- I've talked about link building for many years.
You all know that if you want to rank on Google,
you need to build links.
But link building is hard,
and everyone is already doing the same
generic tactics like let me post on your site,
hey, I notice you linked to my competitors,
can you also link to me?
A lot of that stuff doesn't work that well anymore,
but you still need links, what should you do?
Well, you can't buy them.
Hey everyone, I'm Neil Patel.
And today I'm going to share
seven advanced link building tactics
that'll skyrocket your rankings.
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Before we get started,
make sure you subscribe to this channel.
And if you're on YouTube, click that alert notification,
that way when I go live, you'll also get notified.
The first tip I have for you is run an industry survey.
Contact people in your industry,
CEOs, executives, thought leaders.
Tell them you're running a survey
about a hot topic in your industry.
Ask them the questions.
Then from there, compile the results.
Send them your findings and ask them what they think.
Now I want you to produce really pretty graphs.
You can go to places like Fiverr
if you want to pay someone five bucks
to produce the graphs for you,
or you can just use tools like Canva
or Infogram to produce the graphs.
And then by uploading it,
you'll have this beautiful piece
all with data from industry experts
that a lot of people haven't leveraged.
And then when you release that,
it should go viral because those people
will be willing to share it
and a lot of people will be willing
to link back to it as well.
Now when I do this,
I go above and beyond.
I don't just interview these CEOs.
I'll do this for industry trends,
like the state of digital marketing
or the state of the internet
or the state of the healthcare industry.
When it's around a big topic,
you'll find that when you have these executives,
more people are likely to read it, share it, and link to it.
The second tip I have for you,
host a live event or a virtual summit.
So pick a really cool and specific topic
theme for your event.
If you don't have a niche,
you'll find that it won't work well.
Now you want to package it in a way
that it makes it really interesting
for people to attend.
Offer PDF, action guides, templates,
swipe files, transcripts, cheat sheets,
all the stuff that people want to have.
Give people the ability
to ask their questions to the guests.
Make sure you're getting collaboration
of speakers within the industry.
Everyone should promote the event
'because it helps them with publicity,
and then within their speech
they can also talk about their product and service
which then helps them generate sales and revenue as well.
And make sure you decide on a format, right?
Is it crash courses, interview,
slideshow, presentations?
Will it be Q and A?
All this matters 'because then
you can let people know ahead of time.
Now before you host your event,
you want to start building relationships
with influencers and guests as I mentioned,
comment on their social media profiles,
subscribe to their email list,
ask them to promote the event,
have them speak.
You should promote their speaking spot
which helps them reach out to all these people.
And what you'll find is when you get a lot of influencers,
they'll promote it from their website
which means they'll link to it,
they'll tweet about, they'll showcase it.
And the more people you get to email,
the more of audience you'll have attend the event.
And where you build the most amount of links
is having a page dedicated with all the recordings,
the cheat sheets, PDFs, courses.
All that stuff that people can download,
make a really cool pretty landing page,
email all the attendees.
Not only will they share it,
you'll find that a lot of them will link to it,
and it's a great way to build links.
People are like oh my God,
not only was the information great,
they gave me cheat sheets and step-by-step guides
on how to implement everything each speaker told me.
The third link building tip I have for you
is case studies and ego bait.
Have you noticed that when you pick a case study
and you create something that's super detailed
and it breaks down how someone can do something step by step
such as a case study on how someone
improved their conversion rates or traffic,
but not just like, hey, this company increased it,
and we did some SEO and content marketing
and social media marketing.
Like people are like, alright, that's cool.
I don't learn anything from this.
The more detailed you get,
you'll get more enterprise companies linking to it.
It doesn't matter if you're B2B, B2C.
What I mean enterprise, I'm talking about larger brands,
they're the ones with the higher domain authority.
So when they link, those links count more.
Now you'll find that if you just release one case study,
you won't get too many links,
but if you do five or 10 in an industry,
that's when it starts adding up.
