Links drive rankings — that’s one thing that technical SEOs, content marketers, digital PR folks, and even some of #SEOTwitter can agree on. But which rankings, and for which pages on your website?

If you’ve ever wanted to build links that impact rankings for specific pages on your website, we’ve got the guide for you.

Selecting pages for a targeted-impact link building campaign

Preparing a link building campaign often involves helping the client refine their goals in order to be able to effectively measure the campaign. The first step is typically level-setting based on what we can learn from available data.

Comparing link metrics against top competitors will help us size up the competition. Layered against estimated traffic, Page Authority, and SEO “difficulty”, and we’re able to better understand the opportunity. While this isn't particularly complex or inaccessible, it's likely deeper than the client has gone, and very often they’re happy to move forward with data-informed recommendations.

If we were preparing a link building campaign for Moz, for example, we might pre-select some sections of the site to focus on in the analysis.

Suppose we start with /products/, /tools/ the beginners guide pages (love those), and a few others that jump out. Here are a few pages from that list:

From here, we would compile a list of competitors based on top keywords for each of the pages. That will let us compare average metrics across the top competitors to the metrics for Moz’s pages.

This dataset represents the top 10 competitors from the top 10 keywords for each of Moz’s pages. Once compiled, we’ll have 90-100 rows of competitor data, give or take, depending on where Moz ranks for each page in the list. We can average the competitor data to make it easy to compare, and spot-check from there to look for outliers, or filter out branded or stray keywords we don’t want to compete for anyway:

Now it’s time to look for opportunities. We can eye-ball the metrics in a shortlist like this, but if we’re looking at hundreds or thousands of pages (even after filtering it down), this gets a little cumbersome. Prioritizing the pages will help us look more quickly through the list and find the best opportunities.

In a scenario where it’s a short pilot program, some of these competitors have scary-high linking root domains, and we’re going to have an idea of a monthly budget to set our pilot up for success by not biting off more than we can chew.

So, we’ll add a couple columns to help some of these stand out. To help find the low-hanging fruit, we might look at the relationship to the gap in linking root domains of the competition and our potential campaign page, and the search volume from those top 10 keywords:

By dividing the link gap into the search volume, we can look at higher priority pages for the campaign based on the probability of reducing the linking root domain gap, in order to improve the client’s share of voice on high-converting pages.

Adding rank-order to the rows will help us look at the best potential opportunities:

From this group of pages, the Moz Pro product page seems to be a pretty tasty candidate. We might stay away from the free SEO tools page since, well, “free” doesn’t necessarily scream REVENUE, but it’s worth a conversation to verify. The same can be said for a couple of those beginner guide pages as well.

Even if none end up in the campaign, we'll still be able to assess the link gap for pages that ARE the targets, and help steer Moz towards effective linking choices

After a few refinements, we’ll have a very solid set of potential campaign pages to recommend!

Finding your most-impactful audience

We build out our model of audience based on the specific client URL that we're building links to. So, for sales pages, we're thinking about where, how, when, and why that product or service fits into the customer's life. What are its various contexts of use? What circumstances or conditions benefit from the use of this offering?

The offering’s contexts of use are intrinsically relevant to the target URL, whether or not the same keyword is used to describe them. For example, if we target the Moz Pro page identified above, we’d start asking ourselves: “when is it that agencies and in-house SEOs start thinking about SEO tools?”

Perhaps we explore that point where someone has to pick up the SEO projects left behind by someone whose career has taken them elsewhere. What’s the checklist like for following behind another SEO? Additionally, what about an SEO crash course for folks who suddenly find themselves in charge of an SEO department (we’ve spoken with people in this situation before). Both of these scenarios could give ample reason and circumstance to mention SEO tools. For either of these examples, an expert survey, expert interviews, and off-site informational placements could enable contextual linking opportunities.

Let’s step outside of the SEO space though and think about insurance sales pages. We could begin mapping out the circumstances and events in life as one decides to seek insurance: Events like having your first child, becoming an independent contractor, buying a home, having a cardiac-related scare, etc.

From these "use-case brainstorms", we work up into problem areas — and related queries — that the target audience might be having. These give us a basis for discovering publishers that align the audience of the target page with its contexts of usage. For Moz, we’d likely focus on marketing trade pubs — SEO or not. For the insurance pages, we’d likely start with parenting blogs, health/fitness publishers, websites relating to starting a business, and potentially realtor sites.

For good measure, we frequently examine high ranking pages in the target keyword space to learn more about what we call the "linking context" for a given set of keywords. We're especially focused on the titles of linking pages. This gives instant insight into topics that make sense for prospect discovery. We usually find things like long form guides, tons of coupon pages, review sites, forums, etc. — all of this gives us a better sense of the linking context.

Combined, use-case brainstorms and linking context analysis help us build out a full picture of the audiences and key problems that will lead us to suitable publishers.

Link outreach

Outreach is simple. Well, sort of.

If you understand what the publisher wants, which is ultimately related to how they make a living, then you figure out how to pitch and deliver just that.

If you're in the digital PR space pitching journalists, you're pitching your ability to drive "audience engagement" (as we've picked up from Neomam CEO, Gisele Navarro). So your subject line and offer need to clearly drip with page views, click-throughs, and social shares. And your content has to deliver. After all, with the high content costs involved you’ll need to reuse your contacts!

If you're in broken link building (and to a lesser extent, a tactic like unlinked mentions), you're offering "visitor experience improvements" to a webmaster or page curator who's dedicated to a particular audience. With this in mind, your subject line and offer (a fix) must demonstrate value to the target audience, as well as mention the impact the broken link could have on an expectant visitor in need.

We find that when pitching guest content, especially to sales-supported publishers, we see higher conversions when we pitch topics that will help drive the publisher’s traffic or conversions. You can learn more about our guest content approach in this Whiteboard Friday, but again, we lean into pitching “publishing benefits” to the site owner.

So your key question: what is this person's purpose for publishing to their particular audience? Knowing this helps you determine an offer that will resonate, and earn you a link.

One last bit of advice on outreach: avoid directly implementing subject lines, templates, etc. from other experts. Be inspired by the experts, but remember that their advice involves very specific offers, audiences, and publishers, and they are unlikely to align with your actual circumstances. Study them, for sure, but only for understanding general guidelines.

A quick word on link building tactics

Every functional link building tactic earns its links by meeting the target publisher’s unstated “price” for reaching their audience.

The publisher’s cost can certainly be money, but in the earned link space, we’re usually talking about supplying publishers with value such as exclusive news and information, previously unstated but highly useful advice, articles that could help them sell more products or services, and useful corrections that shore up authority.

We’re reminded, as we discuss value exchange, of a campaign by the link builder Debra Mastaler, in which she offered a cement client’s t-shirt to the members of several dues-supported professional organizations. She not only earned links from the organization websites (who got to provide a “special perk” to their members), but earned business and, of course, brand visibility within their precise target audience. Wow!

So, while a free t-shirt may not work in all verticals, Mastaler reminds us of the most overlooked aspect of link building campaigns: finding publishers who reach your target audience and asking “okay, what can we offer that they will actually want?”. Creative, entrepreneurial thinking — perhaps you could call it marketing instinct? — remains the link builder’s most important tactic.

That said, reviewing the existing array of link building tactics can be very useful, especially as you’re starting out, just as a budding chef spends time reading cookbooks to understand key ingredients and guiding principles. And as it is for the budding chef, your greatest lessons will come from the hours spent in the kitchen, working on your craft.

Check out this graphic for a quick overview of some of the more common tactics and their relationships between the publishers and your desired SEO outcomes:

Measurable link building wins

This is one of the most challenging aspects of a campaign for myriad reasons.

It’s also one of the most effective ways to retain clients, or budget, if you’re on the in-house side.

There are a number of ways to track the performance of a link building campaign, but which methods are chosen largely depends on the tactics deployed. In our case, we’re focused on the content side, and specialize in earning placements to hard-to-link sales landing pages. We approach our measurements of success from the perspective of SEO-related metrics that will show both leading indicators of improvements, and the right performance indicators once we have had impact.

Early on in a campaign, we often see a worsening of average position. The cause of this is typically new keywords ranking on the campaign page. Because the page initially begins to rank on SERP #7 or #8, this will initially pull down the average rank of the page, even if the rank for established keywords is improving.

This graph underscores one of the risks of focusing too heavily on rank as the primary success metric. While average position (the purple line) shows a decline in average position, we can see in the stacked columns that not only is the total number of ranking keywords growing, it’s also growing nicely in positions 1-3 (the blue segment at the top), as well as positions 4-10 (the orange segment 2nd from top). Just not enough to keep up with newly ranking keywords further down in the SERPs.

Correlating ranking changes to ranking keyword count was paramount to continuing this campaign.

While we track and report on average position over time, we certainly don’t lead with it. Instead, we focus on metrics that more directly correlate to traffic and conversions, which positions us for demonstrating positive ROI of the campaign.

The metrics that matter for us are share of voice (a search volume-weighted CTR model) and Moz Page Authority.

Share of voice

The benefit for us of prioritizing share of voice over ranking is that it normalizes dramatic shifts in time series reports based on ranking fluctuations from low-volume queries. Ranking reports, as we all know, can be a serious roller coaster.

Share of voice, on the other hand, aligns with an estimated traffic model, expressed as a percentage of total traffic for the keyword set.

As seen in the graph above, we also include a control group: a second set of pages on the site that are not part of the campaign (and preferably not part of any concerted SEO effort). This second set of pages is chosen from similar sections of the site and from similarly ranking and visited pages when possible, to measure the success of our link building campaign against.

While the graph above does indicate positive growth just with the bars, when we determine the percentage difference between our campaign pages and the control group, the results are even more dramatic.

Page Authority

Another critical metric is Moz Page Authority, which is often another early indicator of imminent success. We sometimes see Page Authority increase even before we see improvement to rankings and share of voice.

And again, tracking against a control group helps to underscore the value of our work.

Another benefit of Page Authority: Third party validation of the direct impact of our work.

While many factors outside of the scope of our link building campaign may affect rank, such as core algorithm updates, gaps in page content, topic misalignment or technical issues inhibiting Google’s full valuation of the page), a metric that is best influenced by “improving a page’s link profile by… getting external links”, aligns very well with our offering.

And hey, we think using a third party metric to validate the hard work we’re doing for our clients is pretty okay in our book (now in its second edition!).

Questions? More link building tips? Share them with us on Twitter.

“By now, you’ve probably heard as much as you can bear about mobile first indexing”, I joked in my introduction. Little did I know.

Only now — in the summer of 2021 — are Google, supposedly, maybe, finalizing the rollout of mobile-first. Even as of August 2021, Google is still very much actively crawling sites with Googlebot desktop*.

As with the recent delays to the Core Web Vitals rollout, the issue here for Google is that they can’t push changes which make their results worse. As Mike King pointed out back in March over at iPullRank, there’s still a big disparity between the mobile and desktop versions of the web, especially when it comes to links.

I don’t need to persuade most SEOs that they should care about links, but I maybe do need to remind you that internal links are, for most pages, a much bigger part of how they get their strength than external links. On an even vaguely established site, it’s not unreasonable to think that including a landing page in your top nav is going to generate more impactful links than most digital PR campaigns could ever hope to. And yet, sites tend to focus disproportionately on the latter, which is perhaps what brings us to this conundrum today.

In this post, I’m going to point out some of the common causes of disparities between mobile and desktop internal linking, when you should care, and what you can do to fix these issues without throwing UX under the bus.

*(thanks to Dom Woodman and the wealth of data at his fingertips for confirming for me that this is still the case!)

A brief history of mobile-first

Back in 2015, SEOs had two months’ warning to prepare for what the industry nicknamed “Mobilegeddon”. This wasn’t the first time that Google had factored mobile friendliness into its rankings, but it was probably the first time they tried to make a really big deal out of it as a way of steering webmasters — a sign of things to come.

About 18 months later, in November 2016, we got the phrase “Mobile-first indexing”. Over the next few years, SEOs with access to multiple Search Console properties became familiar with the routine trickle of emails informing them of sites moving over to the new paradigm.

