Link Building Services: Nurturing Relationships for SEO
A Valuable Website Attracts Links Naturally. How Do You Create That Value?
It starts with a shift in mindset. Everyone wants links. In other words, everyone wants to take link juice from other sites. But this attitude led to the black-hat days of SEO, which Google addressed in the Penguin update. Now, Google looks for value in website content. That means that SEO is no longer about taking. It’s actually about giving.
Link building for SEO is all about giving. But giving what—and to whom?
For webmasters who aren’t thinking like publishers, that’s a pretty daunting question. If you’re like most webmasters, you’re focused on the daily operations of your site or business. Unless your site is a blog or a magazine, publishing great content and promoting it most likely isn’t your top priority. But that’s exactly how you get authoritative, white-hat links—by publishing content that’s irresistible to your niche and related niches.
Enter link building services!
Link building is simple, really.
We follow 3 basic steps in our link building services. But within each step, there’s infinite room for variation across different niches and content markets. In fact, we never offer two clients the same link building service. That just wouldn’t make sense, because every niche is different! However, we’ve developed a highly successful architecture which we use to develop link building services for a diverse array of clients:
We research your core niche as well as related shoulder-niches*.
We write and publish innovative, delightful content that changes the conversation in these niches.
We promote that content heavily to multiple clearly-defined audience segments—audiences who are hungry for content in your niches.
*Hold on. What’s a shoulder niche?
Glad you asked. It’s a content niche that overlaps your core niche on a higher level of categorization. It’s something you might not see if you’re only focusing on your core niche.
Let’s say your core business is selling engineering equipment. That means your core content niche is (obviously) content about engineering equipment. But that’s not the only content niche you can publish for.
Imagine a category tree of content in your mind. As you move down this tree, content niches become more and more specialized. As you move up the tree, they become more generalized. That means there are content niches sitting right next to you which are related to yours, but somewhat independent of yours. In other words, they overlap.
We see too many webmasters who’ve pigeonholed themselves into their core content niche without considering their shoulder niches—the niches that sit next to theirs on the content category tree.
Ready to build high-quality, authoritative backlinks to your site?
Why 216digital?
Because we do this every day. While you know your niche better than we do at the outset, we know the principles of link building inside and out. We bring that expertise to every link building campaign we take on. It’s much faster for us to learn your niche than it is for you to learn our techniques and practice them at an expert level. It’s really that simple!
FAQ
Our link building services look different for every client we take on because every niche is unique. We start by learning the language of your niches and shoulder niches, and this takes time. We never rush our research or setup phases. Ultimately, that would damage your reputation among the niche webmasters who could link to you!
However, we have some general benchmarks on what you can expect. We need at least 3 months to get your content marketing machine to the point where links will start coming in. However, generally speaking, you can expect at least 6 months before you start seeing improvements in your SEO due to our link building service.
While our service is a month-to-month model, we ask our clients to stick with us for the long haul. Since we are building and curating real relationships with webmasters in your niche, you won’t see value in terminating the ongoing relationship growth which we’ve curated for your site.
Our link building services work best for clients who are ready to collaborate with us but are also ready to trust our expertise. Our process is informed by years of experience, and we know what works and what doesn’t. We practice total transparency with our clients, and we’re happy to explain why we believe a particular strategy is the best solution.
We don’t write thin, 300-word blog posts. They don’t delight audiences, and they don’t fulfill business objectives. We prefer to write longer content. Studies from SEO leaders like Brian Dean and Moz have shown that on average, the most common word length for content ranking 1st in Google is 1,800 words. Writing to 1,800 words is not a magic solution, but it’s a good benchmark for the level of research and detail that should go into a powerful piece of content.
We’ve written great 800-word pieces for clients. We’ve written great 5,000-word pieces. It all depends on the market, the audience, and the topic. Rather than crank out 10 lame blog posts a month, we devote all that time to researching, writing, and promoting ONE great piece of content. When that one piece of content accumulates more links than the ZERO which the short blog posts would’ve collected, we find ourselves and our method vindicated.
We also don’t rush publication. We insist that our fact-checking, proofreading, and voice tailoring be 100% perfect for the relevant audience. That takes longer than whipping up a blog post and publishing it the same day.
Our strategy is an integrated whole. We couple our expertise in link building with your expertise in your niche. We want to hear your ideas, hopes, and fears. We get excited to connect your knowledge of your niche with our best practices in link building. In other words, we welcome your input every step of the way!
We also request access to some of your online assets. To publish our work on your site, we need credentials to your WordPress blog. To track our results, we like to have access to your Google Analytics. To promote our content to your niche and shoulder niches, we prefer non-exclusive access to your social media accounts. We also request a willingness to purchase, install, and configure our preferred themes and plugins on your WordPress blog. We do not profit from these purchases, and we’re happy to explain why we believe they offer more value than the free alternatives.
While we can work in ANY content niche (you wouldn’t believe some of the niches we’ve worked in), we only accept clients who have a viable business model. No amount of link building and content promotion will boost a business that simply doesn’t offer an attractive value proposition to a well-defined market segment. We are willing to take on clients who need coaching in this area, as long as they’re willing to be coached.
Ready to start building high-quality, authoritative backlinks to your site? Get in touch today, and let’s start talking about your next big thing.