SEO
Top 4 Link Building Mistakes To Avoid In 2022
Link building campaigns not meeting your goals?
Feel like your efforts have become a kind of SEO groundhog day? You know, the same thing repeatedly with little to no new results?
Break the cycle of bad link building.
Discover which mistakes you might be making and how to fix them.
On February 2, I moderated a sponsored webinar presented by Michael Johnson, Partnerships Development Manager at Page One Power.
Johnson demonstrated how to identify and correct link building mistakes and provided campaign tips for helping you rank higher and drive more traffic.
Here is a quick summary of the webinar.
To access the entire presentation, complete the form.
Issues In Link Building
Time and again, companies of all sizes face the same link building issues.
They consistently dedicate time, energy, and resources. They follow the same processes, yet they get the same lackluster results.
So what are they doing wrong?
Here are the most common link building mistakes:
- Not looking at on-page SEO & search intent first.
- Not creating linkable content.
- Performing bad outreach.
- Setting poor expectations.
[Get The Steps To Overcome These Mistakes] Instantly access this webinar →
Mistake 1 – Not Looking At On-Page SEO & Search Intent First
Looking at and repairing on-page SEO and search intent issues is a must before you start building links.
How to fix this mistake:
In the webinar recap, Johnson gives a great example of what Paycom.com did when they could not rank on page one for the keyword “payroll:”
- Make sure your target keyword is referenced on your page so that Google knows what you’re all about.
- Look at who is currently ranking, do some competitor and industry research, and get some suggestions on improving on-page SEO.
- Show that you’re an expert on your subject matter through a robust content strategy.
[Steps Explained] Instantly access this webinar →
Mistake 2 – Not Creating Linkable Content
Organic link building is about leveraging relationships and finding a common interest within your relationship’s audience.
Linkable content is one way to do that.
How to create linkable content:
Step 1: Look at competitor content.
Use a tool like Ahrefs to find highly-linkable content ideas.
Check out their “Best Pages by Links,” which helps you see what pages on your competitors’ websites have the most links right now.
Ask yourself, why does the competitor’s most linked content stand out?
- Does it have informational/educational value?
- What is the piece’s defined audience?
- Is there an established link authority?
Step 2: Confirm link opportunity.
Before you start creating new content, make sure that there are great sites that may want to link back to it.
- Use Boolean operators.
- Small business inurl: links.
- Entrepreneur inurl: links.
- Look at a lot of pages.
- Check if the page links to external sites and similar resources.
[Learn How To Use These & Confirm Link Opportunity] Instantly access this on-demand webinar →
Step 3: Look for similar resources you want to pitch and see who’s linking to them.
Now, look for and make note of additional backlink opportunities by researching the profiles of resources that are similar to the content you’re planning to create.
Building a robust list of source links that you can work from and pages you can try to get links for will prepare you for your future outreach step.
Mistake 3 – Performing Bad Outreach
Bad outreach will derail your link building campaign and ensure you’re ignored or intentionally avoided.
[See examples of good and bad outreach] Instantly access this webinar →
How To Send Good Outreach Emails:
-
- Be direct: subject lines should be short, simple, and straightforward.
- Be specific: include the correct details.
- Be intentional: include the desired outcome.
- Be personable: if you wouldn’t say it in person, don’t say it.
- Be editorial: Use proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
-
- Get to the point.
- Explain the value to them and their audience.
- Show. Don’t tell.
- Avoid sales or vague language.
-
- Understand that web admins are busy, and they get a lot of emails.
- Send three emails.
- Call back to previous emails.
Mistake 4 – Poor Expectations
Everybody wants a scalable link building campaign that generates quality, organic links.
Usually, this means linking to promotional transactional pages at the mid and bottom of the funnel. This limits your link building campaign from the onset. You can’t have everything.
Therefore, one of the first things you need to do is set expectations.
So, here are the different configurations you can reliably create:
[Learn How To Use This Chart] Instantly access this on-demand webinar →
Set your organization’s expectations around why you want to build links to these kinds of pages and how these pages can help accomplish your overall goals as an organization.
Rise through internal linking by creating various linkable assets and internally link to the core transactional pages you want to influence.
By doing so, you can get organic, quality links at scale and benefit from having more successful campaigns.
Key Takeaways
- Sometimes links are not the problem.
- Not having linkable content is a huge mistake.
- Poor outreach will either get you ignored or avoided.
- Have realistic expectations about your link building campaign.
[Slides] Top 4 Link Building Mistakes To Avoid In 2022
Here is the presentation:
Top 4 Link Building Mistakes To Avoid In 2022 from Search Engine Journal
Join Us for Our Next Webinar!
7 Big Enterprise Content Marketing Strategies You Need To Know
It’s easy for an enterprise brand to pump out content. But is that content providing value to your target audience and driving ROI?
Learn how to create an effective enterprise content strategy that leads to conversions in our next webinar on February 16 at 2 p.m. ET.
