When done right, link building can give you a competitive advantage in your industry by getting more traffic to your website and helping you gain rank in the search engines. If your link building campaign isn’t getting you both of these results, you need a stronger campaign. To get a stronger campaign, you need access to advanced link building strategies only an expert can execute.
You won’t gain a competitive advantage executing self-taught SEO techniques
Link building is a crucial, yet largely misunderstood component of search engine optimization. Within the professional SEO industry, link building strategies differ greatly from what you see self-taught SEOs discussing on YouTube and on their blogs.
Most self-taught SEOs on YouTube don’t mean any harm and are genuinely sharing what they’ve learned. Some of what they share is accurate. However, what they’ve learned is usually more technique than strategy. If you want to gain a competitive edge in your industry, techniques aren’t enough. You need advanced link building strategies.
The difference between link building techniques and strategies
Understanding the difference between a link building technique and a link building strategy is critical if you’re going to successfully gain search engine rank over your competition. Techniques are easy to learn, but strategies require professional expertise.
Online, you can learn how to perform a long list of link building techniques. However, without a strategy, you won’t know how to execute those techniques to get your desired results. On the other hand, hiring a professional SEO agency like link.build will give you access to advanced strategies that get big results.
To help differentiate between techniques and strategies, here’s a brief list of examples.
Link building techniques include:
- Paid/sponsored link placements. This is where you pay someone to publish your link on their website.
- Content marketing. In general, content marketing is when you create unique content containing links to your website and you get that content published on other websites. Preferably sites with high domain authority and a large captive audience.
- Creating infographics. Many businesses have started to create beautiful infographics with industry-relevant statistics. The idea is that other people will want to link to the infographic and you’ll get backlinks naturally. This works well in many industries.
Link building strategies include:
- Developing a plan to gain a certain number of links spread out across a specific number of domains within a specific range of domain authority (DA).
- Coordinating your social media marketing campaign to get newly published internal content shared across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
- Targeting specific websites to publish your content based on that website’s credibility, readership, search ranking, and reputation.
- Regularly analyzing link performance and adjusting your strategy based on that data.
- Constantly doing keyword research using industry-specific tools and techniques that don’t source data from Google’s Keyword Planner.
- Strategically planning anchor text variation.
Your link building techniques are ‘shots in the dark’ without a strategy
Without a strategy to hold your link building campaign together, each technique you perform is like a shot in the dark.
A link building strategy is the game plan you follow to reach your goal. Your strategy should be created specifically to reach your goal. No matter how many techniques you employ, without a clear idea of how each technique will further your goal, you may as well be shooting blind.
If you want a competitive advantage, you need goals, strategies, and then techniques
Competitive advantages come from well thought out strategies built around goals. Before dumping any more money into your link building campaign, make sure your goals are clear. However, avoid goals like “I want to be number one on Google for [insert search term here].” Today’s search results are personalized and will vary per user. You can’t measure your ranking for the whole world.
Set goals you can measure. For instance, set goals for increasing traffic, email subscriber counts, and sales. Set goals for achieving higher levels of organic traffic that comes from the various search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. Set goals that directly relate to your link building efforts so you can measure the impact of your strategy.
Last, if you’ve got the budget to hire a professional SEO agency, take advantage of the opportunity. Many of your competitors are likely using a professional agency and if you try to do everything yourself, you won’t get the competitive advantage you’re after.
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