you suggest, it can become an industry leading piece of content if it is detailed and useful enough for people to want to refer to it. I think this would work very well in B2B industries where there is a lot of technical products/advice around.
WOW! Fantastic advice and great thoughts. Made me think...I hate link building because it is such a pain (but necessary). I can always use ideas like these :-) Blog some more on this topic please!
First off, great first post Paddy! Hope to get more of these kind of post from you.
Really enjoyed reading this article cos it has lots of link building and baiting tips for various industries. It's most likely a post that will be referred and bookmarked cos there're lots of ideas which you can't take in all at once. Will definitely be coming back to this post in the near future when I start working on some of these industries...
Thanks for posting this!
Thanks Paddy. There are some interesting tips in your post I can certainly alter to fit my industry.
I guess my main problem is that I always have great ideas similar to the ones you mentioned, but getting them on the priority list is very slow-going. Seems like I'm always waiting, not on approval for the project, but for the programmers to get finished with other stuff so they can move my stuff up the list. And then I get asked why I haven't gotten a ton of links. :/
It's a cyclical pattern. Unfortunately, especially with article writing, it's taking up a lot of my time. I really hope it's worth it in the end! It's difficult to show your boss that you're trying to get links if there's no tangible (posted on the web) evidence.
Summer :)
Excellent timely, constructive advice and some new ideas to look into. I'm struggling with a client in another difficult niche right now - I'm going to brainstorm the things you mentioned and see what I can come up with.
It's funny - two of your action items were already on my list of things I wanted to implement for another client. I think I'd better push those up on the priority list before the rest of the SEOMozzers beat me to it :) .
Thanks Paddy- this is a very extensive look into some tough / niche industries. I can't say I would have thought of some of these but I will definitely remember to check here first next time I find a tough industry.
I can't believe he forgot the mention the Porn industry :/
HAHA I'm sure that was a mere oversight on his part. I've not looked at porn on the ol' office computers (where the mozbar is) but would be very curious to know the extent to which a link from a porn site would be positive for trust, authority, etc.
Anyone have any stats/info on this?*
*and are willing to admit to it on this fine public forum? :)
Great post, Paddy, and as others have said, should be really useful, both for competitive markets and for regular markets.
Techniques like these are going to become particularly important, once Google implements its new patent on "reasonable surfer" behaviour.
I actually wrote down your bullet points of:
Who do I want a link from?
How will I get their attention?
Why will they link to me?
Are there any quick wins?
It's pretty simple and basic, but it's remarkably easy to lose your way and forget how basic and simple it is, I think. A lot of times when I struggle with link building, it's becasue I'm forgetting to ask myself one of these four questions.
Great first post. Thanks a lot.
I have a big challenge in the horse industry. Only now are bigger equine hub sites starting to put in directories and catering to farms, but so many horse sites are complete JUNK! Since it's a relatively new thing, everyone who says "OMG I love horses" and has internet access has decided to start their own website about them.
I'm finding it really difficult to find who is worthwhile linking to and who is not. I get reciprocal link requests sometimes, but the initiating site is usually something I don't want to be associated with, or they haven't answered the question of "Why will they want to link to us?"
I'm sure it's not just horses, however. I think it's something in the animal breeding and training industry since animal ownership is a relatively uncontrolled and unmonitered thing, so everybody does it, and few do it well!
I have heard a few people in similar industries say the same thing. If you want to submit your industry to the form I'll see if I can cover it in a future post and hopefully come up with some ideas - https://bit.ly/9sUN1Y
Sweet Post Paddy! I will go so far as to say the best Link Building post I have read all year. No doubt! The real word examples you listed go far to inspire additional creative linking thinking. Keep these post coming.
Thanks Paddy. Fantastic actionable advice (and big thumbs up for answering my question on eBikes :D)
Great post, although most of those seem like pretty easy link building sectors to me! Try some of our clients:
I don't know how we pick them... great for a challenge though :p
I know what you mean. There are very few websites devoted to inventory management software, which is my main focus. I guess we just have to be really creative to get results in these relatively obscure categories.
Good luck!
I think that the question of what is tough in terms of link building is a very subjective one, although I'd agree that I'd find some of the industries you've listed a little tricky :)
I may do a follow up post depending on the feedback I get from this one, so feel free to submit your industries, the form is still open - https://bit.ly/9sUN1Y
Thanks, I might just do that, thanks :).
Good post, thanks
It nice to see applications for the techniques we all are supposed to be using.
