Following on from my debut SEOmoz blog post on How to Get Links in Tough Industries, I wanted to go into a bit more detail about the processes you can use to find people who are likely to link to you. Using the right processes to identify the leaders in your industry can give you a much better return on your time spent link building. This is for two reasons -
- You are finding people with a genuine interest in your industry who are more likely to reply to you
- You are finding people who are influential which can lead to more links from their audience
We all know that link building is hard, it takes time, patience and an uncanny ability to handle rejection. I often like to talk about improving your link building conversion rate, if you can do this then you are making your life a lot easier. This post is designed to help improve your link building conversion rate by reaching out to the right people.
Here is a quick visual to show you the basic process of what you are doing:
This is the process I like to work to when getting links from specific targets. It is very simple but from experience, many people struggle with finding the right people to get links from. Here are some specific ways you can find these people. I'll probably cover the other areas in more detail in a subsequent post.
Getting Inspiration
I like to start the process by brainstorming a few ideas of what type of people are interested in my topic, luckily I've got some great colleagues to bounce ideas off and help with this process. If you tend to struggle with this process, Spezify is quite a nice tool for visualizing a topic and seeing what is happening online related to that topic. This can often give you some links to places you may not have previously thought of to reach out to.
Find Influential Tweeters
Although strictly speaking, Twitter is not good for building links, finding people on Twitter who have a large number of followers and have a lot of influence can be very useful in spreading the word for you. These people usually have their own websites outside of Twitter too that may be of help to you for traditional link building.
So how do you find people on Twitter who are influential?
WeFollow is a nice little tool for this, a quick test of "SEO" as a keyword proves to be pretty accurate to me:
You now have a list of influential people from within your industry. What next?
- Follow them
- Make a note of what they like to tweet about
- Check their personal websites for more info
- Look at what type of stuff they retweet
- Retweet their stuff
- Interact with them constructively
- Ask for their opinion on something
By doing all of these things, you are building a relationship with this person and finding out what it takes to get their attention. You are also learning about what interests them and what type of content you need to create to get them to tweet about it. You are also opening a channel of communication with them which you can use to push your own content when the time is right. Once you have built up a rapport with this person, you are in a good position to send them a link to your content and ask for their opinion on it.
Find Local People
This is something that I've found to work very well when doing outreach. If you're fortunate enough to live quite close to someone who you can get a link from, mention it when you contact them. This works very well if you are a small local business who is trying to get some attention and help from local people. It can be a little difficult to find these type of people but here are a couple of ideas -
Search Twitter Local
You can find people who are tweeting about your topic within a certain number of miles of your location. Just head over to Twitter Advanced Search and look for this section:
Local Directories
Dmoz has section dedicated to listing websites because they are based in a certain area. For example, if I'd just launched a website which was for my music DJ service in Stratford-upon-Avon, I may want to contact a few people on this page to let them know about it.
There are literally tons of local directories where you can find people to contact, here is a UK list and here is a US list. These lists were originally designed as places for you to get links from, but there is nothing to stop you getting creative and getting links from the places on these directories too!
Foursquare
Whilst you are following influential people on Twitter, you may notice that they are using Foursquare to check-in to various places. If these places just happen to be in your local area, then there is the possibility of contacting them and seeing if they want to meet for a coffee. This is probably more useful for finding business contacts and networking as it is for link building but it is worth mentioning as a method of finding people who are local to you. Even if you don't meet someone, you can still get an indicator of what area they are in and use this as a hook in your opening email or phone call.
Survey your Customers
I'm a big fan of getting your customers to help you with link building. The idea in relation to this post is to find out from your customers who they follow in your industry and what sites they visit for information.
This is incredibly easy to setup and can provide you with real, actionable data. If your website has a big Twitter following, you can even ask the question in a Tweet or send out an email to previous customers. You only need to ask a couple of questions along the lines of -
- Are you active on Twitter? If so, who do you follow for information about your topic here?
- Do you frequently visit blogs and websites on your topic here, if so which are your favorite?
- Are you a member of any forums on your topic here, if so which ones?
You can get all of the replies together and see which sites or tweeters or mentioned the most. Then you have a quality, targeted list of people to go after to get links.
