15 Actionable Link Building Tips We’ve Learnt from Our Clients

We’re lucky enough here at Fat Joe to be working for some of the smartest SEO Agencies in the World and now, with over 800 active agency accounts, we are forever coming across really clever (and some not so clever) link building and content creation tips that get us talking.

Winning at SEO is great, landing that number 1 spot or even top 3 positions gives you that buzz we all crave as SEOs. However, if you want to yield the same positive and safe results time after time, we have to apply a common-sense approach to link building. That’s all it is, it’s common sense, not rocket science.

The following tips we’ve learned from our clients collectively will help you to ensure you keep yielding positive and safe results for your clients time and time again. Combine these tips with trusted link building methods and you’ll keep the wins rolling in for your clients.

1. Don’t just link to your money pages, link to content assets and blog posts

It’s not natural to only get links to the pages you want to rank. The agencies that ranked well in 2015 linked to other pages like blog posts, content assets, user guides, and even contact pages.

2. Create meaningful campaigns – and link build around those

Instead of link building for link building’s sake, some agencies built a content asset such as a tool or infographic and created a link building campaign around that. Promotion using a combination of Blogger Outreach and PR works well.

3. Vary the quantity of links you build every month

It’s easy to become complacent but the smartest agencies didn’t keep ordering the same quantities of links every month for their clients. They mixed it up, to avoid patterns and to keep things looking very natural as demonstrated in the above backlink history chart.

4. Vary your anchor text

Using the same commercialised anchors over and over is probably going to look unnatural. You should vary your anchor text greatly including long tail partial match, different URL variations, and even sometimes incorrect brand spellings or references.

5. Use brand anchors 80-90% of the time

The smartest agencies know that brand anchors are the most used anchors in the ‘natural’ world, so they emulate that with their link building efforts.

6. Use anchor texts that make sense

‘Best Plumber London’ does not make sense in a sentence. We understand that it may be a popular search term, but within a sentence as an anchor, it sticks out like a sore thumb as a ‘surgical’ link. Keep anchor texts looking natural.

7. Vary your link types

The best performing SEO agencies varied their link type per client across Blogger Outreach, journalist media opportunities, infographic outreach, directories, and so on.

8. Ensure links look unsolicited and ‘earned’

To do this, avoid talking directly about your brand in a whole post, link out to other non–competing (or even slightly competing brands), ensure there are no ‘sponsored’ tags near or on the content where your link appears, and don’t create anchor text that will obviously look unnatural within the flow of content. This is standard with our Blogger Outreach service.

9. Take advantage of seasonal trends

style=”font-weight: 400;”>Think about seasonal trends for your client. If they are an online toy shop, then you’d expect a lot of bloggers talking about and reviewing products during the Christmas Holidays. If they are an online flower shop then expect more buzz around Valentine’s and Mother’s Day.

10. Vary the length of content where your link appears

If you are securing a lot of content placements, ensure these content placements are of various content lengths. Securing links in content placements that are all 500 words is going to create that unnatural pattern you want to avoid.

11. Don’t always chase link metrics

Some agencies become obsessed with only wanting links from content placements on specific metrics like DA30+, TF15+ PR2+, etc. Whilst it’s all good and well landing links on those types of sites it would be natural to expect websites from all quality types and all ages with various different authority metrics to link to you. Is it natural that only really high quality or maybe really low quality sites link to you? Probably not.

12. Bring social media links into the mix

You should be encouraged to share content, some publications, and important company updates on your social media accounts. Linking back to these assets will give you some great social signals to bring into the overall mix.

13. Be realistic about link volumes

Never overdo it, especially when the client you’re linking to may not naturally expect to acquire a large volume of links. A local plumber in Florida, for example, may get a few local citations initially, maybe a couple of bloggers mention them here or there, but you wouldn’t expect them to be getting much larger volumes unless they’re a nationally recognised brand.

14. Build links to your links

We’ve started to see more and more agencies now adopting a method of using our services to build links to pre-existing links for their clients. This is a great way to build value to those links and pass the value through to their client without building a potentially large volume of links all pointing straight to their client’s site. This is great if your clients are in a niche where you’d naturally expect not to get a large volume of links.

15. Create and build links using infographics

We recently had a discussion with a client who absolutely loves building links for his clients using infographics. There are 2 main benefits why he does this. The first one is because his clients are topically boring and creating a stat-based infographic for his clients and then building links through infographic outreach creates a justified reason why it would be natural for them to get links. The second benefit to creating and distributing infographics is that once you do some outreach and get some mentions, infographics are generally more likely to get shared and republished on other blogs with natural credit mentions back.

Are we missing something spectacular? Get in touch and we’ll include it in this round-up.