But as an SEO, you have no choice but to build links… assuming you want to rank on Google.
So, today I am announcing a new Ubersuggest feature, that makes link building faster and easier.
Here’s how…
What is the easiest way to get links?
What if you could only focus your link building efforts on sites that are highly likely to link to you?
Sounds great right…
Well, you can.
Just think of it this way… what are the sites that are most likely to link back to you?
It’s actually the ones that link to your competitors.
For example, if there were 300 sites that linked to 4 of your competitors, but they don’t link to you yet, reaching out to those 300 sites should create a large chunk of new backlinks for you. Because if they are willing to link to your competition, they usually won’t mind linking to you as well.
On the flip side if there are sites that don’t link to you or any of your competitors, if you hit them up, the chances are, they will ignore you and not link to you.
So how do find these easy link opportunities?
Introducing Backlink Opportunities by Ubersuggest
I want you to first go here. Then type in your URL and click on “search”.
In the left-hand navigation click on “Backlink Opportunity”.
In this report make sure you put your URL at the top and enter in a few of your popular competitors. As you can see, I put in Moz and Search Engine Journal.
Make sure you click the “+” button when adding each of your competitors and then hit “search”.
Within seconds you’ll see a report of who links to your competitors, but not you.
You’ll then want to drill down on each domain to see the exact URL that links to your competitors.
Some of the links may not be a good fit, such as the Google Maps page linking to Moz… unless you have a physical office location.
But others, such as the W3.org site, could be a great opportunity.
Wait, it gets better
The example above shows you all of the people that link to your competitors but not you.
But it is on a domain level.
With link building, it’s easier to get links when you have a similar blog post to your competition.
For example, let’s say I Google the term “SEO”. Here’s what I see on Google.
Both Moz and Search Engine Land rank above me.
I can take the exact URLs that rank above me and put them into the Backlink Opportunity report.
When adding competing URLs to the Backlink Opportunity report, you’ll want to select “URL” instead of “Domain” so you can see who links that specific URL.
This is important because Moz and Search Engine Land may have articles around topics that I don’t cover. But their articles on SEO that rank above me are about SEO basics. And the article I have that ranks below them is on SEO basics.
For that reason, it is highly relevant to see who links to the pages that rank above me because there is a good shot, I can convince one of those sites to link to me.
Sending out the email
Once you have a list of sites you want to outreach to, you are probably wondering… “how do I figure out who to email”, right?
Using Hunter.io you can get the email address for any site for free.
Once you have a person’s email, send them a custom email.
For example, for the people who link to Moz’s SEO beginner guide and Search Engine Land’s beginner’s article, I may send something like this…
Hey John,
You already know SEO is changing fast, hence you wrote an article on up-and-coming SEO trends.
But one thing I noticed is you didn’t talk much about AI and how it is going to impact SEO.
And the articles you linked to on Moz and Search Engine Land don’t cover that either. Yet at conferences, it’s one of the buzzing topics that everyone is curious about.
I actually have a few examples of the use of AI in SEO here [insert link].
If you think it’s valuable feel free and add it to your site. 🙂
Thought it would help your readers.
Cheers,
Neil Patel
PS: By the way, I just shared one of your articles on Twitter… you can check it out here.
My outreach emails are very custom. Using generic outreach emails don’t work too well with link building.
When I send out 100 emails based on opportunities from the Backlink Opportunity report, I aim for at least 15% of the sites to link back to me.
Keep in mind I am specifically using the report to see who links to similar competing articles that rank higher than me on Google. It’s very specific, but that is why it works.
Conclusion
If you haven’t, go here and put in your URL. Try out the Backlink Opportunity report and tell me what you think.
Start off by seeing who links to your competition and hit up those sites one by one to see if they are willing to link to you.
It works… just reach out to 10 sites and day and do it for a month. You will see results.
They actually have tons of other tools. Some you may have heard of, but I bet you don’t use them.
And today I am going to show you how you can build links using Google Alerts.
What is Google Alerts?
As the saying goes, if it isn’t on Google, it doesn’t exist.
Google is the most popular search engine in the world. Their database contains hundreds of billions of web pages and is over 100,000,000 gigabytes in size.
Because of their massive size, they are able to crawl web pages more frequently than any SEO tool including my own, Ubersuggest. This is precisely why you want to start using Google Alerts to build links.
So, what is Google Alerts?
As I mentioned above, they have a bigger database of web pages than any other link building or SEO tool. So, you’ll want to use their database to find easy link opportunities and ideally without wasting time digging through billions or even thousands of web pages.
