- [Instructor] Hey everyone, it's Neil Patel
and today's another day of SEO Unlocked.
And today we're going to be going over
specific tactics that you can use to get links.
You should always have a well-rounded portfolio
of ways to get links.
If you don't, you're not going to do well
when it comes to link building,
because you have to adapt.
But here's the thing,
link building's a deliberate practice.
You need to keep practicing and practicing
and doing it to get better at it.
People like Jerry Seinfeld,
he's crushed it.
He's done so well from Seinfeld the TV show
that many of you have seen,
he's worth a ton of money.
Why? Because he constantly is always practicing
and writing jokes.
Same with athletes.
Lebron James, amazing basketball player.
Michael Jordan, amazing basketball player.
Tiger Woods, amazing at golf.
All these people have continually focused
on one skill and got better and better.
And I know you have more things to do in your life
than just link building,
but if you want to do well in SEO,
you have to get good at link building.
And that's why you also have your scorecard.
So make sure you download it,
fill it out,
because it'll help you stay on track
and continually build those links.
Here's the thing though,
before we really dive into link building,
a lot of people have this misconception
that it doesn't work for hyper competitive industries.
It works for all industries.
I don't care if you're competing against
some of the biggest brands like GoDaddy, right?
Even if you're trying to rank for terms like hosting
and beat them, you can.
And there's companies like HostGator
who aren't anywhere nearly as known as GoDaddy,
yet they still rank extremely well
for terms like web hosting.
So, here are some strategies for you.
The first strategy is competitor link building.
You can type in your competitor's domain name,
like GoDaddy, and in the backlinks report in Ubersuggest
it'll show you all the people who link to them.
And you can look at which links are follow links,
because the follow links are the ones that you want.
Those are the ones that pass juice,
export it, and then open up the PDF or more so Excel sheet
that you're given.
Then I want you to filter the results
by domain score,
and you want the highest number first.
Sites with the higher domain score
are the ones that ideally you want
to get linking back to you
because those are the ones
that are going to help you boost your rankings
more than others.
You also want to look at the referring page title.
Is it relevant to your website?
If so, great, you should consider hitting that site up.
If not, you're probably wasting your time
because they're probably not going to link to you.
The second strategy for successful link building
is all about content backlinks.
Here's what I mean by this.
You type in any key words within Ubersuggest
you'll see who's ranking on the right side,
this is in the keyword ideas report.
And you see all right, hosting facts.
They're ranking really high for the term web hosting,
so you end up clicking on hosting facts
and you end up taken to another report in Ubersuggest
which shows you all their backlinks.
You can click on the backlinks number as well,
and that'll take you to backlinks report.
I want you to do the same thing.
Look at your competition,
who's ranking high because a lot of them
are content based websites.
They're not like the GoDaddy's that are just
offering a service,
but many of them are just content based websites.
Look them up, look at their content,
look at their backlinks report within Ubersuggest,
I want you to export the CSV,
and same thing.
You want to sort by domain score,
and then from there look for the results
that are the most relevant
based on page title
and you could consider hitting them up.
I'll provide you with the templates as well
on how to hit them up,
but I first want to go over all the strategies.
The next one is guest posting.
So, you can end up looking at
any popular news website within Ubersuggest
and go to their top pages
and you can see
all right, here are all the popular pages
that they have.
This is a news website.
And some of them will be written by random authors.
That will show you,
okay, these people are accepting content
from other writers.
Whether they're guest posts or not,
in essence, they're accepting content from writers.
And you don't need to worry
if a site only offers guests posting,
just look for news websites
that have a ton of authors.
Because once you find the authors,
you can then Google their name,
and go find all of the places
that they have written.
And what I want you to do
is go to them,
connect with them on their social profiles,
many of them will add you,
and once you connect with them,
I want you to reach out to them.
And send them an email that goes something like this.
Hey, let's say the author's name is Nathan.
Hey Nathan, I just want to let you know
I'm a huge fan of your work
and I love your latest blog post on,
enter in the topic,
it's a great post,
keep up the great work,
and I look forward to reading
informational blog posts from you,
cheers, and then your name.
You'll find that they'll usually respond
saying thanks or something like that.
