Apparently every link building strategy is "highly scalable."
And there is some validity to this.
But the question still remains.
How would you build backlinks consistently?
Well first, you need to know how to execute link building tactics.
Second, you need to learn how to integrate these tactics into strategies.
And third, you need to know how to turn these strategies into systems.
And in this tutorial, you and I, we're going to geek out and build a link building system
to generate a consistent stream of backlinks to your pages.
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 before I get into the link building system, I need to mention two things.
#1. This video is an advanced SEO tutorial.
So if you've never built a link through email outreach, then this video is not for you.
Instead, I recommend watching our playlist on link building, which I'll leave a link
to in the description.
And #2. Different agencies and SEOs perform link building differently.
Some people prefer to go laser-targeted, while others go for the spray and pray approach.
I personally go for somewhat of a hybrid approach, so this tutorial is based on my system.
So if you like it, use it.
If you don't, hopefully, you'll be able to extract an SEO tip or two that could fit into
your current SOPs.
With that said, let's get to it.
First, here's an overview of the linkbuilding tools that I'll be using for our tutorial.
And those are:
Trello, Google Sheets, Ahrefs, Google Apps, Mailshake, and I'll touch on Zapier for automation.
The first step is to set up your Trello boards.
And there are 3 different parts to Trello.
And those are boards, lists, and cards.
In terms of link building, I like to simplify things and use one board per website or client.
To create a board, just click the plus button, Select Create Board, and give it a name.
Next, we need to create 5 different lists.
The first one is Documentation.
And this is where you can keep instructions on how each person should perform their tasks
optimally.
Don't skimp out on creating excellent documentation because it'll improve communication within
your team, efficiency, and give you an easy way to identify and optimize inefficiencies.
So within the Documentations list, I'll create 4 separate cards, each of which represents
the stages in the link building process.
And within these cards, you can add links to documents, videos, or whatever you use to
train employees or outsourced help.
Next, I'll create the other 4 lists, which again represent the distinct stages of link
building that I mentioned.
So Prospecting, Find Contacts, Outreach, and Tracking.
And just like that, the framework of our system is set up.
So let's move on to step #2, which is to create a link building campaign.
Now, a lot of this will come down to your personal preferences and needs, but I like
to set up each campaign as a card.
So as a general format, I'll name each card the link building technique we'll be using plus
the name of the blog post.
So if I created a post called, "What is content marketing?" then my card name for a broken
link building-campaign might be "BLB - What is content marketing?"
Now the reason why I prefer to create separate cards for different techniques is because
it helps personalize your emails when you get to the outreach stage.
For example, if you were going to do outreach for guest blogging and a linkable asset, then
the emails you send would likely be completely different.
Alright, let's move on to step #3 which deals specifically with prospecting tasks and its
Trello list.
So we already know that we're creating a broken link building campaign.
And we found this broken page by searching for one of our competitor's domains in Ahrefs'
Site Explorer.
Then we went to the "Best by links" report, and finally, we filtered for 404 broken pages
to find this golden nugget of a page on "what is content marketing," which has 142 referring domains.
From here, I would click on the number in the "Dofollow backlinks" column, which will
show us a list of all backlinks for this page with the "dofollow" filter set.
Now, I'll set a few more filters to narrow down the list of backlinks to more relevant ones.
So I'll choose "Group similar links," which will group backlinks with the same anchor
text and surrounding text together.
You could also choose "One link per domain," but personally, I prefer to see all unique links
from that domain so I can choose the best target where I would want to gain a link placement.
Finally, I'll set the language filter to "English" since that's the only language I'll be able
to do outreach in.
And we're down to 123 unique linking opportunities.
So I'll click on the export button and then export the results to an Excel sheet.
Now from here, you would go through your regular prospecting process and manually qualify your
link prospects with whatever criteria you or your team use.
If you're new to prospecting, here are a few ways you can do it efficiently in
Google Sheets.
First, I'll create a filter by clicking the "Сreate a filter" icon here.