I just have a question, widgets are great but they are mainly I-frame based which means they are not constituting for a link and secondly even if they are, or link placed under in the disclaimer.
Is it to much to send an accompanying article with link in that or at list link in about author? or is it on case by case bases decision?
Hi Tatiana,
It is possible to use HTML in widgets so that the links are seen by the search engines etc. Also the beauty of a good widget is that it can be easily shared and picked up by websites without the need for you to send them anything.
So having to send an article with each widget isn't going to be scalable really. It certainly wouldn't hurt in some instances to do this as it could give you an extra link, but I wouldn't rely on this to get links.
You don't have to use an iframe but if you did thats fine too because search engines have been able to read them just fine for years.
;)
If you need to use an iframe for widgets simply place the link outside of the iframe.
Look at https://www.ilocal.nl/widgets/routeplanner/ for an example. Sorry about the fact it's Dutch, but it's about the code.
very nice post. I have a fair few clients that are "Surface Heat Treatments Specialists" and your post might have just given me a few ideas to run past them.
My main problem with these clients still remains the fact that I struggle to get them to produce the bait I ask them too. I will never be 'engineer' enough myself to produce something for them that turns the industry on enough to get links.
Cheers
Having to rely on someone else to produce the content for you is a common problem with some clients. Ideally you need to list the strengths and weaknesses of a client before recommending a link building strategy to them.
By doing this, you'd see straight away if a client has little or no resource to write content for link bait or develop widgets etc. So your link building strategy would need to focus on other things where they may have resource.
The alternative is to try and hire someone outside the company who can write the content on behalf of the company. This could take some time but once you've found someone, they would be very valuable.
Have you considered creating the content collaboratively? I could envision this in one of two ways...
1. You take a stab at creating the content and deliver it to the client. As you said, you're not 'engineer' enough so the content may not be up to par. The client will see this and say, "Woah, wait a minute...we need to improve this!" Client is now interested and starts working on it...
2. You ask the client to just bullet point the content and pass it on to you. Then, you wordsmith it and make it interesting / reader friendly / link worthy. You'll likely have to go back to the client before publication, but that's no problem...it just means your back up to option #1 but with better a better starting point!
Thanks a lot for this very insightful article. Link building is indeed a very tough industry however with some very practical and strong tips from you, I think it will help me to be successful on this industry.
hmm nice one i'm going to get one from moz soon you just watch ! ;)
Great stuff! I'm a bit of a noob to SEO, there's so many angles that you'd just never normall think of for getting links, thanks!
RobDesignbysoap
Very late to this post, but I think the Auto Trader/Guardian widget example whilst good needs a disclaimer: At the time they were owned by the same company...
Can still draw lots of inspiration, mind.
Nice post Paddy. Will keep your diamond diagram in mind for later :-)
Great article, I particularly liked:
"ask if students want to contribute ... they could link to it from the University website to help promote it."
So, several links from different colleges and universities? Nice One!
Hi Paddy, excellent and very useful post!Looking forward to more suggestions - perhaps you will cover the travel sector (Hotels, Apartments...), too.
Thank you,
Petra
Hi Petra,
Thanks for the comment.
If you'd like to submit your industry, I'll do my best to cover it if I do a follow up post. Just fill in the details here https://bit.ly/9sUN1Y
Thanks for the info, was recently working on a jewellery site, will go back to it and start using some of your tactics.
Cheers
Thanks Paddy! I really love this post. :) I have to say though that I'm really surprised that people think it's hard to get a link from SEOmoz. We're a link happy bunch around here! I wanted to throw out this old post of mine that gives 10 reasons why you should submit a YOUmoz post. Plus as you noted, jumping in and being a part of the community by commenting, writing a YOUmoz post, etc. will help you to add up those mozpoints to quickly get a followed link.
Thanks again for a great post!
Great post paddy. These are my favorite types of articles. They really make you think about how you can apply it to your industry.
I really like the last part about getting a link from seomoz. A couple weeks after I joined I submitted a post and and I was off to the races. The link from seomoz made a great impact on my site and was a great lesson about the power of anchor text at the same time.
Brilliant list with solid actionable advice there. We recently created a little app for our clients to keep track of our SEO activities, they loved it a passed it round thereby gaining us new SEO clients.
Inspiring post. Thanks for the creative thinking and actionable ideas.
Paddy to the rescue!
This post was all a fellow SEO associate and I talked about this morning over coffee.
