Link building is a process of obtaining backlinks from other websites to your own. This process is important as it is one of the major factors that search engines like Google use to rank websites in their search engine results pages (SERPs).
With proper strategy, planning, and execution, link building can prove to be a highly effective method to enhance your website’s SEO. A link from a high-quality website will not only help improve your website’s visibility, but it will also help to increase your organic search traffic.
What is a Link-Building Campaign?
A link-building campaign is a strategy and process implemented to achieve your link-building goals. A link-building campaign is an ongoing effort to increase the number of authority inbound links pointing to your website.
Link building can also be a very daunting and time-consuming process, especially if you’re new to it. In this guide, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know about link-building campaigns, from how to create one to how to measure your success.
How to Start a Link Building Campaign: The Process
The first step in starting a link-building campaign is to set some goals. What do you want to achieve with your link-building campaign? Do you want to improve your website’s search engine rankings? Drive more traffic to your website?
Once you’ve decided on your goals, you’ll be able to focus your link-building efforts better, and you’ll be more likely to achieve success.
1. Review Client Site
At first, it is necessary to review the client’s website to figure out the target pages, their ranking status, and also the backlink gap. Below are the three steps that are required to be figured out while reviewing a client’s website.
Find Target Pages
When selecting your target pages, it is necessary to consider two things – the value of the page and the keyword opportunity for the page. Every website has certain pages that are more valuable than others, and you don’t want to waste SEO efforts on pages that don’t provide value.
Ranking Or Not (Target Pages)
Start by identifying the target pages by analyzing the conversion potential and the keyword ranking opportunity for those pages. Opt for keywords that match the intent of the page and also have relatively high search volume along with low difficulty.
Backlink Gap Analysis
Backlink gap analysis helps you discover link opportunities. This is the process of identifying which websites link to your competitors but not to you. This analysis is important because it helps you to find possible link-building opportunities that you can pursue.
2. Set Up an Email Account
Setting up an email account for a link-building campaign is an important task. You need to have a professional email account so that you can start contacting other websites for link-building opportunities. This will be the main mode of communication between you and other website owners.
Also, make sure to warm up the email account of the client. This is required so that the outreaching emails do not land up in the prospect’s spam.
3. Finalize Target Pages
From all the identified target pages, figure out the pages that can generate a good amount of revenue if ranked in the SERP results and finalize them accordingly. Also, your target pages are required to have a relatively low backlink gap.
4. Find Relevant Prospects
Find relevant prospect websites that you will be contacting for link-building opportunities. You can find relevant prospects manually using the Ahrefs Content Explorer tool. Filter the websites according to their DR and organic traffic. Select the websites having DR above 30 along with a good amount of organic traffic.
Ensure that the prospects you select are related to or within your niche in order to avoid wasting time, energy, and effort on irrelevant prospects.
Do you need help with Link Building?
Contact us today! We offer a variety of link building services that can help improve your website’s ranking on search engines.
5. Find Contact Details
Now that you are ready with your list of prospects, it’s time to reach out to them. Instead of finding the contact details of the prospects manually, we recommend using tools like Hunter to do the hard work on your behalf.
Just enter the name of your prospect along with the prospect’s website domain name in the tool to get the email address of the prospect you will be contacting. Always give the first preference to the Editor, next the Author, and then the Marketing person.
6. Prepare Email Draft/Script
Once you are done with the email addresses of your prospects, prepare an email draft that you will be sending out to the prospects in order to request a link. Ensure that your script conveys your request clearly in a polite manner.
Make your email scripts personalized to each and every prospect so that it does not look like a mass email ending up in your prospect’s spam. If you don’t hear back, you can send a follow-up email reminding them about your original email to see if they are interested in a link-building opportunity.
7. Email Outreach (Tool & Manual)
You can outreach your email to the list of your prospects either manually or with the help of tools like Lemlist. Lemlist is an email outreach tool that allows you to automate your link-building campaign.
In Manual outreach, you will have to manually contact your prospects for link-building opportunities. This can be done by using a variety of methods such as email or social media.
8. Email Monitoring (Negotiation & Communication)
Once all your emails are sent to your prospects, you need to monitor their performance as to their open rate and conversion rate. Monitoring email accounts comprises negotiation (in the case of paid links) and further communication with your prospects.
You need to regularly monitor the email account in case any of your prospects has reverted back to your email or has any queries regarding the link-building opportunity. Ensure to keep a record of the conversation with your prospect in the same email thread, to avoid any confusion.
9. Track & Maintain Links Performance
The final step is to measure your link-building campaign’s progress. You can use a tool like Google Analytics to track how much traffic you’re getting from your link-building efforts. You can also use a link checker tool to see if the links you’ve built are still live.
Maintain a record of the performance of the live links obtained for your reference. This is necessary to get a clear overview of how well your link-building campaign performed (the success of your campaign), and the areas of improvement if any.
Conclusion
By following all these steps, you can create and launch a successful link-building campaign that will help improve your website’s SEO.
