These are targetted at small companies, probably with limited internal resource or a small SEO agency contract, and who don't have a PR firm able to get them into newspapers or an advertising budget that will put them in magazines, on radio, etc.
Tip 1: Reviews
If you sell huge ticket items this doesn't work so well, but for sites where a typical item or purchase is in the right ballpark (e.g.: £10 - £40ish, depending on how much you'd value a link) then asking people in the right niche to review your products can be very valuable.Specifically, I've found the following to work well:
- Find sites / blogs roughly in the niche of your product (I've mentioned Blogged.com and dir.Blogflux.com but there are others)
- Check that each site is indexed (and not penalised, etc) and based in a particular geographic region, if that's important to you
- Grab their contact details off the site and fire them an email (see the example below)
- Do email from an email address at the site; if you're working as an agency, ask the client to set up an email account in your name
- Find out what they'd like, and send it to them
- They write a review on their site and link to you
- You email to thank them for the review, and ask them to update the anchor text to something with a keywords in it.
Hi Rand,
I'm Rob from Widgets R Us.
You might have come across us before; our online shop has a variety of widgets and whatnots.
I'm doing some work at the moment to try and promote our ranges. I had a read through your blog, and wondered if you'd like me to send you some of our products to have a look at? A little review would be most appreciated, and I hope your readers would enjoy the opportunity to see our widgets being given a real world test.
I saw you bought a new Thingamy last week, so perhaps I could send you a couple of widgets that would fit with that?
Best wishes,
Rob
I'm Rob from Widgets R Us.
You might have come across us before; our online shop has a variety of widgets and whatnots.
I'm doing some work at the moment to try and promote our ranges. I had a read through your blog, and wondered if you'd like me to send you some of our products to have a look at? A little review would be most appreciated, and I hope your readers would enjoy the opportunity to see our widgets being given a real world test.
I saw you bought a new Thingamy last week, so perhaps I could send you a couple of widgets that would fit with that?
Best wishes,
Rob
Tip 2: Non Commercial Content
Without substantial SEO resources, you may be put off from the idea of linkbait, given that you can put a bunch of work in, and it's not guaranteed to result in loads of links.Instead, consider creating link-worth resource-type content (it doesn't even need to be anything as organised as a regular blog) and then manually spreading this to appropriate places. Aim for content that doesn't have a great resource at the moment. Example might be:
- how to install a blue widget in a Thingamy X-1000
- the history of blue widget production
- 10 point checklist for setting up your own blue widget society
- how to use a blue widget to help you through university
- how to get a graduate job in the widget business.
- any of those niche bloggers you found earlier but you haven't talked to you
- university & college student with their .edu / .ac.uk sites
- people in very similar but non-overlapping industries
- sites which aggregate and link to useful content from a particular niche or topic
- customers who've indicated they have a website / blog / social media account (you do ask this in your customer satisfaction surveys, right?)
Tip 3: Business / Industry Friends
I love how many small sites there are out there which haven't heard of SEO, let alone tried to do any, so they have really old domains names, with a bit of good content, and have only really strong, genuine links pointing to them.
Just because it looks like that, doesn't mean it doesn't have mozRank.
There's a fair chance that some of your suppliers, clients, partners, etc have great sites like this. There's every chance that if you ask them for the favour in the right way, they'll stick a link on their site to you. Alternatively, you could offer to write a testimonial to stick on their site, which will then link to you.
For small companies that don't cover a whole country, you could try asking businesses that are similar to yours but elsewhere in the country. (eg: On the Glasgow Widget Shop's website, you could get: "If you want widget repair in Lancashire, we recommend our friends at The Bolton Widget Shop") - I'm pretty sure that even if you want to send them a bottle of whisky to say thank you, Matt Cutts won't really give two hoots.
If anyone has tried the 'reviews' tip mentioned above (or is inspired by this post to go out and try it) please do drop a comment below, and let us know how it goes.
Great article, Rob
"For small companies that don't cover a whole country, you could try asking businesses that are similar to yours but elsewhere in the country. (eg: On the Glasgow Widget Shop's website, you could get: "If you want widget repair in Lancashire, we recommend our friends at The Bolton Widget Shop")"
I found this bit is very enlightening, not only to get links from, but also the business opportunities.
Thank you for the post
Yeah. This was a great take away for me too.
For reviews, I'd suggest doing more than just getting a correct email address, actually spend some proper time on their site: Dig around for a first name, make it clear you've read some of their content. Plus, if they've got any sort of offline publication, buy it and read it!
Doing the above foundation work was responsible for landing a 2-3 page product review, which is getting published in December. 1/16th of the advertising cost for even better exposure.
Treat this as a Tip 4 if you will: Contests/Giveaways
I ran one recently (you entered by commenting on the blog), we allowed additional entries by tweeting the giveaway URL or blogging about it. Those trackbacks piled up pretty quickly.