Next, I'll set a Domain Rating filter to look for websites that have a DR of less than 10.
Now if a website has a lower domain rating, it doesn't mean that these links are toxic,
but the thing is that link building can take a lot of time.
So for me personally, I wouldn't bother spending my time sending these people outreach emails
because a link from these sites probably won't move the needle much.
So I'll select all rows that match my filter and delete them.
Next, I'll clear the filters and set up the next one, which is to remove pages from certain
domains.
For example, I personally wouldn't reach out to Blogspot or Typepad websites because I
consider it to be a waste of my time.
So I'll set the Referring Page URL column to show me pages that contain "blogspot."
And again, I'll delete these rows.
This should give you the gist of how you can clean up your prospects list by using various footprints.
Cool! So we've narrowed down our list by around 33% without looking at a single page and
it should have taken you around one minute.
Next, you'll need to remove duplicate domains from your list since you don't need to contact
the same website more than once for the same link.
So I'll sort the Referring Page URL in ascending order to group the domains together.
From here, you can quickly eyeball the list and remove any rows that have multiple links
from the same domain.
Just look at the referring page title, and gauge which article makes the most sense to
get a link from contextually, and remove the other.
Or if both pages seem like good targets, then you can use the URL Rating to see which page
has the better backlink profile.
Finally, filter the Referring Page URL column for blanks, and delete rows that aren't needed
for your outreach campaign.
So from here, you or your link prospector is going to have manually filter through these
URLs to a.) see if your pitch makes sense for a link
and b.) determine if this is a link that you want to go after.
A quick way you can do this is to use a tool like openallurls.com and paste in your list
of URLs.
From there, you can open all of these URLs at once and quickly qualify or disqualify
prospects and remove them from your sheet as needed.
The final thing in this sheet that a link prospector should do is remove any columns
that aren't needed for the outreach manager and to add new columns that are needed.
So I'll cut this list down to just the Referring Page URL, Page Title, and Link Anchor.
Then I'll add a First Name and Email column.
You could also add additional columns to personalize your emails further, but we'll leave it at
this for now.
Now, to pass this off to the next person in your pipeline.
Just attach the sheet to its corresponding card, which you can do by clicking attachment,
paste the link, give it a name, and click the attach button.
Finally, you'll want to drag this card over to the Find Contacts list and tag the person
in charge of this step.
So let's move on to step 4, which is to find the contact details for your prospects.
And this one is pretty self-explanatory.
All this person needs to do is open up the sheet and fill in the first name and email
fields for the best person to contact for each page.
Here are a couple quick tips to improve deliverability and make
the email finding process a little bit less painful.
If you use email finding tool that offers bulk analysis like Hunter, then you can go
through the URLs and just fill out a First Name, Last Name, and use a formula to parse
the domain from the URL.
After you're done, export your sheet as a CSV and then go to Hunter's Bulk Email Finder
and create a new "Bulk List."
Next, give your list a name and drop your CSV into the box.
Finally, click Upload.
Now, make sure that Hunter has mapped the columns appropriately and if all looks good,
then launch the bulk analysis.
Once the file has done processing, you can download the sheet that has the most email addresses.
Another additional layer that I highly recommend adding is to use an email verifier tool like
Never Bounce.
Just click the "Add List" button and upload that file you got from Hunter.
Just finish analyzing the list and then add a final manual touch to your list since you'll
likely have some blanks or incorrect emails.
Finally, drop the card into the Outreach list, tag your partner, and it's time for some good
old-fashioned outreach.
As great as personalization is, the truth is that scaling email outreach requires templates.
Fortunately, there are tools that make this part a heck of a lot easier and you can still
add a personal touch.
The three tools that I recommend out of the gate are Mailshake, BuzzStream, and Pitchbox.
Here at Ahrefs, we use BuzzStream.
I know a lot of agencies use Pitchbox.
And for my own niche sites, I use Mailshake.
No matter which one you use, they all have their advantages and disadvantages, so try
them out and see what makes the most sense for your business.
