We talk about broken link building a lot. In videos, blog posts, and forums.
But does it really work?
You're about to find out in this video.
Stay tuned.
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What's up SEOs. Sam Oh here with Ahrefs, the SEO tool that helps you grow your search traffic,
research your competitors and dominate your niche.
Now, I know that link building can be a huge struggle, especially for those of you that
are new to SEO, so I want to share one of my broken link building campaigns with you
step-by-step.
And rather than just showing you "results," I want to show you the exact prospecting techniques.
The exact emails that I sent, and a couple big mistakes that costed me really easy links.
So here's a quick overview:
The website that I built links for is a blog about natural health, more specifically in
the aromatherapy niche. And I bought this blog a few years ago and haven't really touched
it, outside of hiring some writers and fixing some critical technical SEO issues.
So let's get straight to it.
First, what is broken link building?
Broken link building is a tactic where you find a broken page with links pointing at
it, recreate a page on the same topic, then email everyone who's linking to the 404 page
and ask them to replace the dead link with yours.
Alright, so step one is to find a dead page that has links.
The easiest way to do it is to search in Site Explorer for a competing website that has
links.
So I'll do a search for a website in the aromatherapy niche.
Next, go to the "best by links" report, which ranks the pages that have the most links from
this domain.
Then use the "HTTP Code" filter and choose 404.
Now, you can see all of the dead pages on this domain and order it by the number of
referring domains in descending order to see which topics would be best to recreate.
Now, it's important to note that the number of backlinks that you'll find pointing at a dead
page will vary big time based on your industry.
So this report might not look that exciting with the top page having only 11 referring
domains, but that's a decent amount of broken links in the aromatherapy niche.
Now, if you're not sure which websites to look up, then just enter in your own domain
in Site Explorer.
And then go to the competing domains report.
Here, you can see a list of websites that rank in the top 10 for the same keywords as
your target domain.
In general, the more common keywords you have, the more relevant these websites will be to
the keywords you want to rank for.
From here, you would just search for each of these domains in Site Explorer, go to the
best by links report, and then filter for 404 pages as we did in the previous example.
Alright, so looking at the 404 pages in the Best By Links report, the one that interested
me the most was this one on diluting essential oils since I already had a post on the topic
that needed an update.
So let's look at the backlinks report for this page.
Here, you'll see that all of the links are 301 redirects done from a different domain,
which actually happened to be from a rebrand.
Now let's go a bit deeper through the rabbit hole.
If we click on the caret for this page, you'll see that the original page had 47 referring
domains before the improper redirect was done.
Bingo.
So from here, I went to the backlinks profile and moved on to the next step, which is to
check whether the broken page is a good fit and to qualify worthy link prospects.
Here's the thing:
If you start blindly emailing all of these people without fully knowing what the page
was about before, then your chances of getting a link decreases significantly, not to mention
a whole lot of wasted time.
So first, we need to understand what was on that page before, and then get a grasp for the
context of the links, so that it actually makes sense to contact our link prospects.
You can see the content that was on the page when it was live by clicking on the caret
beside the dead URL, and then click "view on Archive.org."
Now, don't copy the content on this page. Instead, look at some of the key points that
were covered and the angle they took.
And from the looks of it, this article talked about dilution ratios and conversions for
the most part, which would be easy to recreate.
So since this content is a good fit, I'll actually narrow down our list by changing
the "Link Type" filter to "DoFollow," which will show us only the value passing links.
Next, I'll order the data in descending order by "Traffic."
And what this does is it puts our "best" link prospects at the top of the list, and the
quality of the links will usually deteriorate as you scroll further down the list.
So you can see here that all of these posts seem like editorial opportunities, which is
a good thing.
And as we near the bottom of the list, you'll see a forum link, and a bunch of blogspot
posts, which I would personally weed out in my qualification process.
You could also sort this by "Referring Domains," instead of traffic, if that's what you prefer.
So everything looks good, so I'll export the backlinks report.
Now the next part is arguably the most important. And that's to look at the context of the link,
meaning, why are these websites linking to this page in the first place?
You can do that simply by scanning the anchors and backlink column for your list of qualified
prospects, which is basically telling you key points to include in your post.
So yes, we can create a "handy guide," create a part on the different ratios for children
and adults, talk about proper dilution and include a chart, and maybe even mention that
people should use one to two drops per 10ml of carrier oil.
From here, you would need to remove any pages from your backlinks export to have a clean
list of link prospects.
Alright, so now we have the two main parts that we need for a successful broken link
building campaign.
#1. We have the key points that we need to add in our article, which I actually sent to my writer.
And again, this will make link acquisition much more probable.
And #2, you should have manually gone through the list of linking pages and removed all
URLs that weren't qualified as good link prospects.
And I ended up with around 17 qualified link prospects after weeding out pages from the
original backlinks export.
Let's move on to the part that's going to make or break your broken link building campaign.
And that's outreach.
There are three steps to outreach.
First, you need to find the email address of your prospects, next is to craft an email, and
the final step is one that I'll touch on in a bit, because it's one of the main reasons
why so many link building campaigns fail.
Before we tackle each step, let's use this spreadsheet, which I've left a link to in
the description so you can download it and use it for your own link building campaign.
Once you open the Google Sheet, click on file, make a copy and then click ok to save it to
your Google drive so you can edit your own copy.
Alright, so the first step is to import your clean list of backlinks, so click on the Ahrefs
Import tab.
Then, click on file, import, upload, and then drag and drop your clean list there.
Since we're using just a single report, you can select, "Replace current sheet," then
click "import data."
After your import is complete, go back to the first tab and you'll see some key metrics
as well as the referring page URL.
Now, let's go to the first linking page.
