Link building is high on everyone’s list with regards to SEO.
There is a long-running myth that link building is the single most valuable SEO tactic to engage (hint: it’s not) and so SEOs and digital marketers all over the world pursue every advantage they can get in link building.
Today, we’re sharing two principles that will help you make your link building a lot more effective. They work for almost any brand or website in almost any industry. In fact, these strategies often are easier to do if you’re a smaller brand with less budget than they are with a bigger brand that is more rigid in its way.
Watch the below video and read on to find out more:
Both of our principles tie back to content. Most successful earned or organic link building efforts are a result of successful content creation campaigns that spark a conversation or get audiences to engage.
First, make your content and the destination for your links more interesting or entertaining.
This is an especially easy principle to implement for most consumer-facing brands since consumers tend to engage the most with interesting and entertaining content online. Interest and entertainment value can be improved by implementing content that is humorous, opinionated, risque, or emotional.
These strategies don’t have to be fully conceptualized by your team—most industries already have extensive examples of content that are popular online that you can make your own riff or variation on. Many brands freeze up and assume they can’t be creative enough rather than look at what is working within their existing audience, social feeds, news cycles, or with influencers and brands popular in their vertical.
Secondly, consider ways to make your content more useful to your audience.
A lot of SEOs focus on keyword optimization and hitting a specific list of criteria without really considering the usefulness of the content to the search consumer. Brands often push back on ‘useful content’ because they want more commercially-focused content. They feel that utility is a risky play because it may not be as monetizable.
However, when you find a way to create really useful content to your audience, you’ll find that they tend to do a lot of the link building for you, and it also becomes a lot easier for you to pitch or publish with other 3rd parties. Journalists and bloggers are always looking to be able to refer their readers to great resources. If you can draft some really compelling and really useful content, you’ll find that links naturally land and tend to replicate more readily.
Reach out to us to discuss your link building and SEO campaign and we can talk about some of the ways we have found success for our clients with these two principles in play.