During this period, some SEOs, including the late Russ Jones, myself in the aforementioned post on the Moz Blog, and my old boss Will Critchlow, started to voice concerns about the potential impact on the linkgraph:

The overall impression at the time was that Google was using a hybrid index for now, but that “mobile only” was already on its way.

Fast forward to March 2020, and Google warned we had six months to prepare for the final toll of the desktop index. This initially suggested a September 2020 rollout, then that became March 2021, and then, as I’ve mentioned above, that date too seemed to pass without incident.

We should assume, though, that this is still coming, or perhaps largely already here, and as such that our mobile sites need to present the version of truth we want Google to see.

The roles of internal links

Internal links, like all other links, fulfill multiple vital functions:

• Allowing search engines to discover new URLs

• Passing on clues as to topical relevance, via their anchor text, and source URL

• Passing on authority, via PageRank or equivalent

That’s of course without even getting into their roles in user experience, which is a topic for another post. (Although if you want to learn more about internal links, I recommend this Whiteboard Friday.)

A disparity in internal links between desktop and mobile versions, then, is likely to have far-reaching implications. (This also goes for any other two versions, such as rendered and raw HTML.) In most cases, one of the two versions will be the one that the site’s SEO practitioner(s) were happy with, and as such the other will not be.

At this point it’s common best practice, at least for your major templates, to routinely produce a list of links from both versions of the page and look for discrepancies.

That said, some differences are more impactful than others. For illustrative purposes, I’ve compared the desktop and mobile versions of five homepages, and in the rest of this post I’ll discuss some of the more interesting differences I noted, and what I’d recommend to the respective sites. Just to be clear: I am not involved with, or indeed pitching, any of these sites.

The five homepages I looked at were:

• https://www.amazon.co.uk/ — the UK site of the global e-com juggernaut

• https://www.optimizely.com/ — the well known CRO software

• https://www.ebuyer.com/ — an electronics e-commerce site

• https://www.zoopla.co.uk/ — a UK real estate site, similar to the US’s Zillow

• https://www.nytimes.com/ — an American broadsheet newspaper

Interestingly, of these, two had no differences at all for us to discuss — congratulations to Optimizely and Zoopla for paying attention back in 2018. For the other three, read on...

Less harmful examples

Anchor links within a page

The Amazon UK homepage links to itself no fewer than six times, with anchor text such as “back to top”, “see product details”, and “next page” (within a carousel). These links are all unique to desktop, although the mobile version does have a “Top of page” link instead of the “Back to top” link.

Amazon UK desktop (top) vs. Amazon UK mobile (bottom)

You probably don’t need to be too concerned about links like these from an SEO perspective. There’s no dramatic difference in optimization or targeting implied by the different text, and pages linking to themselves probably aren’t going to reshape the linkgraph.

Links to non-indexed pages

Amazon UK desktop (top) vs. Amazon UK mobile (bottom)

The main nav link to the “Pet supplies” category on the Amazon UK homepage comes with different internal tracking tags on mobile vs. desktop:

• Desktop: www.amazon.co.uk/gp/browse.html?node=340840031&ref_=nav_em__ps_t2_0_2_14_24

• Mobile: www.amazon.co.uk/gp/browse.html?node=340840031&ref_=navm_em__pets_0_3_17_11

From a general SEO perspective, this isn’t an ideal way to handle internal link tracking — both of these URLs have a canonical tag pointing at the actual indexed page, but there’s still unnecessary dilution and wasted crawl budget here, compared to just tracking the link click using a JavaScript event listener.

However, from a specific mobile/desktop parity point of view, this isn’t a big deal. As I said, they both share a canonical tag pointing to the same place, so we end up with equivalent behavior.

A similar rule applies when linking to pages like “my account” or “basket” — there may be differences in desktop and mobile implementations, but as both pages are noindex and/or robots.txt blocked, it isn’t a big deal.

Anchor text

Ebuyer has a few instances of the same element using different anchor text on mobile vs. desktop:

Ebuyer desktop (top) vs. Ebuyer mobile (bottom)

Note the longer anchor text on mobile(!). I also noticed something similar on the New York Times site, although that may be due to them rapidly testing different headline variants.

Either way, I don’t think this is a huge deal as long as the behavior is intended and the implied topic is largely similar, which it is in these cases.

Common problems & solutions

Device-specific elements

One of the most common causes of disparity is navigation elements that are desktop-only. The example below is from Ebuyer, and shows a bunch of links that I was unable to find anywhere on their mobile homepage.

These links all point to URLs that also feature in the top-nav, so the impact on the link graph may not be huge. However, Google is likely to place different weightings on a prominent homepage link like this vs. a link buried in a navigation, so there are SEO implications to this disparity. Ebuyer’s desktop site implies that these are some of the most important subcategories on the site, whereas their mobile site gives them a more equal footing with other subcategories in the mega-menu.

Happening across millions of sites, this is the sort of issue that might impact the quality of Google’s results. Ebuyer has presumably featured here the categories that are core to their business, and if they rank slightly better in these cases than in other cases, that means Google is slightly more likely to show people results from a business that is highly competent in that area. That, from Google’s perspective, is surely a win, but one they miss out on by exclusively using the mobile version.

From Ebuyer’s point of view, the choice of what to feature in this element is a strategic lever that is lost when Google stops counting their desktop links. The only real solution here is to develop a mobile equivalent to this element, but one can be creative. It could be somewhere slightly different on the page, for example, or it could be a carousel on mobile but static on desktop. Alternatively, you can accept that this is a desktop-specific UX element that should be disregarded in any SEO consideration, and instead must justify itself through its benefit to conversion rates.

Mega-menus & subcategory linking

Many sites, especially e-commerce, handle internal linking by having a huge mega-menu on desktop that collapses into a hamburger menu perhaps four layers deep on mobile. This leaves users very many clicks from anything they might hope to find, and the ironic thing is that super-exhaustive top navigations aren’t necessarily optimal from an SEO perspective either. Sure, they get a lot of pages crawled and pass on a little equity, but they do nothing to concentrate relevance around subtopics, and they don’t allow you to focus your strength where it’s most needed.

Some sites improve on this with a section-specific subnavigation, for example these links on Amazon that only appear within the Grocery section:

This is a great alternative to a mega-menu in general, in that there are fewer sitewide links (meaning that each remaining sitewide link is a little stronger), and, proportionately, more links between closely related pages.

However, of course, this element doesn’t appear at all on mobile. D’oh.

Similarly, Amazon has these featured subcategories on desktop, performing a similar role:

Again, I’d say this is a great idea from an SEO perspective, but these links don’t exist on mobile.

Zoopla handles the same issue much more neatly:

Sidebar links to relevant subcategories

They similarly have subcategory links that only feature in the relevant category, but then on mobile, they retain them — just moving them to the bottom of the page instead of a sidebar:

Sidebar links shuffled to bottom of content on mobile

This isn’t hugely attractive, but it doesn’t matter — few people will scroll to these depths anyway, and Zoopla’s SEO strategy is robust to the mobile-only index as a result. Plus, because of the focus on interlinking only relevant subcategories, the volume of links here isn’t extreme.

SEO copy & hidden content

A similar argument could be made for Ebuyer’s treatment of SEO copy here:

It’s right at the bottom of the page, so perhaps this is an opportunity for internal linking? Indeed, there are a couple of links at the end of this block of text.

Without going too much into the benefits and drawbacks of this kind of copy in general, I’d say this is a little excessive for the bottom of an e-commerce category page (you can only see a fraction in the screenshot above). Instead, Ebuyer could do something similar to what they’ve done with their footer:

Collapsed or tabbed content can be a great way to handle bulky internal linking structures on mobile

On desktop, all of these footer sections are expanded by default, and all visible. On mobile, they’re hidden in these expandable sections. This is generally a good way to handle SEO elements on mobile, as Google has said repeatedly at this point that there’s no downside to doing this.

Conclusion: On-page linking, but tastefully

I’ve tried to explore here some of the common issues that sites face when aiming for mobile/desktop linking parity.

To quickly recap, the main issues I recommend sites focus on are:

• Missing navigation elements

• Opportunities for deep-linking without resorting to mega-menus

And my suggested solutions are:

• Pushing linking widgets to the bottom of the page on mobile, rather than removing them altogether

• Using tabs, carousels, expandable sections and other creative solutions to make better use of on-screen real estate

I’m keen to see more examples in the wild, though — how is your site handling mobile-first internal linking? Tell me on Twitter!

If your answer is “yes”, you’re not alone. Link building has taken off in the content marketing world, but we’ve exhausted the typical strategies by overusing them.

There is one method to improve SEO and brand awareness that marketers haven’t utilized broadly yet — designing guestographics.

This is a strategy that we at Venngage have been using for years to earn backlinks and improve our SERP. Guestographics aren’t exactly a secret, but since so few content marketers know about them, here are our tips for creating and pitching them.

What is a guestographic?

A guestographic is essentially a guest infographic. We’ve used this term internally for years because it has a very specific purpose.

Guestographics are created in collaboration with other brands. It’s their content with our infographic design. This has become an effective way to improve SEO for both parties.

For example, we partnered with Hubspot to turn their lead generation ideas blog post into the infographic below:

Over the years, we’ve used this strategy to partner with numerous sites. It’s helped our team build connections in the industry, earn us backlinks, and improve our SEO.

Why should you create a guestographic?

Some types of content are easy to build backlinks to. Blog posts, survey results, and interviews often offer unique content that marketers are happy to include in their posts.

But what about pages for which you want unusual or specific anchor text? What about landing pages? How can you improve SEO for those pages through link building? You can spend all your time doing cold outreach and research and still not get the desired results. Offering to design guestographics can cut your work down significantly because you’ll get more positive responses.

For example, we wanted to build links to a page using the anchor text “infographic maker”, but we came up against a brick wall. That phrase is sales-y and sites didn’t want to hyperlink that specific anchor text.

However, when we offered to design an infographic for Mention, they were happy to add our link to our preferred anchor text when they credited our guestographic on their post. Both parties win.

Why does this strategy work? Because everyone loves visuals. They’re easy to skim. Plus, in the content-rich online space, visuals are better at attracting users.

And if you have original research, why not share it as an infographic, like this example, to appeal to a wider audience?

According to these link building statistics, original research and visuals are a killer combo in marketing.

We’ve produced 200 guestographics since we started using this strategy and they’ve generated 200,000 organic sessions per month. We’ve also improved our SEO and rank #1 on our highest converting pages. Here’s how we did it.

How to improve SEO with a guestographic

If you’re still wondering how to improve website SEO using guestographics, here’s the six-step strategy we’ve perfected.

1. Find the right guestographic content 

One thing we’ve learned the hard way is that not all posts make for great infographic content. A super-long article with multiple headers and subheadings is going to be impossible to condense into one graphic.

You also don’t want to promise more than one guestographic. Whether you’re relying on a designer, agency, or an infographic solution like Venngage, designing takes time.

What we did find is that simple list articles make for great infographics. Lists are easy to read and follow an established pattern. All they lack is visual appeal, which is where Guestographics come in.

A list infographic template, like the example below, can be easily customized for different list articles.

But how do you find the list posts that will help improve your SEO? You can use a tool like Moz, SEMRush, or Ahrefs to find relevant content.

Since we’re looking for lists, we would go to the Keyword Overview in Moz and search for “10 tips for”. You can be more specific and search for “10 tips for content marketing”.

The next bit is a bit more manual. Click through to each link and skim through the content. You don’t want to offer a guestographic to a site that already has an infographic for their list.

You also want to look through the lists in detail. As we said, posts that are too complicated are hard to repurpose into an infographic.

On the other hand, if a post is particularly text-heavy but is formatted into a list, that would be the right target for you.

2. Define your audience

Before you pitch your guestographics to a site, take the time to define your target audience. Remember, the point of this exercise is to improve your website SEO. Getting backlinks is great, but if they’re not from your industry or relevant to your brand, the links won’t help your SERP.

Guestographics require some effort to create. You don’t want to hand them out to just anyone. That’s why we define our audience by creating user personas.

For inspiration, here’s an example of a customer persona profile.

How do you decide the ideal users for your brand? Analyze your existing customers. Where is the traffic to your site coming from? Who are the top purchasers?