Image Credits
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
SEO
Measuring Content Impact Across The Customer Journey
Understanding the impact of your content at every touchpoint of the customer journey is essential – but that’s easier said than done. From attracting potential leads to nurturing them into loyal customers, there are many touchpoints to look into.
So how do you identify and take advantage of these opportunities for growth?
Watch this on-demand webinar and learn a comprehensive approach for measuring the value of your content initiatives, so you can optimize resource allocation for maximum impact.
You’ll learn:
- Fresh methods for measuring your content’s impact.
- Fascinating insights using first-touch attribution, and how it differs from the usual last-touch perspective.
- Ways to persuade decision-makers to invest in more content by showcasing its value convincingly.
With Bill Franklin and Oliver Tani of DAC Group, we unravel the nuances of attribution modeling, emphasizing the significance of layering first-touch and last-touch attribution within your measurement strategy.
Check out these insights to help you craft compelling content tailored to each stage, using an approach rooted in first-hand experience to ensure your content resonates.
Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or new to content measurement, this webinar promises valuable insights and actionable tactics to elevate your SEO game and optimize your content initiatives for success.
View the slides below or check out the full webinar for all the details.
SEO
How to Find and Use Competitor Keywords
Competitor keywords are the keywords your rivals rank for in Google’s search results. They may rank organically or pay for Google Ads to rank in the paid results.
Knowing your competitors’ keywords is the easiest form of keyword research. If your competitors rank for or target particular keywords, it might be worth it for you to target them, too.
There is no way to see your competitors’ keywords without a tool like Ahrefs, which has a database of keywords and the sites that rank for them. As far as we know, Ahrefs has the biggest database of these keywords.
How to find all the keywords your competitor ranks for
- Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
- Enter your competitor’s domain
- Go to the Organic keywords report
The report is sorted by traffic to show you the keywords sending your competitor the most visits. For example, Mailchimp gets most of its organic traffic from the keyword “mailchimp.”
Since you’re unlikely to rank for your competitor’s brand, you might want to exclude branded keywords from the report. You can do this by adding a Keyword > Doesn’t contain filter. In this example, we’ll filter out keywords containing “mailchimp” or any potential misspellings:
If you’re a new brand competing with one that’s established, you might also want to look for popular low-difficulty keywords. You can do this by setting the Volume filter to a minimum of 500 and the KD filter to a maximum of 10.
How to find keywords your competitor ranks for, but you don’t
- Go to Competitive Analysis
- Enter your domain in the This target doesn’t rank for section
- Enter your competitor’s domain in the But these competitors do section
Hit “Show keyword opportunities,” and you’ll see all the keywords your competitor ranks for, but you don’t.
You can also add a Volume and KD filter to find popular, low-difficulty keywords in this report.
How to find keywords multiple competitors rank for, but you don’t
- Go to Competitive Analysis
- Enter your domain in the This target doesn’t rank for section
- Enter the domains of multiple competitors in the But these competitors do section
You’ll see all the keywords that at least one of these competitors ranks for, but you don’t.
You can also narrow the list down to keywords that all competitors rank for. Click on the Competitors’ positions filter and choose All 3 competitors:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
- Enter your competitor’s domain
- Go to the Paid keywords report
This report shows you the keywords your competitors are targeting via Google Ads.
Since your competitor is paying for traffic from these keywords, it may indicate that they’re profitable for them—and could be for you, too.
You know what keywords your competitors are ranking for or bidding on. But what do you do with them? There are basically three options.
1. Create pages to target these keywords
You can only rank for keywords if you have content about them. So, the most straightforward thing you can do for competitors’ keywords you want to rank for is to create pages to target them.
However, before you do this, it’s worth clustering your competitor’s keywords by Parent Topic. This will group keywords that mean the same or similar things so you can target them all with one page.
Here’s how to do that:
- Export your competitor’s keywords, either from the Organic Keywords or Content Gap report
- Paste them into Keywords Explorer
- Click the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab
For example, MailChimp ranks for keywords like “what is digital marketing” and “digital marketing definition.” These and many others get clustered under the Parent Topic of “digital marketing” because people searching for them are all looking for the same thing: a definition of digital marketing. You only need to create one page to potentially rank for all these keywords.
2. Optimize existing content by filling subtopics
You don’t always need to create new content to rank for competitors’ keywords. Sometimes, you can optimize the content you already have to rank for them.
How do you know which keywords you can do this for? Try this:
- Export your competitor’s keywords
- Paste them into Keywords Explorer
- Click the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab
- Look for Parent Topics you already have content about
For example, if we analyze our competitor, we can see that seven keywords they rank for fall under the Parent Topic of “press release template.”
If we search our site, we see that we already have a page about this topic.
If we click the caret and check the keywords in the cluster, we see keywords like “press release example” and “press release format.”
To rank for the keywords in the cluster, we can probably optimize the page we already have by adding sections about the subtopics of “press release examples” and “press release format.”
