Hi guys. A quick video. Well not quick, it's going to take a bit of time. I will open up, this is a can of juice you can hear opening, not a can of beer. I'm going to go through my link building slides that I do in Milan first and foremost. I was talking in Milan, the MB Summit on Thursday and Friday and my specific topic was link building and Gareth does want me to talk about link building as well, so I will run through the slides. It saves me making any others, then show you some other stuff as well, and try and give you as much information about link building as I possibly can. The topic here is, I'm going to have people probably saying some of this stuff's risky, some of this stuff can't be applied to client sites and whatever. I'm only showing you how far people go to build links, whether you implement them into your own strategy and stuff like that is entirely up to yourself.
Obviously there is an element of risk with some of the tactics but obviously, as an SEO my job is not to get websites banned or penalized because it costs me money. Everything is done within moderation and you can take bits of this information, all of it, some of it, whatever. Entirely up to yourselves. Just some of the link building techniques that people never really talk about publicly. I'm sure guys in the affiliate market world will be slightly different. Not sure how much of this stuff's going to be new to you or not but I'm sure there will be some tips in here. First about myself for anyone who's watching and doesn't know anything about me.
My name's Craig Campbell. I'm from Scotland and at present, I do consultancy, training courses, affiliate marketing and link building. Link building's always going to be a key part of SEO and the big part of what I do and the techniques around link building and all that kind of stuff is stuff that I do for myself and my affiliate marketing websites. Yeah, try and keep on top of the game and keep up with the current trends.
You may notice me from SEMrush webinars. Over the years, I've done a lot of SEMrush stuff. Not necessarily on link building, a wide variety of different stuff including webinars with David Amerland. I've also spoke at Search Leeds, done the Chiang Mai SEO Conference 2018. Amazing conference, amazing people, and picked up a lot of new knowledge myself over there. If you ever do have the opportunity to attend the Chiang Mai SEO Conference, not just for link building but just in general to network, building contacts and learn, then you will not go wrong going to that conference there. Amazing experience.
You've always got people talking about hats. As far as I'm concerned, the money hat is what I wear. White hat, black hat SEOs just bullshit. You can coin whatever phrase you like and tell people this is what you do. At the end of the day, you're doing what makes you money. I'm not a big fan of black hat, white hat. There's a lot of arguments over what I do and whatever but I'm somewhere in the middle. I'm not going to do outrageously spammy tactics but I'm not Mr. White Hat who's sitting there waiting for links to come to me organically or whatever. I can't call myself a white hat.
I'm getting spammed to death here. Out there, you will have links are against Google's terms of service. Google will tell you, any links intended to manipulate page rank or the site's rank in Google search results may be considered as part of a link scheme and a violation of Google's webmaster guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site.
Obviously Google on one hand are telling you links are against their terms of service, but on the other hand, they'll tell you that links are the number one ranking factor. In terms of ranking factors, you'll see a number of websites here. All of them will tell you that links are a ranking factor. Obviously you do have other factors, such as site speed, click-through rate and all the technical stuff that goes on out there, all your on-page elements, people get good results from internal linking.
Great, we all do all of that kind of stuff but in most people's websites, blogs, videos, whatever they do when they're talking about ranking factors, link building will be up there with the best ranking factors out there. No matter what you Google, whether it's payday loans, builders in London, anything that's reasonably competitive, they all have links. No matter what we look at, people have links. You can see some of these websites have an outrageous amount of links and then some of them drop off. You have to have consistency when you're building links.
No matter what, every good website in a competitive market have links. Quickquid.co.uk, one of the biggest payday loan providers out there rank ed for 16,400 keywords and they have links but what is important when you look at links is the referring domain name. You see a lot of people have 23,000 back links but 1.3 referring domain names. 1.38 thousand referring domain names is a good thing but you want to have as many of them as different referring domain names as you possibly can. Obviously they've got a good job done here. As a result, they've got some great rankings.