If you feel like you don’t have enough demographic information, or can’t define user interests, send out a survey or quiz to collect this data. Speak to your users directly for more information.

The overlaps in interests, demographics, pain points, and solutions will help you define two to three ideal personas. These will become your targets when choosing sites to pitch to.

3. Choose keywords to improve website SEO

There are still a few stops on the way to the pitch. You know your ideal persona, but have you found the best keywords that will effectively improve website SEO?

Topic relevance is extremely important. If you’re in the real estate field, backlinks from sites that are printing school books won’t do anything for you.

Even if a keyword is lucrative, if it isn’t in your field, there’s no point targeting it. There won’t be much positive impact on your SEO.

In fact, getting backlinks from anywhere and everywhere could end up hurting your rankings. You don’t want Google to think you aren’t an authority or thought leader in your field.

We use Google Keyword Planner to choose primary and related keywords. If you want to know more, Loganix also has a helpful guide for finding long-tail keywords.

You can also find relevant keywords from the Google search bar. Type in a keyword and before pressing “enter”, look at the options presented.

List your set of keywords in a chart, like the example below. This will make it easier to find the right kind of content to create Guestographics for.

There’s another reason why keywords are important for this process: alt text. Marketers seem to forget that images also help you rank on Google.

Google’s Image Search isn’t as powerful a SERP tool as the text search, but it does impact your keywords and rankings. That’s why images need to be keyword optimized.

We use this SEO checklist to ensure that our keywords have been used in the correct areas, including in the image alt attributes:

Before you finalize your guestographic, check that the alt attributes and file name corresponds to your chosen keywords.

4. The guestographic pitch

Once you have a shortlist of content that would benefit from a guestographic, it’s time to pitch the site. Your pitch should be direct and offer the contact added value.

Remember, content editors are busy people. They get tons of emails in their inbox, many of them asking for the same thing. They can’t spare five minutes to read an email.

Since you’re offering a guestographic instead of a link collaboration, you already have the upper hand over your competitors. That’s a good start. But your pitch still needs to be perfect.

Here’s an example of a pitch that we’ve used in the past. It gets straight to the point, offers value, and states what we would like in return, which isn’t much.

Note how we give examples of past guestographics we created with major names in the industry. Name drops aren’t necessary, but they help show the contact that you mean business.

If you’re pitching your first guestographic and don’t have any examples to show, include something that displays your credentials.

After sending your pitch, follow up a few days later. Try not to exceed three follow-ups. If you haven’t received a reply by then, they’re not interested in the guestographic.

When you do get positive responses, you can start collaborating with the site. It took some trial and error for us to reach a process that didn’t require constant back and forth emails.

Here’s what we do. We ask the contact for an outline of the content, including:

• Primary headers

• Bullet points

• Preferred colors

• Brand colors and fonts

• Brand logo

• Call to action

We also ask the contact to look at our templates for inspiration. This makes it easier for the design team as they already have some direction from the site.

Why do we ask for these details before the graphic design process? Because if we create the outline and send it for review to the client, they’re going to return with edits.

We make those edits and send them back for review, and go back and forth until everyone is frustrated and no work has been done. It’s better to get the outline first and work from there.

Also, design is a lot of work even when we’re using our templates. If we also have to provide the outline and review the process, that becomes a huge ask.

5. Design a memorable infographic

With the client’s checklist in place, you can begin designing a guestographic that will successfully improve SEO rankings for both you and your contact.

As a design platform, we’re used to creating infographics pretty regularly.

For organizations that don’t have designers, there are online design resources available (like Venngage) or you can outsource the process to freelance graphic designers.

6. Promoting guestographics to improve SEO ranking

You’ve done the work of creating a guestographic. Is that all it takes to improve SEO on Google? Unfortunately not. There’s still one more step.

The client site will be promoting their guestographic. It’s a huge selling point for their content, after all.

But you also need to promote it. Share the client’s post on social media and let the world know that you create guestographics. This will also help you attract more users.

That’s not all. Look for other sites that would be interested in similar content and ask them to share the guestographic. You can also offer the same service to them.

This is your chance to create a whole new outreach campaign. Use the guestographic as a tool to earn more links from new sites.

A guestographic is repurposed content. But it can be further repurposed for your content marketing strategy. Break the infographic down into multiple social media posts or a slideshow. This is a great way to stretch one piece of content over multiple platforms and to reach a wider audience.

The takeaway is: treat every guestographic as an opportunity to scale your backlinks strategy.

Conclusion: Use guestographics to organically improve your SEO on Google

Backlinks are an important part of improving your SEO, but getting backlinks continues to be a challenging process.

There’s a lot of work that goes into getting backlinks. Most sites are likely to refuse to link to you because of the sheer number of requests they get.

If you can offer additional value to your contacts, not only can you earn a backlink but you can also create a partnership that lasts longer than a single conversation.

With every new and relevant backlink, you let Google know that you’re an authority in your niche and a site that’s worth ranking at the top of the SERP.

That’s the power of guestographics. They add value to your partners and place you as a brand that is willing to go that extra mile for its users.

As Google grows smarter, so do these link-building SEOs – gone are the days of spammy link schemes and black hat SEO. Enter modern link builders who are focused on placing high quality, relevant links on sites guaranteed to drive the most important metrics: conversions and revenue.

But how far have we really come, and are there any lessons we can take from the past to inform where we go from here? We asked eight link building experts their thoughts on this very question, as well as what our readers can do to stay ahead of the link building curve!

For more link building tips, be sure to check out our recent update to The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building:

Read the Guide!

How important are links, really?

Historically, links have been a sure-fire way to build authority and visibility for your business. However, as Google begins to focus on other tactics such as user experience, will that change how links factor into search visibility?

Russ Jones, Search Consultant at Moz, says that the value of a well-placed link isn’t going anywhere: “Google will find more and more ways to extract value from the link graph and click stream data. The link remains king.”

Britney Muller adds that “If Google disappeared tomorrow, would you still get qualified traffic to your website (via your link profile)? That’s exactly how I believe we should be thinking about link building today.”

Backlinko founder, Brian Dean, has a different perspective:

“I think links will be less important as time goes on,” he says, but agrees that they'll always be a major part of the algorithm. “Links are actually a really good signal! Especially today with Google more focused on E-A-T, links are a great way to size up whether a site is credible or not. Without links, they'd have no real way of knowing if the content on a page is legit.”

Has the definition of a “high quality link” changed?

The short answer is yes, and (surprise!) it depends on your goals.

In the early days, SEOs tested Google with sketchy link schemes. These low quality links offered a quick fix of link juice, and a boost in rankings. Today, link builders have ditched the black hat tactics in favor of a more relevant and consumer-focused approach, and quality over quantity.

Carrie Rose, CEO at Rise at Seven, has this to say: “The definition of a high-quality link has massively changed over the years. Relevancy is a huge topic online right now — but what does a relevant link actually mean? Ultimately, we track that based on is it a link that is driving traffic to your website, of whom are your audience? Too many link building strategies focus too much on ‘link juice’ and SEO metrics such as DA — but care less about link engagement metrics. SEOs, link builders, and digital PRs should care more about understanding where their audience is, high traffic websites, and gaining links from there instead.”

Russ Jones agrees: “I believe that Google has dramatically increased the degree to which the relevancy of a link matters,” he says, adding, “Google has placed greater influence on links that come from topical authorities as they combat issues like fake news and link spam. If this is the case, it means that link builders need to narrow their focus and fight for links from industry peers.”

As relevancy becomes more important, our experts encourage other link builders to focus on the audience rather than the outlet.

Tamara Sykes, Public Relations Specialist at Postali, believes that “It’s obviously great to get a backlink in a recognizable outlet like the Wall Street Journal. However, if your audience isn’t there, it only serves half of its purpose. You’ll get a ‘vote’ from a high DA site to prove that yours is more trustworthy, but it may generate little to no traffic because the audience isn’t as invested in what content you have to offer.”

Domenica D'Ottavio, Marketing Manager at Fractl, prefers to diversify her link portfolios, noting that high quality links can mean different things in different campaigns.

“The definition of a high-quality link can change depending on your goals,” she says. “Not all links are created equally for every business. In my opinion, the ideal portfolio has a 1) high volume of 2) relevant and 3) high-quality backlinks. If you're a business in the personal finance space, for example, you might want a mix of links from sites like The Motley Fool, CNN Money, and smaller finance blogs like The Penny Hoarder, Budgets are Sexy, or I Will Teach You To Be Rich.”

Lastly, as with most things in marketing and SEO, Andy Crestodina of OrbitMedia reminds us that there are also a half dozen other factors to consider including DA, follow vs. nofollow, outgoing links and much more! So be sure to take these factors into consideration as you develop your link building strategy.

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The role of link building in SEO is stronger than ever

Developing high quality content and distributing that content to respected sites in your target market can be an extremely scalable and cost-effective way to build and maintain authority in your niche. So, it’s not surprising that link building and digital PR is rapidly becoming a core strategy for many brands.

Carrie Rose highlights the fact that link building and digital PR industries have grown rapidly:

“The responsibility to create good quality content and improve trust to a site no longer purely sits within SEO. Having a good link building strategy which is performing well can improve trust, authority, and therefore rankings for a site. High quality links and high traffic can also increase traffic in the masses… It also has a huge impact on branded search (the holy grail).”

Brian Dean agrees, saying “Content and links have always had significant overlap (after all, people generally link to a page based on the content on that page). But the tie between the two is stronger than ever. That's because many other tried-and-true link building strategies (like large-scale guest posting) no longer work. Which means your link building efforts largely rely on the content that you're putting out.”

Surena Chande believes that, overall, the quality of link building campaigns has improved since Google’s E-A-T update: “We’re producing more topic-relevant campaigns for our clients rather than thinking solely about ideas that would land coverage,” she says, adding that SEOs and link builders are now working together to “reevaluate their concepts and ensure they are true to a brand.”

Getting buy-in is easier — if you focus on the metrics that matter

Because of the extra visibility in recent years, our experts agree that it’s easier than ever to get the buy-in from higher-ups. “I don't need to tell an executive that a link is like a vote. They know that now,” says Russ Jones. “I don't have to say ‘80% of purchases online begin with a search’. They know that now, too.”

“Link building has a way of showing direct results for executives and stakeholders and therefore becomes easier to get the buy-in,” Carrie Rose says. “Traditional PR, creative, or offline marketing strategies are receiving less and less budget and attention because of its inability to prove ROI and we see that budget reallocated to link building and digital PR efforts.”

Andy Crestodina agrees: “Just show an executive the Moz Link Explorer ‘Compare Link Profiles’ report and they’ll get excited ...or upset. Once a stakeholder sees the data, they usually want to take action. The key is to guide the ideas away from the spammy actions and toward high-quality content marketing and influencer outreach.”

With less internal education and campaigning at the executive level, marketers are now faced with tougher questions around how their specific strategies impact ROI. To do so, our experts recommend keeping things simple and taking it slow.

“It’s important to explain that Domain Authority moves very slowly. It takes patience,” Andy says, adding, “it’s a proxy metric for PageRank. It’s not Google. Focus on the actions, not the reports.”

If you need some help breaking down metrics, check out Andy’s Whiteboard Friday:

Russ Jones breaks things down even further: “Report simple campaign statistics such as: ‘referring domains and referring traffic are increasing’. Coupled with a generic metric like DA or PA, this gives stakeholders the most important answers about the quality of the link building campaign. Second, we report the increased traffic and rankings relative to competitors based on the work. It is important, though, to provide context wherever possible. If a competitor has been out-spending you and acquiring more links because of it, we shouldn't let that go unreported.”

Tamara Sykes finds that it’s helpful to provide some background on sites that link to her content. “I go as far as to share what that website’s purpose is, who its audience is and the website’s SEO stats,” she says. “This helps me paint a picture of why this link is relevant to a brand, rather than sharing a number that only shows ‘Hey, we got 12 backlinks’.”

Where should link builders focus?

Google is getting better and better at recognizing high quality, relevant links. “They're super good at identifying links that don't fit with a natural pattern. And it's not just obvious black hat spam,” Brian Dean says. “Google can also filter out many grey hat approaches (like mass guest posting), which basically only leaves a handful of link building approaches: digital PR, targeted outreach, and content designed to get links.”

