How to Formulate an Effective Link Building Strategy
Even the LB teams already have tangible experience with clients from the business, tech and finance
Industries cannot simply jump straight in and start creating links. Three critical things that you first
have to get to know much more about - prior to commencing your LB endeavors - include:
- Your client
- Their competitors
- Their audience
Naturally, there are portions of these 3 types of research that will overlap. Depending on the campaign
duration and intensity, this research should be ongoing, regularly updated and it technically never ends.
For example, our agency has clients for which we have been performing link building services for 3+ years
now and we are still actively updating and tweaking our offsite SEO strategies for them.
Pro Tip:
If your team lands a long-term client, we strongly suggest that you prepare template spreadsheets with
allocated columns for every bit of information you might need later. As an alternative, we highly recommend
using link building, prospecting, and link management tools like
Dibz and Base. Implementing these platforms into your
link building processes will make data gathering much faster and ensure much smoother and effective linking
opportunities prospecting, improving your overall workflow immensely. We will talk about these handy tools
more further within this article.
Client Research
If you want to build links for a client, taking stock of their current linkable assets, their tone of
voice, values, goals and standards is the first step towards helping them improve their online visibility.
Among other things, this includes:
-
A detailed content audit - to identify
client’s content
that needs to be removed, updated, expanded, promoted more aggressively or completely repurposed.
-
Discussion of their goals - which keywords do they want to rank for, which of their competitors’
campaigns are they most impressed with, etc.
-
Tactics - which strategy types are they willing to invest in, and which sites meet their quality
standards.
-
Additional assets - Apart from their website and content on it, what are their other assets? Do
they have valuable industry connections or partners with large audiences? Are they in a position to offer
something that the market needs and that nobody else is currently offering?
Competitor Research
When you carefully and honestly analyze your client’s competitors, you will find exactly which tactics you
are most likely to succeed with, as well as which goals you’ll never be able to reach and shouldn’t waste
any time and/or resources on.
Proper competitor analysis will get you a plethora of prospects on its own, while it will also improve your
other prospecting efforts and help you form the basis for the rest of your strategy.
So, what do you have to keep track of when conducting competitor research?
Backlinks
Aside from the sites linking to your competitors, you should also make notes/comments about the most
fruitful ways to contact them and about the pages characteristic for that kind of website. For instance,
if the site in question is a blog, you’d also save the blogger’s contact email, as well as the blog’s
“write for us" page - if they have one. Finally, make sure to take note of any broken links on the sites
you come across. You’ll see later how this information can be absolutely invaluable.
Keywords and Anchors
It’s very handy to examine competitor’s anchors on incoming links and take note of how they used them for
internal linking or backlinking from their other assets. Make sure you examine the keywords you want to
rank for, as well as those that may be useful for prospecting purposes later. This includes the names of
well-known people or companies in the industry, specific events etc.
Content
Examine competitors’ posts and content pieces to see which of them attracted the most attention and
engagement, especially in terms of likes, shares, organic backlinks, etc. Take note of what makes those
content pieces and/or posts special - is it the information they hold, the way they’re presented, the way
they’ve been promoted?
Other Assets
If you want to replicate tactics your competitors used, you have to make sure you’re actually equipped to
do so. Of course, you’re not only looking for their strengths, but for yours as well, i.e. things that
none of your competitors are offering, but that you can.
Target Audience Research
It is likely that you already know which type of audience you are targeting, but it is critical to have
insight into the following data as well:
- The exact content types they enjoy the most.
- The tone of voice they find the most appropriate.
- The social networks they use so you can reach them.
- How they formulate their queries when looking for what your client is offering.
- Which influencers they trust the most, and why.
Every bit of data about your audience that you can gather is going to help you in the long run. From looking
at your audience behavior report in Google Analytics, to reading their comments on social networks, related
blogs, or forums; there is no shortage of places to look for this information, you just need to be diligent
and persistent in researching and recording it all.
How to Develop Effective Link Building Tactics for Tech, Business, Finance Websites
Once you’re done with the competitor analysis part, you likely already have a fair amount of link
prospects and other useful data you need for the remainder of your research. Creating an effective link
building strategy is the process where you will use the data and insights gleaned from competitors
research we covered above. In this segment, we’ll show you how to use that info, while we’ll also explain
how to do this using
Dibz for link prospecting (but you can use the same
examples in Google search, if you think you have the time for it) and Base for link
monitoring/management.
Guest posting
We’ll outline the three main ways to find interesting business, finance or tech blogs to guest post on,
and give you examples of searches you can use directly within the
link prospecting tool, Dibz, or Google. We’ll
cover looking for tech, business and finance blogs by looking for ‘write for us pages’, pages with
published guest posts, and simply looking for relevant blogs, which may or may not be publishing guest
posts.