And I wouldn't just do case studies
for companies you work with.
You can do teardowns of businesses.
Like I can do a case study
on how Airbnb grew from a startup
to a multibillion-dollar company
and dominated the hotel industry.
I can do a case study on how Delta Airlines
turned around their business.
I can do a case study on Microsoft
on how they went from struggling,
technically they weren't really ever struggling,
but how they went from being flat
to just starting to grow like a rocket ship.
So when you do all these case studies on these companies,
you'll find that other big publications
will start linking to you as well.
And what you want to do is
when you do case studies on these big companies,
look at all the reporters
that are reviewing these companies and writing about them,
whether it's The New York Times or Business Insider.
Reach out to all of them
and reach out to specific reporters
who are covering the topic,
showcase the case studies,
that way in the future they can link to them.
And that's the easy simple way,
but again it has to be super detailed and thorough.
The fourth tactic is leveraging maps.
Maps are the new infographics.
Glen Allsopp figured this out.
People love to see how stuff
is distributed throughout the world.
A good example of this is there's maps
that show all the shipping containers
that are in the ocean at the same time.
Another example to figure out how much people love maps is
go to Google and search intitle this map shows.
There's over 46,000 results.
And there's a lot of cool stuff
that breaks down things like
what powers the world,
that breaks down gas and electricity,
all the mines in the world.
There's so many different maps.
People love linking to them because they constantly change.
Spend time promoting this kind of content,
and if you can create interactive maps on your site,
you'll do really well.
New York Times once released a map in the United States
that shows where the one percentile live,
and it breaks down in every single state
how much you need to earn to be in the one percentile.
When you do stuff like that
and put it on an interactive map,
you'll find that you can get a ton of links.
And that's the new infographics.
Infographics have been out for a long time.
People already know how to read stuff in a visual way.
It's like, alright, cool, that's been done.
But not too many people are creating maps
that can be interactive.
The fifth strategy is leveraging the Moving Man method,
and this tactic is by Brian Dean.
You hear about a website in your industry,
they have a ton of backlinks, they're rebranding,
they're migrating to a new domain name.
Do a backlink analysis on their website.
Find its most linked content pieces
and create a better or equivalent version of them.
By the time your competitor migrates to a new domain,
hit up everyone who's still linking to the old outdated URL
and let them know these pages no longer exist.
Tell them that you have a piece that's equivalent or better
and suggest that they link back to you.
It's a great simple way to get backlinks.
The sixth strategy, do a podcast tour.
Search for podcasts that have had guests
in the same industry as you.
And if you're like a life coach for example,
google podcast interviews for Tony Robbins.
If you're a marketer, google podcast interviews
for people like Rand Fishkin or Neil Patel.
You'll find a lot of podcasts that host interviews
with these people who serve the same audience as you.
Hit them up and offer to do an interview on a specific topic
that could be valuable to their audience.
In this interview, offer a free resource
that's hosted on your website.
All these podcasts,
what they'll end up doing is linking
to that free resource in their show notes.
And when you do a podcast tour,
and you hit up 15, 20, 30 of these podcasters,
and you get on a handful of them,
all of them will link back to your website.
The seventh advanced way
is to find unlinked mentions of your brand.
People who already mention your brand, your name
are likely to link to your website.
Monitor your brand through Google Alerts,
BuzzSumo, and SEMrush.
Actively search for them on Google.
Just use quotation marks in the search
if your brand has more than one word.
When you do this, you'll see everyone who's mentioned you.
A lot of those people won't be linking out to you.
Reach out to them.
Ask them to link out to you.
Heck, if they link out to you in a brand mention
and you think that it'd be more relevant
if they include a keyword,
pitch them on it.
You'll find not only that you'll get a link,
but you'll get a link with a richer anchor text
which will help boost your rankings.
So if you need help with your link building,
check out my ad agency, Neil Patel Digital.
Thank you for watching.
If you have any questions,
leave a comment below and I'll answer it.
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tell other people about it.