Focus on businesses, not content creators, when it comes to link building

Bibi says: "A lot of people focus on content creators, bloggers, and influencers when they're creating prospect lists. These specific types of prospects have been outreached so much. It makes more sense to look at businesses that share a part of your audience and make a connection with them. Reach out to them, build relationships, and create content that serves their audience - and helps them engage with their potential customers."

Many businesses will already have partnerships with other businesses, is the best approach to leverage the existing contacts you already have?

"Yes, people leave those on a table a lot. However, if you do some lateral thinking and think about your audience's motivations and triggers, you can also find new angles to your prospect list. I think a lot of people already have connections with other businesses directly related to their products. If you do a bit of more creative thinking, you can find even more businesses you can connect with."

Should SEOs reach out and make these connections?

"I would focus on marketers or the founders of the business. I wouldn't go to support or tech; I'd just focus on the people responsible for the site's content, or the people who lead the company."

Are business leaders generally receptive to what you're trying to say? Do you lead with a link-building discussion, or are there better ways to secure the link you're looking for?

"You need to be transparent about your intentions because you don't want to waste people's time. If they fully understand your motivation, you can save a lot of time and just mutually collaborate with each other. This is a good thing for both parties. However, you do have to think about their goals. Instead of just thinking of your needs, you have to be a step ahead and think about what's in it for them. This is where a lot of SEOs make a mistake and only focus on getting the link. Your starting point should be what's in it for the other business."

How do you build a mutually beneficial partnership without simply just exchanging links?

"I'm not against link exchanges if they make sense, but it shouldn't be your whole backlink profile. Put it this way, I wouldn't turn down a reciprocal link. However, if you look for other ways to do it, then you have to think about their goals. If you're reaching out to a marketing provider, you have to think about their objectives and offer content they can use to help sell to their audience."

Can you provide some examples you've seen of building a great quality link as a result of reaching out to a business founder?

"Let's say I'm a garden furniture site, and I want to get links from other sites that are relevant to gardening. However, I don't want to reach out to bloggers, because they're all going to ask for money. Instead, I can build a prospect list consisting entirely of people that provide water sprinklers. Then, on my site, I create a resource about water usage in a garden. This is something the water sprinkler system manufacturer can link out to for their audience - so it's mutually beneficial for both parties."

One approach is to interview the top 10 water sprinkler experts and create content to generate links. Is this still an effective strategy?

"I've only done three expert roundups - and they all bombed!"

Do you mean people weren't willing to link because they're interviewed in so many other places?

"Yes, they weren't linking back at all. Maybe at the time, it was such an overused tactic that people weren't impressed by being mentioned somewhere. It could also be the way I executed it. I know other people are still using expert roundups, so there must be some good in it because they must be getting links back. I'm not against a lot of link-building strategies, I just think you have to take the approach that's closest to your own skills and personality. A strategy is only as good as its execution."

Why do you not want to focus so much on content creators for linking building nowadays?

"It can still work if you find a right angle, and you are very persuasive, but the problem is that link builders have reached out to so many content creators and influencers that they've become very jaded. These prospects will now ask you for money. That can be okay, but it can be risky if your whole backlink profile is built on paid links, and those people are selling left and right to everyone. It won't be a very competitive backlink profile because you're not getting the links that your competitors aren't getting. Shift your focus to look into places where not everyone is looking."

Is it a concern that you're reaching out to people who might not be comfortable with creating a link, or what a link means in terms of value?

"It's not a huge problem. You may have a couple of unlinked mentions, but you can always go back and hunt after that link. At the same time, so many brick-and-mortar businesses now have a website - especially after the impact of COVID. Business owners are now more likely to understand the value of SEO - so they understand more about links. Even if they don't, you can educate them and explain how this will help them."

How often should link building happen? Weekly, quarterly, or bigger projects every six months that can be forgotten about for a while?

"I have clients where we paused link building for a period of time. For others, we ramped up the link building. We also do the same number of links continually for other clients. The results are so varied that I don't really have a good answer to this question. It's dependent on so many other factors. If you have decided to do link building, you should probably do it continually, because you will learn so much about link building if you do it consistently.

Doing it all the time also allows you to start seeing great opportunities around seasonal things, current topics, and developments in your niche. Don't just do link building at the moments you feel you need to give your site a boost."

Is it not important that link building matches the cadence of content publishing? Is there a danger that getting lots of links, despite not publishing content for six months, might look artificial to Google?

"I don't know if this is a danger. I either do link building for content that already exists on your sites, or I do guest posts, so it's not dependent on your site. It's just dependent on the quality of the content in the guest post. A guest post is an extension of your own content, it's just on another domain - so it's still part of content marketing.

I try and use my common sense. If you have evergreen content, then you might be picking up links all the time after you start ranking for a keyword. We did a piece on the science of kissing for a client last year - but now it's suddenly starting to pick up links. Is that going to look unnatural? I have no idea - but that's what's happening naturally."

Absolutely. I'm aware of pieces of content that have been published five-plus years ago that are still exceptionally popular, because they're great pieces of content. It's completely natural for people to still be recommending them to their readers.

"Yes. The only issue is that you don't know what is going to become popular. You need to create 20 pieces, and only two of them are going to get these results. You've got to be okay with taking risks."

If an SEO wants to spend more time on higher quality link building, what's one thing they can stop doing to free up some resource?

"Stop just finding link-building prospects based on keywords. Many SEOs build their list by looking for sites that are ranking on the same keyword they want to rank for. Use a couple of different prospect angles. You could look at businesses that are catering to your audience in a similar customer journey. Let's say you have people that are interested in gaming, so they might also be interested in VPN. You can reach out to VPN sites to get links from them.

Another angle is to look for people that have a correlated interest. If you're looking at people who are interested in keto diets, they might also be interested in gardening or sustainability. It's not your direct customer, because they don't have the same search intent you're trying to rank for, but they are in the same realm. Explore relevancy and don't just go directly for your main keyword. Stop building up the same type of links and start thinking outside of the box."

You can find Bibi Raven over at BibiBuzz.com.