Link Building Strategies on Steroids: How to Get Backlinks FAST!

Key Takeaways

in this video I'm gonna show you how to turn your backlink analysis into actionable link building strategies fast stay tuned everyone Sam oh here with eight refs this is the last video in our three-part series on backlink analysis and link building using just HRF site Explorer tool now in the first two videos we went pretty deep into link prospecting and competitor analysis but today you and I we're gonna be focusing on link building efficiency and cover five tactics that you can execute quickly from just a single site analysis if you haven't watched the first two videos then I highly recommend going back to those right now so that you can get the most out of this baller tutorial some of these strategies that I'll be covering may be very familiar while others may be completely new and I've got some cool link building tactics in here for everyone no matter what stage you're at I am absolutely pumped so let's jump right in first I want to set some context so throughout this tutorial let's imagine that I have a new and upcoming content marketing blog called content marketing hackers and I'm looking to build links to it so with that said let's get started with link building strategy number one piggyback off your competitors homepage links so here's the skinny when you're analyzing a home pages backlinks you're gonna find that the majority of Link's will have an anchor text to the company's branding the domain name or the founders name even and with branded anchors like this it's usually a general mention of the company so by looking through these general mentions your job is going to be to full so first we need to find out why your competitor was mentioned and you weren't and the second thing that we need to do is we need to find out how to squeeze your way into that post so let me show you a few examples so I'll go to site explorer and enter in content marketing institute comm here and i'll set the setting to the exact URL now if we scroll down to the bottom of the overview page you'll see that over 80% of their backlinks have branded anchor phrases now let's scroll back up and look at the backlinks report for CMS homepage to see where these links are coming from first I'll set one filter here for now - just the do followings now if you look at the first batch of links you'll notice that some of these sites have linked to CMS homepage thousands of times this to me looks like site-wide links so we'll skip over these for now and as we scroll down we'll come down to this post from social media examiner twenty social media marketing tips from the pros in the referring page column you can see that it was an expert roundup from the title then looking to the anchors and surrounding text column you can see that the anchor text is on jhope let's see the founder of CM a-- now just a little bit below that you'll see this link that cm I got from top-ranked blogs big list of marketing blogs now the question boils down to this why do they link to Content Marketing Institute but not content marketing hackers which again is my imaginary blog that I need to build links to so in many cases it's because they don't know that my awesome in imaginary blog exists so as an example I could reach out to top rank blog and be like hey notice your big list of marketing sites doesn't include content marketing hackers but we seem to fit all of your requirements mind vetting our blog and adding us to your list now as you continue to filter through this list you're gonna find all sorts of other opportunities that could be easy and big wins for you so check out this example you can see from the anchor and surrounding text that the interview Joe where he spoke about generating revenue with content so I could reach out to the site and ask to be interviewed in a future podcast episode assuming I have something unique and valuable to offer to help narrow down your search you can scroll back to the top and then look for specific keywords so if I wanted to get interviewed more I could look for keywords like a podcast or interview in the search bar here a few other common types of links that you might find by analyzing a competitor's homepage are testimonials quotes and guest posting opportunities since the author box almost always has a link pointing to the writers home page once you filter through the list you can start sending your own pitches to these site owners to have your brand mentioned alongside your competitors okay on to the second link building strategy build links to your existing pages that need the extra boost now there's a good chance that both you and your competitors have pages with similar content products or services and that's probably what makes them a competitor in the first place right so here's the skinny on this tactic this is a simple three-step process step one pick a page on your site that you want to build backlinks to step two find a competing page and analyze the backlink profile to find relevant link prospects and step three send a unique page that shows how your content product or services is different than the one mentioned so let's say that I have a great post on my blog about link building but it's not getting the attention it needs so first I would change this URL search to a full domain search next I'll click on the best buy links report in the sidebar to see the most linked to pages across the domain lastly I'll use the search bar and look for a relevant keyword so I'll type in link and then run the search right away you'll see some hyper relevant posts that have a solid number of unique linking domains and if we were to add up these referring domains you could