Forums
Noooo! Forums are no good for link building I hear you shout. For the record, they can be good for link building, but thats a discussion for another day :) What we are interested in is what makes a forum active and who the key leaders and influencers are. There are ways you can use this information to your advantage and get links from places outside of the forum.
First of all how to find the forums which are active. We just use a couple of simple Google search tools:
All I've done is searched for my keyword which is link building, clicked on discussions on the left hand side, then selected from the past 24 hours. Nice and simple and I've now ended up with 50k + results.
Now where this helps us for link building is being able to find which people on these forums are moderators and ones which are active contributors. This is the equivalent of finding people who are influential on Twitter which I described above. Most forums will have this easily accessible although you may need to register. You are looking for a list of "Top Posters" or "Top Contributors".
Once you have found these people, see if their profiles or footers contain links to their Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin or personal blog. Then you can see if they may be interested in your website, hopefully they are which makes them a primary candidate to get a link from!
The one big advantage of this approach is that if they talk about you on their blog, its perfectly reasonable for you to ask them to mention it on the forum which means even more exposure (and links) for you.
I love this one! Using the Facebook Ads system, you can carry out research into the likes and interests of the gazillions (ok millions) of Facebook users. So within a few minutes you can have a list of people who you know are interested in a certain topic. From here, you have a couple of options -
- You could then start a PPC campaign on Facebook which aims to grab their details in exchange for some kind of incentive, for example you could try and target users who have their own blogs. You can ask them to submit a story, blog about a topic, upload a picture, loads of stuff to try and capture this type of user
- Join the group with the other members and interact with them and the admins of the group. This is a similar approach as you'd take in forums to try and work out who may be in a position to help you push your content on the group and external sites
Advanced Search Operators
We are getting more into "traditional" SEO here as opposed to market research but this is another favourite of mine but with a bit of a twist. Firstly though I'd advise you to go take a look at the SEOmoz Guide on Advanced Search Operators.
Another great place to start is the SEOmoz Link Acquisition Assistant (PRO Only). This tool does a lot of the hard work for you and can find lots of places to get links from as well as making you think a bit more about how you can tweak the operators to your own needs.
Here are a few of my personal favourites when it comes to advanced queries.
This will restrict results to only UK Universities which mention blogs. If you are in the US, just swap out .ac.uk and put in .edu:
keyword here inurl:.ac.uk +blogs
Same as above but this will only show results with blogs in the URL:
keyword here inurl:.ac.uk inurl:blogs
This one is designed to help you find blogs which are active, therefore giving you a better chance of getting a link. This query only shows me results which have published posts in July 2010. This isn't perfect as all blogs work differently but you will still get some good results.
keyword here inurl:2010/07
My best advice here is to just go and experiment and keep tweaking queries until they give you the results you need. By doing this you are filtering out all the websites which are not right for you and therefore improving your efficiency and link building conversion rate. Here is a useful reference guide for a ton of Google advanced operators.
The Twist...
Don't do what everyone else does and start at page 1 of the search results. These guys get link requests all day long!
Start at page 10 of results. These guys are less likely to get link requests if they are not always at the top of Google, so you could have a better chance of getting their attention and getting the link you want. The websites may be of a lower quality but as long as you use your due diligence and analysis, you will still get some good quality sites and valuable links.
Bonus Random Tip
I'm often asked about finding people who can guest blog for you on a particular subject. This advanced search query may help a little to find these people.
keyword here inurl:author
Because of the way that some blogs work, they often put "author" in the URL of pages which contain all the posts by a writer as well as contact details. Here is an example using Danny's page at SEOmoz.
As always I welcome your feedback and additional ideas in the comments below. I'll do my best to reply to any questions.
This also seems like a good time to shamelessly plug the Distilled & SEOmoz Pro SEO Seminar in London. I attended this event last year, before I joined Distilled. Of the conferences I went to, it was one of the best in terms of actionable tips and quality of the talks. I'd highly advise you to take a look if you are looking for some advanced SEO strategies.
Stop giving away my link building tactics :P
I am glad that you highlighted the fact that when requesting links, start from the lower end of SERP pages.
Nice post Paddy. You spoke my mind. I would like to add one more blue square in your first diagram and that is "Establish yourself as a recognized authority in your niche". This is important before you try to 'build a relationship' for number of reasons:
1. People take you seriously and show interest in what you say/tweet. If you are following 1000+ people how many tweets you even consider looking at. Very few. And who are those people whose tweet you consider. The one who has influcened you in the past like Matt Cutts. So out of 50 tweets, matt cutts tweet will stand out and get your attention and click. Same is the case with digg, stumbleupon and any other social network.