So when it comes to link building strategy, where should link builders and digital PRs focus their efforts?

Get creative

Test out new content mediums to stand out from the pack!

Carrie Rose notes that, even though we’re seeing more automation in marketing, “Robots can’t manufacture creativity. That's where the best links come from — where content is more creative than their competitors and brands are getting links others can't replicate.”

Andy Crestodina recommends creating new tools and original research that features bite-size, shareable nuggets such as stats, graphs, and infographics. “These are 100-times more link-worthy than anything else on your domain,” he says.

Build relationships

As the market becomes more saturated, it will be especially important for link builders and digital PRs to deepen relationships with respected publishers and authors in their industry. But you don’t need to overthink it.

Andy believes that a little personalization goes a long way: “Link building has a bad reputation for a good reason: spam. Spammers send cold emails to website owners, clogging our inboxes with the same messages.”

But how do you build those connections in the first place?

Warm up the conversation by engaging with that author or editor on social media! Domenica D’Ottavia uses Twitter to connect. “Twitter is an excellent tool for building those relationships with journalists,” she says. "Reach out to them, like their stuff, respond and retweet, show them you're a real person… When you finally outreach them with your link building project, they'll recognize your name from your interactions on Twitter and will be much more likely to respond positively to your PR pitch.”

Others agree that the ROI of mass outreach continues to decline, remembering the days of in-person link building. “Believe it or not, I used to CALL people, introduce myself, explain how interesting I thought their ‘X’ business was,” says Britney Muller. “I’d ask some questions and then weave in a thoughtful proposition of us linking to each other's websites.”

“People are becoming numb to any non-targeted outreach,” Brian Dean adds. “If you are good at personalization, there could still be a chance of securing links but the bar of what qualifies as ‘personalized’ is higher than ever. Now you almost need to mention their dog's name to get a response.” (Note to all the link builders out there: my dog's name is Ginger.)

Learn more about great outreach from Britney's Whiteboard Friday on the subject! 

Tap into influencer networks

Influencer marketing is a growing field and, no, it isn’t just for consumer brands and Instagram. Leveraging experts to elevate your content can capture the attention of your target publishers and audience.

Surena Chande says that “utilizing expert commentary is one of the strongest and most overlooked techniques in link building. If you have clients who are experts in their field or have access to the CEO, you can utilize them to build links with minimal effort for both you and your client.”

“Link building is influencer marketing,” says Andy Crestodina. “You’re pitching an influencer (usually blogger or editor) with a request, usually some kind of collaboration. When you combine influencer marketing with original research, you have the ingredients in place. Your content supports their content. Links begin to appear spontaneously. You’re attracting them. Do it right and high DA sites will link to you every few days. Magic.”

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Capitalize on trending topics

In a news cycle that is constantly changing, hot topics can rise and fall in the blink of an eye. But if you have your timing right, you can ride the trend wave to secure extra eyeballs from editors and readers.

“I believe that the pandemic, particularly the early stages in 2020, taught the industry a very harsh lesson in the form of reactive outreach and campaigns forming one of the best methods of outreach,” Surena Chande says. “I was so used to conceiving campaign ideas for large-scale interactive pieces, and the unpredictability of the situation taught us that we had to quickly change our approach to link building.”

“Jumping on a trending topic and creating a project or link building campaign around something that's already earned the attention of journalists” says Domenica D’Ottavio, but notes to proceed with caution. “While newsjacking is a clever way to earn a ton of links very fast, it's also pretty risky. You have to work around the clock to get your idea created before the topic has lost relevance, and it might flop if you're too late to respond, wasting your investment.”

Our experts also advise to stay on top of the news across the web, read articles from a variety of publications weekly, study what journalists are asking for when they put out #journorequests, and analyze what angles they take on topics as they go viral. This will ensure that you are well positioned when it comes time to pitch your content.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, link building has undergone some major changes in the last 15 years (likely for the better!), but what’s old is new, and many of the same rules continue to apply:

• Relevant content will always perform so long as you target the right audience

• Links remain a major part of how Google determined the expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness of a site.

• Creativity and timeliness in link building will be rewarded

Big thank you to our expert contributors:

• Andy Crestodina

• Britney Muller

• Brian Dean

• Carrie Rose

• Domenica D'Ottavio

• Russ Jones

• Surena Chande

• Tamara Sykes

If you ask link building experts about their experience with this strategy, their responses will vary. While some say that it’s a waste of time, others insist that it still works for them.

This leads to comments such as these on public forums:

Truth is, a broken link building campaign will be effective and get you great results if you approach it the right way. Otherwise, you’ll just be wasting time and resources.

In this post, I’ll show you the exact process you can use to get results with broken link building, including:

• How to find resource pages at scale

• How to get broken link building opportunities from resource pages

• How to analyze your competitors’ link profiles for broken links

• Best practices that help you succeed with broken link building

What is broken link building?

Broken link building is the process of finding broken or dead outbound links on another website, informing the website owners/managers about them, and recommending a similar article you’ve written as a replacement for that broken link.

For instance, in this blog post on Mention about building an email list, I found a link to Neil Patel’s blog:

When I clicked on the link, I was redirected to this 404 page:

As you can see, the page no longer exists, but a reputable publication still links to it.

In this instance, this was a case study that was published on the blog about how their team increased Tech Crunch’s organic traffic by 30% within 60 days.

If you’re a marketing agency and have a similar case study you’ve published recently, you can reach out to websites still linking to this post and offer yours as a replacement. That way, you help them fix an issue on their website and get a backlink in return.

Broken link building is effective because it’s focused on adding value and reciprocity. You’re not just asking the other person to link to you, rather you’re giving them value upfront and even suggesting how they can make the user experience on their website better.

Even if they decide not to link to you, they’ll appreciate the help identifying broken links they may have missed.

Take this email I got recently as an example:

As you can see, they came across a post on my blog about conversational marketing and found a broken link in it. They reached out to inform me about it and suggested one of their articles as a replacement.

If I decide to link to them, it’s a win-win for both parties. From my end, I’m able to fix the broken link, which helps with a better user experience, and they’ve successfully secured a backlink.

How to find broken link opportunities at scale

Your ability to find broken link opportunities at scale will determine whether you’ll succeed with this strategy. The reason is simple: Broken link building is a numbers game. The more opportunities you can find, the higher your chances of getting backlinks in return.

1. Scraping resource pages

A resource page is usually a static page on a website that curates different resources on specific topics with links to the original sources.

Here’s a good example from Learning SEO, where Aleyda Solis curated the top resources and guides about SEO:

As you can see, she’s linking to other relevant articles about keyword research from this section of the resource page.

How exactly do you discover resource pages at scale?

To discover resource pages, you can make use of Google search operators. These help you uncover lots of resource page opportunities faster by extending the capabilities of a regular Google search. For reference, here’s a comprehensive list of 67 Google search operators.

Let’s use the intitle operator as an example. By typing “broken link building intitle:resources” into the search bar, the SERP shows pages that have “resources” in their title and are related to broken link building.

Here’s what that looks like:

How can you find broken link building opportunities from these resource pages?

Let’s assume that you want to explore the broken link opportunities from the Citation Labs broken link building resource page.

All you need to do is open the page and start checking the links one after the other. Once you identify any broken link, you can note it down. Using that strategy definitely works, but it takes time.

Alternatively, you can use chrome extensions such as Check My Links or Link Miner for this process.

With Link Miner, I was able to spot these three opportunities on the page above:

When I clicked on one of those red links shown above, here’s what I found:

If you have a page that’s a match or similar in topic, you can reach out to Citation Labs, inform them about the broken link, and suggest your page as a replacement.

Here’s where it gets more interesting.

If there are other websites linking to that broken link page, you can reach out to them using the same process above. All you need to do is use any of the SEO tools such as Moz, SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc., to identify other websites linking to the page.

When I checked one of the broken links in the resource page on Moz, here’s what I found:

As you can see, there are about 15 other websites linking to this broken link. I’ve now unlocked 15 more opportunities from one broken link alone.

2. Competitor link profile analysis

Using SEO tools, you can easily analyze a competitor’s link profile to identify the broken links they have. Once you do, you can create a similar page, then reach out to all the websites linking to the broken page to notify them about the broken link, and ask them to link to you instead.

This is what the process looks like on Moz: Link research > Top pages > Enter root domain or specific URL > Change status code to “4xx - broken”.

For example, if you’re a prospecting tool, one of your competitors is Ontolo.

Using the process above on Moz, you can easily identify some of the broken links on the website:

As you can see, one of the broken links has more than 100 websites still linking to it. You can identify these links by clicking on “View Links”. Once done, you can use Wayback Machine to find out exactly what the page looked like in the past, and then recreate it.

Using the Wayback machine, I discovered one of the broken links above was a free tool to check duplicate URLs in a list.

So, let’s say this is your niche and you want to take advantage of the links to this dead page. All you need to do is recreate a similar tool, and follow the process outlined above.

Best practices to help you succeed with broken link building

Reach out to the right person

If you contact the wrong person, getting a response will be difficult. For a broken link building campaign, you want to reach out to someone who’s in charge of inbound marketing or manages the content publishing process in a company.

Reaching out to someone in a more senior role such as VP Marketing, Director of Marketing, Head of Content, etc., in a large company almost guarantees that you won’t get a response.

To identify the right person to contact, you can check the company’s About Us or team page on their website. Alternatively, you can check the company’s LinkedIn page.

After identifying the right contact person, you can use email finding tools such as Hunter, Skrapp, Voila Norbert, and so on to find their email address.

When sending a cold email, make sure you comply with the ethical requirements of the CAN-SPAM Act. This means that your cold emails:

• Shouldn’t use a misleading subject line

• Should have an accurate sender information

• Should include your company’s physical address

• Should make it easy for recipients to opt-out from receiving your emails

Send a great outreach email

Many outreach emails get marked as spam. So, sending an amazing, personalized outreach email that adds value for the recipient will make you stand out instantly and will put you in a better position to land that broken link.

To make your emails stand, you should:

• Use a clear and click worthy subject line.

• Address the recipient by their first name.

• Mention something unique which you found about them on social media or elsewhere .

• Compliment them if possible, but make sure it doesn’t sound generic.

• Keep your outreach emails short and straight to the point.

• Use the inverted pyramid style of writing. Begin your email with the most important points.

• Be explicit about what you want.

Here’s an example email template you can use to acquire broken links from resource pages:

Subject line: Found this broken link on [website name]

Hey [First Name],

Just found out that the link on your website to [Mention website name with 404 page] doesn’t work anymore:

[insert URL of the broken link]

Here’s a screenshot of the page: [Insert link to a screenshot]

Came across this while going through some of the links you mentioned on [topic of their resource page]:

[insert URL of their resources page]

So, I recently created a comprehensive guide on [mention your website] that will be a perfect replacement for the 404 page. [Include additional comment on why your content deserves to make it on their list of resources].

[insert URL to your page]

I believe that your visitors will find it useful.

Either way, keep up the amazing job you’re doing curating the best resources on the internet about [topic of their resource page].

Let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with.

Thanks, [First Name]!

[Your Name]

Offer similar content as a replacement

The mistake most people make with broken link building campaigns is suggesting content that isn’t a good replacement for the dead page. If you do this, most people won’t bother responding to your email outreach, and even if they do respond, they most likely won’t link to you.

Before you begin that broken link campaign, make sure you find out what content was existing on the dead page. If you have something similar, you can send it to them as a replacement. Else, you should consider creating an amazing piece of content from scratch.

That way, you’re adding more value upfront, and stand a better chance of getting more website owners to link to you.

To figure out the exact content to recreate, you can use the Wayback machine.

All you need to do is enter the URL of the 404 page on the search bar in the tool, and click on “Browse History”:

Once you do, it’ll show you exactly what was existing on the dead page previously.

For example, this screenshot below is a 404 page on Drift’s website.

I found the broken link from this article.

To know what was existing on this page, I searched for its previous history using the Wayback machine and this is what I discovered:

As you can see, the post is an in-depth guide on “Demand Generation” covering the following sub-topics:

• What is demand generation?

• Why is demand generation important?

• Who’s responsible for demand generation?