1. Find 'Write for us' pages
Sure, you can just
look for relevant blogs, which is
exactly what we’ll describe in the third section of this part, but by focusing your search on ‘Write for
us’ pages, you are ensuring that the sites returned as results are accepting guest posts (unless in rare
instances where they have an outdated ‘write for us’ page, or one informing you that they no longer do
this).
Step 1: Keywords
Since you’ll use step two to indicate that you want blogs, specifically, their collaboration pages, you
need to use the first step to describe the type of blog you’re looking for. To do this, you need to
observe the ‘write for us’ pages of blogs you know to be a great fit for your campaign, and see which
keywords they tend to use there.
There are three main groups of phrases that they often mention there, which help you define the niche:
Broad topics - most of these pages will list broad topics that contributing writers are supposed to
write about, so terms like:
- Investment advice
- Money management tips
- Innovative businesses
- Tech news
- Starting a business
- Financial management
- Web design
- Martech stack
Example topics - aside from giving you broad topical categories, these pages will often list some
of the exemplary guest posts they received, along with their full title. Simply look for topics you know
are common within the niche you are interested in:
- 1..100 Best Tools for Project Management
- Investment advice from experts
- Best Wordpress plugins for
Advanced Tip:
Two periods next to each other (..) are used in Google to signify range, so in the example above - 1..100
best tools - you would get results including any number between 1 and 100. This search trick works in Dibz
as well.
Their audience - most ‘write for us’ pages will try to define the audience that guest bloggers will be
writing for, which means you can use keywords like:
- Business owners
- Entrepreneurs
- Startup founders
- Webmasters
- Software developers
Step 2: Advanced Parameters
To make things simpler, we use the term "advanced parameters" to describe the
operator/footprint combinations
you can find (or create) in Dibz. Like we mentioned, for this search, you need to use parameters that will
instruct Dibz to look for collaboration pages on blogs.
Advanced Tip:
In case you don’t know which footprints to use for your searches, check out the sites you already know as
they are great prospects. See what phrasing they’ve used, and add that to your list of footprints.
- inurl:/article-submission/
- inurl:/contribute/
- inurl:/get-involved/
- inurl:/guest-blogging-guidelines
- inurl:/guest-post/
- inurl:/submit-article/
- inurl:/write-for-us/
- intitle:“Submit Guest Post"
- intitle:“Submit an Article"
- intitle:“Contribute to our site"
- intitle:“Articles wanted"
- intitle:“Become a Guest Writer"
- intitle:“Guest Post Guidelines"
- intitle:“Submission Guidelines"
- intitle:“Editorial Guidelines"
- intext:“Your article will be published"
- intext:"We don’t accept topics related to gambling"
- intext:"Write your article and send it in Word or Google Docs format"
- intext:"Your post must be original"
- intext:"NO advertising, NO promotion, NO commercial"
Advanced Tip:
If the phrase you seek has multiple combinations that are similar, you can include them all in one query
with the OR operator - ensuring Dibz, or Google, will check for them all. For instance, in the case of
‘write for us’ pages, you could create a string like:
inurl:"write us" OR inurl:"writers guidelines" OR inurl:"write for us" OR inurl:"submission guidelines" OR
inurl:"contribute an article" OR inurl:"submit an article" OR inurl:"writing guidelines" OR inurl:"publish
a guest" OR inurl:"guest post"
2. Pages With Published Guest Posts
Another great way to track down relevant tech, finance or business related blogs which are likely to
publish your guest posts is to look for those that have been publishing them before. Find them by looking
for something on a page which indicates that it is a guest post on a tech, finance or business blog. Since
we covered how this would work in Dibz and in Google in the last section, we’ll simply list the best
example search queries and footprints for finding guest posting blogs.
Keywords:
Since you are looking for pages with the posts themselves, good keyword choices include:
- The names of popular and prolific authors in business, finance and tech niches
- The names of popular companies, events or laws often mentioned in the niche
-
The most common keyphrases specific to your niche, anything that could appear in the title of a post that
you might pitch yourself, or that could show up as a category on a relevant blog
Potentially interesting keywords include:
- webmasters tips
- professional development
- sales and marketing software
- stock trading
- task management
- thought leadership
- business AND tips OR advice OR mistakes OR lessons
Parameters
Since most of the footprints used for this kind of search are found in the text of the page, you can just
provide them without an advanced operator, or you could modify them with intext: but there is no real need
to do so.