What are the techniques to build links? That's a key question here. Starting out with any website, you have to get directories done, which I'll go into in a minute, just for local rankings, Google My Business listings and stuff like that. I'm not saying directory listings are the be all and end all but in terms of citations and stuff, then you are going to have to do some directories. Regardless of whether you do them, you bribe people for links. Links are links. No matter what guys you put on it, people need to get linked. As I say, people can bribe people, you can buy cakes. You can take people out to a cigar bar. Whatever you want to do. People will go to any lengths to get good quality links.
Some people spend 100 man hours doing outreach to try and get links and they will have some success with that as well. Regardless of what strategy you use, it does cost you money, is the point here. Always bear that in mind from the outset. Links cost money. I've had guys come to me, want to do joint ventures and stuff saying, "You do the SEO and I'll do all the sales and all that stuff and we'll go 50/50," and I'm like, "What the fuck? Who's paying for the links?"
What you have to do is remember, regardless of what happens, you're going to have to either pay someone for a link, bribe them for a link, take them out for a drink for a link, there's not that many people giving links away willy nilly for free. Obviously, you can lean on some of your friends for some of the resources but that will soon dry up. At some poin, you're going to have to spend money. Good is clever but it's not that clever. What I mean by that is Google can't tell whether I paid Gareth Dean for a link. I haven't paid Gareth Dean for a link, let's get that clear from the outset but Google couldn't tell whether I bought him a beer, whether I took him for a cake or gave him cash. Google's not that clever. Anyone who's saying paid links are bad, obviously a paid link in a link farm's bad but it's not that clever and everyone thinks that Google's got eyes everywhere and they probably have to a certain degree but they can't see payments going on.
As I say, all of these link building techniques have to happen and the first one was directory listings or citations, if you like, and this is more for people who want local rankings for whatever they may be doing. A common mistake when you're doing citations is you give it to the most recent member of staff who's joined your team and they get the business description, the URL, the email and all that stuff and go through 100 directories, bashing them out all over the place, copy and pasting, bang, bang, bang, tedious job, spend a few days doing that. That's wrong. Really wrong.
The reason it's wrong is because copying and pasting those business descriptions time and time again on Yell.com, Thomson Local or whatever it may be, is going to result in probably only a handful of those directory listings getting indexed. Now, it's a pain in the arse to do that job regardless and you can pay a virtual assistant to do it or whatever. Again, they're probably going to copy and paste but the key part here is making your business description unique. That is what citationsbuiler.com does.
You can see here, citationsbuilder.com offer a range of different packages for citations or directories or whatever you want to call it. The purpose of these, obviously to manipulate the map rankings, which I'll talk about in a minute but the unique point here that a lot of people, I think, miss out on, is that this is done properly. If you take the smallest package, for example, they give you 30 citations. Those are mix of generic, geographic specific and niche websites and they'll obviously do five social media sites. They spin your description, as I say, to make it unique and then they send the citations to an indexing tool.
Now that, at present I believe, is probably about 70 percent at the moment, is what your indexing rate is if you use one of these services, which is great. It's a lot better than getting two or three indexed, and they have a range of different packages. If you can't be arsed doing it yourself and you want it done properly, then citationsbuilder.com is one way to build your local links there.
As I say, outsourcing this is a great thing to do, if you're working at scale and you've got a number of websites. I just do this as part of every process of making local lead gen websites. Citations build up better trust and authority and as I say, it helps with GMB listings and you don't need to do thousands and thousands of them. Probably the middle of the road package is the one for you. Going onto local links first. Local search statistics will tell you that 40 percent of all searches in Google are people looking for local information, whether they're looking for a local plumber, builder, local shop, hairdresser or whatever it may be.
There's a high amount of people looking for local search results and the map listings in general. There's a lot of traffic to be had there but a lot of people don't know how to get results in the map listings. They think it's all about links and stuff like that. It's anything but links, obviously the links will probably push you up so far but to get those map listings, you obviously need to get Google My Business listing. You can get phone verification on certain occasions but on most cases, they will send you a postcard to verify you're actually at that location.
The purpose of me using my slides was to tell people, if you'd done your citations first, that can very often trigger phone verifications. A lot of people do Google My Business. There's no instances of their business sitting about on Google. There's no citations, no nothing and that's where Google say, "I want a postcard sent out." If there's a ton of citations, then you can trigger phone verification, so just bear that in mind, but you do want to verify your listing. Regardless of whether you verify it or not though, people can make a suggest edit to your business listing.