I agree with your tip #4. I've found that contests/giveaways are not only great linkbait, but they can create great user generated content for you as well. By incorporating blogging or other user gen methods into the contest or giveaway, you win twice - IF it's done right. Prepare well, research putting on a contest, and BE CREATIVE.
Another approach I've seen work recently is to provide products to an online company celebrating some event. We donated some products and received not only recognition from the company we donated to but also 10-20 nice online comments mentioning our brand and products from users of that site.
Great! The fallout through the network of something like that can be at least as valuable as the initial coverage.
nice article with some pretty simple beginner tips. I'd also refer back to some of the recent "head smacking tips" that Rand has posted.
In particular modifying your order confirmation email to ask users to review the product, service on their website in return for a voucher code or credit note.
Cheers,
Ben
A tool I am using to find similar sites to mine is SimilarSites
www.similarsites.com
some of the sites are competition (always good to know) but some of them are great for link exchange
May I repeat one thing you said: Find sites / blogs roughly in the niche of your productRelevance is the key. I can't count how often a small business asks me what the best places are to get do-follow links, or wants some way to send a mass-request to all of them. It's like the days of search-engine submission all over again. For a small site, a handful of relevant links are more valuable than 100 crap links.
years ago, I SEO'ed a very small niche ecommerce site and relied heavily on relevant industry blogs and actually competitors. We ended up successfully obtaining do-follow links from many competitors by providing resources and information that they were not able to provide.
A very good thing about small mom and pop ecommerce sites is that alot of these smaller business owners do not know how to SEO or what SEO is. They've been around for YEARS and usually have good PR as well, and never thought to expand their website or develop it into something big. I targeted these smaller businesses that didn't really employ nofollow links and really pushed the resources my site provided. They eventually caved and found that the resources we provided could help their business as well, despite being a competitor.
Why they didn't think to just write their own resources? Who knows...people are lazy, they want to run a business, not write articles.
As for blogs go, I submitted many guest-written articles to relevant blogs. Working in a small niche industry, you form relationships rather easily with people/bloggers in that same industry.Take advantage of it!
I have been debating with people about the value of not relevant BUT high trust/PR links.
My thought is they might not build rank for terms but do build trust/PR.
What do you think?
As someone who is new to SEO articles like this are extremly helpful. I will particularly be looking at the writing of an article/how to/etc. However, I find myself in a difficult situation with some of the other tips, and wondered if you had any suggestions.
My industry is in steel counterweights and is EXTREMLY competitive, not only for customers, but for suppliers as well since the cost of the materials can really drive costs, and make or break a sale. So we can't do anything to tip off our competitors on who either our customers are, or our suppliers.
Also, each of our counterweights is customer built to our customers prints, so we don't have "stock" parts to get reveiws on.
We are members of certain associations which I have made sure our profiles include our web site, and for those that have "Industry Links" had our web site added to the list.
WOuld anyone have any suggestions on how to build links without giving away customers or suppliers information?
Hi Thutzler;
I don't know anything about your industry, but it sounds like it could be ripe for some resource pages.
For example, articles about 'How to choose a steel counterweight' or 'Top 10 uses for a steel counterweight' or 'How steel counterweights helped the Phillies win the World Series' could be interesting and link-worthy perhaps?
I really like the review idea since these sort of links will be valuable of course depending on the source and quality of writing.
The hardest part is finding people that actually have websites since it probably be close to zero depending on your market.
Rand made a post a while back about asking your customers a few days after their purchase to give a link. This is a great time to get a good link and you could even give away that product for free in exchange for the review. You can also have a run through your exisiting customer list and check for custom domains in their e-mail address and contact these people personally.
I'm a big fan of the non commercial content, even just the simple stuff which isn't necessarily link bait. It is great for just building credibility and authority in your niche. You don't need to be constantly selling to make money.
I'd like to add that offering users the option to write product reviews can be good for SEO.
This is a great way to get unique content on an eCom site that may otherwise have very little unique content. As it may be using the standard product description that 101 other sites are using.
This applies to other forms of user generated content too forum posts, blog comments etc
I'll second adders comments about reviews. My best selling product is highly ranked on Google -and Google uses a reviewers comments and not the product description or meta tag description.
Great tip. (I almost subtitled this post with 'Part 1' when I realised how much you can say for small sites like this.)
Onsite product reviews are great for generating unique content - particularly if you have a catalogue of products that are similar to other sites.
If you're having success generating positive reviews, I'd also suggest submitting your products to Google Base (Google Product Search) and then getting people to review your products through Google Checkout / other review sites - this should help them appear more often and more highly in search results for the particular product.
Where do you draw the line on reviews? Wasn't there a bunch of controversy around sending bloggers your product with the hope of getting reviews and links? Where is the line with getting links/reviews and paying for links?
