Without a solid base of links, your site won't be competitive in the SERPs — even if you do everything else right. But building your first few links can be difficult and discouraging, especially for new websites. Never fear — Rand is here to share three relatively quick, easy, and tool-free (read: actually free) methods to build that solid base and earn yourself links.
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Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about how to get those first few links that every website needs to be able to compete. Many folks I know when you get started with link building, it can seem daunting and overwhelming.
So let me walk you through what is essentially a half a day of work, maybe three or four hours of work to try these three tactics that will almost certainly get your business or your organization the first handful, let's say 50 links that you need to start being able to compete. Content can you take you a long way. Keywords can take you a long way. Engagement and interaction can take you a long way. But you've got to have a base of links. So let's get started here.
#1. Your brand name, domain name, and founder's/execs names
The first one is basically looking for links that come from your own name, your brand name, your domain name potentially, and the names of the founders or people who run your company.
Step One: Search Google for the names in quotes.
So if it was me and Moz, you'd be searching for "Rand Fishkin" or "Moz.com" in quotes, not the domain name in the URL field. But in the Google search bar, I'd be searching for "Moz.com" in quotes or "Moz + SEO." Moz also has other meanings, including the singer Morrissey, which makes for confusing types of things. If you have that, you'll need to use your brand name plus some sort of signifier or identifier. It's very rare that Morrissey gets mentioned along with search engine optimization. It's very often that Moz gets mentioned along with SEO, and so I can combine those to search for it. So any of these searches will result in a big list of tons of Google results.
Step Two: Manually check the top let's say 50 to 100 results to confirm that...
- They link to the right place, and if they don't, if there are mentions of Rand Fishkin that don't link to Moz, we should fix that. We're going to contact those people.
- If you can control the anchor text and where the link location points, you can update it. For example, I can go to my LinkedIn. My LinkedIn has a link to Moz. I could update that if I were at a different company or if Moz's domain name changed, for example when it did change from SEOmoz to just Moz.
- If it's missing or wrong, I find the right people, I email them, and I fix it. As a result, I should have something like this. Every single mention in Google has a link on the page to my website. I can get that from brand name, from domain name, and from founders and executives. That's a lot of great links.
#2. Sites that list your competition
So this is essentially saying we're going to...
Step One: Identify your top 5 or 10 most visible on the web competitors.
This is a process that you can go through on your own to identify, well, these are the 5 or 10 that we see on the web very frequently for searches that we wish we competed for, or we see them mentioned in the press a ton, whatever it is.
Step Two: Search Google not for each one individually, but rather for combinations, usually two, three, or four of them all together.
For example, if I were making a new whiteboard pen company, I would look for the existing ones, like Pilot and Expo and Quartet and PandaBoard. I might search for Pilot and PandaBoard first. Then I might search for Pilot and Expo. Then I might search for PandaBoard and Quartet and all these various combinations of these different ones.
Step Three: Visit any sites in the SERPs that list multiple competitors in any sort of format (a directory structure, comparisons, a list, etc.)
Then in each of those cases, I would submit or I would try and contact or get in touch with whoever runs that list and say, "Hey, my company, my organization also belongs on here because, like these other ones you've listed, we do the same thing." So if it's here's whiteboard pen brands, Expo, PandaBoard, Quartet, and your site, which should now link to YourSite.com.
This is a little more challenging. You won't have as high a hit rate as you will with your own brand names. But again, great way to expand your link portfolio. You can usually almost always get 20 or 30 different sites that are listing people in your field and get on those lists.
#3. Sites that list people/orgs in your field, your geography, with your attributes.
This is sites that list people or organizations in a particular field, a particular region, with particular attributes, or some combination of those three. So they're saying here are European-based whiteboard pen manufacturers or European-based manufacturers who were founded by women.
So you can say, "Aha, that's a unique attribute, that's a geography, and that's my field. I'm in manufacturing. I make whiteboard pens. Our cofounder was a woman, and we are in Europe. So therefore we count in all three of those. We should be on that list." You're looking for lists like these, which might not list your competitors, but are high-quality opportunities to get good links.