You'll always be notified if you verify your listing so if someone says that you've changed your opening hours or location or whatever it may be, any random Tom, Dick or Harry can do that, suggest an edit, you are notified but see, if you don't verify your listing, you'll end up getting your map listing taken off of you. What I mean by that is people can suggest an edit and if you've not verified your listing, they can claim that listing and you'll not be notified of any changes and before you know it, someone will be off with your listing. They can then go in there, edit the website, edit the phone number and start sending those leads to their lead gen sites. It's quite a common thing to happen.
Lots of people do that on a massive scale and actually run million pound businesses from it. Always make sure you verify your My Business listing. Now, here there's a guy saying a competing business has been stealing leads from me by changing phone numbers and suggesting an edit, blah, blah. Google responds that there's no legal recourse for this and they're going to have to go through all this process stuff. A whole load of garbage. It's quite hard to get your listing back. Just be aware of theft and verify that first and foremost. What works well for local businesses is your name, address, post code and I'll run through this quickly. If you've got multiple locations for your Google My Business, have a page for each location. Don't have multiple locations in the same page.
Avoid using acronyms and avoid spamming your name, address and post code, which is what the NAP stands for, all over the place. What is an example of bad NAP? On my citations, I'm maybe a doctor. I know that's a bit of a joke because I'm clearly not but I could have Doctor Craig Campbell, 123 Test, blah, blah, blah, blah. Dr Craig Campbell at 123 Test St. You can see the options here. There's all shortenings of names and all that kind of stuff. For your Google My Business, Google want consistent NAP listings. Consistency's the key. They don't want shortenings and stuff like that. They want the name, address, post code to be exactly the same across every directory.
You also want to use the same Google account for your Google My Business as your analytics and your search console. Keep them all tied together and use a local number where possible. You can use Twilio for a couple of bucks and redirect that onto your mobile if you use a mobile for your local stuff.
You'll see here that Google are telling you that citations are a local search ranking factor. IT's critical to keep them up to date and to rank well, it's important that you have your NAP consistent across all citations. Make sure. That is what Google are looking for to rank you in the map pack, which is why directory listings are the first point of call as part of your link building strategy. Make sure they're consistent.
The next one that a lot of people do, and everyone does it, is SEO outreach. Now, what you can do is get a Mailshake account. They cost you relatively low amounts of money. Basic package, $29, pro package, $49. Mailshake is amazing for outreach. Great tool. I use it myself personally and you want to build yourself an outreach list. How do you build an outreach list? What you can do is go through tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, all these kind of tools looking at your competitors' links. You can also just go out there and look for niche relevant links, niche bloggers, you can buy a list or acquire a list one way or another. Whatever acquire means, it's a loose word but regardless, you need a list to reach out to.
That list should consist of good quality, relevant websites to your niche. You can then chuck that list into Hunter.io and what Hunter.io does, and it's relatively cheap, is gets the email addresses of the websites that you're putting in there, which you'll then put into your Mailshake account to do the outreach. Hunter.io, you can chuck a bunch of websites in there that all your competitors are getting links from and chuck it into Hunter.io and then put it into your Mailshake campaign and reach out. Hunter.io is relatively cheap. You can check the prices on the pricing page. These are two cheap options. As I say, you can check for domains, email finder and you can also verify emails with Hunter.io.
If you really want to go out ane use the crème de la crème of all tools then Pitch Box is what you want to use for outreach. What you can do it chuck a list of websites in there and that will go and scrape up all the emails from there. Exactly what Hunter.io does within Pitch Box. Pitch Box is the full bells and whistles of outreach and lots of guys are doing outreach services use Pitch Box and use it very well and that's where they build up the list from.
Building up that list using any of these kind of tools is building you money because what happens is, if you get good websites that get real traffic, you're building relationships with SEO guys, webmasters, bloggers and outreach works very well because links with all these metrics, good metrics, relevant, real traffic and all that kind of stuff, work really well for people who are looking to rank their websites.