Google Alerts allows you to create notifications on any subject, topic, or keyword.
So, when a new web page talks about anything that could be an easy link opportunity, you’ll get notified in an email.
Just like this one…
So, let’s set it all up step by step so you can get some backlinks.
You’ll see a screen that looks like this (make sure you sign in at the top right).
I want you to type in your domain name without the www or the https part.
In my case, I would type in: neilpatel.com
You may see an alert preview like the one above, but if you have a newer site you probably won’t see any results, which is fine.
Then I want you to click on the “Show Options” link next to the “Create Alert” button.
Your settings should match mine:
How often – at most once a day
Sources – Blogs, Web (select those 2 options, you don’t want news as an option as it tends to create more irrelevant results and we’ve found that it is harder to get news sites to link back to you)
Language – English (or the language you are targeting)
Region – any region (or you can select the country you are targeting although I recommend picking “any region”)
How many – all results
Deliver to – should be your email.
And then click “Create Alert.”
Up to once a day, you’ll get an email with a list of pages that mentions your website or domain.
I want you to repeat the process and create an alert for the following items:
Your domain – you should have just done this.
Brand name – in my case I would create an alert for “Neil Patel.”
Product names – if you are selling any services or products you can create an alert around that. In my case, I would create an alert for “Ubersuggest.”
Industry terms – create alerts for anything related to your industry. When people are talking about your space, it is an easy link opportunity. In my case, I would create alerts for the terms: digital marketing, online marketing, and SEO.
Your email address – create an alert anytime someone gives out your email. Again, another easy link opportunity.
Here’s what mine looks like:
You’ll also notice for all of my two-word phrases I have quotation marks around them.
For example, I would not create an alert for: Neil Patel
But, I would create an alert for: “Neil Patel”
The reason being is that alerts for two-word phrases without quotes aren’t as relevant. For example, here are some alerts from the term: online marketing.
When I use quotes, here are the results.
See the difference?
Getting links
Now that you have alerts set up, it is time to get links.
Keep in mind that when you get an alert email, someone could have already linked to you. So, not every alert will be a link building opportunity, but many will be.
Typically, more than half will be opportunities.
Depending on the alert type, some will be easier than others. So, let’s go over how to convert each opportunity into a link.
Your domain
You’ll find that a good portion of the mentions of your domain will contain a link back to your site.
For those, you don’t have to do anything as you’ve already got a link. 🙂
For the ones that aren’t linking to you, I want you to send the following email to the webmaster…
Subject: Did you make a mistake?
Hey [insert first name],
First off, I just wanted to say thanks for mentioning [insert your domain] in this article [insert a link to the URL that mentions your domain].
I know you are busy so I will just cut to the chase.
Would you mind hotlinking my domain to my website? I know it doesn’t seem like a big deal, but that extra traffic really helps small companies like mine.
Cheers,
[insert your name]
PS: Let me know if I can do anything for you.
Brand name
When it comes to brand names, it is a 50/50 shot. Roughly half the people will link to you when they mention your brand and the other half won’t.
For the ones that didn’t, send them this email:
Subject: You forgot to do this
Hey [insert first name],
I’m flattered.
Thank you for mentioning [insert your brand name] in your article on [insert the title of their article].
[insert the URL of their article]
You really made my day with that.
Again, thank you!
I feel bad doing this because you already mentioned us, but it would mean the world to me if you also linked our name to our site.
Would you mind doing that?
Sorry to bug you.
[insert your name]
PS: Let me know if I can do anything for you.
Product names
With product names, usually 70% to 80% of the websites will be linking back to you and the rest not. For the ones that don’t, send them an email similar to this:
Subject: Did you mean to do this?
Hey [insert their first name],
I just wanted to take a minute to tell you how much I appreciate that you mentioned [insert your brand name] here [insert the URL of the webpage that mentions your product].
Seriously, thank you!
Now, I feel bad doing this, but would you mind hotlinking [insert your product name] to this page on our website where people can find the product [insert the URL on your site that covers the product]?
Sorry to bug you.
And again, thank you for mentioning us. It really means a lot.
[insert your name]
PS: Let me know if I can do anything for you.
Your email address
Now this one is rare as most people won’t be publishing your email address.
And when they do, they usually aren’t linking to you.
If you try to get them to link the email address, you will find it hard. But what’s easier is to get them to remove your email address and link to your contact page instead.
Here’s the email template I use for this.
