Today I will show you how I run our white hat link building service and explain to you exactly how it’s done (and how it shouldn’t be done).

Keep on reading as if your business depended on it...because it does! 🙂

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What Link Building REALLY Is?

Before I got in a BIG white hat game, I would always find some marketers offering their tips and tricks on how to build links.

Now that I work with fairly big companies in different niches (supplements, travel, medicine...), I understand how all those tricks are extremely dangerous.

If you are looking for long-term success, there is just no way you can risk your entire business using shady tricks that can get you in trouble.

It’s like what Nassim Taleb ("Black Swan" etc) wrote:

Consider a turkey that is fed every day...
Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race 'looking out for its best interests,' as a politician would say.
...
On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief.

You don’t want to be THIS (i.e. you don’t want to be affected by a “black swan”):

​So this brings me to this simple (yet complicated) question about what link building really is...or, better said, what link building should be all about.

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​Must Read: How We Don’t Build Links

​If you are an e-commerce store or just have sales page/s on your website, then naturally you’d want to build links to those so that they rank higher in Google.

I got news for you - this won’t happen.

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There are 2 main reasons for that.

• First, building links to sales pages is a waste of time and resources.
  People, as a rule, don’t link to sales pages (exceptions...there are always exceptions) because they just don’t want you to become rich and run away with all the millions!
• Second, and this is huge if you want to sell through Google (which is essentially another medium which you are bound by), you must pay them.
  Time for examples! 😉

Here is a typical e-commerce keyword you could have targeted if you had a supplement business - “whey protein for weight loss”.

​Let’s look through the results that Google spits out (I highlighted them according to the type which came to be 4 result sets).

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Result Set #1: Sponsored e-commerce results

These are your e-commerce pages that you’d probably want to build links to hoping they would rank...and waste time & money.

Don't!

If you want to sell right away, you will have to pay big G for ad space.

Simple.

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Result Set #2: Featured Snippet

Also called “Position/Rank 0” is a result Google generates from one of the top-10 organic results, which it picks based on a number of factors.

Is it an e-commerce/sales page that’s featured?

It’s not 😉

This is “Above the Fold” by the way, but let’s not stop here and scroll down.

Here is what SERPs look like here:

Result Set #3: “People also ask”

These are long-tail queries that people also tend to ask...using voice search.

Voice search is already massive and it will continue to grow because it’s cool (it is).

Here is a perspective for you, and this is what the majority of business owners don’t know/understand yet - Google is your new competitor.Results like this don’t exactly encourage people to click at all.

They “google” something, but never click on any results because...Google showed them everything they need!

Here is the estimate of "No-click searches" done by Ahrefs:

Out of 100 people that use our example query, 33, on average, don’t click through to any results!

33% is even not that bad, but it’s still alarming - how do you sell to someone...that’s not even there?

Hint - this is when Linkshero comes in 😎

But let’s look at the final result set first…

Result Set #4: Organic Informational Search Results

No sales pages here either.

All of these are informational “How to guides” which naturally have more content and attract links a lot easier.

They are what Google wants to rank because:

• Google can’t (and unlikely will) substitute truly in-depth detailed guide.

• They don’t directly get into Google’s ad revenue pocket as info-related pages are not exactly conversion-oriented.

Ok, if buying ads is the only way to get sales pages on Google’s first page, why do link building at all?!

I thought you’d never ask…keep on reading!

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How We Build Backlinks at Linkshero

I often say that a website is like a house.

For the house to hold the roof, it needs to have a solid foundation and strong walls.

A website’s foundation is its hosting, technical SEO...and its “walls” are the content that it has.

Did you know that Google ranks individual pages and doesn’t look at the overall site’s DR/DA?

Well, that’s absolute rubbish or, as Rand Fishkin (former Moz) calls it, “Semantic Bu**sh*t”! 

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This is a super important thing to know (I want to stress its importance once again as it took me a while to understand that myself).