potentially find hundreds of link prospects almost instantaneously from just a single competitor next we can click on the corresponding number under the do follow column and open up the individual backlink reports now we will perform a backlink analysis exactly the same way we did in the second video in this series and send our pitch to the various site owners it's important to note that when you're pitching these sites you should provide some kind of unique value in your pitch so in this case with link building are you sharing new tactics that no one's talking about do you have a unique case study with your results or a creative process that you follow do you have unique data or insights you can provide that the page that they're currently linking to doesn't basically you need to ask yourself this question why should they take their time just to add your link to their post and if your only answer is out of the goodness of their hearts then you may want to rework your pitch one thing to note is that when you're looking through your competitors best buy links report you can look for older outdated posts in general it's easier to steal your competitors backlinks when you have bran new content with information that's relevant today now in our example CMI happens to include the dates in their URL so it's really easy to identify outdated posts with a quick skin there are a couple other ways that you can find competing pages the first is to go to google and type in a keyword phrase that you want to rank for so in this case if it was link building then I could go through the top 10 results copy and paste each URL into site Explorer and analyze the individual backlink profiles to create an even bigger list of prospects now the great thing about this tactic is that it's not limited to just blog posts the exact same logic and principles apply for product and service pages for example if we were to create a marketing automation software then I could simply take one of my competitors so let's say MailChimp's feature page and then paste the URL into site Explorer and from here you can see that this URL has 615 referring domains linking to this page now I can click on the backlink profile here in the left sidebar and then look through the list of people who are linking to this product page looking at this result here the anchor and surrounding text tells us a lot it says tools such as MailChimp's marketing automation software can help with personalization so the question that comes to mind is why aren't they mentioning my marketing automation software and the most probable answer again is that they don't know it exists so in my outreach email I could offer them a free account and show them unique value in how my tool is superior easier and better than MailChimp's all right on to one of my favorite tactics and that's because it is one that is easily scalable seriously easily scalable tactic number three is broken link building so here's the skinny on broken link building you find a dead 404 page from a competitor's website that has backlinks next you recreate that page with your own twist and then you email everyone who's still linking to the broken page and ask them to replace the dead link with yours now there are a few ways to find broken pages with backlinks using site Explorer the quickest way to do it from a domain level search is again in the best by Lynx report the only thing we need to change here is this one filter to find only the 404 not found pages and boom we now have a list of over 23,000 broken pages from our competitor site that has backlinks from here you can click on the referring domains column to sort the list in descending order you can see right here that there dot aspx version of the site was never redirected properly in this broken link here on what is content marketing has earned over 400 do follow backlinks from a hundred and eighty eight unique websites the one below seems to be a list post of the top forty two content marketing blogs which has ninety one referring domains and the one below that drumroll please is the same post without a proper redirect so that ninety one referring domains now turns into a hundred and fifty seven unique linking websites aka one hundred and fifty seven new link prospects now if you already have a solid replacement then it's just a matter of pitching the owners editors and webmasters with your piece and you can use the search filter here again to look for topics that are similar to ones that you've already published so let's say that I have a great post on content marketing tools I can search for the keyword tool and you'll see all of the relevant broken pages with a keyword in the URL but if you haven't created the post yet then you can do something cool right here within this report first I'll clear the search filter and now let's look at one of these pages that seems to lack context this one here has a URL permalink that reads repurpose one video and has thirty-two unique linking websites what you can do is click on the carrot here and if there are any records inside of archive.org which is a free service that lets you see what pages look like in the past then you'll see a shortcut link here click on the link and it'll load up the page and show you what the page looked like when it was live now we know that this post is a case study done on their podcast where they repurposed one video and got X results so if you have a similar case study on repurposing content then it might be worth creating after your content is pitch ready you can click on the number in the do follow column which will open up the backlink support with a do follow filter set now you can see all the pages that have linked to this