A few days later,
I want you to send another follow up email.
Hey Nathan, I just saw that
you wrote about XYZ article,
it's awesome, it's actually very beneficial
but I noticed that you missed a few key points,
and then in this area you want to give them feedback.
Readers like me and your other readers
might find those points beneficial
if you covered them,
I just wanted to share your thoughts,
hopefully I didn't offend you,
your number one fan, Neil.
What you'll find is,
after you send out the second email,
they usually get back,
they appreciate the criticism,
constructive criticism more so,
because you're helping them become better.
Who's going to hate on that?
And they usually will just respond saying thanks
or appreciate it,
and then eventually once they respond
I want you to send out a third email.
Hey Nathan, I really love what you're doing
at the New York Times
and I want to follow in your footsteps,
you're a huge inspiration to me
and I think I can learn a lot from you
and one day hopefully I can write content
just as amazing as you,
pay you back,
and I want to help create an article for your audience.
And then you can suggest an article
and just ask them directly for
an introduction to the editor.
And either they'll do it or not,
but typically what I find
is yes you're going to get ignored
but roughly 30% of the time
they're going to respond positively
and do an introduction.
See, if you get introduced to the editor
of some of these news sites from other authors,
you're much more likely to get accepted.
When you're doing guest posting,
remember, these links should be no followed,
and use them not just because
hey it can manipulate Google.
You don't want to think that way,
hence I'm telling you to no follow the guest post,
that's a common standard practice.
But it's more so
that you want to do this
because these sites can also drive
a lot of volume in traffic
as well as revenue and leads
or sales for you.
There's another way that you can also find
link opportunities and that's just using Google.
There's a ton of search operators
such as putting intitle:"keyword", inurl:"links".
And when you do those things
and you put in your keyword
where it says keyword,
for the links you just leave links,
you'll find a bunch of resources
and sites that could potentially be willing
to link out to you.
You can also use broken link building,
you can follow the operators on the right side.
I won't read all of them off,
but as long as you follow them,
you can also find a lot of sites
that link to other resources
and just check to make sure
they're live and if some of them are broken
you can reach out and have them replace it
with a link to your site
that's very similar.
You can also use the site audit tool within Ubersuggest,
it'll tell you if you have any broken links
on your site,
or any of your competitors sites.
This is great because it opens up
a ton of opportunities for you as well.
Some other search operators that you can use
for guest posting,
you can see all of them on the left,
I won't bore you with them,
you can just go through them step by step
and type them into Google.
The ones on the right for PR
you can use those as well.
One thing to note is
when I'm doing link building,
I like looking at the traffic of the website.
The more traffic it has the better it is.
You don't want to link for the sake of link
or to try to rank higher just on Google,
you want links because it's good for you,
it's good press,
it can improve your brand awareness,
it can drive revenue.
It's worth it.
So I highly recommend that
you look at the traffic
that some of these sites have
when you're approaching them for a link,
because if they only have one visitor,
they're not going to be that valuable.
So some other link building resources for you,
and I really love this one
but very few people do it is
create custom images.
You can do this through Canva,
you can do this through Infogram,
and when you publish these images on your site,
you'll notice that a lot of people
will just take them and repurpose them
and they won't give you credit for them.
So you want to take those links,
or images more so,
put them into Google image search,
and do a reverse image search lookup,
and it'll show you all the websites
that are using that image.
And if they're taking your image,
you can hit them up and ask them to link to you.
So some action items for you,
I want you to first download the search operators PDF
so that way you have them all
and you can find more link opportunities.
And two, make sure you find backlinks
and fill in your link building score card
which you already downloaded in the previous week.
And three, I want you to join 10 Facebook groups
and start joining the conversation,
because if you join these Facebook groups,
you'll get to know people,
and it'll also open up more PR opportunities
and more link building opportunities as well.
If you're not sure where to find the files
and you don't see them,
go to neilpatel.com/training,
click on SEO Unlocked,
you would want to go to module five,
and you want to go to the second video
under module five
and underneath that video
you'll see the download file
to all of these.
The link building scorecard,
technically that one is under
the first video in module five.
Thank you for watching,
and I look forward to getting you loved by Google.