That's what I was thinking too...although perhaps I've just been listening to Michael Gray too much lately ;)
This is a very interesting post, thanks! I am new to SEOmoz. I am working with a small eCom site as a consultant, so I will be sure to re-read this over the next few weeks as I try to build their SERP.
One of the greatest analogies to this post would be to compare it to automotive online forums. Such forums like NicoClub, FreshAlloy and HondaTech dominate search engines with user generated content. I know Nico is position well on great how-to's.
Another great example is https://www.frsport.com/
They proved a Guides, Writeups, Articles section, which they link to in there forum signatures on major sites like Zilvia, Nico, FA, etc. They created an awesome online reference guide that drives traffic, as well as creates inbound marketing for their brand.
Knowledge is power, knowledge is free.
The non commercial avenue is something I am very keen on. I have a friend that has a very low search volume sports related product (VLSVSRP) and I have been toying with the idea to have him put together a really nice guide or cheat sheet on some type of sports activity. Something worthy of linkbait.
My hope is to bring brand awareness to his product/website from people that would probably never have thought "boy I sure do need some “VLSVSRP”.
I’ll keep you posted on the results.
Very useful for me
Any other good way to get product reviews rather than offering the product itself. The company policy prohibits us from doing so.
Any bright ideas?
Also, any ideas on how to get linked from the magazies like cosmo, frisky, etc.
Thanks Rob for Explaining . how this this Actually Work for Small E commerce Sites. Great SEO Explanation.
The best investment i ever made was taking subscription for https://ahrefs.com. I can dig out what my competitors are doing what is working for them etc etc. Links are generally a good indicator of social activities planned by competitors. I also look at similarto.us and similarweb for finding details on related services and traffic details.
This is good stuff and another powerful example of why the SEOmoz community is such a great place with people sharing valuable content. Thank you.
Neat post Rob, thanks. On the tip #4 - Competitions sub-thread, another fantastic bi-product of competitons is at worst semi-qualified names and contact details for target customers. Compared to list buying, our experience of competiton entrants has been that they are cheap and good.
I like the idea of writing 101s for your products. Thanks for sharing.
Videos can be another powerful way to build brand recognition, get another listing in the SERPs, and build links. You could create an instructional video on how to use the product in a new and different way, tutorials, reviews, or go the humor route. For software/online-based stuff, using something like Camtasia and putting together a quick tutorial is very easy and could generate some good links.
Rob nice post.
I think the review tip is something of interest based on all this issue around FTC and bloggers getting paid/rewarded for comment.
There are also some shopping comparison websites that allow your store to have a profile, feeding their products thru rss is another duplicate content question...
If you are really slack or cant ask for links as part of company policy you can pick a set of websites/bloggers that you wish to get links from and get their postal details.
Send them out a gift card for your online store that they can use or pass onto friends/family along with a soft sales letter personally signed inviting them to test your store.
Gift cards can also work well for student/charity groups offering gift cards for their weekly newsletters/competitions which often keep past newsletters on their websites, giving you a link...
It is then their choice if they chose to write a post or even contact your website/store and matt cutts cant get cross at you...
A little outside of SEO, but it may also be benefical to think about getting your products into places like shopzilla, setting up on amazon and also ebay.
I agree Jeff. Many of these shopping sites have areas where users can leave reviews of your products as well. Shopping.com and Nextag.com are similar sites offering this feature to add your products and get reviews. These reviews can be good for SEO, especially in the near future where buzz about you/your product may become a signal in determining rankings. But, like in real-world business, creating positive buzz is about creating a positive customer experience.
Very good ideas...I have been working on a small ecommerce site and you got me thinking...thanks.
Thank you. I value practical articles, especially your ideas for resource content.
@rin:jiang I like your idea "If you want widget repair in Lancashire, we recommend our friends at The Bolton Widget Shop"
this concept is really new for me!!!
Great article with some really handy tips for beginners and people who are already experienced in SEO. I've been doing SEO for a while but this has some good tips I could put to use. Thanks.
Really interesting artilcle. I never though to ask my supplier for a link
You obviously put a lot of work into that post and its very interesting to see the thought process that you went through to come up with those conclusion. Thanks for sharing your deep thoughts. I must admit that I think you nailed it on this one.I'm new to the blogging business. I'd love to learn more about this topic. I've bookmarked your blog. Looking forwards for your new posts.
That's some good advice, I'm going to use it.
By the way - I do data entry and custom MS Access/VBA programming - I would like to offer you a sample of my service and a little review would be most appreciated.
How m'I doing?
Thanks for the article.
I am a loyal reader of SEOMOZ, I am a new seo practitioner.
This article helped me a lot.
Thanks again,
Robin.
It’s been an interesting article. The tips which you have stated are really good and easy to implement. Thanks a lot for sharing such a useful information
Now that's what I call a great way to explain Link Building for Small eCommerce Sites A very informative SEO post.