The act of acquiring backlinks isn’t as easy as putting together a strategy for your backlinks.
Contrary to what people may think, establishing a strategy for building B2B links is very important when building and growing a link profile.
Backlinks add a great deal of value to your link profile and much of our organic growth is a direct result of having a successful backlink strategy. As a result of our belief in the importance of backlinks, we produced eight guest posts per week to support our strategy. Though some options will demand a little more effort from you, there are many ways to get backlinks. Within this article I will show you how to build your link profile ranging from tactics that require the least amount of work to those that require the absolute most. The three categories you will see will include:
- Outreach (least amount of work)
- Submission (medium amount of work)
- Exchange (the most amount of work)
It is a good idea to utilize all of the tactics together to get the best results. If you would like to have links that will reward you in the best way in organic rankings, the tactics that require the most amount of work will deliver the positive, authoritative results you are seeking. Follow along as we dive into the 10 tactics for building your B2B link profile. You can start to use these very tactics to build your B2B marketing strategy as soon as today. Read also: SEO Tips for Your Hispanicize Wires
Backlinks Acquired Through Outreach
Scholarships for Students
Get some high-quality backlinks while simultaneously helping students get through school. URLs that end in .gov or .edu are recognized and trusted by Google to be of high authority. It is not likely that random people will have access to these URLs. It’s a great tactic and many businesses utilize this technique to build their backlink profile.
The steps to successfully doing this require you to build a page on your website dedicated to scholarships. Once this is done, you will need to place an application form on the page. Google forms is a great service to use to create your application. Next, you will need someone to locate the contact information to the Financial Aid Office and other programs of interest you would like to offer the scholarship to. We collected contact information for not only the Financial Aid Office but also the programs for Computer Science and Marketing at over 180 universities. You can choose a program that better relates to the field of your company. The choice is yours. This will only take you a few hours and will allow you to quickly acquire backlinks for your profile. This process is simple. Build an additional page on your website for scholarships, create an application form, send out an email campaign to all contacts on your list of universities. After setting up our scholarship page we have already gained 22 links that are recognized to come from high-authority websites. With each week we are acquiring more links.
Links from Wikipedia
Here is another way to receive links that are of high quality to add to your profile. The links that you can acquire from Wikipedia will be connected to the blog posts on your site. As you start the process of getting the links, you will need to search Google for relevant keywords being using on the web. Next you will filter through Wikipedia to discover any topics related to previous blog posts you have written for your website. If there are any topics you have covered related to the keywords you have searched, check to see if there is any information you have covered in your blog posts that has not been covered already on Wikipedia.
This guide will walk you through how to edit a Wikipedia page if you have no experience with editing on the site. Your link may or may not be approved. If your information and citation are adding great value to the page, the chances of it being accepted are high. Unfortunately, the links provided by Wikipedia are no-follow. Regardless, Google may still recognize them as links that are valuable. The advantages that they bring include sending traffic that is referred and they also provide a platform that leads to other valuable links.
Icon Packs
Have your company designer develop icon packs that are customized for your brand. Once the icon packs are created, there are a variety of sites available that will permit you to upload the icons to be downloaded by others. If you do this, don’t forget to communicate to the people to provide a link back to your site in a designated place on their page. Of course, everyone will not do this. However, there is a big chance that at least 50 percent of the users will provide a link that will send others back to your site.
This technique requires little to no upfront work on your part. The icons that you upload must be original and legally owned by you. If you are interested in finding a website that allows you to download and upload customized icons, check out this article that lists places to download icon packs.
Reclamation of Links
The tactic of link reclamation is another option that does not require a ton of work. Instead, you will need to do a little bit of data mining and outreach. Your job will consist of acquiring uncredited brand mentions. This can be done through images and text followed by requesting a link back to your website through outreach. The time you are able to invest in this will determine which way you choose to go about doing this. Here is a post that goes into detail on how to do this. An alternative to this would be to do a Google search.
The results of this search will show all of the websites that have mentioned your company. You can also see which of the sites have links leading back to your webpage along with the ones that aren’t providing links. You could hire a freelancer on Upwork to do this task for as little as $8 an hour. There are also mention monitoring services (Google Alerts) that will notify you each time you are mentioned by other sites.
Affiliate Link Building
This is the last technique for link building in the Outreach category. When we use this tactic, we take content that we have already written and do a search to find the main keywords from the article on BuzzStream. Our goal is to find at least 25 articles on the topic. The authors to each article can be easily found through BuzzStream highlights. Once you find them you have the ability to add them to a project. Here is an example. We have an article written about link building and we want to utilize this technique to build links for it. Through BuzzStream we will create a new project for link building. Within the project we will find writers who have not long ago written about the subject and add them to the project.