How about this question for a client to add to the mix: What content will add to the betterment of your industry? What content can we create for the betterment of mankind!? (okay not quite that far).
Excellent post. I wouldn't put too much weight into forum sig links however. The tip for SEOMoz is a good one. Didn't know links here are dofollow after 100 points.
Nice post, i keep on following you.
Thanks for this paddy - some really useful ideas!
Great post,
printing it out and putting this apart of my process, thanks
great advice on getting difficult links. Will work on crafting the perfect blog post for youmoz.
I came to this site wondering how to get links from websites and this post was inspiring. The ideas are innovative and where as before I was thinking about contacting site owners directly, you have opened my eyes to a wide range of strategies and ideas which will almost certainly be more successful.
Thanks!
Great post Paddy!
I had a query. Do you have any strategy for link building when you are up against branded sites which have physical stores and great online presence.
Working on a small budget and inhouse can be a bit frustrating upon seeing these brands spend so much on advertising at big places.
Your inputs for competiting with such sites would be really vital.
Hi Kevin,
Thanks for the comment.
If I were running SEO on a small site and was going up against large brands, I'd choose to focus on a specific area of my site. Try to become a authority on one area rather than going after the generic keyphrases that the big brands are going to rank for and spend money on.
By doing this you can also target long tail keyphrases with your link building and on-site SEO and get yourself ranking for these first. At the same time try to engage with online communities in ways that the big brands can't, you can often put a personal touch on this kind of thing which can earn you links.
Hope that helps!
Fantastic actionable advice
Very nice post Paddy. I am definitely going to use a lot of stuff I learnt here..
Thanks for writing such an in-depth article on linking stratagies -- it helps us stay positive on linking... which can often be a cumbersome experience. Andy :-)
Great post Paddy - I find the b2b marketing world difficult in terms of link acquisition.
Great stuff Paddy. Thanks for wrapping this information for us.
It would be good to get a generic list of checkpoints we can apply to linkbuilding for niches; This way, we could get a bunch of ideas dependless of our niche.
Also, I would like to get your recommendations concerning international linkbuilding. As I mentioned in the past, it's "easy" (not so easy, but you get my point) to get links when your website language is english. If it's french, or any other language, there's an obvious lack of resources at some points. What I mean is linkbuilding is definitely more difficult for foreign languages. Would be nice to get a list of those multi-languages websites that can help you in several niches.
Thanks!
Thanks for the comment.
I'd agree that link building in other countries can be very tough, its something I'm trying to learn more about along with other aspects of international SEO. Some of the guys at SEOmoz and Distilled have experience on this so I'll look at putting together a future blog post on this.
I love posts like this - a lot of the tips can be twisted to work with many industries. Seems like widgets & content really are the bread and butter these days.
Great post! It's really great to see how people are doing things in certain niche industries that the reader might not be currently working in... some of the methods you mentioned are very applicable to other areas as well!
-Jason
Hi,
Social media and sharing seems to be a good way to have backlinks but what about the quality of those links ?
Are those popular backlinks, from social media, the best backlinks to work for ?
Thanks
Hi Sorano,
Social media links can serve a purpose in terms of getting your content promoted and spreading the word to more users. This can help build links in the long term, but social media links on their own are not likely to help your site rank for competitive terms - at least in the long term!
Ideally you want to follow these steps -
All right, thanks a lot for your anwser !
Your technique seems really very effective to get link from taugh industries. I am working on promotional product site. Plz give me some more idia to get better link to it.
Excellent post. Though I'm finding it just as useful in other industries that you did not list.
It also helps that you have a cute photo of a kitten at the top.
Thanks for such a great post on the right, ethical and scientific approach towards link building.
But, I think even the social media can contribute a lot in helping to get the right links.
With people sharing links like never before on Twitter , Facebook , etc. can help the site to get some good links if the social media campaigns are focused and managed with the PR factor in mind.
Thanks a lot for this very insightful article. Link building is indeed a very tough industry however with some very practical and strong tips from you, I think it will help me to be successful on this industry.
Excellent tips. I have found link building quite difficult on my partners jewellery site. Writing a article for the jewelry tips site you noted did help a while back. Will run through some more of your ideas later.
Some industries are so huge in terms of competition and competitive that adds even more difficult that is not described.
Nice post paddy, although I'd questions some of your tough industries on here - vets and electric bikes - really?!
What i'd add in all these industries is make sure you're doing the basic stuff as well as possible before you try the difficult stuff. Directories, articles and competitor link mining might not get you to the top in a hard industry but not getting these easy links first is making the hard work harder if you get what I mean.
