Getting links and citations from other sites is important for SEO, but finding good sources of links and performing outreach can be very time consuming and not everyone’s favorite job. Having this routine once every 4 weeks make sure that you get round to doing some link-building every month.
In this two-hour period, you will
- Check SEOPress Insights for new backlinks
- Add to your list of potential backlinks
- Create links to your site or ask other people to create links through outreach
SEOPress Insights Backlinks report
Your first stop for today will be to check the SEOPress Insights Backlinks report. First of all, you can get a general appreciation of whether the number of backlinks and referring domains is increasing (which is generally a good thing) and also check on the latest links you obtained. Are they ones you were expecting? Are they of good quality?
After the chart you can see a list of backlinks to your site, by sorting them by the “Last Seen Date” you can see the most recent links found. The CF and TF columns correspond to the Citation Flow and Trust Flow scores provided by MajesticSEO. These indicate the importance of pages for SEO based on a score from 0 to 100. Generally, if both CF and TF are over 30, the link can be considered as of good quality and helping your ranking. Ideally, the subject and the country of the site where the link is coming from is also relevant for the subject of your website and its audience.
For our fictive example of a fitness gym in Bristol (UK) called Vegas Fit Zone, it would be better to get a link from a UK website about fitness rather than from an American website about cryptocurrency.
Pay attention to the NF column too. This column will indicate if the link is a “No Follow” link with a white cross on a red circle. No Follow links do not count towards Page Rank and may not help you rank. You may be able to contact the site to ask them to change their link to remove the No Follow attribute. Note this in your SEO spreadsheet in the “link building” tab.
If you spot a lot of good links in your report this week then maybe it is the reward for the hard work you did in previous weeks, creating links, contacting bloggers or writing new content. In any case, well done!
Search for new link opportunities
However positive your SEOPress Insights backlinks report was, don’t rest on your laurels! Keep looking for links. It is generally thought that a popular website should be continually earning links from other sites. You want to make your efforts to obtain links constant over time to prove to Google that your site is popular and deserves to rank in the first results.
If you are starting your SEO routine, then the first thing you want to do is to start building a list of link candidates. You may also want to take some time out to read our eBook Link building with WordPress. If you already have a long list of link candidates to process, jump down to the sections on directories and outreach.
One of the first ideas for finding links is to search in Google for the name of your company. You may need to put your company name between quotes and add your city name to make sure that you filter results down to sites that are talking about your company and not a homonym.
Searching for “Vegas fit zone” Bristol in Google gives very few results – but this is normal, it is a fictive example!
What you are looking for is sites that cite you, but that are not linking to you.
Imagine that we found the text “Vegas Fit Zone” on the personal blog of one of the gym’s coaches, Alex, who mentions that he works at the gym, but he doesn’t provide a link to its new website. This would be the first good candidate for a link – should we rush into his HIIT class and ask him for a link straight away?
No. We recommend spending separate time researching link candidates and contacting them. Note Alex as a link candidate in your SEO spreadsheet.
Here are the details you could add:
- Site: https://www.example.com/ (this would be the home page of Alex’s blog)
- Page: https://www.example.com/personal-trainer/ (this would be the page where Alex mentions Vegas Fit Zone)
- Type: Partner (this is the type of website, Alex is a partner)
- Contact: Alex, with his email address and or phone number
You may find it interesting to note all your coaches and instructors in this list. Maybe you could contact them all and suggest they link to your website from their personal sites – or mention you on their social media.
After searching for your own name, you could try searching for competitors to see where they are getting citations and links from. Try searching all your target keywords one by one and have a close look at the results to see if there are sites where you could be listed.
Here is an example of link opportunities that we could find for the Vegas Fit Center in an hour.
Adding your site to directories
Once you have spent some time searching for link opportunities, spend some time this week creating links and contacting sites. For businesses, a lot of the sites found in link opportunity research will be directories.
There are Yellow-Pages-type directories like Yelp.com or Yell.com but also specialist directories like https://www.zumba.com/, https://pilatesnearby.com/ or https://www.hussle.com/. Go back to these sites and try and find how you can submit your site and whether it costs money to do so. Even just adding your address and phone number to a well known, official directory may help your ranking. For directories that cost money, you will have to make a decision whether to invest or not. Base this decision on the potential for this site to give you useful visibility and traffic rather than promises of improved ranking. It is mainly popular sites that can drive traffic that provide good links for SEO.
Once you have submitted your site to a directory note the date in the SEO spreadsheet. If you get a link, add this information too. Color the line in green to show that it is done.
Social network optimization
Searching link opportunities may surface a lot of links from social networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Visibility in social networks can be a massive source of traffic for some websites – in some cases more than traffic from search engines. However, links from posts in social are usually No Follow and do not help you rank better in Google.
This said, if you do manage social networks, make sure that you do link to your website from the profile page. You can do this in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube and Instagram, for example.
Doing outreach to obtain links
Beyond directories and social networks, there will be sites that you have to contact one-by-one to ask for a link. Coming back to the Vegas Fit Zone gym example, the owner could contact coaches and instructors to ask them to link to the website. This is an example of “Outreach” – he is reaching out to other people.
Asking partners directly for a link may be successful because you already have a close relationship with these people. When reaching out to strangers (bloggers for example), asking straight up for a link will probably be unsuccessful.
You may want to imagine a promotion or giveaway that you could share with bloggers, give them exclusive information or offer to promote them on your site or social networks.
Again, note when you contacted these sites in your SEO spreadsheet and note when you are successful in obtaining a link. It is a good idea to note the contact person for the site in this file too so that you have easy access to email addresses and phone numbers if you need to contact them. See the article How to Run Link Building Campaigns for more help on outreach.
Next week you will go back to Week One in your SEO routine, “2 Hours to Check SEO Progress and Issues”. Keep going! It may take a few months to see concrete results but as you add content, improve on page optimization and obtain links, you will be improving your chances to rank in Google and get more traffic for your website.
