- [Neil] Hey, everyone, it's Neil Patel. And today I want to be covering more link building tactics. I know the last lesson in "Content Marketing Unlocked," we talked about promotion and we skimmed over link building and we didn't go into it too in-depth.
And that's because I wanted to have a whole lesson on different link building tactics. Link building's super important because without links, what you'll find is you won't rank that highly on Google. So it is one of the key necessary things that you have to do if you want the best rankings.
I've built links to many sites over the years. Here's some campaigns on NeilPatel. com for some of my websites.
As you can see, super effective, works, provide results. And if you keep doing it for years and years, you can really do extremely well. Quick case study for you.
Credit Karma, nearly one billion in unaudited revenue in the calendar year of 2019, up 20% from the previous year. I wish I had more current numbers for them, but I don't. They're a very competitive vertical.
Intuit acquired them for $7. 1 billion in stock and cash, a little both. And when you look at Credit Karma, overall, their traffic continually is high, but what makes them super powerful is all those backlinks.
Like, look at that, over 600,000 backlinks. And again, those backlinks come from a handful of referring domain names, 17,000. But it's been super effective and that's what's producing the results.
And if you want to know what backlink count you have, go to NeilPatel. com/backlinks and put in your URL, and you'll be able to see your backlinks. If you want to put in your traffic, just go to Ubersuggest, put in your URL and you'll see your traffic over time, if you don't see it starting off.
But you can always type in a competitor and see their data too, just like Credit Karma. Trust me, links are really important. And it is the key for long term rankings.
So what is link building? Link building is about acquiring new inbound links to a website from external websites. In essence, it's a way to build your brand, build your referring traffic.
You're getting other websites to link to yours, which really boosts rankings. And it's what Google loves. And it's a huge part of the algorithm.
So let's go over the link building process, and there's quite a few steps. In the link building process, you need to confirm keywords and URLs, conduct link analysis, identify sites to contact, then conduct outreach, follow up, of course, get your links published and rinse and repeat the process. So where do you find link partners?
Well, you can always go to NeilPatel. com, put in your competitor URL. Go to Top Pages, and then look at all their most popular pages and click on View All, under Backlinks.
That'll show you all the people that are linking to that page, to your competition. If you have something similar to them, similar type of content, or if you don't, you can always write it, create it, build it. You can hit up all those sites and try to get them to link to you, as well.
because if someone links to your competition, why wouldn't they link to you as well? And then when you have that list, you want to build an outreach list. You can also use the backlinks report on NeilPatel.
com, put in any competitor URL or page, and you can see who's linking to it. Create a list and that'll help you build that list that you need. Then you want to, of course, look for the do follow links.
See if you look at that backlinks report, there's no follow and do follow. Do follow are the ones that pass juice that help you with your rankings. No follow, they don't really help that much.
So in the backlinks report, make sure you click on Follow. Follow is the ones that are the good ones that can help with your rankings. And you want to make sure you reach out to those sites and not really the ones that have no follows.
And when you reach out to these websites, you know, you can give them your website, tell them the pages you want them to link to, assuming they're linking to other related competitors. And based on what your article is about, or page is about, typically the title of it or the keywords in it, that's usually what they're going to use in your anchor text of the link. You know, that clickable part that has a keyword.
So you want to make sure the title of your post, the title of the page, contains the right keyword. So that way you're getting also the right type of links, as well. And if you want to see the type of sites that link to your competition, that use good anchor text, go back to the Top Pages report in Ubersuggest, put in your competition.
Click View All under Backlinks, and look at the anchor text. The ones that have rich anchor text with keywords are the ones that are probably more likely to link to you. And when they do link to you, it'll help boost your rankings in the long run because it's keyword rich.
You also want to make things natural. Some of the links pointing to you will have your website name, or your brand name, or your URL, or the keyword or variations of it, and that's okay. Don't obsess about having every single link say the keyword, because that's not natural and you can't force people to do that.
When you're also getting these links, look for sites that link to sites in their content. Not the sidebar, not the footer, because those link placements aren't that great. You don't want to do deals where, "Hey, I'll link to you, you link back.
" That kind of stuff isn't good. You just want people to link to you because you've produced amazing content, amazing quality and provided so much value. In essence, you're going after relevance and high quality.
See search engines consider the links, not just, "Hey, is it in your content? Does it have the right keyword in the link text, the anchor text? What's the type of site linking to you?
