u/serpbro How does your agency handle link building? I head up the search team at a fairly large agency and have seen many wins and fails in link building. I really want to hear from some other agencies/EXPERIENCED SEO guys/girls as to how they handle IN HOUSE link building when you have 50-100 clients all with budgets between $1k-$5k a month. We have a general process we implement that has worked for us. Each campaign is different based on industry, business relationships and budget. Here is a very high level breakdown of links we build. We will always have a big strategy/audit from the beginning that directs the first few months and we chase low hanging fruit to start. Looking for Spammy links, broken backlinks to be 301'd, competitor backlinks for trying to attain the same and ensure business directories all have correct info. Who dominates page 1? Audit their links and try mirroring A linear task is to be checking authority of all of these "potentials" Chase the "potentials" through outreach and digging up old logins/resetting passwords. Partner acquisition Go through business relationships with client and get natural links that way Build local directories within the industry (we have a master list we work from broken up by industry) Guest posts – we have a few industry specific platforms and will generally pay for high Domain Authority (DA) posts – Being in the industry for years helps you build these connections Writing quality content then resharing through platforms like medium, Google posts and others Visual sharing generally with infographics on visua.ly and pinterest Thoughts? Anything that works well for your agency? 37 💬🗨📰👈
LenonTV I use guerrilla ads, then cover it with public media release. Media has great authority and articles are shared and recopied in other websites which gives a viral reaction. Guerrilla ads gives backlinks from media way more cheaper than pay-per-article model.
[deleted] So.. guerrilla ads? Care to elaborate?
LenonTV *make offline guerrilla ad which has a creative approach to your product/service *make a public release with photos and video *target every single media channel with emails (30-200 units) *communicate with journalist and answer interview questions when article is releasesed: *post it on social media with an additional Facebook campaign *repost article on medium *share via organic channels: Reddit, flipboard, hackernews, etc. *target media again with a personal interview or indepth post or any other content to continue/finish the story Results: 10-1000+ media backlinks with very high authority, not only local or niche media but such media as china daily or mashable Price: 100-1000$ plus manpower (creativity, time) serpbro ✍️ I like the idea but rolling this out in an agency setting seems unrealistic. It seems you really need consistent brilliant ideas for your content which is always hard putting into a "process" Creating this type of viral content everyday for professional services / B2B ie:Bulk of agency work would be extremely difficult and costly. BUT I think being client side / having a small handful of clients guerilla marketing would do well. This seems like a once off service rather than ongoing work.
TheMacMan Link building still doesn't make sense to me in this day and age. All that work to move the needle so little. I can put 1/10th the work into creating a piece of content which will get 20x more backlinks in a single day than the links an entire agency can build in a week. Just seems like a huge waste of effort in the wrong place, especially as links continue to be worth less and less to Google over content quality.
serpbro ✍️ You sound like a content writer not an SEO. So easy to talk about but not to execute when looking after more than a few clients. Great content with a proper content/link building strategy will get results. If you are confident in 20+ links off 1 article with no outreach or prior business arrangements you are dreaming. Client side copywriter yes… SEO agency no..
TheMacMan While I write content, it's certainly not my job. I direct digital marketing programs and have done so for numerous Fortune 500 companies. Generally SEO agencies have too narrow of a focus, looking only at what they know and are far too slow to adapt and change. There's a reason agencies are suffering and being hired less as more companies bring those things internally. serpbro ✍️ Totally agree with heaps of agencies being slow to adapt. I see this a lot with agencies that lack development knowledge. Agencies that constantly push back to external devs and take ages to sort things out is where a lot of campaigns go south. Unfortunately the majority of people with internet access say they have SEO experience and some even get hired. Mostly client side due to nobody being able to qualify them. Then when your new guy flops and burns you are on the phone with an agency getting your site out of a penalty. There will always be a need for agencies for the fact that sometimes your solo SEO guy (trying to get through as many moz articles per day as humanly possible) will not match up against a team of experienced SEO, content writers and devs which make up any half decent agency.
joedoohan We focus 60% of our time on bounce rate, time on site and conversions. 30% of our time is spent on content 10% of our time is backlinks This generates excellent results for our clients. Public Relations (PR) mentions, outreach to local news agencies and online industry magazine outreach gets us the best results, for the least amount of effort to reach client revenue goals.
serpbro ✍️ Only spending 10% on link research/maintenance/outreach isn't enough. Off page factors are strong as they always have been. After dropping bounce rate to a certain point (bounces aren't always bad) and adding a few buttons/forms you would run out of 60% of your job.