Step One:
- List your organization's areas of operation. So that would be like we are in technology, or we're in manufacturing or software or services, or we're a utility, or we're finance tech, or whatever we are. You can start from macro and go down to micro at each of those levels.
- List your geography in the same format from macro to micro. You want to go as broad as continent, for example Europe, down to country, region, county, city, even neighborhood. There are websites that list, "Oh, well, these are startups that are based in Ballard, Seattle, Washington in the United States in North America." So you go, "Okay, I can fit in there."
- List your unique attributes. Were you founded by someone whose attributes are different than normal? Moz, obviously my cofounder was my mom, Gillian. So Moz is a cofounded-by-a-woman company. Are you eco-friendly? Maybe you buy carbon credits to offset, or maybe you have a very eco-friendly energy policy. Or you have committed to donating to charity, like Salesforce has. Or you have an all-remote team. Or maybe you're very GLBTQIA-friendly. Or you have a very generous family leave policy. Whatever interesting attributes there are about you, you can list those and then you can combine them.
Step Two: Search Google for lists of businesses or websites or organizations that have some of these attributes in your region or with your focus.
For example, Washington state venture-backed companies. Moz is a venture-backed company, so I could potentially get on that list. Or the EU-based manufacturing companies started by women, and I could get on that list with my whiteboard pen company based there. You can find lots and lots of these if you sort of take from your list, start searching Google and discover those results. You'll use the same process you did here.
You know what the great thing about all three of these is? No tools required. You don't have to pay for a single tool. You don't have to worry about Domain Authority. You don't have to worry about any sort of link qualification process or paying for something expensive. You can do this manually by yourself with Google as your only tool, and that will get you some of those first early links.
If you've got additional suggestions, please leave them down in the comments. I look forward to chatting with you there. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.
Hey Rand,
I would also suggest a simple tactic that works - 'Giving Testimonials'. As a business, if you have vendors with an online presence, give them testimonials for their work. They will happily publish that on their websites. You not only get a backlink, but also, you get noticed by their website audience. Adding to that, when that vendor wants to promote themselves through other media channels, they might use your testimonial to show how good they are at their work. With them getting benefits for that, you also get more eyeballs looking at you. :)
Thanks
Great... Thanks for this extra dose Praveen :)
Extra Dose
:p
Good tactic. I would suggest even calling those people you want a link from. Once you talk to them it is much easier to get a link. But you should have the stamina / courage for it.
Thanks you @PravinSharma.
I'll try this.
Interesting comment here. Not sure how to acquire them without being a customer but would welcome the idea!
That's a good one! Thank you!
Solid introductory link building tactics that we feel a lot of people skip over. Great tips Rand! Using some search strings like the following can be a huge help for identifying some easy link opportunities as well:
helpful..! Thanks
Thanks :-)
thanks .can u elaborate more
No problem. So a "search string" is essentially an advanced way to search on Google to get more specific results. So using my example of “city” intitle:directory, if you are a marketing agency in New York, NY you could type into Google ("New York" intitle:directory) or as another example ("marketing agency" inurl:links) to potentially uncover some places your competitors are listed that you could also get your business listed. These are just examples and you may have to try a few different variations to uncover some relevant links opps.
Thank you! I've used it and was very interesting!!
Just a suggestion but I would also search on Google for sites who list competitor offerings and promote them with titles such as '40 Best Colour Widgets...', 'The top 35 whiteboard pen providers' and so on. I reached out to a couple of publishers like this and interestingly in time there was a whole set of global publishers using variations of each others listings.
In the end,we ended up being promoted across a number of domains, all from ONE publisher reach out. We received quite a strong online boost and a considerable number of leads referred to by these sites.
Hi David,
I have some technical questions about your approach.
What is the quality of these websites that you are reaching out to? Are they blogs, or blogs for a company's website? What channels are you using for your initial outreach (emails listed on the site, phone numbers listed on the site, digging up personal contact info from social media profiles, etc.)?
Walk me through what you are doing and how people are responding. It seems like there is something to what you are doing, but I cannot get to the meat of it from what you have shared.
Personally, I have tried these cold outreach tactics for a variety of clients, in a variety of industries, and it is never as little as a days work (or less as Rand claimed), and the yield is never as high as 50 (or even 20) links from a single outing.
