Often times as a small or mid-sized business, the most important aspect to your website’s SEO success is gaining backlinks. Unfortunately, not many people know this! Many think SEO is all about keywords when in fact, backlinks matter to Google more than ever. This e-book is designed to help drive backlinks through content marketing and other initiatives. You’ll learn how to come up with awesome content ideas, write them, and find the right websites to get links from. By the end of this, you’ll be considered a backlink superhero!
Here are a few key concepts you’ll need to understand with this ebook. These are considered to be the fundamentals of link building:
In this section, you’ll learn how to come up with killer content ideas. To start your content ideation process, you should base content and topic choices around what has already worked. To do that, we’ll need to find existing content pieces that have had success, and ultimately, emulate it.
Here’s what you’ll need to research when finding ideas for content ideation:
The Content Process:
Ideation
Persona
Keywords
Idea Expansion
Content Formatting
10x Elements
Linking Assets
Collab
Outreach
The content ideation process begins with customer personas. Finding compelling topics to customer personas will help create interest and engagement in your article.
Customer personas are defined as fictional representations of your ideal customer. They’re established and supported through research and data. Personas incorporate the motives, values, and behaviors of potential buyers, which can be used as content ideas. These are the topics that users are most concerned about and will often search answers and clarity using Google and other search engines.
The chart below is a good exercise to do to explore initial “user persona” topics.
Whether you have formal data of personas, or informal research, you’ll want to use personas through content topics that they would find meaningful or valuable.
After finding persona-approved topics, it’s time to find examples of similar content pieces published online. By finding other existing content similar to yours, you can get ideas around the topic, what to include in the content, the angle on the subject, and more. It’s really a great starting point for your research, and something to keep in mind as you go through content creation.Â
You can find ideas from a number of different sources:
Compared to regular searches, using Advanced Google Search Operators helps explore content ideas to find more specific content faster. Here are some of the popular search operators
Now that you know the basics, we can use these operators to find potential content ideas. Here are a few ways to use different types of advanced Google Search Operators:
Forums + Advanced Google Search Operators:
The use of forums in advanced Google searches can be a great way to find topics that your personas may be interested in reading. Using forums is one of the purest ways to your target audience’s thoughts on a topic. Here are a few ideas on how to use Advanced Google Search Operators with forums:
Competitor Websites + Advanced Google Search Operators:
Another source to consider are competitors. Using broad topics with Advanced Google Search Operators, you can see exactly the content your competitors are posting.
Searches by Topic:
With Google Search Operators, you don’t necessarily need to search for content pieces on specific websites or domains. There are different ways to find the content you’re looking for without a site:search:
For more relevant searches, try filtering over the past year, month or week in Google searches. This way, you can find more recent content on topics.
Social media can be another way to explore content ideas. Chances are, when searching on social media, you’ll find some content pieces you may not otherwise see in Google searches. Here are some social networks to use:
Once you found an idea, it’s time to find a keyword to use. While your main idea behind topic research is to get backlinks, identifying keywords will help drive relevant traffic through organic search. Here’s what to look for during content keyword research:
So far, we have a persona-approved topic, and a keyword – but to write great content, we should have a general idea of what to include in the piece. What exactly should the content you’re writing include to yield great results? Here’s how to go through that process.Â
To better understand what to include in our content piece, it’s helpful to see what else is published online by other companies or publications.
Type in your keyword into Google and click on the top search results. Google’s goal is to show users the best results based on that keyword, so there’s a reason why top results are shown. By using the top results as a benchmark, we can emulate the top ranking blog posts in the execution of writing a content piece.
When researching the performance of similar content pieces, data will tell us a lot. There are social and content analytics tools like Buzzstream to help you understand the quality of the content. Here are a few metrics to keep track of:
Social Media:
• Checking the social engagement of other articles published online helps determine the quality of content, and why it’s engaging to a user. Beyond just social media likes, check what people are saying in the comments and shares – you’ll sense why people are engaging with that content piece.
Backlinks:
• Just like social engagement, it’s important to see if a similar piece of content has been linked to by other websites. You can measure the number of backlinks and referring domains a specific URL gets through tools like Moz, or Ahrefs.
When you take a look at each of the first few search results, be sure to note the following:
Now that we have our idea and a what we will need to have in order to be competitive in Google search result, it’s time to create a plan for our content piece. This plan will help you create a content piece that will be remarkable, and more importantly, linkable.