For lazy bastards like me who sit about the office like that all day and don't want to do outreach, you can use moneyhat.co.uk. An outreach service, belongs to Gary Wilson and Gary does outreach on a regular basis and sells links to other people. Now, these links are not PBNs. They're not shady websites. Whatever. Gary has basically done outreach for a while and built up a massive list of contacts. If you want a link, you simply pay Gary for it. He gets the link for you because he's got the relationship. He gets the content for you and that's it, job done. That's what the price of the link's for. You cut the corners, you're not spending 100 man hours reaching out to people who may or may not get back to you.
When I say to you, think about the money aspect. Although you're paying, possibly not paying for links, when you're using your internal staff, you're wasting up a massive amount of time, which you're paying for because these staff are being paid a salary. Regardless of what you do, you're paying for them. It's much easier in a lot of cases just to go direct to Money Hat or any of the other providers I'm going to talk about in a minute, and say, "These are the links I want. Can you get me them?" They'll get them for you very, very quickly because they've got their relationships. They've going to get an instant response and the links just happen.
Whereas, you can spend tens of thousands of pounds worth of man hours and get three links, which is not good business sense. Think about the money side of it. Other guys, seeker.digital, Gareth Simpson and his wife Kayleigh run this business. They, again, have a different list. They'll have a different list from Money Hat. They all have different clients and all that kind of stuff and Gareth's got links that Gary doesn't have and vice versa. People use a couple of different vendors when they're getting links. It's not all about one person's links. Obviously that adds variety and all that kind of stuff as well. Seeker Digital is Gareth Simpson's. Comes highly recommended.
You've also got DFY links. This is another great service and, again, we do outreach, done for you. You have to apply to be on the waiting list because they're so busy but done-for-you links, DFYlinks.com is the next one. The next one is getbacklinks.io. This is James Gregory. Again, he's got his pricing and all that kind of stuff on his website. Getbacklinks.io is another vendor, highly recommended. James certainly knows his stuff. He's well known in the industry and you can go through his website and there's parts on there that will tell you how it works, how to order them. It's a white label link building service that you can do and you can work at scale. James is another guy that is well known in the industry, provides results, which is the key part of it, and can be considered an outreach specialist.
That is all the domains of the four vendors I recommend. There is a lot of other, well I'm not going to say a lot of other. There are other vendors out there, who I'm sure are working well and have good lists but these guys are all guys that I have used, met with, have friends that have used and consistently provide results. Have a look at moneyhat.co.uk, DFYlinks.com, seeker.digital and getbacklinks.io and have a look at them and try them out. I'm sure you'll see results. That is something I would do as part of my link building mix. Get some outreach specialists with good lists, give them the money that they want and get myself good links consistently on a monthly basis.
PR links. You'll hear of all these big PR agencies getting you Guardian links, BBC links, Mirror links, all of these kind of things. PR links work very well but they cost an arm and a leg. Now, the reason they cost an arm and a leg is PR companies have got tools like Gorkana, puts them in touch with journalists anda ll that kind of stuff. They do have tools, having to type out emails and pitch to journalists and all that good stuff. PR for me does cost a lot of money. It might not be a lot of money to some of you guys. PR is definitely a great thing. Getting some of these high profile, good quality links is important if you can get them but you obviously have to pitch good stories and stuff like that.
They do work well together but what's the cost of PR? If you Google it, you'll probably see that some of the rough fees for a typical business will be up to £6,000 per month and they'll put you on, and your contacts and all that kind of stuff. Do you get good value for money when it comes to PR? 100 percent, of course you do, if someone's doing the job properly but I'm not here to sit and tell you to spend that kind of money because I certainly wouldn't be paying these kind of figures. What am I supposed to do? Just give up and not rank? Absolutely not.
Obviously people tell you, there's quotes and all that out there about losers quitting and all that kind of stuff. Obviously some of these guys I'm going to put up in my next bunch of slides to get the point across, was Gennaro Gattuso because I was talking in Milan but he's also a boyhood hero of mine, used to play for Rangers in Scotland, which is why I've picked him but as I was talking in Milan, I put him in there. Alan Sugar, Richard Branson, Alex Ferguson, Muhammad Ali. What did all these guys have in common? They didn't give a fuck. They done whatever it took to win at all costs.