2. Influencers are influenced by other influencers. These influencers can be other recognized authorities in their niche or people with whom they have special relationship like friends, relatives, colleagues, other top viral connectors etc. To get the attention of an influencer, you first need to be in his clique which is not easy. If the influencer is not following you, your tweets will not reach to him. Even if your tweets reach to him, there is a high probability that he will overlook them as he gets thousand of tweets like this and you are not someone with whom he is infulenced in the first place. One easier way of getting the attention is to infulence the following of influencers like his colleagues or friends. If you could impress them, they can forward your tweet to the influencer for consideration. It is just like recommendation in the offline world. You consider recommendations from those who you know. Don't you?
3. One you are a recongized authority, you start getting fans/followers and other influencers who help in making your contents go viral. Authority helps in expanding you network of target audience and getting repeated visits/links from industry influencers. To know more about the relationshp between authority and networking understand the link building pyramid.
Regarding finding guest post oppurtunities, article submission sites can be of tremendous help. Here you will find all those webmasters who are struggling to build links for their websites. For e.g. go to ezinearticles.com and type your industry keyword say 'event planning'in the internal search box. You will then get a list of articles on the topic. The writers of these articles are your potential linking partners. Contact them and they will more than happy (hopefully) to accept you guest post or write a guest post. You can also use blog directories (like technorati) and meetup sites like meetup.com to find potential linking partners. Here is one advanced search engine query which has always worked for me in finding guest post opportunities:
Industry-Keyword + inurl:category/guest
Just thinking when you will decide to post a YOUmoz...
I have submitted a post today for consideration.
Great! Surely Jennita and the SEOmoz staff will approve it a second.
I second that.. :-) Well done himanshu!
>The one who has influcened you in the past like Matt Cutts. So out of 50 tweets, matt cutts tweet will stand out and get your attention and click.
Has anyone tried proximity association - what I mean is you make sure that the next tweet after MC's is yours. The SEO tweet next MC's has to get more focus by simply being next to where the eyes rest ... or am I wrong.
I'm sure you could have a script to drop a new tweet when as soon as some other person tweets? Anyone know of such a thing, am I way behind the wave I don't use twitter much.
Thanks for the comment and feedback.
Whilst I agree that becoming an authority is important, it is something that I feel comes after the process I've outlined above. You need to do your researchon who leads your industry at the moment and see what they are doing right. Once you've put all this hard work in then you are in a better position to be naturally seen as the authority.
Oh and I look forward to the Youmoz post :)
Paddy
This is great. You've really set out some imaginative link-building processes here, and one which we've not thought to use at GWS before- searching keyword here inurl:author.
We've just taken on a client who is in a particularly competitive sales-based industry and one for which web visibility is only half the battle- we have to find creative ways to build up their profile as a trustworthy and reputable provider, and we're brainstorming ideas...the blog post search has really helped with that. We'll be giving you a mention in our 'weekly round up post'- will tweet at you when it goes live.
Regards Cordelia@GWS Media, Bristol, UK
Lots of good advice - be an internet stalker of influential people, (only of the good kind) keep quiet, absorb what is going on around you, then join in the conversation with something of value to say - links will follow.
Yes I wanted to be careful not to stray off into what appeared to be online stalking with some of my recommendations!
The principles are good though and essentially you are just researching a market before entering it yourself, you just need to be careful not to go overboard I guess :)
Great post Paddy. Explored some new ideas through your post. Thanks for the information about some real cool tools here like spezify and wefollow. Didn't know about them before. But they are great to use. Loved your concept on link-building. Definitely an interesting method for quality link-building
Thanks for sharing. Kudos to you. :)
Link building is a confusing thing for lots of websites. It's a lucky thing for them (and us) that you spell out the details and give examples.
Overall we believe the best way to build links is to create value-add content. Easier said than done but anything worthwhile takes time.
thanks for sharing!
Great article, funny that you mention Stratford-upon-Avon. I know that it's quite a famous town but I'm there all the time. My girlfriend lives right in the centre of it.