I've got a similar post on some of the tough markets i've worked in - https://www.johnmcelborough.com/link-building-in-tough-markets
Hi John,
Thanks for the comment!
Whilst I'd probably agree, I think the question of what is a tough industry to do link building for is a very subjective one. For example I used to work with two B2B clients in very small industries and products which just were not that interesting. But it got to the point where I found it quite easy to get links after I became familiar with the industry. Most people would call it a tough industry but if I were to work in it again, I'd fine it quite easy :)
Thanks for the link to your article by the way, some interesting points.
Thanks for the article as it opens a door to a whole new discussion on link building on boring industries.
I am an SEO specialist focusing on payday loan industry and personally I have found it very difficult NOT TO BUY LINKS for my clients. The main reason is that everyone else in the industry does it. Of course Google keeps going through their back links and discounts those links which is the reason they buy even more links.
Average payday loan website on top pages spends 6 figure type of money on link building because most SEOs don't even want to bother to use the tactics you said.
However my clients don't have that kind of money so I don't buy links for them so my focus has been more on long tail, more descriptive and specific keywords like "get payday loans online" as opposed to "payday loans"
Anyway, if you have any suggestion that how I can survive in this jungle of link buying business without actually doing g that would be great.
Thanks
You're not the first person to say this, it can be hard not to buy links if you not only see all of your competitors doing it but also see it working for them!
For me, the risks are too high with a website where if they get caught and are banned, they lose a LOT of money. A lot of businesses are reliant upon the traffic Google send them, so the risk outweighs the benefits for them.
I know that Rand wrote a blog post about the SEOmoz position onlink buying but I can't seem to find it now. If I do I'll add a follow up comment with a link or maybe Rand may see this. From what I remember it had some advice in there too.
great thanks for the reply. If any tips you have for me to compete with my competitors let me know.
Right now I do a lot of natural link building but competitors buy links like crazy. And google keeps devaluing their links so they buy even more links....
Great first article Patrick. Hope to see more from you.
Whenever I'm brainstorming how to get links in any industry, I always return to Rand's post: The Emotions that Make Us Link. It seems that there are some very commons attributes to all link-building campaigns.
Great post - shame I couldn't add my list of toughies for feedback
You still can if you wish here - https://bit.ly/9sUN1Y
If feedback on this post is positive I'll hopefully be able to do a follow up post with more tips for other industries. There are still a lot more for me to cover so I can't guarantee I'll include everyone's suggestions but I'll do my best!
Hmmmm...is that really scalable? I mean, there are a lot of industries out there. Why not automate this?
Seems to me what you need is a Link Building Generator!
Better yet, it's likely to attract links too. LBG FTW! ;)
Hi Ryan,
You're actually the second person to say that :)
SEOmoz have the Link Acquisition Tool (currently a labs tool) which does a similar job of findig links based on the industries and location you give to it.
Ah thats a great first SEOmoz post, you could even expand this and create an application on your website that people can enter a few points such as country, industry and get an email sent to them with suggested places to look for links relevant to them.
You get the email of the people looking for help with seo/links to market to and they get a free resource they might link to....
Great idea for a link building tool!
The SEOmoz Link Acquisition tool does a similar job at the moment. (currently a Labs tool)
Right now just in english... personally after I launch it I've to tweak the google string writing the right country code (it for Italy, es for Spain...) or adjusting the query (for instance business with imprese) as with the example below:
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=italia+Business+Directory
https://www.google.com/search?hl=it&q=directories+imprese+italia
Why not doing it directly, maybe you could think... because this tool save so much time even if you have to personalise the results.
Do kittens normally have black alien eyes like that?
... it's creeping me out.
I really like your article. It's insightful and helpful in many ways.
I apologize, but I noticed one sentence you wrote in particular that I just have to comment on because of its grammatical issues:
"There is also this head-smacking tips from Rand which is very scalable no matter how many products you have, its just a case of automating the follow up email."
Here is a version of that sentence without the grammatical errors:
"There are also these head-smacking tips from Rand, which are very scalable, no matter how many products you have. It's just a case of automating the follow-up email."
Again, great article overall. I just wanted to share that little correction.
Sorry about that, I'll make a slight edit :)
Paddy, Thanks for the response. It was my question about iPhone apps for the SEO industry. I was hoping that you might link up the person who asked the question. Sadly you saw through my cunning ploy. Thanks Charlie