And you can see right away, that this website seems to be from a single author blogger named
Lindsey.
So, I'll add her name to the spreadsheet.
Next, we need to find her email address. The tool that I primarily use is hunter.io.
They have a Chrome extension, so you can see that it's lit up orange, which means that
they have some email addresses on file for this domain.
So I'll click that, and you can see the email addresses that Hunter has scraped.
Now, you want to choose the most appropriate email address.
So for small companies, it would likely be the author or founder. And for mid-sized and
large companies like Ahrefs or Whole Foods, that would be someone like the editor or content
marketing manager.
So I'll quickly added Lindsey's email address to the spreadsheet and you would just need
to do this for all of the different URLs in this list.
Alright, now we need to actually craft an email that will hopefully result in a link
back to our site.
Now, when you're writing your email, I want you to keep these two things in mind.
So first, you want to sound as organic as possible. So to start, address them by their first name
and use natural, conversational language.
So you don't want to say something as robotic as
"Hello Webmaster,
Your website has a broken link and it may be a good idea to fix it. Here s a good link
to do it with.
Instead, you want to somehow connect with them in the first sentence if possible. So
take the extra minute to get to know a thing or two about the person you're contacting.
Since Lindsey has a short profile in the sidebar, I know that she is into holistic living and
loves food.
Cool! Me too!
So I might start off with:
Hi Lindsey,
My name is Sam a fellow holistic foody :)
Next, you'll want to tell them why you're contacting them. So I might say something like...
I'm emailing you because I clicked on one of your links to Lea Harris' blog in your
"Natural Remedies For Ear Infections" post and it looks like she deleted it.
Thought you might want a friendly heads-up to remove/update this part.
Now the key part about the line above is that I'm, saying that she can remove it or update
it. Not just update it.
Next, we want to pitch our resource, so let's continue.
If you're open to suggestions for a replacement, I recently created a handy (yet comprehensive)
guide on how to dilute essential oils safely; and then with a link, (peer reviewed by a clinical
aromatherapist).
Again, I'm not being pushy, but I'm making my intention clear of why I'm contacting her.
And a couple advanced tips in this line would be to use the language they use.
So if we look back at our spreadsheet, then you'll see that the link anchor was, "handy
guide," which is why she gave the link in the first place.
I've also added an additional qualification as to why my article is worth linking to by
mentioning that it was peer reviewed by a clinical aromatherapist.
Now, let's finish the email.
No pressure at all. Just thought you might be interested in an up-to-date article.
Either way, I'm glad to have found your blog! I've already shared it with a few other writer
friends in our Facebook group :)
Warmest, Sam
Now, a quick disclaimer:
Don't say that you love their blog if you haven't taken a second to read through their
content. I actually did share their post with a few other writer friends.
Finally, let's put the icing on the cake and offer more value.
PS. If you ever need a hand with anything, i.e shares, feedback, or whatever, I'm always
happy to help. :)
Sounds like a pretty solid and kind email right?
Well, there are two key points that I missed here, which led to above average results, but nothing
extraordinary.
So from the 32 emails that I sent, 7 responded and 6 linked. That's an 18.75% conversion rate,
which is quite good, although the sample size is small.
But want to know what more than doubled my conversions?
Two things:
First, add a screenshot of where the broken link is.
So let's modify our original email a little bit and add, "Here's a screenshot of where
I found it:"
And the final touch is to add one follow-up email to those who don't respond after a reasonable
amount of time.
Again, we want to sound as natural as possible. So don't say, "this is the last time I'll
be contacting you, so I wanted to see if you got my last email."
Instead, offer up more value.
So you might say something like,
Hi again! We were just setting up our Pinterest share queue (30,000+ followers) and it reminded
me of your ear infection remedies article that would make a perfect fit for our Holistic
Living board.
Just wanted to check-in and see if this is the best one to add, or if you have another
that would be a better fit.
Warmest, Sam
And boom. Check this out.
From the next 20 emails I sent, 7 people responded. And of the people who responded, all 7 linked
to the article and 2 people actually linked to the page without responding to the initial
email, which I of course knew because of Ahrefs Backlinks Alerts.
So a total of 9 out of 20 new links, which is a 45% conversion rate.
Now, let's do the math.
So with a total of 52 emails sent, my broken link building campaign came in with 15 links,
which is a 28.8% overall conversion rate, which is an A+ in my books.
Now, all of the emails that I sent weren't for the dilution guide, but the result was
a number one organic ranking position for my target keyword.
Now, it's important to note that your results will vary. I've seen significantly lower conversion
rates in different niches and even on different topics.
Also, if your content isn't pitch worthy, then I recommend making sure that it's top-notch
before sending emails because you'll likely burn through a lot of perfectly good link
prospects. Finally, I want to make one quick note on scaling this process.
Everything that I just showed you can be outsourced.
But certain tasks like link prospecting, and responding to emails may be parts that you
want to handle yourself until you find someone with the right skillset to take care of it.
For example, you can get people to fill in names and email addresses for anywhere between
3-10 cents per contact. So you can find freelancers on Upwork or another one that I've had decent
results with is Mechanical Turk.
So in this particular case, I think I paid under $3 for the 50 or so contact details,
which saved me quite a bit of time.
For the outreach step, you can use tools like Buzzstream, Mailshake, or PitchBox to send
mass emails, while still personalizing them using merge tags.
So I'm sure you can see why we love broken link building, right? From my experience, this is the easiest
and most effective tactic to get high quality backlinks to your website with as little effort
as possible.
Now, hit the subscribe button for more actionable SEO and marketing tutorials, and hey, if you
want to see more real-life link building and SEO campaigns like this, then let us know
in the comments below.
So keep grinding away, go get more links, and I'll see you in the next tutorial.