• How to do demand generation

• Implement strategic demand generation tactics

• Demand generation vs. Lead generation

• Demand generation metrics: how to measure your efforts

• Demand gen benchmarking: how are companies like yours generating demand?

• Demand generation tools & technologies

To recreate this page, you'll need to write an in-depth piece of content on demand generation covering these sub-topics and more. That way, the website(s) linking to the broken link will be happy to link to yours instead. This is because you've provided a replacement that’ll add value to their audience.

In contrast, if you reach out to these websites and suggest your service page as a replacement for the broken link, they’d most likely not link to it.

Send follow-up emails

Don’t send one email and call it a day. Rather, you should have a follow-up sequence (think two to four emails) in place to remind the people you’ve reached out to previously about your email, and why a broken link on their page isn’t great for user experience.

Doing this helps you land more links. This is because the person you reached out to has a lot going on in their life, and might have skipped responding to your initial email. By following up with them, you’ll be top of mind, and if your pitch is a good fit, they’ll be more likely to respond to you.

Conclusion

It’s rare to find a website without a broken link. The reason is simple: most website owners and blog managers link to external content from their pages and don’t really monitor the content they linked to months and years ago.

In some cases, these pieces of content no longer exist online because they were created for a short-term purpose, or perhaps are no longer relevant.

This is a goldmine you can tap into as a marketer. By finding these broken link opportunities the right way, you can build relevant links for your website and pages to help you rank higher in the SERPs.

Join the conversation: Tweet your questions and comments about broken link building using #MozBlog!

This year, we asked a bunch of additional questions related to the content-led link building process, one of which asked respondents to tell us which steps of the process they found most challenging. Here are the results:

Today, we’re going to talk through each step of this process and look at ways to make them less challenging, thus leading to more successful results.

1. Getting links from outreach targets

I wasn’t too surprised to see this picked as the most challenging part of the process. After all, the crucial part of succeeding isn’t in your control. You’re asking someone else to do something for you, and all of the work up until this point will be for nothing if they just don’t want to do it. Not to mention that bloggers and journalists can often get hundreds of emails a day, meaning that standing out can be difficult, even if you have a solid campaign idea. As Stacey MacNaught, one of the contributors to our report, says:

“Naturally, as more and more people turn to content marketing and digital PR tactics, the space gets more crowded. Journalists are getting HUNDREDS of emails a day. So even if what you have is brilliant, there's always going to be that element of things that's out of your control.”

There’s another crucial element in the process here that is rarely, if ever, talked about: luck. As Stacey goes on to say:

“What if your email just lands in that important inbox just as they're getting a response to something really important? What if it lands on a day they just happen to be out of office? What happens if they login and there's 400 unreads in the inbox and yours just gets scanned over? Yes, you can have tactics and strategies in place to chase up, or optimize timing. But let's not fool ourselves into believing that there isn't an element of this that's luck even after you've produced something wonderful.”

One scenario I often think about is the fact that many of us will check email on our phone whilst on the move, or even when taking a break from our desktop and making a coffee. What if a journalist reads your email, likes it, but by the time they get back to their desk, something else has grabbed their attention?

The thing is, as we’ll discuss a bit more later, that the seeds of success at this point in the process are sewn long before you send that message to the person who you’d like to link to your campaign.

With all of that said, how can we improve our chances of getting links at this point in the process, and overcome this challenge?

Don’t treat outreach as a numbers game

It’s 2021 and we’re long past the point of link building being a numbers game. I’m not just talking about outreach here, I’m talking about the effectiveness of links themselves on your organic search rankings. Long gone are the days when raw numbers of links were the key driver, at least over the long-term. You’ll still see some websites ranking off the back of high volumes of low quality links, but it’s not something that a legitimate brand should build their search traffic on.

As Gisele Navarro commented on this question:

“This right here is the reason why trying to scale content-led link building campaigns is a waste of time. I've read people saying what we do is a numbers game but it's not.”

Gisele mentions an important word — scale. Once you scale anything, quality can start to suffer, and this is the same across many processes. Of course, some quality can be maintained, but when it comes to link building, scale often means a number of things:

• Emailing as many link prospects as possible

• Using email templates with minimal personalization

• Automating follow-ups

None of these are a great way to represent a brand online, let alone be effective at link building.

Gisele went on to talk about the importance of putting time into content instead of worrying about scaling outreach:

“No matter how many emails you send or how many sites you add to your target list, if your content is not link-worthy then you will struggle getting links. Grab all the time and effort you're dedicating to scaling link building and put it into the content you're producing.”

So, the question becomes, how can you be more effective at outreach? Let’s look at a few ways.

Focus on key relationships in your sector

Much has been said about the convergence of SEO and PR over the years, and I don’t want to focus too much on that today. But one thing that PR professionals are good at is building relationships, and I think that’s something that has often translated well into the SEO world.

You don’t need to have a campaign in your hand in order to start building relationships, either. You can start any time with a simple email, and many journalists or bloggers will welcome an authentic message from you where you might be starting a conversation about their work or views on a specific topic. Our team at Aira has done this many times over the years, and real friendships have developed as a result.

Look at your sector and ask yourself how you can engage with key people — without asking for anything in return. You’ll be surprised at how receptive those people are.

The key point to remember here is that you’re putting time and effort into this up front, knowing that you’ll see the rewards later. When the time comes to share a campaign that could be genuinely useful to your contact, they’re going to be far more likely to open and read your email. Even if the campaign isn’t for them, you’re likely to be told that, and have the chance to get feedback rather than having your email completely ignored without knowing why.

Find the right person to contact

When link prospecting, it’s very easy to go to a domain and make a note of the first name and email address that you find, and then continue on. This is fine for small blogs and publications, but you should take time to do more research for the medium to larger ones.

Bigger publications, especially top-tier newspapers and magazines, will have whole teams of people who cover different topics. Even specific topics can often have several people working on them — check out the travel section of any large newspaper and you’ll quickly see just how many writers there are.

It’s worth taking a bit of extra time to find out if there is more than one person who you could contact, and if so, making a note of all of them at the same time. You can then dig into each one a bit more to see who may be the most appropriate person to contact.

Keep an eye out for a few things in your research:

• How often they publish content: do they seem to be a regular writer or more like a guest writer?

• Are they on Twitter and if so, are they active? If they are, this may open up a way to engage with them and learn more about what they like writing about.

• What specific topics do they write about? Don’t write down “travel”, write down the specific niche within travel.

• Look at the headlines they use: are there any patterns in them, or anything you can learn about their reporting style?

Yes, this takes time. But it’s worth it because when you need to do outreach, you’re more likely to contact the right person and increase your chances of getting a reply and a link.

If you still find that your outreach is failing and you need to fix it quickly, check out this process and framework from Shannon McGuirk in her Whiteboard Friday.

2. Coming up with ideas for campaigns

Second in our list of challenges with 23% of respondents was coming up with ideas for their content campaigns. I fully understand why this is a challenge for many people, because knowing if an idea is good or bad can be very subjective. Not to mention, there’s a huge difference between a good idea and a good idea that will get links.

You may well come up with a solid idea for a piece of content that sits on your website and may get traffic, but it may not quite provoke someone to link to it over and over again. It’s important to understand this difference when coming up with ideas.

So, how can you overcome this challenge and come up with ideas that will work?

Develop a process and methodology

Not everyone will describe themselves as a creative person and unfortunately, those who describe themselves as not being creative will assume that they aren’t going to be very good at coming up with content ideas. Even if you’re at the opposite end of the spectrum here and believe that you are creative and can come up with ideas, having a solid process that guides you is a great way to ensure some consistency and save time.

Coming up with link-worthy content ideas can be hard, doing it over and over again is even harder — a process and methodology will help with this because it can be used repeatedly and across different sectors.

There are multiple processes that you can use here and there is not a single right answer, so here I just want to share a few that we use at Aira which may be helpful to you and point you in the right direction.

Content strategy framework

Our content strategy framework is designed to provoke ideas that are tied into the themes and topics that are most important to the brand that you’re working with. It also helps you understand which content formats are available to you and what the associated KPIs should be.

The last point is important because whilst links may be the focus, a great content campaign will add much more value and this should be acknowledged. For example, a campaign may also help you drive referral traffic to your website which could have value.

On the flip side, this framework also helps you demonstrate that some content campaigns will not lead directly to leads or customers — something that can be a common misunderstanding with some stakeholders. Using this framework lets you be explicit on what the primary KPIs for the campaign are, and when driving direct customers or revenue isn’t one of them.

Here is the framework itself, along with pointers for what each line means:

And here is an example of how it may look if we were working with a company who sell products to help you get a good night’s sleep:

Whilst this won’t define every single topic, it gives a solid starting point and importantly, keeps your ideas focused by making sure that they fit within the overarching themes and are linked to the right KPIs.

Audience pain points framework

Another methodology that we use at Aira revolves around the pain points of our client’s target audience, then connecting those pain points to solutions that the client can provide or create. There are there parts to this framework:

Audience: we work with the client to determine their core target audience for their products and keep this as tightly focused as possible on who they want their content to get in front of.

Pain points: we carry out research on this audience to understand what their main pain points are when it comes to the service or product that the client is offering.

Solutions: this is where we look at how the client currently solves these problems with either their products, services or content. This gives us a steer on where we ultimately need to be driving traffic to or if we need to create a new page.

Here is an example which imagines that we’re working with a company that helps people buy a home:

Once complete (although it’s never 100% complete, it’s an ongoing process) we can start to connect the dots between these three areas which can lead to campaign ideas.

For example, we may join the dots between these:

We could then base our idea generation around the target audience, their pain points and the solution offered by the client. This means that a campaign idea will be closely tied to the business and audience of the client, not going off on a tangent and reducing the value of the idea.

If you want to take a deep dive into the creative process, my go-to is always this deck from Mark Johnstone who also recently produced this report which picks apart 31 campaigns from different digital agencies to see what made those ideas work.

3. Getting approval for campaign ideas

Third in our list was getting approval for content ideas, with 20% of respondents saying that this was a challenge for them.

Having pitched many ideas to clients over the years, I understand how this can be a challenge, but it can also vary massively on a number of factors. The projects where I (or the team) have struggled most with sign-off are when we haven’t fully understood client expectations for the ideas.

The truth is that a lot of these expectations should be understood up front either when you sell a project or when you kick the project off. If you put together a creative brief, it should include questions that will help you ensure that the ideas you come up with are as likely as possible to be signed off.

Let’s look at the kinds of questions we need to be asking up front in order to do this and hopefully avoid pain further down the line.

Core topics and teasing out objections

Asking a client up front what topics they are happy to talk about can be useful, but won’t always unearth potential problems. Start by asking basic questions such as:

• What topics do you want your brand to be famous for?

• What topics would you say you’re credible to talk about?

• What topics does your audience resonate with?

• What questions do your customers always ask you?

This can give you a really good starting point but once you hear the answers, you need to go deeper. This involves a bit of thinking on your feet, but you should start to test the client at this point to see where their limits are and what they will and won’t sign off.

Take one of the topics they’ve mentioned and throw out a random example of using that idea, then do it again and again. Start to get a feel for how they react to ideas and listen carefully to what they say. They will start to give clues as to how they respond to ideas and what questions come into their mind.

For example, a reply may be “yeah, that would work but….” then they will give you a glimpse into potential problems. So this may become “yeah, that would work but we’d need sign off from our compliance team” or “yeah, that would work but Jenny in our data team would need to review it first.”

Off-topic ideas

Following on from this, it’s important to get an early understanding of what topics they want to steer clear of. Again, from experience, usual answers here may be fairly typical and not that helpful, such as a client wanting to steer clear of content that may be a bit risky or mention competitors. It’s not uncommon for companies to want to avoid political content being produced by a third party, even if the company doesn’t generally mind talking about political issues.

To try and dig deeper, repeat the process above and give some examples to test the boundaries a little and see how they respond. One way to do this is to ask about any previous campaigns that have gone wrong, not worked or caused issues for them internally or externally.

If you’re not dealing with the CEO, perhaps ask something like “if we wanted to produce an idea on this topic, what would your CEO say? How would she react?”. The additional benefit here is that you can start to see how internal dynamics between teams and the people above them works too.