Looking forward to your insight.
After a long time, back to read WBF. Another great piece Rand!
I am wondering why I never thought about the 3rd pint you mentioned. I have tried this today and found many great link building opportunities. For the second suggestion of your Rand, I would say that it depends on how big is your niche. Because I rarely found people talking about comparison of my niche industry. I searched over Google with the collected name of my competitors and I was surprised to see zero results. But I am sure this technique will work well for big or medium sized businesses.
As usual the whiteboard friday is a hit.
I've been learning a lot since, I belong to moz community. All the documentation is great but I think is for complete beginners in my case I'm not a guru as you but I'm not a newbie and this post is a great place to start. I ve been preparing my personal website to launch it and was thinking about how to promote it.
In my work I have tools like Moz or BuzzStream and are very useful, but for me the challenge consist in promote a my site whitout any of this tools, at least in the beginning.
When you started Moz you did not have all the engeneers, marketers, content specialist that Moz has right now.
So my point of view is that you can use the whiteboard to teach all those techniques that everybody needs to know.
using an example of the real life.
My suggestion maybe you can create an dummie site use as example to implement
all those techniques that all seo specialist needs to know
Cheers
I agree. Would love to see the traffic grow overtime.
Can't discount local citations / company profile links, especially for businesses that care about local SEO.
Super useful article - demonstrates that doing your research is an important factor in link building as well as being prepared to reach out to others for links - Hard work but a great approach!
Quite interesting post it is. And the tip of testimonial said by Praveen is just like 'icing on the cake' in this WBF. I think creating a page in Wikipedia also could be a option for getting link.
I've tried Wikipedia, however it wasn't working for me.
I'll try it again.
Thank you!
Perfect intro link building tips Rand! A lot of times, especially for local services and small businesses, just by following step #2 and spending time duplicating some of your top 5-10 competitor's links, you can see some great results.
Another way to build backlink is to get link from Press page. Most of companies have press page so you can make them request to be listed there and they will.
My website has been providing review for web hosting. So whenever I launched my new article I request to be listed on Press page or relevant blog post.
It works for me. I have got 3 strong links in the past month from high domain authoritative website that slightly change my rank and domain authority. For your understating type in google "PureVPN Press review" or "hostgator Press review" and see the pages.
By this example you can clearly understand how you will get easily backlink if you provides reviews, deals an more.
Great whiteboard Fish! I would add call the business or organization you would like a link from as someone else suggested. My link request emails get deleted unless I know the sender but if someone takes the time to call I will check them out. (This is not an invitation to call me)
My first tip would be never to use that Blue pen again, really struggling to see it.
Tip for link building is help a reporter out - can get some great links for relativity little work, only downside is you have to wait for relevant requests so can mean some months nothing other several links built.
Good
backlink strategy Rand, simple and straightforward, you just have to
look for the competition and get you do the same as her, but you can
never beat it but just match.
How do we even it? Look for new things.
A greeting!
Great link building reminders and tool free!!! Would also include creating any "industry related keywords + statistics" in which people searching will naturally have reference/linking intent.
Some great tips here, thanks Rand. Agree the hardest links are always the first.
Thanks Rand
Great WBF once again. Another strategy that I sometimes use is to do a Google image search for the images on my site. Inevitably others have "acquired" them and used them on their own sites. So I send them an email asking for credit (link back to my site), rather than an IP infringement letter or whatever.
Anecdotally, I had one lovely website owner who would only credit my image to me if I paid him a few hundred $$$ haha. So it doesn't work every time.
After reading this post and all of yours comments. I would like to suggest some other techniques.
Get some website domain as per @Rands techniques or if you can try it on your own database.
In Google search for:
"related:domain.com" (without quotes)
Bingo! You'll have related websites.
For most of the domains this will not work
Thanks Rand, another great video. Some nice ways to get your initial links here and should definitely be on everyone's checklist when launching a new site (or something to revisit if you're up and running). I would also add in to make sure your social media profiles are all present and correct. Sounds obvious but surprising how many lack the consistency in this area. As a side note - always worth signing up to all of the main social networks when starting out, whilst you might not think you're going to use that network now, you don't want to get in the situation where someone has already taken your preferred username if you change your mind.
