🗒️ Overview
- The ins and out of link building in 2023
- How to vet sites for quality link building opportunities
- How to build good relationships and why it matters
Link building is all about fostering relationships, providing value upfront, and working hard to build a network of high-quality websites. In this week’s episode, Jason Malone, founder of the link building agency We Outreach, joins Mark to give us a look behind the scenes at exactly how We Outreach builds hundreds of links every month.
Prospecting and Filtering Your List
There are two simple methods to build a raw list of prospects for link building: using relevant keywords to scrape Google, or exporting backlink profiles of your competitors.
The next step – filtering the prospect list – is what takes up a significant amount of your time and effort.
We Outreach Vetting Tool
We Outreach has an invaluable vetting tool that you can use to check the quality of a potential link-building website. The tool runs a thorough analysis of factors like the DR, traffic, and outbound links, helping you decide if the website is right for your outreach endeavors.
If the site has excessive outbound links to industries that are usually considered questionable – think casinos, essay writing services, or even VPN – it’s not an ideal choice for your link-building initiative. And We Outreach has a free Blacklist to add these sites to so you can protect your website from low quality links in the future, too.
Vetting The Good, The Bad and The Borderline
The first impression of Wooden Earth, an online store for wooden products, is that it’s a decent looking, legit site that would probably be worth getting a link from. And indeed, with a DR 54, 3500+ traffic, and a good outbound link profile, We Outreach’s vetting tool gives this site a “Pass”.
Sites that cover a broad range of topics and have multiple links to casinos, like Optimistic Mommy, would definitely raise red flags to anyone with experience in SEO or link building. And with hundreds of outbounds links to low quality sites, We Outreach’s vetting tool clearly marks this site as a “Fail”.
But what about sites that are harder to vet, that fall somewhere in the middle? Sites like In Plain English that look decent and have other quality signals, like a legitimate opt-in form. Here the vetting tool is especially useful. It marked this site as a “Fail” because of it’s poor outbound link profile, something that is not always obvious. Even though the site has a high DR and high traffic, its pattern of linking to lower quality sites might mean that it’ll lose its value over time.
Building Relationships and Offering Value
Link building is about investing in relationships upfront, with the longer-term game being the build-up of a network of trusted websites for an ongoing supply of valuable links.
Your goal here is to overcome the trust barrier. Always aim to to provide value before asking for something in return.
Have something relevant and link-worthy to offer them, and then offer value with cash, a guest post, a link exchange or three way link exchange.
High-quality links can cost anywhere from $50 to $500. The trick is to find those sites that will grow in value over time through their own link building.
Relationship building can be time-consuming, but the first step to building a critical mass of relationships starts with a single link exchange of value. From there, build up your network over time by leveraging those existing relationships and consistently deliver value.