broken page now it's just a matter of reaching out to each site owner editor or webmaster to let them know about the broken link and to pitch your post as a replacement one side note that I want to make is regarding outreach now when you're pitching different site owners you want to make sure that your replacement article is actually relevant to the context of why they link to the broken link so for example if we look at this broken pages backlink profile which is on content marketing spend and you can see from the anchors slash surrounding text column that the context of these links is largely because of stats so if you are recreating a similar page to this one you should be prepared to use your new and up-to-date data as part of your pitch and if you don't have the data then don't recreate the post all right onto link building strategy number four which I don't think many people are using and that's link building from irrelevant 301 redirects here's the skinny when a website decides that they want to consolidate content meaning they're gonna take some of their less popular posts and then redirect them to ones that they want to rank for and the result is gonna be completely irrelevant redirects that you can capitalize on within the same report which is the best buy links report we can change the 404 filter to 301 moved permanently and you can see that they have over 6700 articles that have been permanently redirected the one that stands out to me is the blog post here it looks like they've redirected a post on headline click-through rate to their headline tips and tools post now this might seem like they're completely irrelevant but if we click through to the tips and tools article and then search for the word click you'll see that there are only three occurrences the first shows cheesy clickbait headlines the second reads the winner gets the clicks and the third says most clicks looking at the archive.org page you can see that the original topic was on tips to improve your headline click-through rate which the new article clearly doesn't help with now from here you'd go to the backing support skim through the anchors and surrounding text column to see the context of the backlink and here we can see that the majority of links are coming from a stat that was mentioned related to click-through rate and if you look at this one here it says that the stat comes from the folks at Outbrain which you can also link to in your post so that your article is relevant when you're pitching these sites pretty neat twist to 404 link building right already link building strategy number five guest blogging on sites where your competitors are posting with a twist in the method that I'm about to show you it's a pretty creative one that I haven't seen anyone talk about but first the skinny on guest posting first you find a website you want to write for you pitch them with some topic ideas and if accepted write a post that will most likely lead to a link back to your site and I've covered a lot of effective ways to find guest posting sites in my content explorer video so if you're using or plan to use guest posting as a promotion strategy then I highly recommend watching that video now before I teach you this new tactic let me start with a story it was a dark and stormy night you know I was just sitting at home reading through some of my favorite blogs minding my own business and for whatever reason blog after blog after blog after blog this guy's name in face kept popping up on my screen Brian Stewart he seemed to be on some kind of relentless guest blogging blitz so I followed him on Twitter and literally binge read everything he had written well done Ryan well done here's the thing if I was noticing him everywhere so are others and when it comes to anything online there are always footprints the main one footprint for guest posts is the author bio and in it you'll normally get a link to your website and some links to your social profiles so what you can do to find guest posting opportunities is to open up site Explorer and search for a popular guest bloggers Twitter profile URL so I'll put in Ryan's Twitter URL and click Submit and you'll see that a hundred and twenty-eight unique domains have linked to his Twitter profile let's look at the backlink profile if you skim through the referring page as well as the anchor and backlink column then you can almost instantly see why they got a backlink for example this one from an amazing blog that I absolutely adore was an expert roundup which you can see from the title then you'll see this one here on local SEO that looks like a naked URL and if we click through to that article you'll see that Ryan was the guest author now where does this link come from right here so you could skim through this column and look for naked URLs empty anchors or even links from images which often suggest that it was a guest posts by using these five link building tactics that I just showed you you should be able to build a large enough list of prospects and get backlinks to get your pages ranking with the big boys and that's it for this SEO tutorial and actually this entire backlink analysis and link building series if you haven't watched the other videos then I'd highly recommend going back and working through these videos at your own pace make sure to hit the thumbs up button and subscribe for more actionable SEO tutorials in fact let me know in the comments if there's anything that we haven't covered that you'd like to see in action right here on YouTube now I've got some links that need to be built and I'm sure you do too so until the next video keep grinding away I see old friends and I'll see you soon [Music] you [Music] [Music]