The Content Process:
Creation
Persona
Keywords
Idea Expansion
Content Formatting
10x Elements
Linking Assets
Collab
Outreach
Great content formatting makes content digestible and engaging. These days, web users have a very short attention span, so great content helps users get the information they need quicker and easier.
Here are a few engaging ways to format content:Â
In addition to these formatting types, it’s important to incorporate best practices in content when appropriate:
These elements will help you engage readers. Well-formatted articles are the first step in getting backlinks. The more readable and engaging an article is, the more likely someone will link to that content piece.
A well-formatted article is the foundation of a linkable article, but in order to take it to the next level, an article should incorporate 10x content elements. 10x content is defined as content that is “10 times better than the best result that can currently be found in the search results for a given keyword phrase or topic”.
Here are the characteristics that help define 10x content:tc
In addition to the idea of 10x content, there are other elements of content pieces that can enhance how users interact with content, both aesthetically and cognitively. These elements will ultimately be the reason your users will share and link to a content piece:
Content that creates or elicits an emotional response is likely to be shared or linked to. Consider creating content that induces happiness, awe, surprise, joy, or anticipation.
The use of visuals can help enhance the users tend to engage with visual posts; infographics, maps, inspirational visuals tend to do very well in terms of engagement.
Educational “how to” content pieces answer questions that your users may have. The question should be a common one that is asked by user personas, and the answer has to be quality, actionable and in-depth.
Data can support your content. This would require your own research, or using existing data. Consider running your own survey on Survey Monkey, or other data collecting sources.
Newsjacking is the practice of incorporating current events or recent news stories and tying it back into a content piece. The recency of newsjacking can make content more linkable.
Content pieces that are broad topics are highly linkable. These are universal topics, like dating, finance, Even in a niche industry, the use of broad topics can help drive backlinks, because they apply to everyone.
Here is a good example of a data-driven content piece in the form of an infographic. The graphic outlines most popular Halloween candy in every state, and the data sourced was from Google search volume for keywords, a public tool.
Link assets focus on how prospects will link to our piece of content. More specifically, where on a prospect’s site will they put a backlink pointing to your website. The most common way to get a link on another website is through an HTML link on either a “press” /”news” page or on a blog post. In addition to the good old fashioned HTML link, embedded links are another, less common (but still effective) way to get a backlink.
A great way to get backlinks on a content piece is to get companies or organizations involved in the content itself. By featuring other people’s opinions, advice and experiences, you ‘ll greatly increase the likelihood of them linking back to your content piece.
There are many different types of collaborations to consider when creating content that features guests. Here are some of the different collaboration types to consider:
Before creating your content, you’ll want to make sure that the collaborators will bring SEO value. For more on the outreach process, jump down to the “promotion” section.
When creating content, make sure to put in the extra time to make it look professional and polished. Obviously, this should go without saying, but if you take it to the next level, it will help you “sell” your content piece to interested linking audiences. Here are a few helpful tips to boost your content piece’s appearance:
The promotion stage of content is where we put link building to action through our “collaboration” with others. In this section, you’ll learn how to find the best link building prospects, link outreach best practices, and ultimately, how to get links to your content.
The Content Process:
Promotion
Persona
Keywords
Idea Expansion
Content Formatting
10x Elements
Linking Assets
Collab
Outreach
As mentioned, a good starting point in the outreach process is the “collaboration” from content creation. Our content idea will be achieved with the help of contributors. With best link building prospecting practices, we’ll learn how to find prospects that will give us the best value.Â
Before you start researching a link building prospect list, you should know what your company is worth to your link building audience, and how willing they would be to work with you. Here are some deciding factors that can persuade or dissuade another business from working with your business:
You want to take stock of your website’s leverage among your audience and cater this to the websites you reach out to, and your ask/pitch in the outreach email/message you send.
When looking for participants and promoters, we can’t just choose anyone. Prospecting takes great patience and a lot of time to find the right opportunities.
The prospecting process starts by compiling a list made of potential websites to reach out to. The list should be pretty expansive, so you’ll have a lot of options to choose.
Here are the criteria to keep in mind as you narrow your prospecting list:
Once you’re satisfied with the list, you’ll want to narrow down your list with certain criteria that fits best for link building.
