Distributor Links from Manufacturers
Which brands do you sell? Do they link to their retailers from their website? Many manufacturers will keep a list on their website of vendors that sell their products.
How to get them?
These are some of the easiest links to hunt down on this list because you already will have relationships in place. If your vendors do list websites that sell their products, just make sure that you are on the list and reach out to your contacts if you are not there.
Photo Credit Links
Great photos are part of an entire marketing philosophy that is conducive to SEO and attracting natural backlinks. Credit links are a small part of this. Don’t expect lots of links to be earned by your stock product images. Detailed, original photos from a product review blog might be better candidates to earn links from photo credits.
How to get them?
Add useful images to your website and earn them naturally. Or… start by using Google’s reverse image search feature. Visit this URL and click the icon for “search by image”. https://images.google.com/. This will allow you to see other websites that may have downloaded and reposted your photos. Ask them for credit.
Local Clubs and Organizations for Your Industry
Some industries will have nothing of the sort. You may be able to review all of the relevant clubs for other industries in one or two days. For other industries, you might find an abundance of clubs and a lifetime of link building work that includes outreach to the clubs and organizations from your industry. Everythingsummercamp.com has taken this idea to the next level and integrated hundreds of summer camps directly into their business model.
How to get them?
Find clubs via google searches and backlink searches. Reach out. Consider ye ole’ broken link trick as discussed next in this list. This is a prime example of a place where that can be useful.
Ye Ole’ Broken Link Trick
Find broken links on other websites and try to parlay your outreach email into a link for your own website. This might seem like a long-shot or link building mythology, but this is a method of outreach that has been tried and tested over the years by us and has proven to be effective for link building.
Webmasters still appreciate help and if you find broken links on their websites, they will at least pay attention to your emails. This makes your outreach more effective right away just because it increases your chances of your email getting read.
If your content is as awesome as it should be, they may link to your content while fixing their own website just because you have pointed it out. If a link to your content does not belong on their page, this is the fault of your content, not the fault of ye ‘ole broken link trick.
How to get them? Here is a tip for turning this outreach technique into an efficient and effective activity that can generate backlinks at a rate of 1 per hour when you are running hot. Once you find someone linking to a missing website, do a backlink search for that missing website. This will usually give you a list of more people linking to the same missing website. You can email all of them in quick fashion with a quasi-form email and move through the list rapidly. Rinse and repeat. You will soon realize that if you can find an authority website that got taken down or moved without a redirect, you will have found a gold mine for link building. The more broken incoming links, the better.
Event-Based Links
This is a great example of maximizing SEO benefit from something that you are already doing. There are many websites where you can list events in order to increase attendance… Many of these provide links.
How to get them?
- Start by looking for event listings on local news websites. These websites will often have event sections that will include links. Some will be followed, some will not. Go after them all if they are relevant.
- Look for other similar event websites and do backlink searches to see where they have obtained links.
- Here is another website from our internal list that you can consider for event links.
Harness Your Own Industry Data for Links
Do you have inflation metrics to share? Pandemic trends? These are a few current examples of data that you might have which journalists are interested in right now.
How to get them? Share the data on your website. Share it on social media and around the community. Reach out to journalists to pitch stories.
Have a big budget? Consider this… Create a list of industry journalists and bloggers. Upload the list to your Facebook audience section. Create a lookalike audience (or don’t). Boost a Facebook post about your content to this audience. Your chances of generating a link with any particular post or campaign is not great for an average business with average content and average budget. As “average” slides up the scale towards “awesome”, your chances of earning links via this technique increases. If this is done as a sustained strategy with sufficient budget over a long period of time, it will eventually earn natural links.
Build Unique Website Features That the Community Loves
Here are a few examples of website features that can earn you incoming links:
- Calculators for your industry such as mortgage calculators and cost estimators. These can be useful to website users.
- The internet in real time. This is one of our favorite link building experiments from many years ago. Come up with your own version of this for your industry. This is not intended to be particularly useful, rather, just very cool and shareable. The website that originally created this is gone but a functioning version can still be seen here.
How to get the links?
If you build it, they will come. They won’t necessarily link to you (most will just show up for a bit and then go play with their bitcoins most of the time). For links, you’ll want to do some outreach to your friends in the blogosphere for starters.
Hire the Right PR Company
PR companies and SEO agencies have become more and more similar over the last decade with SEO agencies being the ones changing the most. Great link builders will often do many of the same things that a PR agency might do. The task is outreach and the goal is visibility. Hiring a great PR company has been a profitable SEO move that we have seen done by many websites including our clients.
How to get the links? Look for a firm that is specific to your industry. Once you have a list, look at the link profiles and media mentions that they obtain for their clients. Pick a winner and pay the piper.
Links from Your Blogosphere and Influencers
Know who they are and jump into bed with them when you can. Sending out lots of products and asking for links in return should not be considered a valid link building method for SEO purposes. That is something that Google can (and sometimes will) penalize your website for. However, becoming a part of the community is allowed. Many relationships may even start with giveaways and this has nothing to do with SEO.
How to get them? Outreach to the blogosphere is often more like an effort to position yourself to earn links later. Get on their radar and be a good friend. When you have something worth sharing, maybe they will share it. Collaborations and giveaways are often suggested.
Reporter Query Links (HARO)
HARO (helpareporter.com) is a website where reporters can ask for help and you will often receive some form of credit for your help and knowledge. This often will include a link. This method is proven to work, but there are also thousands of people just like you doing the same thing in the same place so it can also be a time waster and resource drainer.
How to get them? Take your pitches seriously, pay attention to requests and requirements, and monitor the queries diligently. When you do respond, make sure that you give them the goods.