If you go back to Muhammad Ali, he was trash talking, he was very, very tactically aware as a boxer, pulling every trick out the bag and he had people beaten before they went in the ring. Alex Ferguson intimidated people, kept bollocks and motivated people and all that kind of stuff. Richard Branson, I'm sure had, and he will tell you some of his quotes out there, he was taking people's money and then tried to figure out how he was going to provide the services that he was providing and guys like Alan Sugar, wheeled and dealed, done a lot of stuff, stuff that you probably wouldn't consider to be ethical but hugely successful guys, all of them and they didn't give a fuck.
That's what happens with SEO. You don't just give up. You've got to have the not giving a fuck attitude if you want to get on and make some money, which is why I wanted to put those guys in there. Lies make good SEO and you've got to say, "What the fuck?" I'm Scrooge, I don't want to pay for those PR links that I was talking about earlier. I just refuse to pay it. I'd never pay 20 grand a month on PR links. What do I do? I want the PR links anyway, so for example, you've got the Liverpool Echo. You get a nice news article on there. Quite a highly powered website and they've got a wee part under here saying, image copyright unknown.
At the top of the article, you'll see there, the article's done by Liam Thorpe, blah, blah, blah. What do I do? I reach out to Liam Thorpe and I can get him on social media, email or linked in. Now, if I was to get him on LinkedIn, I'm going to show you quick. Just in case any of you are doing outreach or want to reach out to people. I'm just going to pick a random person, right? I'll probably go for an SEO consultant. You don't have to be directly connected to these people. I'm going to find someone I'm not connected with.
Connections, apply. We'll go for this guy. Steve Moss. I'm not connected to him but if I want to reach out to him very quickly, I can go to Contact Out, which is a free Google Chrome extension. It will give me his email address. There you go. It's also given me his phone numbers. Quite easy to reach out to people using LinkedIn. If I go back to here I can reach out to him on Twitter, send him a message. I could go to his LinkedIn or pop him an email. Either way, I want to get in touch with him. The next part is what I want to say to him.
What I would tend to do is say to someone like that, "That's my image." Not that particular image but one image that was probably more relevant to my website so I would do a bit more research, and say, "That's my image you're using," and believe it or not, 9 times out of 10, they fall for it and place a link on you. These guys that you're reaching out to are probably not the journalist. They'll probably have a novice member of staff who reply to emails like that and 9 times out of 10, as I say, they fall for it, so you're doing what is known as the image trick within the industry. It's probably normally some office geek and as I say, they don't even argue, they just put it up.
Sometimes people say, "No it's not." You walk away at that point and they move on. If someone's saying that, then you're not going to get the link. You can also do the same kind of trick or a similar trick to people. Say, for example, you scrape up and find a whole bunch of broken links on the Liverpool Echo or the Telegraph or whatever it may be, you can go there, reach out to journalists and say, "Listen, I've changed my website, that's why that link's broken. Can you put my new domain name on there? The link's totally relevant." Again, 9 times out of 10, they don't even ask you to prove anything. They just do it.
Tell them you've got a broken link or you change your domain name or whatever, just find broken links on news websites and reach out and say, "Listen, great article, you're linking to a dead resource, it was my website. Give me the link," and again, they'll fall for it. If they play hardball, and this goes back to the image trick, you can actually send an email out from a lawyer website. You can set up a fake website, whatever, solicitors, and do an outreach with an email saying, "I'm reaching out on behalf of my client regarding a piece of copyrighted intellectual property that's been placed on your website. The image is currently used on this page. My client is very understanding at this stage and has agreed that no further legal action will be taken if they're credited for the work."
A lot of time, if the person is a little bit more savvy and wants to play hardball, they can be persuaded by the threat of legal action, which is a bit naughty, bit it works very, very well. It could be worth setting up a little PBN, not even a PBN, just a website that has some lawyer stuff on it, and do your outreach from that email address.