Subject: Privacy issue
Hey [insert their first name],
I noticed you mentioned our email address, [insert your email address], on this page [insert the page they mentioned your email on].
Would you mind mentioning and linking to our contact page instead [insert your contact page URL]?
For privacy reasons, I would rather have people get in touch with us through that page instead of our email.
Thanks for your time.
[insert your name]
You also notice that in this template I didn’t include the PS at the bottom. The PS typically helps boost your success ratio, but when it comes to this email, you want to be a bit more firm as it is related to your privacy.
You ideally want the link and fewer people sharing your email because then you’ll have to deal with a ton of spam messages.
Industry terms
In almost all cases, alerts that contain industry terms won’t be linking to you. And this group will also be the largest number of results you get with each alert email.
You’ll have to go through each alert and look at the context of the web page.
If they are talking about something that you have already covered on your website and did more in-depth than they have, there is a good chance you can convince them to link to you.
For example, if there is an article about SEO and they mention how you need to build links, but they don’t go into how to build links, I would email the site owner pointing to this article as it breaks down how to build links.
Here is the type of email I would send:
Subject: Some feedback for you
Hey [insert their first name],
Love your article on [insert the topic of their article] [insert the URL of their article].
I just have one piece of feedback for you (hope you don’t get offended), but you mention [insert the subject they mention that you go more in-depth on within your own site], but you didn’t go too in-depth on it.
I think if you adjusted that it would provide a lot more value to your readers.
Or if you don’t have the time to, I already have an article on it here [insert the URL on your site where you go in-depth on that topic] that you could just link to.
Let me know your thoughts.
[insert your name]
PS: Let me know if I can do anything for you.
How do I get in touch?
Now that you know what kind of emails to send depending on the alert you receive, you’ll have to, of course, get in touch with the site owner.
So how do you find their email address?
Well, the simplest way is to go to their contact page and see if their email is there or if they have a contact form.
You can also check out their terms of service or privacy policy.
Another option is to use tools like Hunter. Just type in a domain name into Hunter and you’ll see a list of people you can contact.
Their free plan allows 50 requests per month, which should be enough to get you started.
Conclusion
Google Alerts is an easy way to build links so I would start with that.
What’s beautiful about it is that you’ll get notified of opportunities. This will save you a lot of time.
And if you find yourself with a bit of extra time, I recommend one more strategy to build links.
Once you hit “search” you’ll see a report that looks something like this:
These are all of the websites linking to your competition. What’s interesting about this list is that it is sorted.
The results at the top have more authority, in which they typically boost SEO rankings more than the ones at the bottom of the list.
You’ll want to go through the list, click on each site, and see if it makes sense to reach out to that website and ask them to link to you.
Typically, if you have similar content to your competition that is more thorough, it’s possible to convince someone to link to you. You’ll have to send them emails like the one below…
Hey [insert their first name],
Question for you…
How do you think it makes you look to your readers when you link to another site that doesn’t really help them?
It kind of makes you look bad and maybe even lose a little bit of trust with your readers, right?
In this article [insert the URL on their site], you link out to [insert the competition’s URL].
The article you are linking to doesn’t cover [insert the areas the competition missed].
I actually have an article [insert your article URL] that covers [insert what you cover that the competition doesn’t and why it benefits readers more].
If you aren’t interested in linking to us no worries. I just know that you care about your readers and you want to do the best for them.
Cheers,
[insert your name]
PS: Let me know if I can do anything for you.
If you follow the steps above, you’ll start building links.
It isn’t that hard and you can do it. You just have to be willing to put in the time and not get discouraged if you send out a handful of emails and no one links back to you.
Just think of your email as a sales pitch and it may not be perfect the first time… so you may have to modify and adjust it.
If you have any questions on the steps or are confused about anything, just leave a comment below.
Do Outbound Links Matter For seo in 2020? I’ve had a number of comments questioning the usefulness of outbound links recently, so I wanted to create an official space for that discussion, and help people understand the uses and benefits of outbound links. So, do outbound links help SEO? If you’re looking for a quick … Continue reading Do Outbound Links Matter For SEO in 2020?
We all know that links help rankings. And the more links you build the higher you’ll rank.
But does it really work that way?
Well, the short answer is links do help with rankings and I have the data to prove it.
But, you already know that.
The real question is what kind of links do you need to boost your rankings?
Is it rich anchor text links? Is it sitewide links? Or what happens when the same site links to you multiple times? Or when a site links to you and then decides to remove the link?
Well, I decided to test all of this out and then some.