If you take a look at your spreadsheet, you should have a list of URLs, details about
those pages, and some basic contact information.
Now I'm not going to get into personalization using merge tags because we have a video on
doing outreach that shows you exactly how to do that.
Instead, I'll show you the basics of setting this up in Mailshake, and if you're using
another tool, the set up will be very similar.
Just click the "New Campaign" button.
Give your campaign a name and make sure that you have the correct email address selected
if you're using multiple email accounts.
Now, we need to upload our finalized CSV file.
And if you have additional fields in your spreadsheet, then you can add checkboxes next
to the ones that you'd like to use.
So I'll just add all of them and click the "Next" button.
Next, you need to craft your email.
So I'll just snap my finger.
And boom.
We now have an email here.
Now obviously, you wouldn't send something like this, but the important takeaway here
is that you can use your merge fields by clicking the dropdown here and enter in whatever it
is that you want to include.
So I highly recommend adding different merge fields within your spreadsheet so that you
can add a more personal touch to your emails.
I also highly recommend sending one follow-up email, but again, more information on that
in the outreach video.
So let's click "Next," and you can preview all of your emails.
And since we're only using one merge field in this example, these should all be safe to send.
Again, I highly recommend using merge fields to personalize your emails and to do a thorough
check on all emails before sending them.
So if your email template isn't perfect or if you accidentally left a merge field empty,
then you'll see issues where the email doesn't make much sense.
After all checks are done, you can finalize your email and start your campaign.
And going back to our system in Trello, all we need to do now is drag that card into the
tracking list, where a project manager or someone else can take over.
Now step 6 is to track your link building progress.
And this is a very personal thing.
Some people will want to track at the website level, others at the page level, others at
the client level, and so on and so forth.
But it is important to track how well your emails are converting into links because it'll
help you modify your pitches and see which campaigns or tactics perform the best for you.
So for me, broken link building performs well, so that's always the first tactic that I go
for because it gets me the best results.
You can keep your tracking as simple as Google Sheets or a more robust tool like Google
Data Studio for reporting.
A couple things that I do recommend doing is to set up a New Backlinks alert in Ahrefs Alerts.
You can do this at the domain level, page level, or even subfolder level.
So in this case, I may set the recipient as the project manager for this website, so that
any time a link is earned, which may not necessarily come back with a reply, then they can update the report.
The last thing I want to touch on is automating parts of this process.
So as you build your system, you're going to start noticing inefficiencies or bottlenecks
because no system is perfect.
The best way to handle these is to see if you can automate these tasks or if needed,
hire a new talent.
Let me give you a couple of examples.
You can semi-automate your email finding by setting up a zap between Google Sheets and Hunter.
So you could set up a zap that when a last name is updated in a sheet, Hunter should
look for an email address.
And this way, the person who's in charge of finding contact details can simply focus on just finding
the appropriate people to contact.
And as they fill in the list, the emails should start populating too.
They also have a Google Sheets add-on so you can bulk analyze your list once you have your
full list ready.
Another example would be to set up Trello automations if you decide to keep certain
boards private.
And this again is up to your preference, but, you know, there may be sensitive documents that you
don't want to share with outsourced help.
For example, if your Trello boards looked like this where you used tactics as lists, then
you could create another list beside each one called "Send - Tactic Name."
Then in Zapier, you could set up a condition that any time a new card is added to one of
these "Send Lists," move the card to a different board and tag the next person responsible
in the pipeline.
Now I won't bother going any deeper into these as these kinds of automations will be highly
personal, but know that when it comes to automation, your greatest barrier will be creativity.
Now, this video could easily extend another 30 minutes, but I'm going to leave at this
because there's a lot of information in here to digest, especially if you're new to collaborative
link building.
So for now, if you found this video to be helpful, then make sure to like, share and
subscribe, and let me know in the comments if you have any additional tips that you or
your team use to streamline your link building process.
So keep grinding away, keep building and optimizing your systems, and I'll see you in the next tutorial.