Scare tactics, if you want PR links, work very well. People just don't want any trouble, don't want any hassle. They'll just give you the link and move on. The next thing, do private blog networks still work? 100 percent, they still work. I didn't want to go into too much detail on private blog networks on these slides because I speak about them at a lot of different events but if they're done properly, they still do work but you want websites that have real traffic, so PBNs that get real traffic, real rankings. They've got unique content and they're footprint free.
Also, not overdone with links. They don't have tens of thousands of outbound links on there. I wouldn't really consider that to be a good PBN. PBN stands for private blog network. A lot of these private blog networks seem to be public blog networks that everyone knows about and they're so willy nilly in Facebook groups and whatnot. You want to avoid those PBNs. Those guys that say PBNs don't work, it tends to be those kind of guys that are using those kind of websites.
This is an example of a website that's actually just a PBN. PBNs have to look fairly real. It's just a lead gen website for me now. It was a company who went bust and I got hold of their domain name and I put a copy of their website up from Wayback Machine. I can use it for lead gen websites. You could also use certain PBNs for affiliate websites or dropshipping websites, as well as being a link building resource. Try and make your money back on your PBNs and make them real websites. That's what I've done. I've done it with some degree of success.
I may not have the best PBN in the world but I don't sit and share it with people and compare but you have to make sure, if you start looking into PBNs, do brace yourself for a massive shit show. You have to rummage about and make sure that you get the right type of PBNs. Now you can also pick up, if you're looking to build your own PBNs, you can pick up domains from GoDaddy auctions and various other places.
You can also reach out to old, unused websites to build up some PBNs. For example, you can go to tool like Scrape Box, stick in there, copyright 2014 and what it'll do is chuck out a whole bunch of websites that have got copyright 2014. You can chuck that into Mailshake and just send an email out saying, "Listen, I see you guys are not updating your website much anymore, are you doing anything with it? Are you interested in selling it?" Try and spark up a conversation and try and pick up old websites before they expire. A lot of people building PBNs will use expired domain names, which is fine but I try to go a step above that and try and get domains that have no drops in their history. They work a bit better, in my opinion.
You can also look for websites that have got no SSL certificate or websites that are not mobile friendly. They tend to be your websites that are older, untouched or are unused but think outside the box, just look for footprints and try and find some websites out there that you can acquire but the key part of a PBN would be to use different IP addresses for the PBNs, different templates, different registrars, different plugins, different logins, unique content and importantly, build unique backlink profiles and also use unique social accounts.
Social accounts buy a bit of trust, believe it or not. If you can't be arsed going to all that trouble, you can use costaPBN.com. Costa PBN, a couple of guys who are geniuses and build PBNs. They also do a lot more than PBNs. They're trying to get into the gaming niche and do various other things. They actually design real website as well that's not all just about PBNs. They've different models there but the one that obviously suits this particular conversation is the PBN setup. They can do websites for as cheap as $67 or the premium setup for $160.
They will set up legal pages, random plugins, basic on-page SEO, they'll put some content on there for you. They will design custom logo and graphics and give you a unique theme. You can use Costa PBN if you can't be bothered doing it. Have a look at them if building PBNs, definitely.
Now another link building tool, out with PBNs, is a tool like SEPO autopilot. Some of you may use it and some of you may not. It's very similar to the tool Money Robot, which a lot of people have used over the years and you've going to say, "Fuck, why are you talking about these automated tools?" Obviously these tools give you 100 percent backlink automation and what these guys are doing now is good. They've got an indexer, they've got video ranking stuff, and it's relatively low cost. They've also got spinners in there but they've got a bunch of decent Web2.0s, which have not been saturated too much. Obviously, what you're going to do with links ...
What I'm going to do it revert back to the Liverpool Echo article. Say I was to do that for myself and I was to get that Liverpool Echo link, so that guy was to give me a link on that article, give me credit for it. What I would tend to do it power up that particular link with a tool like SEO autopilot. Just to juice up that link and power that URL up, I'm going to then start pushing all sorts of spam, blog comments, Web2.0s and everything else up there to these websites, to power them up. You can also do that with other guest posts that you get and whatever as well. SEO autopilot does have a place in the market. People are doing that but equally, what they're doing is really good work.