At this point, you’ll also want to start gathering contact information for each website. For this step, I like to use Email Hunter, an email extractor Google Plug-in which collects emails for a website and displays the information for you to copy and paste. Beware, the free version only gives you 100 credits.
Here are a few other tips on gathering contact information:
Now that you’ve gathered a prospect list and contact information, it’s time reach out to those prospects! The outreach process involves reaching out to webmasters, businesses, bloggers and influencers in hopes to get a backlink.
Outreach is mainly done through email, but it can also be done through social media messaging, or by phone. In the link building process, outreach is an important step in securing quality backlinks from content created.
Listed below are a few tips to keep in mind during the outreach process:
Up until this point, we’ve talked a lot about content. When featuring contributors, it’s good to reach out prior, or during writing a rough draft. This creates a sense of exclusivity with your prospect list. It also gives you the leeway to pivot your request, if needed.
Create a few email templates to base your emails on during your outreach process. This gives you the time to really think about what to say and how to say it. Below are a list of emails to draft up prior to the outreach process:
Creating templates can help you say what you want to say, how you want to say it, at each point in the outreach process. The message and tone should ultimately remain the same, however, the next point is important too…
Try to be short, sweet, and to the point. For example, if you are looking for someone to participate in a new round-up idea, something like “Feature Opportunity on businesswebsite.com.”
Personalizing is always encouraged. It’s worth going the extra mile for because it increases the response rate. The last thing someone wants to do is waste their time reading an email that reads like it could have been sent to literally anyone. Use your outreach template as a guideline, but personalize it to the person and company you’re reaching out to.
With the intro email, reference the next step. Consider ending it with something like “if you’re interested in hearing more, I’d be happy to send you more details on this opportunity.”
Assuming the prospect agrees to participate in the content, or promote the content, we’ll move on to the “guidelines” email. This is the email where you will explain the offer in full detail and give some more guidance.
This is also the time to allude to having participants “share” the article on their website. We say “share” as a way to allude to getting a backlink. If they respond positively and confirm they would share the post, then by all means, continue on with that contributor.
The “final content” email serves to notify the interested prospects that the content is published. The next part, and the trickiest, is asking for a link.
The contributor should already be warm to this idea. In order not break Google’s guidelines, avoid using the word “link” in your link ask. Instead, use another word or phrase that alludes to this: “we hope you share this on your website and social audience”.
Keep in mind, some contacts may be hip to SEO, and will not give a link if you ask point-blank. There’s a notion that giving backlinks to another site is bad for SEO. Despite whether or not that’s true, you’ll want to keep the focus on creating great content, rather than backlinks.
It’s important to thank a participant for their time, especially if they take the time to contribute something in a round-up or send you content.
Be sure to leave the door open for future opportunities. At the end of the email, mention that you will keep them in mind for other opportunities.
Obviously, the end goal is to get backlinks. Be sure to check whether someone has linked frequently. If they haven’t linked in 7-10 days to send them a follow-up email, encouraging them to promote but don’t be too pushy in your tone. Consider sending something like “we would certainly appreciate if you were to share this content piece on your website or social channels”.
While going through your email outreach process, here are some things to keep in mind before & during your outreach process:
In addition to “collaborators”, there are other websites and publications that could be interested in promoting and linking to the content published. Before you publish, you should have an idea of who to promote the content piece to once it’s finished and live, beyond just the contributors featured.
Use your current brand following (no matter how big or small) to promote your content. These are the people who are most likely to share your content:
Use a sheet like this to track prospecting and outreach efforts. This sheet would not track qualifications of potential outreach partners like domain authority, but it will also track when you reach out to these people. You can make your own sheet similar to mine!
As you go through this process, keep these things in mind:
When creating content, knowing your audience is powerful. Knowing what entertains them, annoys them, or motivates them will help you create content that will make a lasting impression.
Creativity will help make your content piece more linkable! Whether it’s the topic, or how the content piece is laid out, it should be like no other piece of content.
See if your link audience is even interested in participating
This process takes time and effort! Between thinking of an idea that resonates with your audience, to reaching out link building prospects, you’ll need to set aside some time in order for this to be successful.
Nate helps agencies and enterprise businesses improve their organic search visibility and performance. In addition to link building strategy and on-going link building services, I also offer keyword research and implementation strategy services and technical SEO support. Find out more about me and how I can help you with SEO.