So, do you already get the direction I am pointing you towards? 🙂

Nah...I tend to be too discrete with these things so here is what I am actually trying to say:

1. Google doesn’t allow your sales pages on its first page organically - TRUE.
2. Google answers simple queries without requiring people to actually click through to a website - TRUE.
3. Google is full of BS and a website’s overall DR/DA (they obviously have their own metric) is important for SERPs - TRUE.
4. DR/DA is directly affected by both, quantity and quality, of the links that your ENTIRE website gets - TRUE.
5. Google loves in-depth informational content - TRUE.
6. Building links to informational (i.e. non-sales) content is a lot easier - TRUE.

With all these in mind, it’s time to finally show you how we build links at Linkshero (with some real-world examples).

Our process is extremely simple and consists of 3 basic steps:

• Step 1: Create amazing content
• Step 2: Build links to it
• Step 3: Rinse & repeat

Let’s go over each step in more details.

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Step 1: Create amazing content

As I work with more and more clients in different industries I see one common MASSIVE problem - they don’t have any amazing content.

Now, “amazing” is a crappy KPI, but if you want to put a metric on it (all you data heads), go with links per URL.

Here is a piece that I created in spring 2017:

Yes, I did link building for it back then, but this new DR 93 (!) link appeared there on its own - I didn’t do anything for it.

This is what naturally happens with elite content - people are “awed” and “wowed” by it.

They share it.

They link to it.

In white hat link building, we call this type of content “linkable assets”.

A linkable asset is anything that’s link-worthy.

Here are a couple of examples:

• In-depth expert guides
• Infographics
• Unique data
• Research
• Something cool and outstanding
• News & newsjacking
  

Step 2: Build links to it

​I am proud to say that we build 100% white hat links via a process called blogger outreach.

We basically look for anyone that might be interested in a content piece we just created and send them a cute email letting them know about that.

The link building techniques that we primarily use are:

• Resource page link building
• Broken link building
• Link roundups
• Competitor link building
• Guestographics
  

There is no magic here - it’s a game of (smart) numbers.

The trick is to make those numbers work for you and your business.

I won’t be honest if I said that every single piece of content that we create results in awesome links.

White hat link building campaigns flop.

For example, recently we created a massive protein guide for an e-commerce client (you can now tell why I used protein e-commerce examples above, eh 😉 ).

Getting links for that didn’t quite work (we struggled through and got 2 links eventually for the budget that we had), but fast forward 3 months to May (2018) and here we are at 4 links!

Nice, but that’s not the end of story!

The article shows up #8 in local SERPs for its primary keyword (which is uber-competitive I might add).

So even though I wouldn’t call that our best shot, we still succeeded (probably telling you about our failures is not the best way to sell our service, but I don’t care - I am real).

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Step 3: Rinse & repeat

A linkable asset has its limitations - there is as much leads we can find and reach to.

Once that number (even fairly massive at times) is done, we need a new linkable asset.

And so the cycle of creating amazing content and building white hat links to it continues…

The Burning Question...

Ok Artem, that sounds cool, but how does link building help me sell more of my product/service?

Awesome question!

And here are the answers.

Grow Your Tribe

As you build more and more quality content that your audience loves and finds genuinely helpful, good things start happening - they become familiar with your brand.

They stick.

And eventually...they buy! 😎

Link building increases your exposure to the world, it helps to rank your awesome quality content so it reaches more people and grows your authority.

Once you get traffic, you are the king!

You can do anything with it.

Capture leads using a lead magnet and use remarketing for increasing brand awareness, traffic and sales.

This is particularly functional for e-commerce products and some services.

Become Oversubsribed

As you grow your customer base, you may discover that you only wish to work with X amount of people in any given time.

So instead of growing bigger and worrying about where to get the clients from, you focus on the vital few - the ones you want to work with.

If you want to learn about other ways link building can catapult your business into success, get in touch!

And now let's talk business...