You know what they say if you want to hide a dead body, put it on the second page of Google.
Competition for prime real estate on page one of Google is fierce, SEO companies can work tirelessly for months just to get their clients there.
Why Is Link Building Important?
Google uses a lot of factors to determine the quality of your content and rank it. One of those factors is links. Good quality links to and from your site are great for SEO. More quality links mean better ranking which means more website traffic.
Let’s say you’re a SaaS company that has developed a new HR automation platform. . You know your product is good, and your existing customers love it, but your website isn’t getting the traffic. After all, you’re competing with some pretty big hitters. There are a few HR platforms out there with a lot of resources behind them.
You might look at paid search, Google and running ads on relevant sites. All good, but none of these will organically push you up the rankings. As soon as your budget runs out, you’ll disappear.
So Google needs to know that you’re a high-quality site so that it can feature you in their rankings.
At this point, you’re going to have to get creative and start producing some interesting and useful content that other sites want to link to. Once you start building your links, Google will start noticing you and you’ll begin to climb those search results.
Link Building
So how do you go about building these all-important links? Whether you hire a specialist SEO company or go it alone, the process is pretty similar.
First of all, don’t be tempted to try and get around the Google algorithm with link buying schemes or buying blog posts. It’s not good practice and sooner or later Google always comes up with a way to spot them. Then you’ll be right back where you started. Or worse, you’ll get a dreaded Google penalty.
A strong SEO strategy for link building is the best way forward, but it can take up a lot of your time, which is where automation comes in.
We’re going to show you two ways that you can use Salesloop to automate your SEO link building in minutes, rather than hours (or even longer)!
Journalist & Blogger Outreach
If you want to be featured on high authority blogs, newspapers or magazines, then you’re going to need to get your content in front of the right people.
So, taking the example of the HR platform we used before. Let’s say you’ve produced a blog on the ‘How To Solve The Top 5 HR Challenges With Automation. It’s a well-written article, which will give a number of great insights to HR departments everywhere, but you’re going to need to get it out there for people to see (and get those backlinks).
With Salesloop and LinkedIn, you can set up your personalized outreach campaign in just a few minutes and then wait for those backlinks to come in.
Here’s how:
- Create your target list
You can run a search on LinkedIn for ‘HR journalists’ and use the search filters until you are happy with your list.
- Launch your campaign
Once you’ve created your outreach list, create a campaign in Salesloop (you can find out how to do that here) and craft your connection message.
If your content is relevant to a number of niches, you can run separate campaigns targeting things like business journalists or small business owners who may not have an internal HR function.
- The Follow-Up
There are a few ways in which you can follow up with journalists. The first is to have an automated follow-up message as part of your Salesloop campaign.
It could look something like this…
Then just sit back and watch the backlinks come in. With Salesloop as your automation tool, SEO companies and solo marketers can scale their SEO outreach in just minutes.
Social Listening For Link Building
Getting your content in front of the right journalists and editors is key to building those backlinks. Another way to find backlink opportunities is to find calls for content on social media.
Publications often put out calls for content or comment, which is a no-brainer when it comes to getting your name out there.
Keep a search running on social media for:
#HARO (help a reporter out)
#Journorequest
#Bloggerswanted
Results
Your overall results are going to depend on a few things including your content and niche. The SaaS HR automation company we’ve been using in this blog used Salesloop as part of their link building campaign.
Over two months they received 24 backlinks to this one article from online publications that ranged from specialist HR blogs to national publications. The average domain authority for their links was 48.
There was also a traffic bump of 18,000 visits to the blog post in question across this same two month period.
The entire process to set up and run the campaign took them less than 20 minutes.
Resources
There are tonnes of great tools out there to analyse and track your links. Here’s a list of some of our favourite free ones that can help you get started on your link building quest.
Backlink analyser – SEO Reveiw Tools
Domain Authority Checker – Moz Bar
Social listening – Hootsuite
Journalist requests – Help A Reporter Out
If you’re ready to start your link building outreach, take Salesloop for a spin, free, for 14 days and see how much time you can save and get the results you need. You’ll be climbing those search rankings in no time.