It's interesting that you should talk about Foursquare, it's amazing how many leads and how much value I've gained from using things like Foursquare and Gowalla, not only that but the game dynamic of these apps makes them even more fun. I suppose it's the same as social networking, you always are networking (which is usually a bit boring) but it's fun!
Thanks for the comment.
I used to live in Birmingham so I visited Stratford upon Avon quite a lot, beautiful place to live! :)
Yes Foursquare has a lot of potential, although I know it has a few opposers who do not like it. I'm somewhere in the middle right now, I can see potential butncan also see problems if it gets too big and starts being spammed/abused.
Ohhh, I live in Redditch which is ridiculously close to Birmingham and work in Alvechurch which is also basically Birmingham.
There are a few concerns about Foursquare. I get quite a few followers on it who I don't know. I think there's far more value in the Tweets that are sent out automatically. For example, I sent out an automatic Tweet whilst travelling through Barnt Green and then got a phone call a little while later from someone looking for a website designer...
Any specific suggestions for .ca sites targeting Canada?
Great post, I was just fretting about link building for a potential job I have coming up and I'm glad to have a few directions I can go in now. It's interesting thinking about how to apply this to clients. I know that I can suck it up and deal with Twitter (I know I have to, I always just have a hard time getting into it), but my (older) clients don't necessarily use Twitter or blogs or Facebook.
How much social media consultation are people giving to clients? It's so much work to maintain I can't imagine it being feasible to throw a Twitter at someone and hope they can keep it going to get these links. How much work can you put into this end of research as a consultant before it gets out of hand? How much homework do you have the client do for you?
You are describing interesting ways of finding links. I also use Twitter and recently I also seek link building ideas on social bookmarking services such as digg or delicious.
Nice article Paddy.Explained the process effectively and some good advices by some users in comments.
Thanks
Vinayak
<a href="https://www.bloggout.com" title"Bloggout" > </a>
Great article! Do you have any new suggestions for building backlinks since the latest Google updates? We have found that tagging images with links have been a great way to create instant backlinks using, IMGUR, Google Drive Public Images, Social Media(Obviously), Wikipedia, and others. Do you have any new insights for posting backlink images?
Thanks,
Kyle Taggart
nice list.
Looking back - a lot of these things are still very much relevant.
Thanks for the tips - I agree that Facebook and Twitter are so important for link building. Lots of businesses are reluctant to sign up and stick to 'traditional' methods. But social networking has become too huge to ignore.
Lovely information..also it would be beter that if we could follow up the matt cuts suggestion on link building that will be benificial as well.Also some real practicle experience can make you innovative in terms of link building...so try to find your creative idea making unique linking instead of following the famouse personalities...
Cheers!
Anirban
Great post. I've been using Spezify for my keyword research for a little while, I think that it's a great tool.
Another great way to obtain backlinks.. il sure add this to my arsenal..
Paul
ThinkCore SEO
[link removed by editor]
Thanks for the post. I went through it fast and I must read it again when I get home but I wanted to include a note. There are some industries, such as financial industry in particular the conversational parts of it (payday loans, debt consolidation, credit reports) where it is really hard to get links from the market leaders and blog because chances are they are affiliates of big guys and competitors.
It is not impossible but it is very hard. Any suggestions on how we can cope we industries like that?
Thanks
I'd agree that the finance market can be a tough one to get links for as it is so competitive. As you say though it isn't impossible.
One great advantage that the finance market has in terms of getting links is that there are numbers everywhere which to an average person, may not make sense. This opens up the possibility of visualising numbers in the form of graphs, info graphics etc which the average person can understand.
If done well, these can often attract links and traffic. Going a step further, you could do monthly reports and visualisations of industry stats and figures. Here is an example of a non-finance site who do a good job of regularly reporting industry stats -
https://www.autoblog.com/category/by-the-numbers
I guess an actionable tip I could give here, would be to find a high authority site who produce reports but in a bad way or non-visual way. Then see if you can reproduce the stats in a better way to publish on your own site. You would need to make sure you have permission to do this of course but all it may need is a link to the source of the data.
Great idea thanks
Also I wanted to add, when I worked for FreeCreditReport.com, we came up with those commercials (the credit report band) that turned credit report, something that is very boring, into something very exciting.
Ofter airing it,a few days later we saw links coming from everywhere.