You can obviously do a lot more than you can with Money Robot on SEO autopilot. You can take 100 percent control of your link profile creation and put in primary keywords, branded keywords, generic keywords, longterm keywords, all that kind of stuff. You can put all of that in there. You can also embed your maps and stuff like that in here as well for local SEO rankings. It's also got a video ranking feature. Everyone knows that ranking well on videos is all about spam. This tool works very well. Using this as well. If you want to rank some videos and I think video optimization is something that's under-utilized by many but what is really, as I say, really good about this tool is different unique settings per group as well so they've basically cut it all up and made it a bit more unique when you're doing your spamming, over and above what Money Robot done.
Similarly, you can design your own link scheme on SEO autopilot. Similarly to Money Robot again, you can have your different structures, all the different tiers point to this, that and the next thing. We can do that with SEO autopilot. That was my link building talk in Milan but what I'm going to do is now go onto some other stuff. I'll get rid of the slides and put the screen back up.
Obviously, I discussed some off the link building techniques that go out there. People do find it a little sketchy but obviously what I wanted to show people was, people out there blogging and stuff, and obviously this was a while ago, you know, black hat SEO tips that are used today, paid links, Google can't see that kind of stuff. Spam comments will get you into trouble. No one's recommending you do that from the other side. Duplicate content, you'll never global economy anywhere. Article spending can work if it's done properly. Cloaking, doorway pages, keywords, stuff in invisible text, all of thee kind of things are considered black hat and not what you want to do. Any expert out there suggesting you do use techniques like that to build links, you are likely going to get a penalty.
From a link building point of view, there isn't any real other tricks that you can do. Links are links at the end of the day. You just have to make sure you get as many of them as you possibly can. As I say, even if I was to put in something like lawyers London, get one of the good guys. Saunders, put that into Ahrefs. You'll see that these guys do have a bunch of good referring domain names that are continually going up there but obviously Ahrefs a great tool to analyze people's backlinks. You can look at the backlink profile here. You can see organic search. Alongside, looking at the organic backlink profile, which is growing, you can also see the organic search is growing. You can see, which I also think is quite important from an SEO point of view, that the vast majority of the backlinks do follow, which is what you want but you do have a nice bunch of referring IP addresses and stuff like that but they do have an element of no-follow links in there.
No-follow links don't pass any value from a link building side but there's certainly other things within no-follow links like the traffic it brings to a website or just the sheer power or whatever. Even if it's a crappy, no-follow link, just to vary things up, you see that it's nice and natural. Out of the backlinks, 33 percent are no-follow. I'm not going to sit here and say you have to have X amount of percent no-follow. It's really natural to have a percent of your links, no-follow. This particular person's got a lot of text links so that's links within content. You want to try and very stuff up here as well. Image likes and stuff like that as well, where possible, just again to give that element of reality when building links but what you can see is a lot of the links are at the bottom end of the scale for that particular lawyer.
They're not doing particular great link building but it's enough to get them ranking well for lawyers in London. Fair play to them. You can also see here that a lot of their links ... You're going to add links and some are going to drop off. That's why link building has to be consistent, ongoing, come from different website, from different vendors, all of that kind of stuff and make sure that you get as many different referring domain names and stuff like that, as you possibly can. All of that will go a long way to helping you rank well.
As I say, you can look at your competitors or any website out there, see what backlinks are on there, what backlinks are new and stuff like that as well. You can go on there and analyze people's backlinks and say, it's got to here, let's see what they are and see if that's something we can get as well. I'll look at that and you can see the metrics. Probably not bother going for that backlink but what you want to do is through using Ahrefs, pick as many of these links as you possibly can. People will say, why am I talking about Ahrefs? Is there other tools out there? Obviously SEMrush, who I love, have some backlink profiles that you can look at but Ahrefs has a lot more data mapping from the backlink side and it is the one I use for backlink analysis when I'm looking at competitors.