3. Target these keywords with Google Ads
Paid keywords are the simplest—look through the report and see if there are any relevant keywords you might want to target, too.
For example, Mailchimp is bidding for the keyword “how to create a newsletter.”
If you’re ConvertKit, you may also want to target this keyword since it’s relevant.
If you decide to target the same keyword via Google Ads, you can hover over the magnifying glass to see the ads your competitor is using.
You can also see the landing page your competitor directs ad traffic to under the URL column.
Learn more
Check out more tutorials on how to do competitor keyword analysis:
SEO
Google Confirms Links Are Not That Important
Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed at a recent search marketing conference that Google needs very few links, adding to the growing body of evidence that publishers need to focus on other factors. Gary tweeted confirmation that he indeed say those words.
Background Of Links For Ranking
Links were discovered in the late 1990’s to be a good signal for search engines to use for validating how authoritative a website is and then Google discovered soon after that anchor text could be used to provide semantic signals about what a webpage was about.
One of the most important research papers was Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment by Jon M. Kleinberg, published around 1998 (link to research paper at the end of the article). The main discovery of this research paper is that there is too many web pages and there was no objective way to filter search results for quality in order to rank web pages for a subjective idea of relevance.
The author of the research paper discovered that links could be used as an objective filter for authoritativeness.
Kleinberg wrote:
“To provide effective search methods under these conditions, one needs a way to filter, from among a huge collection of relevant pages, a small set of the most “authoritative” or ‘definitive’ ones.”
This is the most influential research paper on links because it kick-started more research on ways to use links beyond as an authority metric but as a subjective metric for relevance.
Objective is something factual. Subjective is something that’s closer to an opinion. The founders of Google discovered how to use the subjective opinions of the Internet as a relevance metric for what to rank in the search results.
What Larry Page and Sergey Brin discovered and shared in their research paper (The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine – link at end of this article) was that it was possible to harness the power of anchor text to determine the subjective opinion of relevance from actual humans. It was essentially crowdsourcing the opinions of millions of website expressed through the link structure between each webpage.
What Did Gary Illyes Say About Links In 2024?
At a recent search conference in Bulgaria, Google’s Gary Illyes made a comment about how Google doesn’t really need that many links and how Google has made links less important.
Patrick Stox tweeted about what he heard at the search conference:
” ‘We need very few links to rank pages… Over the years we’ve made links less important.’ @methode #serpconf2024″
Google’s Gary Illyes tweeted a confirmation of that statement:
“I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that”
Why Links Matter Less
The initial state of anchor text when Google first used links for ranking purposes was absolutely non-spammy, which is why it was so useful. Hyperlinks were primarily used as a way to send traffic from one website to another website.
But by 2004 or 2005 Google was using statistical analysis to detect manipulated links, then around 2004 “powered-by” links in website footers stopped passing anchor text value, and by 2006 links close to the words “advertising” stopped passing link value, links from directories stopped passing ranking value and by 2012 Google deployed a massive link algorithm called Penguin that destroyed the rankings of likely millions of websites, many of which were using guest posting.
The link signal eventually became so bad that Google decided in 2019 to selectively use nofollow links for ranking purposes. Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed that the change to nofollow was made because of the link signal.
Google Explicitly Confirms That Links Matter Less
In 2023 Google’s Gary Illyes shared at a PubCon Austin that links were not even in the top 3 of ranking factors. Then in March 2024, coinciding with the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update, Google updated their spam policies documentation to downplay the importance of links for ranking purposes.
The documentation previously said:
“Google uses links as an important factor in determining the relevancy of web pages.”
The update to the documentation that mentioned links was updated to remove the word important.
Links are not just listed as just another factor:
“Google uses links as a factor in determining the relevancy of web pages.”
At the beginning of April Google’s John Mueller advised that there are more useful SEO activities to engage on than links.
Mueller explained:
“There are more important things for websites nowadays, and over-focusing on links will often result in you wasting your time doing things that don’t make your website better overall”
Finally, Gary Illyes explicitly said that Google needs very few links to rank webpages and confirmed it.
I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that
— Gary 鯨理/경리 Illyes (so official, trust me) (@methode) April 19, 2024
Why Google Doesn’t Need Links
The reason why Google doesn’t need many links is likely because of the extent of AI and natural language undertanding that Google uses in their algorithms. Google must be highly confident in its algorithm to be able to explicitly say that they don’t need it.
Way back when Google implemented the nofollow into the algorithm there were many link builders who sold comment spam links who continued to lie that comment spam still worked. As someone who started link building at the very beginning of modern SEO (I was the moderator of the link building forum at the #1 SEO forum of that time), I can say with confidence that links have stopped playing much of a role in rankings beginning several years ago, which is why I stopped about five or six years ago.
Read the research papers
Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment – Jon M. Kleinberg (PDF)
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
Featured Image by Shutterstock/RYO Alexandre
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