Brand guidelines and tone

You need to ask how much they expect a piece of content to adhere to brand and tone of voice guidelines. Chances are that they want to make sure that content is consistent with their brand, but the extent of this can vary a lot depending on the business. Some will ask you to stick very, very closely to them whilst others will give you more freedom.

Knowing this is important because it can affect the ways in which you can execute an idea and sometimes, it will mean that some ideas aren’t feasible.

Format of presenting the ideas

When writing up and planning to present your ideas, don’t underestimate the importance of choosing the right format for delivery. This will change based on the client and quite often, how long you’ve been working with them.

At Aira, we have some clients who we’ve worked with for many years who know our process and team very well. These clients may only need a simple email with a summary of each idea in order to sign off or to ask a few questions.

This will be different for a client who is brand new and perhaps hasn’t run any campaigns before. This one will need a lot more detail and probably a full presentation with details/data attached so that they can fully understand everything.

Getting the format wrong up front is a sure fire way to put yourself on the backfoot, no matter how good the ideas may be.

4. Finding enough domains to get links from

Fourth on the list from our respondents, with 13% of them saying it was a challenge, was finding enough domains to get links from. This appears to be a relatively small challenge and even in competitive sectors, there are usually plenty of domains out there that are relevant to the campaign that you’re producing.

There are plenty of guides out there which give away lots of techniques and processes for finding link prospects, here are a few:

• How to Find Sites That Will Want to Link to Your Content

• The Beginner’s Guide to Finding Link Targets

• Building Your Outreach List

To add to these, I want to encourage you to also think carefully about the attributes of the domains that you’re trying to find and not to obsess too much over “SEO metrics”. Let me explain.

I believe more and more that Google passes value across links in very different ways than they used to. Essentially, Google can pass more or less PageRank across a link based on a number of attributes associated with that link. The concept of this has been around for many years and Bill Slawski has written about how Google may do this here.

Whilst not new, this is one area where I believe Google can (and does) refine more and more as time passes. If we assume that links will remain a core ranking signal for a while yet, it stands to reason that Google will refine the signals within it, of which, there will be many.

Side note: our State of Link Building Report also asked respondents if they felt that links as a ranking signal would still exist in five years time, many believed they would:

The belief reduces a little if we look ten years into the future, but the majority still said yes:

Back to our core point, I believe that it’s important to think about the attributes of links that Google may look at in order to define value, but also to think about what is valuable to you beyond pure SEO or ranking value.

Here are some examples:

• Links that send traffic to you

• Links from domains that your audience frequently visits

• Links from domains that you don’t already have

• Links from domains that your competitors have (and don’t have)

• Links from domains that have high levels of traffic

When you start to do link prospecting with these kinds of attributes in mind, you start to think a little bit differently and you naturally lean toward quality over quantity. These are the links that Google wants to reward now and in the future.

5. Design and development of ideas

Finally, in last place in our survey was getting the design and development of ideas. Only 10% of our respondents listed this as a challenge.

We don’t spend too much time on this but here are a few tips for making sure that your content campaign doesn’t fail at this point.

Don’t start with the format

As tempting as it can be, try to avoid any bias toward a certain format or type of execution before your idea is fully fleshed out. For example, try to avoid starting by saying “I want to do a map” or “I want to do an interactive infographic”. Let the idea lead to an appropriate format by asking yourself what the best way to communicate your idea is.

This could lead to a range of options:

• Blog post

• Long-form guide

• Infographic

• Tweet thread

• Video

• Slidedeck

• Whitepaper

The list can go on and you get the idea.

You should still be aware of what content formats can work and keep an internal log of your campaigns to see which ones work best, but don’t let yourself get caught up in the format. A successful campaign that was an interactive piece most likely worked because the idea behind it was strong, not just because it was interactive.

Don’t let the idea get lost

Leading on from the previous point, it’s very easy for a core idea to be lost when it goes through the process of being designed and developed. If we imagine that the core idea has come from one or two people, who have then passed it along to a designer, maybe a developer and also other stakeholders who have given feedback, it’s very easy for the core idea to be diluted.

It’s important to be clear about the core idea and why that idea is so crucial to the success of a campaign at all stages. When you brief a designer, start with the idea. When you pitch the idea to a stakeholder, start with the idea. When you start to do QA on designs and development environments, keep the core idea in mind.

Be aware of restrictions

The design and development of an idea can fall down very easily if you present something that can’t be executed on the company website. For example, if you’re unable to upload interactive content or you have to publish content within an existing template, this is going to cause blockers with design and development. It’s important to be aware of these up front so that you can design and build content that can be published.

To wrap up: every step is a challenge, but is also important

Despite some steps being harder than others, the truth is that you need all steps to be doing their bit and pulling their weight if you’re going to end up with a successful campaign.

Outreach becomes easier when you have a great idea.

Coming up with ideas becomes easier when you have a good brief.

Implementing a design becomes easier when the idea is clear and compelling already

You get the idea. Take time to understand the process in full and optimize each step as much as you can, whilst allowing for flexibility and for people to be creative and do what they think is best.

For more link building tips, be sure to check out our recent update to The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building:

Read the Guide!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Cyrus Shepard. I am a full-time SEO consultant, working here with Moz. Today I want to talk to you about a subject I saw on Twitter that I thought was really interesting: Does fixing old broken links still matter to SEO?

Now I thought this was a great question because fixing broken links is an SEO best practice. You read about it all the time. But if you've been doing SEO long enough, like I have, you've run into situations where you've fixed a broken link, or you found a page with hundreds of broken links, maybe thousands of broken links, you fixed it, you redirected it to a new target, and nothing happened.

So does this happen all the time? Is this common? Has Google changed the way it treats broken links? What's going on here, what are best practices, and what steps can we take to increase our chances of seeing a benefit from fixing broken links? That's what we're going to talk about today. 

Why we fix broken links

So let's start off with why do we fix broken links. This is the basic stuff, the introduction.

Links pass link signals. Google uses links for things like PageRank and anchor text. So when they find links, they can give you a rankings boost. When a page 404s when those links break, when they go to a page that doesn't work, those link signals don't have a chance to pass anymore, and that can hurt your SEO. Usually these are caused by one of two reasons.

One, the link itself is just bad. It points to a page that doesn't exist on your website or something like that. There's a weird parameter in it. Someone typed it in wrong. But oftentimes pages break on your own site. You remove a page and you don't redirect it to another page. A combination of these factors means that on any given site you can find tens, hundreds, thousands, even millions of links sometimes because this is a very common scenario.

So that's why we fix broken links, to regain that link juice and get that ranking benefit that Google is looking for. So it's supposed to work and oftentimes it does work and a lot of times it's great. But there are times when it doesn't work. 

Why it might not work

So what could be going on here during these times that it doesn't work? So here are four reasons why fixing broken links may not be effective in certain situations.

1. The links didn't count

First of all, the links may not have counted in the first place. The truth is there are a lot of links Google just doesn't count. These could be spam links, manipulative links, or links they find that are non-editorial. Just because a tool reports a link as being broken or pointing to a non-existent page doesn't mean that link actually has value. So that could be one reason why fixing the broken link may not work.

2. The links were low value

Second reason, Google may have counted those links, but they were considered low value or not fresh. Consider a link on a page that's a broken link from a page that's 10 years old. It doesn't have very much traffic or no traffic. It's buried at the bottom. No one even visits this page. Google doesn't even rank it.

Would you expect Google to attach a lot of value by fixing that broken link? Probably not. So a lot of times when you're fixing broken links, you may find low value, not fresh links, pages that aren't updated. They may not pass a lot of value and fixing them may not have a lot of benefit. 

3. You redirected to an irrelevant URL

Third, and this is a really common reason, you fixed the link, but you redirected it to an irrelevant URL or a URL that's not as pertinent.

We see this a lot with sites that discontinue an entire section and they redirect everything to the homepage. They get rid of a subdomain. They redirect to a category page or something like that. Google will often report these as soft 404s, meaning they see your redirect, but they don't think the page that you're redirecting to is as relevant as the original page or the page that was broken or intended to be there in the first place.

So that's another reason why Google may not pass these link signals through these links when they see a soft 404 or they see you redirecting to a page that just isn't as relevant as the original. 

4. Google may not rely on "live" links

The fourth reason it may not work, there's this phenomenon, this theory that Google may not rely on live links, that these link signals don't necessarily have to be there all the time for Google to pass value to them.

Now Google advises us, when we do redirects, to leave those redirects in place for a year. Now why would they say a year? The theory is that after a year any value in those link signals has already passed. Rand Fishkin noticed this phenomenon and named it ghost links several years ago, where links that no longer exist might already have passed their value.

So sometimes we don't really know how Google treats these older links. But sometimes it may not be necessary for links to be live for them to pass value, so fixing them doesn't really have an impact. Again, this is an area where we don't have a lot of insight into how Google actually works, but it's possible that the link signals have simply passed on their relevance anyway.

5 broken link building best practices

So what can we do about it? What can we do about these situations to maximize fixing old broken links on our website? So here are my five best practices. 

1. DO fix broken links

One, yes, you should fix broken links. Do continue to fix broken links, because we don't know which links Google isn't counting, and there are several, often many instances where it does work and you can see a benefit.

Plus it's just a good user experience. When users are coming from one URL to another, they don't want to see broken pages, and those link signals can pass relevance and value to Google. 

2. Prioritize pages with high authority

Two, prioritize pages and links with high authority. Your site may have thousands of broken links or millions of broken links. You don't need to fix all of them. But what you want to prioritize are the high value links, the pages with lots of links pointing to them, or links from pages that have lots of value themselves.

We score pages here at Moz on a value called Page Authority. A lot of SEO tools have different metrics that help rank pages based on links. So fix the pages with your highest number of links, your highest Page Authority or whatever score you're using, and prioritize links from pages themselves that also have high Page Authority. These are going to be your most valuable links to fix. 

3. Prioritize links with freshness signals

Third, we want to prioritize links with freshness signals. We want to avoid these 10-year-old pages. Well, we don't necessarily need to avoid them, but we want to prioritize the most important pages. So what are freshness signals? Generally, we want to prioritize links from pages that get traffic themselves, that are regularly updated, that get links coming to them.

There are many, many different types of freshness signals. There's an old post I wrote a while back. We'll link to it in the transcript below. But we definitely want to prioritize those links that have the highest value. 

4. Redirect to relevant URLs

Fourth, we want to make sure we're redirecting to relevant URLs. You don't want to redirect everything to your homepage or necessarily a category page that's off-topic.

A question to ask is: Does the page you're redirecting to rank for the same types of keywords as the old URL? Or would it provide a good user experience to someone coming from the old link, or would the user be confused? The closer you are in topicality to the original page, the more likely those link signals are to pass from one target onto another.

Ideally, you're linking to the exact same page and it just happens to be a broken page and you can fix it and it's relevant and everything is great. But in cases where you can't redirect to a relevant page, as close as possible or maybe you just shouldn't redirect at all, because 404s are okay. They're a natural part of the internet. It's not always bad to have a 404.

5. You don't need to fix every link

Which brings us to best practice number five, you don't have to fix every link. This happens all the time. Broken links are a natural part of the internet. Moz, if we go into our broken links report, we have tens of thousands of broken links. It would not be worth our time to fix every one of them, and it would be a waste of money and effort. But fixing the good ones, fixing the ones with high authority, with freshness signals, and redirecting to relevant URLs or the original URLs, those are the ones that are going to have value.

So you don't want to give your developers a list of 10,000 broken links and say, "Hey, fix all these." They're going to be mad at you, and you're not going to see the value out of it. So if you want some tips on how to fix broken links, how to find those high value links, we have a video from Dr. Pete on tips on exactly how to do that using Moz. You can use many other tools.

Google Search Console and others are great at this. So yes, fix those broken links. You don't have to fix all of them. That's how you're going to get the value. Leave us your tips in the comments below. Thanks, everybody.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

 Tweet your questions and comments about broken link building using #MozBlog!

Like most SEO consultants who don’t focus on link building as a central business offering, for a long time, the entire process of link building at scale seemed overwhelming, and every link building campaign I launched failed to generate the results I needed.