You can use Ahrefs for a whole bunch of other stuff as well, looking at keywords, movements, top pages, content gap. There's everything in here so you can totally go through a competitor's website and check out, what's going on, what they're doing, what's good, what's bad and tweak your own website accordingly. As far as link building goes, I think you have to have the right tools to do your research first and foremost before you do set up your Mailshake and stuff like that. I'm going to log into my Mailshake here and show you because a lot of people go, "Bloody hell, I'm reaching out to the wrong kind of people." I said earlier in the slides, you can acquire lists and stuff like that.
This is just a test Mailshake account. What I'd done was done an outreach campaign. 374 emails were sent out, just want to do it as a demonstration. One email was sent to them. There's no follow-ups, no nothing. 374 were sent. 84 replies and I got 211 opens, which is a good rate in terms of me reaching out to people. Now that was me acquiring someone's list and I wanted to see how good that list was and when I sent messages out to it, I got quite a lot of replies and open.
Acquiring the right list is key. They you just put it in here, upload the emails. You put the domains into Hunter.io, which will get the emails from the domains, put it into Mailshake and do your outreach campaign. Here, you can do automated follow-up sequences. If you don't get a response, you can then chase that up with people and say, "Listen, I sent you an email. It didn't get a reply, how about it?" That may prompt a reaction, or say something different or whatever it may be but Mailshake is really good, simple and easy to use. Something that I recommend anyone does at the start of a budget.
You've also got a lot of tools out there like NinjaOutreach, a well known tool where you can do your outreach from as well. It really depends. NinjaOutreach is a really good tool and it's fairly cost effective. Does a similar thing and it's got a whole load of other stuff in here as well. Influencer marketing stuff as well. You can find Instagram influences, Twitter influencers and stuff like that as well. It's similar to Mailshake, you can do your stuff, unlimited emails, unlimited searches, automatic email broadcasting. Then you can do the whole automated follow-up thing as well. It's the automated follow-up that sometimes does the damage because sometimes you send an email out, first time it doesn't spark a reaction from the person you're sending it to.
Definitely if I look at NinjaOutreach as well as some of the other outreach tools out there, if you do have a premium budget, you want all the bells and whistles, Pitch Box is one. That's undeniably the premium, crème de la crème tool out there for outreach but I think regardless of what you do, you have to either do outreach, buy links, build PBNs or do PR or trick PR people to get links. That's the four main ways to get a good, strong backlink profile. Top of your stuff at this start, when you're getting your local citations but everyone's doing that so that's not going to help you in a real competitive market for top of the table keywords. As I say, all of these are the link building strategies that people are using today.
Not a lot of people admit to using them. A lot of people spin them and call them different names. They'll get PR agencies out there claiming they're doing full-on PR, pitching out to people, when they're not. They're doing link reclamation. What link reclamation basically means is ... One more, I'll show you this tool. You've got a tool like Brand24.com. I'll just check the pricing. I think it's reasonably cheap. Yeah, depending on what you want
What you can do with Brand24 is get one of these packages, whether it's 50,000 mentions a month, 400,000 mentions a month and all that kind of stuff, a lot of people talk about you and mention you on websites, social media and whatnot and you may completely not notice that but the reason that this happen is, they may mention you or they may have liked something you've done but didn't link to you because they've been either too lazy or couldn't find a website or whatever. You can do this and do a lot of link reclamation. A lot of PR agencies, it's one of the first things they do is link reclamation because a lot of big agencies or big companies out there get mentions all over the place but they don't actually have all the links.
Do a bit of outreach, again, similarly used in the same tools, Mailshake and whatever, are going to help you. Do your outreach regardless of whether it's link reclamation or just generic outreach but link reclamation is something that can work very well, in particular, big brands and stuff are getting press mentions and all that kind of stuff. It's quite easy to pick up a whole bunch of links doing a good link reclamation campaign but brand24.com is a place where you can put all your settings in there and monitor your mentions online and then apply that to your outreach campaign and try and do a bit of link reclamation. That is some link building techniques that people are using, whether they tell you they've used them or not or whether they call it something else is entirely up to them but that is some of the tricks that are working well for me just now.
There you go. I will be on to answer some questions to anyone who's got any. All right. Cheers.
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