We can navigate through all of the articles by there location, when they were written, topics and domain authority. After we gather all the information we need, we can then send out the emails needed to start our affiliate link building. If you send emails to each author individually, you will have a better chance of receiving a backlink. Though this technique is listed under Outreach, it will require some data mining. The content that you provide does not have to be freshly written. However, you content should add value for the other author’s audience.
Backlinks That Are Submission-Based
The Use of Infographics
Good infographics are often shared by viewers. You can find located on HubSpot three blog posts that show you how to develop infographics that people want to share. To create more resources through guest blogging opportunities, make use of infographics. When you opt for infographics you don’t have to present new blog posts to everyone that you reach out to.
You will need to start the process by developing a great infographic. Next you will need to contact relevant sites through email and ask them if they would like to post your infographic. Ensure them that your audience is similar to theirs and that you are willing to provide a short summary to inform the audience of what the infographic is about. This requires a lot less work than writing a 2,000- word guest blog for their site.
Posting to Forums
This tactic requires that you make providing insightful information your main priority. You want to add value to the post and not take advantage by constantly plugging your website. Seeking only to plug your site will cause you to develop a bad reputation. When having a bad reputation your get downvoted and no one will see your answers. Another result of constantly plugging your site is that the moderator of the site will simply delete your answers.
Forums are a great tool to for building your link profile. Begin by providing answers to questions on sites like Reddit, Inbound.org, Quora, Growth Hackers and other similar pages. You want to aim to grow your following so that users know you as a helpful contributor to the site. If you have written a post that can provide an answer to one of the questions, it is a good idea to link it in a natural way.
Backlinks That Are Exchange-Based
Writing Guest Blogs
When seeking to move up in the rankings organically, utilizing guest blogs can have a great influence on the building of your link profile. Similar to forum posting, your main priority should not be to constantly plug your site within the article. Doing so will almost certainly upset the editor of the site you are writing for. If you plug your site too much the editor will have to manually go through and remove all of them while managing to make sure the post flows well. Sharing fresh tactics to the site should be your main priority.
This is what we do to earn our guest posts. After hiring a VA through Upwork to complete the task of locating two sites that differ for digital marketing, we took a list of companies who are known for sponsoring big conferences about B2B and compiled them together. Our topics were perfect for their audience. Our VA retrieved all emails and names of editors that managed the websites. Lastly, we sent out emails through Pitchbox containing these three key components.
- Background information about our writer along with specialty area
- Past sites we have written for
- Different topics to consider for the guest post
This was a very effective technique for us.
HARO
The abbreviation HARO means to Help a Reporter Out. This tactic allows you to successfully diversify your backlinks to many different websites. It doesn’t cost anything to contribute. Once you are signed up as a contributor, you will receive three daily emails that contain a list of queries writers are seeking to publish their articles on.
You simply need to answer the query in a small paragraph. The writer will decide whether they like what you are contributing. As a result of them liking your contribution, they will include the information in their post and offer you a backlink. When responding to queries, you want to include a good subject line that will stand out from all the other responses.
Conference Sponsorships
This technique for building your link profile is the most expensive. This doesn’t require a lot of work, but you will need to exchange funds in order for it to work. This tactic allows you to gain high-authority links from quality sites. Deciding on which conferences to sponsor can be a challenge. We split our sponsorship prospects into categories that focus on the regional level, prospects that are available expansively within our field, and then those who are ideal for our market. On the local level we are able to strengthen our SEO, including Spanish SEO if language and culturally appropriate. When sponsoring Industry conferences, we grow in awareness and create new partnerships. Sponsoring conferences aimed at our target audience allows for our company to be placed directly in front of our ideal clients.
Final Thoughts
Link building does not happen overnight. It will take some time to grow and strengthen your link profile to where you want it to be. It isn’t the most fun part of your job, but it will pay off tremendously in the long run when seeking to climb the ranks organically.
[Disclaimer: A similar version of this article was first published on HispanicMarketAdvisors.com]
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sebastian Aroca, MIB is an entrepreneur and a customer centric Hispanic Marketing professional. He co-founded Hispanic Market Advisors® and has over 20 years of professional experience managing search marketing programs, including Spanish SEO, and client acquisition strategies geared towards connecting innovative brands and professionals with the U.S. Hispanic markets.