I would spend hours writing content, testing numerous tools to discover link opportunities, validating each site, and finally reaching out to site owners in a desperate attempt to secure high-quality backlinks. But nothing seemed to work, and as my success rates dropped, so did my confidence in myself as an SEO. 

It wasn’t until I started to look through my entire link building process that I realized I needed to spend more time qualifying sites to ensure I didn’t waste time on low-quality sites or irrelevant content.

Over the course of a few years, I slowly started to develop a system to help me discover, prospect, and secure powerful links for myself and my clients. This process was made around me being the only person doing the work, so I had to find ways to minimize wasted time or resources along the way.

A quick note for readers

I’m not a professional link builder, and I’ve found that this process to qualify potential sites works for me and my needs. Since link building is a powerful SEO tactic, you should be sure to do thorough research to determine the best approach for your specific needs. What works for me might not work for you, so, I highly recommend you look at resources like Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to Link Building, or pick up The Ultimate Guide To Link Building by Garrett French and Eric Ward.

So again, before we go through my qualifying process in the pre-pitch phase of link building, I just want to reiterate that this process is not perfect, it won’t work for all types of link building campaigns, and it will continue to be improved upon. I created this process based on my needs and goals, and it works on a few assumptions:

• You are a solo or small team, and need to maximize your time throughout the process.

• You are looking for broken link building and guest post opportunities. This will not work for local link building or other related strategies.

• You have access to various tools like Moz, Ahrefs, and Majestic, and you know how to pull data from those resources.

• You are more concerned with maximizing your time than you are about finding every site available.

With that said, I hope it helps other SEOs shave some time off their link building process and combine it with other approaches for the best results possible!

Qualification & audit in the pre-pitch phase

No one will deny that link building is one of the most important pieces of any SEO strategy. While you may have an impeccable technical setup and the best content on the internet, the truth is that Google will not reward your efforts if you don’t have the types of links to your site that signal authority.

Since all link building boils down to outreach, I needed to have amazing content to offer the right people to land links from the right sites. Whether I was performing broken link building, resource page link building, or reaching out to powerful sites for guest posting, I needed to make sure I limited the amount of time and resources wasted on irrelevant sites.

The first step of any successful link building campaign is to make sure that you have the right content for the desired audience. At this point, let's assume that you have a great piece of content that’s relevant for a long list of potential sites. For me, the most important aspect to consider is my time, so this is where pre-qualifying sites is crucial. I have to cut out as many sites as possible as quickly as possible, and focus on the sites out there with the best fit.

Step 1: Bulk disqualifications

Once you know that your content will solve a problem, you can run various footprints through a tool like Scrapebox, NinjaOutreach, or Pitchbox to develop a large group of potential sites to reach out to.

Depending on the industry and footprints used in the discovery phase, you might end up with a list of a few thousand potential sites. While it’s exciting to see that many, you can also lose a lot of time by reaching out to sites that are irrelevant or low-quality.

Disqualify various URL parameters

Before I look at metrics or other aspects of a site, I'll prune my initial list of sites based on specific words in their URL that I think will yield poor results for my outreach efforts. I do this with simple commands in Excel or a Google Sheets document to search for and remove each row with a URL that includes footprints like “wiki”, “forum”, and “news”.

While this process isn’t perfect, I’ve found that these types of sites usually offer a low-quality link on a generic page buried deep in their content archive.

Remove blatant guest posting sites

Now that we removed sites with specific parameters in the URL, I like to remove sites that are obviously made for guest bloggers. While guest blogging has been a good strategy for me, sites that appear to be built around guest posts are usually unscrupulous sites that I don’t want a link from. While not always the case, I've found that these sites are likely part of a Private Blog Network (PBN) and could yield low impact for my link building efforts.

To prune out these types of sites, I will pre-qualify sites like I did in the previous step by taking out sites with “submit”, “write for us”, or “guest post” in the URL and move them to my “junk” spreadsheet that I keep and examine later on.

Step 2: Use tools to identify powerful sites

At this stage, I’ve removed quite a few sites from the initial list based on their URL. Now I can assume that the sites I have in my list aren’t trying to generate guest posts, and my efforts won’t result in a link buried deep within a wiki page.

It’s important to note that the exact metrics I consider acceptable will vary based on industry, client goals, and if I’m performing local link building campaigns vs. national outreach efforts. But to simplify things, I’ll use the general baseline with the metrics below when evaluating a typical client for authoritative outreach campaigns.

Obviously, not all sites are disqualified, but if a site has high metrics but upon further examination I find the site is low quality, then I know that site was only built for rankings and I will disqualify that site from my target list.

Majestic website metrics

The most important factor to consider in any outreach campaign is the topical relevance and authority of a site based on the industry that you’re working in. It’s important to ensure that all backlinks are relevant to the target page from a topical and contextual perspective.

Since topical authority and relevance are so important for outreach efforts, I run my list of sites through Majestic SEO so my spreadsheet of prospective sites are all related by topic and context to the piece of content I want to point links to.

Once I have a list of topically relevant sites, I will run that list through Majestic and only keep those sites that return CF/TF of 12 or above. I may adjust this baseline depending on the number of results, but I have found that sites with CF/TF below 12 tend to be weaker sites that won't move the needle.

It should also be noted that I only keep sites where the CF and TF scores are at least 50% of each other. For example, I will not consider a site with CF 50, but a TF 10 score.

This step will whittle down my initial list and usually leave me with about 20-30% of it. I take all sites that aren’t relevant to the destination site and place them in a separate spreadsheet to review later.

Ahrefs website metrics

Now that I have a list of topically relevant sites that also meet a minimum threshold in Majestic SEO, I will move on to Ahrefs. I copy/paste the remaining sites into the Build Analyze tool to find sites with at least 500 monthly traffic and a DR of 15 or above.

This step helps me identify “real” sites that generate traffic before I manually review the site.

Moz website metrics

Finally, I take the list of sites that are topically relevant and have strong baseline metrics through the Moz Pro tool. Since I can’t justify the cost of Moz API for my small team and limited use case, I need to do URL checks manually at this stage, so it’s important to do everything I can in previous steps to ensure I only work with sites that show good potential.

I check my list of sites in Moz through their Link Research tool to understand the strength of a root domain and quickly identify any spam sites that might have survived previous steps. I also look at the Moz Spam Score to determine whether a site requires more manual review.

Depending on the scope of my link building campaign, the industry I'm targeting, and geographic region (among other factors), I usually only reach out to sites with a DA of 10 or above. I’ve found the Moz DA tool is pretty accurate when evaluating the “realness” factor of a site, and anything below a 10 DA is likely a PBN site.

My final step to evaluate a site through SEO tools is to look at the Spam Score to catch any leftover low-quality sites that may have passed the other checks:

Like with most tools, you can get false positives as it’s pretty easy to stand a site up just to generate “good” SEO metrics. For this reason, I like to take the final step of a manual review before I reach out to website owners.

Step 3: Manual review

Now that I have a small list (usually 10-20% of the original list that I started with) of sites that meet benchmarks set in each tool, I'll begin the manual process of reviewing the remaining sites.

I think it’s important to manually check sites before reaching out to them, because I can usually find sites that are part of a PBN, or those sites that were built just to sell links, based on their design and functionality.

As I review these sites, I keep an eye out for obvious signals of a poor site. I almost always disqualify a site at this stage that has excessive advertising on it, because I can assume it was only built to increase their sales commissions and not the quality of content for real people.

Use SEO tools to save time during the link prospecting phase

No matter the scope of your outreach or the industry you work in, all outreach campaigns take a lot of time and resources. Most SEOs know that bad link building can result in a whole host of problems, and as the only person in our agency who performs outreach, I need to protect my time.

The balance between scalability, quality, and efficiency is made or broken during the prospecting phase of any link building campaign. I use various SEO tools to help me save time and determine the best sites for my outreach efforts. Not only does this stack of SEO tools help me identify those sites, it also means that I'm more likely to successfully communicate with a real person at a real site to build links with.

Feel free to test out this process for yourself, and I’d love your thoughts on how to improve it in the comments below!

But in order to be successful, your content has to be newsworthy.

One of the most common newsworthy elements is timeliness, meaning the information is either brand new or relevant right now.

Most brands aren’t operating full newsrooms and don’t have the capacity to cover breaking news, but there are still ways to participate in relevant, newsworthy conversations — and surveys are a great option.

I’m going to walk through how you can utilize surveys to add value to conversations, and earn the interest of writers at top publications.

Step 1: Identifying the trends

Saying “trends” is honestly too broad, because a trend can last for hours, days, months, or even years. Obviously, the shorter the trend, the harder it’ll be to contribute in a timely fashion.

For the purpose of building links, I tend to ignore Google Trends, Twitter trends, and other rapidly changing interests, because you’ll need at least a handful of days to put a survey together, and there’s no guarantee the topic will still be popular by the time you’re done.

Instead, I look for trends that last in the range of months, as they accommodate longer-term conversations and give you the room to explore new angles and perspectives without racing against time.

Here are some ways to identify these types of trends:

• Keyword research: When keywords and topics have a high volume, that means there’s a great deal of interest; often these tools use historical data to inform their volume estimates, so it’s safe to assume these topics didn’t just start trending.

• Exploding Topics: The goal of this site is to help people identify trends before they peak so they can contribute while the conversation is becoming more and more relevant. Keep tabs on topics related to your industry to get ideas.

• BuzzSumo: When using this tool, check out the Content Analyzer and type in your niche. But don’t just look at the stories that have gotten the most engagement — see if there’s a story or pattern in the first couple of pages of results. Perhaps there’s an underlying trend there.

• Join communities: See what topics are being discussed where your audience connects with others. Are there Facebook groups, Slack/Discord channels, Twitter chats, or anything else where these conversations are happening? Make sure to pay attention.

• Publisher stories: Keep tabs on your target publications. What are they publishing stories about? What do these stories have in common?

For example, let’s look at a project we did for our client Signs.com called American Mask Mandates. As you know, COVID-19 has been a very unfortunate “trend” that’s been thrust upon us, and because it’s a once-in-a-lifetime event, the scary novelty of it has generated a lot of news stories. But you can go even further than that — what else related to COVID-19 is trending?

We knew mask-wearing debates were appearing constantly in the media, but it was hard to tell exactly where the general public stood on the matter separate from all the noise those sensational stories stirred up.

When we identified this trend, we decided to survey 1,000 people to get their thoughts on the issue, and we framed the timeliness and trending aspect of the story in our project’s introduction:

Once you have a few trends like this in mind, you can move on to the next part of ideation.

Step 2: Consider new perspectives

When people discuss topics that aren’t cut-and-dry (which are sometimes the most interesting topics), they often rely on their own experience to understand it.

Because of this, there are perspectives that aren’t being fully represented in the conversation, and that’s where a survey can provide a ton of value.

Ask yourself these questions to identify hidden perspectives you can tap into:

• What does the general audience think about this topic overall? (Follow-up: Are people afraid/unwilling to share their views publicly?)

• What is the sentiment around certain points made in this conversation?

• Are all groups being represented here?

At this point, you should have a solid brainstorm going about 1) who you should survey and 2) what you could ask them that would unearth new insights.

For the Signs.com example, we knew this was a contentious topic, and we wanted to get a sense of how extreme the views were in the general public (rather than the few that are the loudest). But we also made sure to have a sample size of people from the different political parties for insightful demographic breakdowns (more on that later).

Here’s an example of one of the assets we created:

Despite all the controversy, our survey revealed a vast majority of people said masks should be worn in public. And while baby boomers were more likely to think masks were unnecessary, it was still only about 5% of surveyed baby boomers who felt that way.

By taking this perspective, we were able to get closer to the truth about perceptions of a trending topic. And the media was interested: we earned coverage for this project on Washington Examiner, MarketWatch, MSN, and more.

So how can you draft a survey with similar results?

Step 3: Drafting the survey

A guide on survey building could be a whole separate post, so I’m not going to go through this step-by-step. I will, however, provide some best practices on how to get the most fascinating takeaways out of your survey — while eliminating sources of bias.

First, you’ll want to make a list of potential questions to ask. A great way to spark ideas here is to consider what you want the final results to look like (which will of course change based on the data).