- "contributing writer"
- "guest blogger"
- "guest contributor"
- "guest column"
- "guest post courtesy of"
- "guest post was written by"
- "community post, written by one of our"
- "following guest post"
- "guest post is from"
- "guest post was written"
- "guest article"
Advanced Tip:
Google's AROUND operator allows you to specify the maximum number of words that separate the two names. You
can use this to create a search like: Microsoft OR Dell intext:"guest post" OR intext:"guest article"
AROUND(5) intext:"provided by" OR intext:"contributed"
3. Look for Relevant Blogs in General
Many high-rep blogs are actually quite willing to publish relevant content of great quality, but they
don’t really advertise that too blatantly. A lot of your best business, tech or finance guest posts are
likely to be published on blogs that don’t necessarily have a ‘write for us’ page, but that are open to a
well-researched and presented guest post pitch.
You have a lot of freedom to improvise here. You can use roughly the same keywords you used before, and try
them out with footprints common for blogs. Since a lot of the best blogs in this niche will be on sites of
various companies or agencies, you can also include the keywords describing these businesses.
Advanced Tip:
Doing this kind of broader search in Dibz is a great way to quickly find which keyphrases or footprints are
getting the most results in your industry. Simply take a look at your search queries in a completed search
and compare the keyword/advanced parameter pairs. In other words, note how many results a particular
keyphrase returned when combined with different parameters; or, how many prospects a particular parameter
returned with different keyphrases.
Keywords
- entrepreneur OR entrepreneurship OR startup OR start-up
- business AND software OR intelligence OR management OR news
Parameters
- inurl:/blog/ OR inurl:/insights/ AND inurl:/2018/
- inurl:"about our company" OR inurl:"our team"
Forums
Like we said, forum links don’t have to be spammy if you don’t make them that way. Forums have a wide
range of convenient footprints:
- inurl:showthread
- inurl:forum
-
intext:"powered by SMF" OR intext:"powered by Phbb" OR intext:"powered by IPB" OR intext:"powered by
MyBB" OR intext:"powered by PunBB" OR intext:"powered by vBulletin"
- inurl:/community/topics/
- inanchor:"Forum Rules"
- intext:"0 members, 0 guests, 0 anonymous users"
- inurl:forum.php?
- inurl://forums *
To find relevant forums, simply combine some of these operators with keywords describing your niche; with
a common customer/user question that you have a good answer for; or with nicknames of people you’ve seen
frequently posting on forums you already know about (from the competitor research stage, for example).
Since one of the main benefits of forum links is the fact that they can attract people actually interested
in becoming customers, you need to make sure that you are only targeting forums in locations where your
client is offering their products or services, so adding location-specific keywords is usually highly
recommended.
Local citations
Like with forums,
local citation link building
is sometimes described as a
black-hat tactic, most
often by people who seem to assume that if you are going to do something, you are necessarily going to
overdo it as well.
Not only are local citation links not always black-hat, in some niches, most definitely including the
business niche, you actually need them to prove your legitimacy, help Google recognize you as an entity, and perhaps
even attract a fair amount of qualified traffic.
Aside from this, higher-quality directories with hundreds of listed businesses in your client’s industry
are a great way to find blogs to guest post on. Simply examine the listed business which seem relevant to
what your client is doing, and check if they have a blog they might need some content for.
Here are some of the footprints you can use to instruct Dibz (or Google) to look for business, finance or
tech web directories.
- inurl:/business-categories/
- intitle:directory OR inurl:directory
- inurl:submit intitle:directory
- "free business directory"
- intext:"review your listing" AND directory
The keywords or keyphrases you need to provide with these parameters can include the names of your
competitors; your location; your exact niche, or niches related to yours; common services in your
industry; etc.
Resource pages
Since all three of these niches are brimming with highly specialized expert research materials, books,
case studies, whitepapers and the like, resource page link building for business finance and tech websites
can be a very effective tactic. While you really need
something special
to get good response rates, the sites linking to you will often be quite authoritative. Some of the
footprints you can use to find relevant business, finance or tech resources pages include:
- inurl:links intitle:"link resources"
- inurl:resources OR inurl:"favourite resources" OR inurl:links OR inurl:"favourite links"
- intitle:"suggested websites" OR intitle:resources OR intitle:"recommended sites"
-
intitle:suggested OR intitle:recommended OR intitle:additional AND intitle:resources OR intitle:reading
OR intitle:links
Complement these footprints with keywords describing the topic you have an interesting resource on; names
of respected authors in the industry likely to show up in properly referenced research; names of the laws,
techniques or services unique to your industry, and so on.
Broken links
When looking for interesting tech,business and finance related resource pages, you are likely to come
across a number of broken links. Take note of these dead pages, see how many backlinks they have, and if
it seems like it might be worth it, create a well-researched and written post that you can offer to
webmasters as a replacement for the one that is no longer available.