Great tips Rand! I will use them. Especially the first is great for me as I sold my previous business last year and now I have a new business... This advice can be really significant for me.
My tip:
Manufacturers many times have on their brand websites a list of shops that are selling their products. ECommerce sites that are selling their products usually get the links just by asking.
Great article Rand, came up with another method while trying to apply method #2.
I googled "best {{your niche}} websites" to find my competitors. Plenty of "top 5", "top 10" results popped out. I checked first 20 results to extract all the names, and to my surprise around 30% of the websites listed there were no longer active.
So I made a list of those websites, and now I'll use the step 3 to contact the authors of the articles, letting them know that their list is no longer valid because page XYZ has been suspended, and mention that I have something similar, maybe they can put that one instead.
In a way this is a mutation of your method #2 and backlinko's moving man method, but I though might be worth giving it a go.
Thank You so much Rand. I have watched a lot of your videos on Youtube before deciding to join the community. I must say you have been a source of inspiration to me. I will definitely use your advice.
Hey Rand,
thanks for that post! This awesome ressources are a real killer! I plan such things too!
Greetings from morocco
Numbers 2 and 3 are my favourites. Client are often amazed at how simple that can be. Also they a very good research point for finding out the other tactics of your competitors. For example are they Blogging or even perhaps Guest blogging etc etc. You can start to spot activity patterns in what they do during this type of exercise.
I realise that this is a step beyond gathering your first 50 links but always worth keeping an eye on the next steps in the journey.
Don't forget your web designers. They can link to your website from their portfolio page which can be one of the easiest links to gain as they should be very proud to show off their work. In fact, it could be something that's agreed upon when negotiating the price; even before the website is live you have 1 good solid link.
In education field, I talk to students and interview them. Universities like publishing them on their press release.
As always, great work! Regarding the 2nd tactic though, this will not work if you're just starting out. I'm talking about, if you just built your new site/business, and are trying to get those '50 first links', there will be no mentions to convert into links because you're not known yet. Unfortunately that's what I'm struggling with right now... will definitely try the other 2!
I agree with you, but if your web has mentions it could be very profitable. And I didn't think about this posssibility at all :)
I didn't understand this. In the first tactic, you are searching for your own name, domain, etc. That's the one I would not expect a new startup (like me) to get any results on. In the second tactic, you are searching for sites that list two or more of your competition, not yourself. That's the one of the three that I plan to use, along with the comments suggesting phone rather than email.
Great WBF once again. Another strategy that I sometimes use is Google's image search for the images on my site. Inevitably others have "acquired" them and used them on their own sites. So I send them an email asking for credit (link back to my site), rather than an IP infringement letter or whatever.
A
I learnt something as a Newbie is blogging. I will definitely use this new skill to promote my website. Thanks alot for the tip
For a local business I would suggest to akquire links from your suppliers. Best practice would be for the supplier to establish a partner-webpage that serves as the beginning of a sales funnel that leads users to the merchants website in order to make appointments directly in the store.
Nice suggestions. Sometimes I even call the websites' owners to get their attention and request for a link through guest blogging. And the success rate is around 95%. Sometimes a podcast with them also helps me get more traffic from their website and social media pages.
I always get links from different company or niche directories where my competitors already exist. A quick opensiteexplorer.org search is good to start with. :)
It's cool that you actually haven't used any tools for finding linkbuilding opportunities. It's natural in both ways.
Those are real good ideas. Most of them are hard to apply since we build websites and we always ad a mention "realized by OUR BRAND", which gives us backlinks, but make impossible to search for brand mentions.
Is it still a good idea in 2017 for web development agencies to add "realized by" in order to get backlinks?
So.. So good! Thanks Rand. Tooling does make #2 a bit easier, but it's really impressive to see that this could all be done with no tooling.
Thanks a bunch. I’m going to try these tips out!
Hey Rand, I like your shirt color....Its beautiful... :P (I am sorry for out of topic comment)
and yes its very knowledgabe blog thanks for sharing such a great information
Hi Rand! Woah! I have almost 2 years in SEO and I didn't knew some of the techiniques you commet here. The problem when we are very specialized is that some times we forget simple and easy things like this to do! I'll try them too! Thanks!!