Over the last 10 months, I decided to run an experiment with your help. The experiment took a bit longer than we wanted, but we all know link building isn’t easy, so the experiment took 6 months longer than was planned.
Roughly 10 months ago, I emailed a portion of my list and asked if they wanted to participate in a link building experiment.
The response was overwhelming… 3,919 people responded, but of course, it would be a bit too hard to build links to 3,919 sites.
And when I say build, I’m talking about manual outreach, leveraging relationships… in essence, doing hard work that wouldn’t break Google’s guidelines.
Now out of the 3,919 people who responded, we created a set of requirements to help us narrow down the number of sites to something more manageable:
Low domain score – we wanted to run an experiment on sites with low domain scores. If a site had a domain score of greater than 20, we removed it. When a site has too much authority, they naturally rank for terms and it is harder to see the impact that a few links can have. (If you want to know your domain score you can put in your website URL here.)
Low backlink count – similar to the one above, we wanted to see what happens with sites with little to no backlinks. So, if a site had more than 20 backlinks, it was also removed from the experiment.
No subdomains – we wanted sites that weren’t a Tumblr.com or a WordPress.com site or subdomain. To be in this experiment, you had to have your own domain.
English only sites – Google in English is more competitive than Google in Spanish, or Portuguese or many other languages. For that reason, we only selected sites that had their main market as the United States and the site had to be in English. This way, if something worked in the United States, we knew it would work in other countries as they tend to be less competitive.
We decided to cap the experiment to 200 sites. But eventually, many of the sites dropped off due to their busy schedule or they didn’t want to put in the work required. And as people dropped off, we replaced them with other sites who wanted to participate.
How the experiment worked
Similar to the on-page SEO experiment that we ran, we had people write content between 1,800 and 2,000 words.
Other than that we didn’t set any requirements. We just wanted there to be a minimum length as that way people naturally include keywords within their content. We did, however, include a maximum length as we didn’t want people to write 10,000-word blog posts as that would skew the data.
Websites had 2 weeks to publish their content. And after 30 days of it being live, we looked up the URLs within Ubersuggest to see how many keywords the article ranked for in the top 100, top 50 and top 10 spots.
Keep in mind that Ubersuggest has 1,459,103,429 keywords in its database from all around the world and in different languages. Most of the keywords have low search volume, such as 10 a month.
We then spent 3 months building links and then waited 2 months after the links were built to see what happened to the rankings.
The URLs were then entered back into the Ubersuggest database to see how many keywords they ranked for.
In addition to that, we performed this experiment in batches, we just didn’t have the manpower and time to do this for 200 sites all at once, hence it took roughly 10 months for this to complete.
We broke the sites down into 10 different groups. That’s 20 sites per group. Each group only leveraged 1 link tactic as we wanted to see how it impacted rankings.
Here’s each group:
Control – with this group we did nothing but write content. We needed a baseline to compare everything to.
Anchor text – the links built to the articles in this group contained rich anchor text but were from irrelevant pages. In other words, the link text contained a keyword, but the linking site wasn’t too relevant to the article. We built 3 anchor text links to each article.
Sitewide links – they say search engines don’t care for sitewide links, especially ones in a footer… I wanted to test this out for myself. We built one sitewide link to each article.
Content-based links – most links tend to happen within the content and that’s what we built here. We built 3 content-based links to each article.
Multiple links from the same site – these weren’t sitewide links but imagine one site linking to you multiple times within their content. Does it really help compared to having just 1 link from a site? We built 3 links from the same site to each article.
One link – in this scenario we built one link from a relevant site.
Sidebar links – we built 3 links from the sidebar of 3 different sites.
Nofollow links – does Google really ignore nofollow links? You are about to find out because we built 3 nofollow links to each article.
High authority link – we built 1 link with a domain score of 70 or higher.
Built and removed links – we built 3 links to articles in this group and then removed them 30 days after the links were picked up by Google.
Now before I share what we learned, keep in mind that we didn’t build the links to the domain’s homepage. We built the links to the article that was published. That way we could track to see if the links helped.
Control group
Do you really need links to rank your content? Especially if your site has a low domain score?
Based on the chart, the older your content gets, the higher you will rank. And based on the data even if you don’t do much, over a period of 6 months you can roughly rank for 5 times more keywords even without link building.
As they say, SEO is a long game and the data shows it… especially if you don’t build any links.
Anchor text
They say anchor text links really help boost rankings. That makes sense because the link text has a keyword.
But what if the anchor rich link comes from an irrelevant site. Does that help boost rankings?