Of course, you can also look specifically for broken links that are discussing a subject you already have
an amazing resource about, saving even more time and money. The entire process is perfectly laid out in
this
Broken Link Building
post by Ahrefs
Link reclamation
If you’ve been promoting your website for some time, chances are that you have not only created a ton of
links to it, but that a fair portion of those links may have been removed at one point. You can use a
scraper to check the health of your incoming links, find the ones which return a 404 or some other kind of
error, and see if the webmaster might be willing to return your link if you informed them about the issue.
Unlinked brand mentions
Instead of searching for tech, business or finance websites which have a non-working link to your site,
this tactic involves you looking for unlinked mentions of your brand name; of prominent members of your
staff; of a valuable resource you have created or anything that might deserve attribution or that would be
made clearer and more user-friendly by the addition of a link.
You can look for these mentions with Dibz and either manually examine which of them have a link to your
site and which don’t, or compare the list with an export of your entire link portfolio from Google Search
Console. Of course, if you have an Ahrefs account, they offer a
much more streamlined way
to do so, and we warmly recommend it for this tactic.
Outreaching business, tech and finance websites
If you want to do link building for a business, finance or technology related website, you need to be
forewarned that these are among the most demanding niches when it comes to
how you’ll formulate your outreach.
Instead of hypothesizing about what may or may not work as perfect outreach for finance, business and tech
link building campaigns; we decided to simply ask the people who know the most about it - our link
builders.
Here is a summary of some of their recommendations, along with an example email template. While we will
talk mainly about outreach for guest posts, most of the advice below is applicable regardless of the exact
link building tactic you decided to leverage.
-
Write short
email subjects, without mentioning the phrase ‘guest post’. Attempts at humor in the subject of your outreach email
are completely out of place if doing outreach for a business or finance site, and probably best avoided
if you are promoting a tech-related client.
-
The text of the message should be short, to the point and pedantically formatted. You are dealing with
detail-oriented people, whose time is precious and patience short. Sending a needlessly long or messy
email may not only prevent your respondents from reading it through, it will set the expectations for
the quality of content that you would send if your pitch was accepted.
-
The email should show that you know what you are doing. It should be addressed to the right person, and
mention them by name, and even position, if available and relevant. The email should clearly show that
you have been reading the blog for a while, which means that you must also take great care not to offer
them a guest post on a topic they have already covered before.
-
Since most websites in business, finance and tech niches probably have at least some kind of a general
plan for their editorial calendar, it is often better not to suggest a topic for the post in your first
email, but allow them to list the subjects that are most interesting to them at the moment.
-
Most of these sites deal in complex subjects and they need some assurance that you are up to the task.
You can provide that assurance by
creating an online portfolio
with links to the best articles on related topics that you have previously written and published on
authoritative sites in the niche. Listing them directly in your email would take too much space and
increase the chances of that email being labeled as spam.
-
Don’t try to be duplicitous or manipulative, as bloggers, especially those in these niches, are likely
to recognize this. Instead, state your offer clearly; accentuate but don’t overestimate its value; and
stay true to your promises if you actually secure the post
-
Mind the attribution and other legalities. While blogs in other niches may be a bit more lenient when it
comes to properly sourcing images or other materials you’ve used in your post, business, finance and
tech blogs don’t take this kind of thing lightly, and neither should you.
-
Always follow up. According to our internal statistics, introducing regular follow-up emails improved
our response rates by 20% in the finance, business and tech niche, which is nothing to scoff at.
Naturally, you shouldn’t keep pestering the bloggers and ruin any chance of a future collaboration, but
sending one or two follow-up emails is highly recommended.
To see this in practice, here is an email template similar to what we would use for business, finance or
tech guest posting outreach.
Hi [blogger’s name]
[Name] here. I'm a digital marketing specialist focused on helping startups and small businesses grow. I
also write actionable posts about business and marketing, as it allows me to reach more people and help
them on their business journey.
Besides being a regular contributor for [a blog you frequently post on], I occasionally write guest posts
for other websites and I think I could make a valuable contribution to your blog [insert blog name] as
well. Here's a link to my portfolio so you can get a taste of my writing style. [online portfolio link]
Let me know if you're interested in collaborating with me and if you'd like me to send you some topic
ideas.
Looking forward to your reply!
Kind regards, [name]
Summary: Putting it All Together
Sure, creating backlinks for finance, business and tech websites is not the easiest job in the world, but
this guide should be more than enough for you to drastically improve your efficiency in this regard.
From link building tactics like guest posting, local citation building, link reclamation or looking for
unlinked brand mentions, to specific prospecting and outreach advice, this post attempted to cover all the
specifics of trying to build links to business, finance or tech related websites.
Of course, seeing how this subject is not one that can easily be exhausted, if you feel like there is
something we’ve missed, or haven’t explained in sufficient detail, do let us know, and we’ll rectify that
error. In the meantime, enjoy your link building
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