Does it have a high domain score? " If you're not sure of the domain score, you can put that URL into Ubersuggest, and it'll tell you the domain score from zero to 100, the higher the number, the better. "Does this have a high domain score?
Is that a site related to yours? " Because if a dog food website links to my marketing site, NeilPatel. com, not too relevant.
But if another marketing or a business site links to me, that's much more relevant. You also identify websites that you want to contact. So now that you got this all, you figured out what are the right type of sites, the sites that link within the content, that use anchor text, keep a spreadsheet.
And when you keep it, you can use Whois. net or GoDaddy WHOIS, find out who owns these sites with their contact page, or any information that you can find from tools like Hunter. io.
Organize all this in a spreadsheet, so that way you can do outreach. And you can hit up those websites and you can send multiple emails and followups and try to convince them to link to you. And that really comes down to the type of content you have.
If you have shitty content, they're not really going to link to you that much. If you have great content, they're more likely to link to you. You can use tools like Mailshake, or Ninja Outreach, or Buzz Stream, or Pitch Box to help you with this whole process, as well.
One thing I found is when you use amazing subject lines, like "someone's first name, I think I'm in love with you," I found that to work well. Not as well as it used to though, because a lot of people are copying me on that one. Now even more people are going to copy me on that one.
But anything that's relevant, that's very direct, that is going to want to cause someone to open it, it can end up working out quite well. I also like customizing everything, even if you're using a template, by putting in their name, their website URL. Here's one of the emails that I use that you can end up copying.
And it works well, because you're not telling them that you're in love with them, you're in love with their website. And you're not trying to be creepy. And then you're breaking down why they should link to you.
And I found that this works out really well. You can set up, Mailshake, check it out. It's a really fun, easy to use app.
We use it all the time. We love it. And the reason being is it allows you to scale up your link building process really quickly.
So once you set up Mailshake, if you want to set it up, just click the Plus button on the bottom right, and then you're off to the races. Create your CSV file with the email column, name, and then start doing the outreach. And follow the steps to define your email, define your name fields when you're uploading your CSV file.
because it'll ask you, which side or row or column is more so the names, which one is the email? And you just want to upload it correctly. And then once you do, you can plug in your template.
And then once you plug in your template, it can quickly adjust everything based on the person's name. And then boom! It'll start sending out emails and it'll start sending out a mass quantity.
And it even starts following up with people if they don't open up the email or respond back. So when you're doing this process, make your emails relevant. Don't just blast out people in quantity.
Quality really does matter. Roughly five to 10% of the people that you email should link to you. And don't pay for links, it's too risky.
It's frowned upon. Don't break the rules. You can also use broken link building.
Here's a template that I use and you can just copy it. You can pause the video here and just copy it. Here's follow up message templates that I use.
I'm not going to go and bore you to death and read it line by line. But you can just follow it, pause the video here, capture it and just make sure you use it. Or, of course, you can just go to NeilPatel.
com/training and click on "Content Marketing Unlocked," week three, video two, underneath there you'll find the link building templates. You can just copy them, or as I mentioned, you can just pause the video and capture it line by line. Now pages that you want to build links to.
Pillar and cluster pages really help, key landing pages, conversion pages, all this stuff really helps. You want to remember, it's all about relevancy, relevancy, relevancy. If you have persuasive emails to relevant websites, you can get links.
And you just do this over time and you'll find that your links will just continually rise and grow over time, as well as your rankings too. Because in general, it takes a while to rank. You're not going to end up ranking right away.
And as you can see from Moz, Moz is a marketing company, and they did research. It takes around 10 weeks to improve rankings once you start building links. So it takes a little time and you need to be patient.
And how long does it take time to do the work? Well, an agency can typically ramp up within four to 16 weeks. In-house link builder will take at least four weeks.
Strategy concepts could take another four weeks. Link prospecting could take four to 12 weeks. Link execution somewhere around there, as well, two to four weeks.
In general, agency's going to be the quickest. But, hey, if you're strapped for money or budget, you can end up doing a lot of it in-house. That's the action items for you, download.
They're 18 Link Building Outreach Templates and download your Technical Outreach SOP. You can all find this at NeilPatel. com/training.
And if you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment, share the video, like it, tell other people about it. If you need help, you can always check out my ad agency, Neil Patel Digital. And make sure you build a diverse link portfolio.
Thank you very much.