All great tips Rand, thanks!
im from argentina, and i love this things, because im a newby in SEO world. espero que entiendan mi ingles pobre :(
Thanks Rand Fishkin !
Most effective and easiest way to create backlink without using any tool. I am sure by using these tactics we can easily expand backlinks in natural way.
Great WBF! I would add that another thing to do on top of the #3 strategy is to look for professional organizations and/or clubs that your company could join and get a link from. Oh and make sure that any philanthropy your company does comes with a link from the charitable organization too.
I wonder if you can expand the cluster of competitors strategy with the look for competitors' link strategy. The algorithm goes something like this.
(1) Search for you competitors' backlink with the standard SEO tools
(2) Find which backlinks are common to all / most of your competitors. (this could be a machine learning search if there is a significant number of backlinks to process)
(3) Contact the common backlinks with a link request.
This is similar to the Google search tactic you describe but the input data source is different. Different in and of itself could be good but you can also get more metadata from a backlink list. Examples of useful metadata would be follow / no follow, link test, linking page's authority, etc. This could be useful for prioritizing which links you pursue.
Hi!
We're not alone. Each company belongs to a group. For example, a cluster. Not only are competitors but strategic partners as well. Come on the link! :-)
Once again, excellent advice. I'll be putting those tips into action right now. It's nice that you can still get quick wins with SEO!
Awesome! This is really great and easy to understand article, building backlink is not an easy task but I believe Mr. Rand's tips and explanation could get everything about backlink building well understood and put it to practice. Great whiteboard!
Thanks for this Whiteboard, Rand. Really like the approach in #2. Finding appropriate directories/lists can be a pain sometimes, especially when a client's business is super niche. Looking forward to putting these into action!
Thank you, Rand.
I have just gotten to the point of acquiring links for my very first project and i will definitely use your advice :)
Hi Rand
Effectively, giving testimonials to collaborators you assure a backlink besides making a collaborator that can be another brand of relevance will help you to have more audience
Have a good weekend
Great Tactics. Startup's can really use it. Thanks for another Whiteboard session :)
Hey Rand great stuff as getting backlinks from others is really a tough task. Thanks for your tips.
Great post! For your item 2, some directories trigger warnings on link research tools. Are you assuming that we should practice some discretion when requesting a link on a directory?
Hello Guys,
I do exactly what you are saying for my buisness: and I do call the blog users to get a backlinks, very good system! But I try to hit Dubai City phrase - Super hard...
I do use #Dubai #City and #DubaiCity hashtags for Dubai City Company but going slow!
Thanks a lot!
I offen search for Pages wich lists alternatives for competitors. So i search for competitor+alternetive and make Sure i get on that list. With my greatest pros of course. Ok i do it for clients, Not for me. Thats nearby 2 i guess.
In my opinion it is important to use some tool to check the authority of the domains before. Not all are valid.
Thanks for this, Rand. Will dedicate the next few hours to the 2nd tactic. Just do it, right. :)
Hello Rand,
Very good tips to start with a solid and trouble-free link strategy. One of the things we usually do in Zoping, is to analyze the links of the competition in the top positions of Google with your tool, so we can discover more potential links, measure their quality and create them for the pages of customers. It always works and there is no problem of penalties because the competition has not received them.
I hope that helps.
A greeting.
Can you elaborate more on this. I am just attempting to start a website and would like to piggyback off of 23andME if I can. How would I best gog about this using your strategy? Thanks for any help you can give.
This is a tough call but I think this is the most useful whiteboard Friday there's been! My fiancee and I founded our practice here in the UK and none of our competitors are women. That makes this advice so, so useful to us. Thanks so much, I've already gotten a couple. Super exciting times!
Great way to use search modifiers for quick and free link building. Thanks for another solid Whiteboard Friday
Perfect timing! I'm struggling with those first 50 links. Your strategy is so much simpler than what I've been doing. I will definitely give your advice + comments a try.
Excellent as always Rand!
Personally I like Step 2, this is the basis of my link strategy.