How To Get Tough Links. Relevant Link Building Vol. 1
Building links sucks. Yet, for some odd reason I do it for a living. There are a million different ways to get links, but getting good links that actually skyrocket you up the SERPs can be akin to finding the proverbial needle in a haystack or worse.
The truth is, you want to get editorial links from sites related to your industry. What's an editorial link? One that someone made a decision to add to the body of a page. This is the difference between low/no value links like spammy directories and comments, no one makes a decision to add it to a page. The thing is, in most industries, the person who runs the website isn't likely to wake up each morning and think, "You know what I want to do today? Go link to some other websites!" As this is usually the case, how do you convince people running these relevant sites to give you an editorial link? This is the first part of a series on how you can get some of these "difference maker" links.
Competitor Links
Nope. I'm not talking about getting the same links as your competitors, I'm talking about getting links FROM your competitors. Now these are some tough links to get. Why would a competitor link to you?
You make their life easier.
Think about it. When you make your own website you tend to think of useful stuff to help your customers. Why not make your useful stuff easy to share?
Electromatic is a company that makes electronic signs. In a tough economy, I'm sure it can be a tough sell to get someone to spend their money on a sign unless you can prove some return on investment. So, Electromatic smartly built a tool that helps prove to potential customers how much return they can expect from their sign (or if I want to pretend I'm in marketing, I could call it by its proper name - an ROI calculator). Now, if I owned a small sign company and didn't have the budget or in house skills to develop a similar tool, this could be a useful addition to my site that I could promote.
The return? Could be links...
Of course, you need to promote this thing to get people to link to it. I would find small regional sign makers with pretty plain sites and contact the business owner by phone/email/fax/snail mail and let them know this is out here and how easy it is to install. I have a feeling this could turn into some highly relevant links with a little effort.
Make them an offer they can't refuse.
I swear that line's in the book!
Another great way to earn links from competitors is by doing something nice and offering them a chance to get on board as well. For example, you can give away products or services or sponsor an event for a charitable organization and then invite them to partake. Create an elaborate page on your site about the event and list who's contributing or participating. If you do some homework in advance you can target competitors with active blogs and news sections on their site, as they're likely to promote their participation and link to your page on the event. If you want to take it another step, you can whip up a press release or news brief with links embedded and pass it along to the appropriate contact and take all the work out of it for them.
While neither of these approaches are easy, you'll quickly learn that high quality, relevant link building rarely is.
About Adam Henige
Adam Henige is Managing Partner of Netvantage Marketing, an online marketing company specializing in SEO, PPC and social media. Adam heads the SEO and link building efforts for Netvantage and has been a contributing blogger for industry publications like Search Engine Journal and SEOmoz.
Tags: building links from competitors, competitor links, high quality seo, how to get relevant links, how to get tough links, link building
Very true – Thanks for the breakdown!