But current clients are a lot smaller and can afford to do TV commercials perhaps I can push them to do some online \ youtube videos and maybe they can get some links that way too.
But I like your graph idea. I will defiantly try it. People are more visual theses days.
helpful post Paddy
i got lots of ideas and tools from here.
Thanks for sharing
I really appreciate the post! Thanks for the Advanced search operator tips! this is going to be a tremendous help!
Really good post on link building. Appreciate you sharing this.
Ben
Fabulous.... I'd not seen Spezify before, but it's so helpful. I typed in a couple of topics and ended up cropping screenshots of some quotes I'd found as they look fab, they'll be going in the blog post.
Then, for another topic, I ended up finding loads of great images from Flickr too, which I went to browse...
Thanks for suggesting it - I'll deffo be bookmarking that.
I'm sure that there are loads of other uses for Spezify other than brainstorming which I haven't discovered yet. It really does seem like a really cool bit of software.
The other thing that I've used it for as well is just putting in a keyword for a market that I don't know a lot about. Very quickly I can get a broad overview of whats going on within this market at the moment.
Great Tools mentioned. Spezify gives you great data and you can use it for your keyword research, too.
I'd be interested to know more about how you use it for keyword research. I'm sure there are a ton of other uses for Spezify which I haven't discovered yet!
Great post Paddy - lots of great ideas and tools here.
I've not used Spezify before - am off to have a play :)
It can get quite addictive so be careful :)
Starting at page 10 .. interesting. That's creative and might really be worth taking a closer look.
Good post.
Link building is the most difficult but most rewarding part of SEO. I struggle with it a great deal, and the more info about link building the better.
I liked the Tips Forums, Twitter ones they are really exciting and helpful.
This post will be much helpful for my next link building campaigns.
I have to be careful about link building with our equestrian businesses... most barns don't like having other competitor links on their site at the risk of losing money! We fortunately have some exceptions where we work closely with other businesses.
Thanks for the post, this points out to me that I need to concentrate on the more objective industries (horse magazines, information and databases) to get objective links where we probably won't be misrepresented.
Great suggestion Paddy.
To use Twitter as a way to start a friendly relation with top influencers is somehow a new version of the linkerati practice, that in its original statements (bloggers and others media as Reddit, Stumble Upon, Digg, Delicious or relevant websites) I still consider overly valid.
The tip to start from the low competitive websites to start a link building campaign is very good too, and very useful especially for smallbusiness or startups who are still moving their first steps online.
Finally, the Facebook tactic is potentially huge, as everything on Facebook follow the Six Grade of Separation theory, therefore if you start to connect with one or more groups/pages/"facebookerati", then you can possibly find your way to an infinite number of people.
Thanks for the comment.
I totally agree that the Facebook tactic could be potentially huge. Using Google Adwords has long been a link building tactic for a new site (even though many don't seem to use it). Facebook PPC is just an extension to this and in some cases, could help you reach a more targeted audience.
Hi Paddy--
Great post! Lots of tips and tricks, which is what we like! I played around with some of your ideas and had some head-smacking "ah ha" moments. (So thanks to you, I get to walk around the office with a slightly red forhead for the rest of the day!) ;)
Like others who have left comments, I hadn't ever heard of Spezify, so I gave it a spin. It was fun and great to see my business was listed on there already.
One thing I did have a (slight) issue with, though, is that on GetListed.org, one of the links was for Localeze.com. I went ahead and started filling out all of the different form questions (ended up spending a half hour on it) and then got to the end and found out you had to pay $297.
**Just warning others not to spend time on it if they don't want to pay for it.**
Like I said, though, great post! :)
Thanks for the comment Summer.
Yes unfortunately some local directories can charge quite a high fee for inclusion, it then becomes a business decision about whether to pay this and whether you are going to get benefit from it. Sometimes with these type of directories, the benefit lies in getting real click through customers rather than pure SEO benefit.
This can sometimes make the fee worthwhile, but as I said it is a business decision.
A lot of helpful tips here. Thanks for the post. I had never heard of Spezify before, looks like a cool tool!
This is a wonderful opinion. The things mentioned are great andneeds to be appreciated by everyone.
All great ideas, unfortunately the hard part as always, is execution. Obviously if your content is regurgitated and hacky, all of the effort promoting it will be a waste of time.