It looks like anchor text plays a huge part in Google’s rankings, even if the linking site isn’t too relevant to your article.
Now, I am not saying you should build spammy links and shove keywords in the link text, more so it’s worth keeping in mind anchor text matters.
So if you already haven’t, go put in your domain here to see who links to you. And look for all of the non-rich anchor text links and email each of those site owners.
Ask them if they will adjust the link and switch it to something that contains a keyword.
This strategy is much more effective when you ask people to switch backlinks that contain your brand name as the anchor text to something that is more keyword rich.
Sitewide Links
They say sitewide links are spammy… especially if they are shoved in the footer of a site.
We built one sitewide footer link to each article to test this out.
Although sites that leverage sitewide links showed more of an increase than the control group, the results weren’t amazing, especially for page 1 rankings.
Content-based links
Do relevance and the placement of the links impact rankings? We built 3 in-content links that were relevant to each article.
Now the links were not rich in anchor text.
Compared to the baseline, rankings moved up to a similar rate as the sites who built rich anchor text links from irrelevant sites.
Multiple site links
I always hear SEOs telling me that if you build multiple links from the same site, it doesn’t do anything. They say that Google only counts one link.
For that reason, I thought we would put this to the test.
We built 3 links to each article, but we did something a bit different compared to the other groups. Each link came from the same site, although we did leverage 3 different web pages.
For example, if 3 different editors from Forbes link to your article from different web pages on Forbes, in theory, you have picked up 3 links from the same site.
Even if the same site links to you multiple times, it can help boost your rankings.
One link
Is more really better? How does one relevant link compare to 3 irrelevant links?
It’s not as effective as building multiple links. Sure, it is better than building no links but the articles that built 3 relevant backlinks instead of 1 had roughly 75% more keyword placements in the top 100 positions of Google.
So if you have a choice when it comes to link building, more is better.
Sidebar links
Similar to how we tested footer links, I was curious to see how much placement of a link impacts rankings.
We looked at in-content links, footer links, and now sidebar links.
Shockingly, they have a significant impact in rankings. Now in order of effectiveness, in-content links help the most, then sidebar links, and then sitewide footer when it comes to placement.
I wish I tested creating 3 sitewide footer links to each article instead of 1 as that would have given me a more accurate conclusion for what placements Google prefers.
Maybe I will be able to run that next time. 🙁
Nofollow links
Do nofollow links help with rankings?
Is Google pulling our leg when they say they ignore them?
From what it looks like, they tend to not count nofollow links. Based on the chart above, you can see that rankings did improve over time, but so did almost every other chart, including the control group.
But here’s what’s funny: the control group had a bigger percentage gain in keyword rankings even though no links were built.
Now, I am not saying that nofollow links hurt your rankings, instead, I am saying they have no impact.
High authority link
Which one do you think is better:
Having one link from a high domain site (70 or higher)?
OR
Having 3 links from sites with an average or low domain score?
Even though the link from the authority site wasn’t rich in anchor text and we only built 1 per site in this group… it still had a bigger impact than the sites in the other group.
That means high authority links have more weight than irrelevant links that contain rich anchor text or even 3 links from sites with a low domain score.
If you are going to spend time link building, this is where your biggest ROI will be.
Build and removed links
This was the most interesting group, at least that is what the data showed.
I always felt that if you built links and got decent rankings you wouldn’t have to worry too much when you lost links.
This one was shocking. At least for sites that have a low domain score, if you gain a few links and then lose them fairly quickly, your rankings can tank to lower than what they originally were.
I didn’t expect this one and if I had to guess, maybe Google has something programmed in their algorithm that if a site loses a large portion of their links fast that people don’t find value in the site and that it shouldn’t rank.
Or that the site purchased links and then stopped purchasing the links…
Whatever it may be, you should consider tracking how many links you lose on a regular basis and focus on making sure the net number is increasing each month.
Conclusion
I wish I had put more people behind this experiment as that would have enabled me to increase the number of sites that I included in this experiment.
My overall sample size for each group is a bit too small, which could skew the data. But I do believe it is directionally accurate, in which building links from high domain score sites have the biggest impact.
Then shoot for rich anchor text links that are from relevant sites and are placed within the content.
I wouldn’t have all of your link text rich in anchor text and if you are using white hat link building practices it naturally won’t be and you won’t have to worry much about this.
But if you combine all of that together you should see a bigger impact in your rankings, especially if you are a new site.
So, what do you think about the data? Has it helped you figure out what types of links Google prefers?
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