Imagine how the takeaway or eventual article headline would read. If we use the Signs.com project as an example, a theory we had was that we (the public) aren’t actually as in-conflict as we’re led to believe. From there, we imagined what the headline (that actually ended up featured on MarketWatch) could be as a result of our survey questions:

The benefit of doing this is to help you visualize whether the potential results of your survey will actually be newsworthy or interesting enough to publish. It also helps you frame your questions in a way to get the format of answers you’re looking for.

For example, the headline on Washington Examiner and MSN is: “New consensus for mask use and $225 fine for refusing.” When you’re able to imagine a potential headline like this, which cites how much the public says people should be fined for breaking mask rules, you know to ask a question about that in a specific way. If you’d asked for ranges rather than providing a fill-in-the-blank, for example, that would have meant a much clunkier headline.

However, you have to be careful not to bring your hypotheses into the survey in the form of bias.

The way you form questions can definitely impact the results you get and make them significantly more subjective if you’re not careful. Consider the following:

• Are your scales biased? Are you asking, “How annoying is this?” rather than something like “Do you find this acceptable or unacceptable?”. Providing both sides of the scale makes for a less-biased question.

• Are all potential options presented? If you force someone to choose the answers you provide, you could be pigeon-holing them into choosing something they don’t actually want to choose. Always include an “Other” option as well as a “None” or “Not applicable” option.

• Does your question tap into social desirability bias, where people feel like they need to answer your question in a way that is socially acceptable? For example, someone may not want to admit how many drinks they have per week if they’re heavy drinkers. (You can perhaps move forward if you phrase things in a non-judgmental way, ask respondents for honest answers, and remind them their input is anonymous.)

Sometimes it’s best to just ask for a fill-in-the-blank. Look at this insight we got from asking respondents how much they think people should be fined for not following mask regulations:

While sometimes ranges can help get an insight you’re looking for, fill-in-the-blank options help you see more specific insights. Here, you can see Democratic respondents would like a higher fine, a result which may have been lost if done with ranges.

Finally, make sure you’re asking inclusive demographic questions (and later break down your results by demographic). Doing so might reveal trends you may not have discovered otherwise, like that millennials worry about something baby boomers don’t, or that women have a different opinion than men on an issue. This is a good way to illustrate the opinion of groups who may not be well represented in a conversation.

When we broke things down by generation and political affiliation, we saw that, while there were some differences, they weren’t nearly as dramatic as some would assume. This is an important insight we would have missed otherwise.

Step 4: Promoting the results

Our strategy when doing surveys is to do all of the analysis and create images like the ones I showed previously in the article. The images should depict the data in straightforward graphs, and takeaways should highlight the key parts of your report. We build an accompanying write-up around these insights, and then we pitch everything to writers.

Remember that tip about imagining headlines? That’s going to come in handy here, too. Now that you have the final data, ask yourself: what is the most surprising or impactful information you can glean from the results?

Have this in mind when writing your pitch email, and include the key interesting facts in your pitch. Essentially, you don’t want writers guessing why they should care about your survey.

Perhaps you can even reference the trend you’re referring to and a time when that writer or publication covered the trend in a different way. How does your survey complement that story?

Conclusion

Surveys give you access to a wealth of public opinion. When you’re reading content, be mindful of what you’re wondering about. Can you confirm or deny the assumptions you’re making by launching a survey? How can tapping into other people’s perspectives add more context and value to a conversation? 

Sharing your survey results can not only enliven a conversation and give it more depth — it can demonstrate you care about the topic and are willing to do the work to contribute in a meaningful way. And if you create the content and use an earned media strategy to get it out there, you can get the dual benefits of building links and brand authority simultaneously.

First, though, a little background. The Disavow Tool was launched in late 2012, into an SEO ecosystem very different from the one we work in today. The Penguin link-spam update was still very new, and Manual Actions were commonplace. Working in an SEO agency in 2013 and 2014, I remember this being a common source of new business — sites that had been working with a less reputable agency on link building work would receive a message from Google, and all or part of their site would disappear from search results.

They’d come to us to get it fixed, and we’d trawl through their portfolio of terrible links, work on a disavow file, and engage in what was often a drawn out back-and-forth, exchanging messages with Google employees through Google Search Console (or Webmaster Tools as it was then).

What was particularly different compared to today’s landscape was that generally, if you had been penalized because of link building tactics, you were explicitly told, and the tactical implications were extremely clear and included use of the Disavow Tool.

Nowadays, it’s very, very rare for someone to get a manual action. If your traffic drops, you have no way of knowing for sure whether it’s for some link-based reason, or something else entirely. Your traffic may indeed bounce right back with the next Core Update, even if you do nothing — that’s something I’ve seen happen to numerous sites. British news site, The Daily Mail, were so confused by this pattern that they’re suing Google over it.

So, in this divergent landscape, is the Disavow Tool a dinosaur, or still relevant?

Is the Disavow Tool still useful in 2021?

Traffic drops

So now, if you experience a big traffic drop, but you don’t have a manual action, should you disavow?

Google seems to say no. In 2020, Marie Haynes asked Google’s John Mueller if a site could see increased traffic after using the Disavow Tool, even if it did not have a manual action (i.e. a visible message in Google Search Console.) John Mueller said such a benefit would be “very rare”, essentially suggesting that if sites see benefit after a disavow, it’s probably a case of correlation rather than causation.

This builds on previous advice from Google to the effect that its algorithms were now intelligent enough to just ignore bad links, rather than requiring some penalty action.

However, if you have just seen a big traffic drop, you probably want to cover your bases and try everything that might reasonably work, right? A sensible first step would be to take a look at your backlink portfolio and see whether, broadly, it seems suspicious. Of course, everyone has some bad links, but are you heavily reliant on them? Are a lot of them recent? Moz’s own Spam Score is the perfect metric for this task if you’re stuck, and this post gives a good walkthrough.

If, after reviewing your own link portfolio, you think maybe you deserved the traffic drop after all, perhaps a disavow file should be part of your clean-up plan. But remember: if you were reliant on questionable links, the disavow is supposed to wipe those out — meaning you’ll have to replace them with some hard-earned, legitimate equivalents.

Proactive disavow

What if your traffic is fine right now, but you’re worried about the skeletons in the closet? Perhaps you think it’s remarkable you (or your client) is getting away with the state of their link portfolio, and it’s an accident waiting to happen? Or maybe you believe someone is building dodgy-looking links to your site in a deliberate effort to do harm, or just for some unrelated reason that ends up looking bad nonetheless?

In these cases, you can consider a proactive disavow, again as an “erring on the side of caution” measure. I would advise a very light touch, though, as there’s an element here of “don’t fix what isn’t broken”, and it would be all too easy to do more harm than good.

Which links should I disavow?

I won’t go into too much detail here, as there’s already an excellent Whiteboard Friday on the topic: What Links to Target with Google’s Disavow Tool.

A rough process could look something like this:

1. Use Spam Score to narrow down your analysis to links you’re particularly concerned about.

2. Use Excel, Google Sheets, or similar, to prioritize some links for manual review (if a site links to you 10,000 times, you probably only need to review a handful to get the idea!). Remember at this stage to cut out any links that are nofollowed, expired, 404ed, or otherwise no longer passing equity.

3. Look through the links you’ve found, and ask yourself what motive the author might have had for placing them. If you can’t imagine any reason other than financial incentive or the site’s security being compromised, you might want to disavow that link. If all the links from that domain look like this, you might want to disavow the domain.

Once you’ve figured out which links and domains you want to disavow, you can proceed to the next step.

How to check your disavow file

You can always download your existing disavow file, as long as you have Google Search Console access. It’s always a good idea to take a look at what this contains — at this point many sites have a historic disavow file, often with comments revealing the reasoning and the time that any links were originally added.

You can navigate to the tool here, and select your site from the dropdown. Be aware though that the disavow tool is old, so it doesn’t support domain properties. Instead, you’ll need to look at prefixes (e.g. “https://www.moz.com”, instead of just “moz.com”). It’s very likely that any old disavow file was uploaded in the era of HTTP rather than HTTPS too, so you’ll need to make sure your HTTP:// and HTTP://WWW. properties are verified.

Can I remove links from a disavow file?

What if you find some domains in a disavow file that you’re pretty sure shouldn’t be there? I’ve been in situations quite a few times where I’ve found an old disavow file that was probably created in a bit of a panic, and perhaps disavows some of the site’s best — and cleanest — links. In a couple of cases, I’ve even seen sites that disavow themselves.

In these cases, I’ve corrected the errors, and I have to say I’ve seen no positive uplift from doing so. Which leaves a few possible explanations:

1. Google ignores disavow files altogether anyway

or

2. Once a link is disavowed, there’s no going back

or

3. Google ignores clearly errant entries

or

4. These sites weren’t in a position to benefit from more links anyhow

This tweet from John Mueller in 2019 explicitly rules out option 2, and sort of implies option 1 isn’t the case either. 

If you remove something from a disavow fire and upload it again, then it won't be disavowed anymore, so that should just work.

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) August 13, 2019

My suspicion, given my familiarity with the cases I mentioned above, is some combination of answers 3, and 4. These weren’t sites that generally lacked for authority compared to their peers (quite the contrary), but I’d expect disavowing yourself to be a fatal blow if it had any effect at all. The two sites that had done this were by no means dead, so I guess disavowing yourself has no effect.

So yes, you can remove links from a disavow file.

How to create a disavow file

A disavow file is fundamentally just a text (.txt or .csv) file. Each line in the text file must be one of the following:

• A disavowed link, e.g. https://example.com/dodgy

• A disavowed domain (meaning every link from this domain is gone), e.g. domain:example.com

• A comment (which Google will ignore, but your colleagues may find useful in the future), e.g. #New disavows 2021-02-01

Here’s how those might look together:

A few important notes:

You can disavow subdomains.

E.g. domain:blog.example.com

This is particularly useful if you have links from some questionable blogspot sites (e.g. dodgyblog.blogspot.com), but you don’t necessarily want to disavow every blogspot site, even though they all share a domain (blogspot.com).

A disavow file must be UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII

If you build your disavow file by pasting from Excel into Notepad, for example, you’d need to then navigate to “Save As” and make sure it looks like this:

Maximum file size is 2MB, or 100,000 lines

I’ve heard ex-Googlers suggest a 10,000 row limit in the past, but Google’s own official advice suggests the larger figure of 100,000 rows.

How to submit a disavow file

1. Navigate to the tool. It’s now impossible to navigate to the Disavow Tool through Google Search Console. Instead, you need to navigate to https://search.google.com/search-console/disavow-links.

2. Select the site you want to disavow links for. Remember that you’ll need to be verified on the relevant prefix property (e.g. https://moz.com, as that’s the indexed version of this site — not http://moz.com, https://www.moz.com, etc.).

3. Upload your disavow file. Depending on whether you previously had a disavow file, you’ll get a button saying either “Upload disavow list” or “Replace”. If it’s the latter, make sure you keep a copy of the old one as backup!

Using the Disavow Tool after a domain migration

In theory, you only need to disavow on the new target domain — there’s no need to go back and update disavow files on old properties that now 301 to the current canonical version.

For example, there would be no need for Moz to update the disavow file on:

• http://moz.com

• http://seomoz.org

That does mean that if you already have a disavow file you’re happy with, and you’re undergoing a planned migration, it’d be a good idea to bring it with you and re-upload on the new property.

Weighing the risks and benefits

The hazard of the Disavow Tool is that you don’t know which of your links are doing more harm than good — if any.

Furthermore, if you actually are engaged in nefarious link building practices, there’s a very good chance that a disavow file is helping Google to profile the links you build as bad, which will make it even harder for you to succeed on your next project.

The benefits, meanwhile, are uncertain, poorly documented, and nigh-impossible to test. I have worked on sites in the past few years that proactively disavowed links and then saw improvements, but this kind of SEO activity does not exist in a vacuum — numerous Core Updates, competitor changes, offline marketing initiatives, and new content came and went in the meantime.

Overall, my advice would be to use the Disavow Tool sparingly, and with caution. If you have links you are confident are doing you no good, then ultimately it may put your mind more at ease if you disavow than if you don’t.

I’d love to hear other SEOs’ philosophies on this grey area, though. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.