Good links are the best way to attract traffic
All too often, companies are spending money on link building, to improve their online visibility but are these budgets being spent wisely? Are acquired links going to maintain their value in the long-term?
By Carlo Pandian, SEO Account Executive at Tug
Targeted Audiences
Every marketing book you read talks about specific groups of people within the target market, at which a product or message is aimed (see Kotler 2000 for example). How can we translate this into an off-site SEO strategy?
The off-site link building strategy should tap directly into the targeted audiences of brands, with the following intentions:
- To assist the customer journey
- To provide appropriate resources
- To highlight the characteristics of the product
The Internet has repurposed institutions, communities and individuals that already existed in reality. This means that your targeted audience has preferred digital journeys – which you can tap into with your off-page strategy.
Some examples include: Mums having discussions outside the school gates, these can be transferred into ‘Mum blogs’ or parenting sites such as Mumsnet. On the other hand, technology geeks read Mashable when they are online, and in real life they buy the paper copy of Wired Magazine.
Every website can be filed according to the degree of interest it holds for your targeted audience, the SEO authority, the monthly visitors, and the value of the brand. In every online community, there are big media outlets such as GeekWire, medium sized ones such as Techli.com, new blogs with great content such as FutureRising.com, and low quality blogs that exist for the sole purpose of building links.
Link Building strategy direction
The off-site SEO strategy needs to both enhance the consumer awareness of a product, and at the same time, increase the websites ranking positions using high quality links and citations. In order to make this possible you need to prepare an action plan for your offline and online marketing techniques.
They should give you visibility in either the online community where your potential customers are spending their time online. There is a vast range of high quality link building techniques available, and great creative solutions; take a look at some examples below:
- Infographics
- Guest Blogging
- Online PR
- Giveaways
- Link requests and Citations
- Interviews
- Content outreach, geek mining etc.
- Crowd-sourced posts
It’s becoming more common for link building to be influenced by offline activities. For example a blogger event showcasing a product could lead to citations and links online. A brand sponsoring an industry association can have the same effect. The most important thing is to target those sites that are influential for your audience.
On the other hand, Google still ranks websites considering where anchor texts links and web page elements (title, URL, etc) are placed, so an SEO team needs to make sure they also influence a small quantity of links on these Google pages too.
Analyse success and failure
The major strength of digital marketing is that is fully measurable, so you can see the effects of link building on traffic and positions. However, most marketers should consider the return of off-site SEO, by looking also at the referral traffic. How much has referral traffic grown since the link building campaign started? How much did the outreach activities impact the direct traffic?
What tends to happen is the opposite process – where link builders go after websites that carry the same topics as their product, but are not necessary visited by the targeted audience. This is because SEO has been strongly related to the semantic web for several years.
In the past, web pages have been manipulated to convey particular semantic power to the links, whereas now, Google is becoming wiser to this and is constantly trying to make it harder for sites that are spamming the results to rank.
Conclusions
SES, LinkLove and SMX search conferences have seen many speakers talk about content. At this stage – March 2013, SEO professionals all agree on the importance of this.
At the same time, marketing managers are aware of how this must be accountable, and that it can only convey results in terms of conversions and brand awareness, if it appeals to the target audience.
By researching the favourite digital journeys of the targeted audience, and using a full range of link building techniques, brands can have an optimised return on their allocated SEO budgets in the long term.
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