The demand for SEO services has increased over the past years, as more and more businesses understand and see potential gains from their investments on search marketing.
With that, many freelancers and in-house SEOs are putting up their own agencies to cater to the growing SEO needs of businesses. And with increasing demands comes great challenges for marketers.
SEO and link building agencies like SharpRocket must adapt a robust line of processes and strategy execution to deliver the highest quality of services. In different core areas of search engine optimization, agencies must apply the best practices to scale growth without sacrificing quality.
One of the many difficult facets of SEO is link building — this is where most SEO agencies fall apart.
Most of them are good with technical SEO but have a hard time scaling backlinks to their client’s site, which is critical to the site’s search rankings and domain authority.
In this article, let’s discover three effective link building strategies you can use as an SEO agency.
1) Guest Blogging With Rankable Topics
Guest blogging is nothing new. In fact, most seasoned marketers still use this technique to faciliate link placements on high-end authority sites.
The beauty of guest posting is scalability. Any starting SEO can build low amount of backlinks to clients in specific industries, and scale it as campaigns progress.
The more needs for backlinks, the more your SEO team must set up processes to best facilitate steps and a smooth flow from one phase to another (e.g., link prospecting to content creation).
The strategy in guest blogging that works effectively nowadays is finding topics on relevant blogs that can rank for targeted keywords.
Rankable topics can bring additional search traffic to your target guest blog, a unique value proposition for email pitch. It would be uncommon for the publisher to resist any suggested topics that bring new potential customers to their brand.
Here is a quick overview of how this type of guest blogging works.
Start with identifying topics with a significant search volume.
You can use Ahrefs or other link analysis tools to research topics that bring good search traffic to your target publisher.
You may opt to consider Ahrefs’ Content Gap Analysis feature and insert your domain URL and your competitors’ domains. What the tool does is that it allows you to discover keywords your competitors’ sites are currently ranking that your site doesn’t yet.
Choose at least three keywords that are relevant to your target publisher. And from these choices, you craft titles you can submit to your guest blog.
The email pitch for this type of guest blogging differs from what most bloggers send with their emails.
Aside from the unique proposition of rankable topics, the email must address the need for your guest content — what’s in it for them, which is answerable by bringing new potential search traffic to their website.
You can scale this new guest blogging technique by creating your own process document — step by step process on finding rankable topics for target publishers. Send it over to your link builders (or SEO team) and let them do the detailed procedure.
2) Enterprise-Level Link Reclamation
Any agency catering to enterprise brands can leverage the power of link reclamation.
Most enterprise websites have several mentions of their products or services, their content, and their brand, in general. Unfortunately, websites that mentioned them don’t credit the page that’s due with links. This is where link reclamation outreach comes in.
Basically, link reclamation is getting publishers with unlinked mentions of your website to link to you. Requesting them to credit you with links isn’t that difficult, as they are already familiar with your brand.
SEO agencies can create their process documents detailing how to execute a link reclamation strategy.
To get started, you can use tools for web monitoring of brand mentions. Recommended tools such as Mention, BrandMentions, and Ahrefs’ Alerts feature can help you speed up the process of discovering new mentions of your clients.
Make a list of all pages that reference the client’s content. Collect the email address of each contact person or publisher.
Reach out to them and ask if they can attribute their mentions to the referenced page with a backlink.
The link reclamation process is simple, and it only takes less than an hour to mention discovery. Sending emails won’t take too much longer as well — so this kind of link building strategy is a must-do for SEO agencies wanting to scale high-quality link building for their enterprise clients.
3) Resource Page Link Building
Some industries don’t have a lot of blogs to pitch topics to for guest blogging. That raises a challenge to build backlinks to niches where there aren’t too high-quality relevant blogs to find.
One link building strategy that you can use and scale as an SEO agency is resource page link building.
Resource page link building simply gets contextual backlinks from resources (sometimes called “links” pages).
This link building strategy is geared towards tapping a linkable audience with your content.
There are specific groups of people who have the inherent need for additional resources for their sites. One primary reason resource pages list down external links to recommended resources or references is their deeper need to serve their audience.
The mission of most resource page curators is the exact reason you’ll be pitching them with your industry guides.
So if you can create content pieces that help them serve their mission, it would be easy to include a link to your content on their links pages.
To start this link building strategy, you need to make a list of linkable audiences available on the web. Examples of these audience groups include seniors, veterans, teachers, parents, and students.
You can also use Google search to find more linkable audiences that align to your website’s target customers (inurl:links.html “TOPIC”).
From your list of audiences, you choose one or two that you’ll cater to with your content — recommended to be a comprehensive industry guide.
This list will also be your initial outreach list. You add more link prospects to it through reverse engineering who linked to similar content assets.
Once you have the outreach contacts readily available, the initial email pitch includes considering if there are any broken links on the resource page. It is an added value proposition as you can tell them there are technical errors in one of their pages, suggest replacements of links to fix those defunct links — where one of the link replacements is a link to your industry guide.
Scalable Link Building Strategies For Growing SEO Agencies
Knowing what link building strategy to use as an SEO agency helps you relieve negative stress from not moving the needle in your client’s search performance.
If you can guarantee high-quality link placements to your client’s site, you would help them drastically grow their search traffic.
Go and test out three link-building strategies I mentioned in this article. Create process documents to delegate tasks step by step to your link builders. And expect great results through scaling your link building campaigns.