Summary
- I've learned that backlinks are crucial for SEO and a site's authority, as studies show they lead to higher search rankings.
- It's essential to focus on quality over quantity when building backlinks to reduce the risk of penalties from Google.
- Creating linkable assets is a must. These should link internally to your commercial pages, which helps build overall site authority.
- You can start your link-building by leveraging existing assets such as a personal brand, free resources, or proprietary data.
- Standard "how-to" or listicle content doesn't attract many backlinks; instead, content should be engineered to acquire them.
- Using the 80/20 rule for link-bait ideas means 80% should have some type of validation, while 20% can be experimental.
- To validate a link-bait idea, look at total linking root domains and user engagement as indicators of potential success.
- Proven linkable asset frameworks include calculators, interactive infographics, rankings, and data-driven content.
- Promoting your linkable assets is key to attracting backlinks – use internal linking and consider outsourcing outreach.
- Outsourcing to services like digital PR can help scale your outreach and ensure high-quality backlinks.
- Focus on relevance when prioritizing link opportunities and create a "dream 100" list of target websites for backlinks.
- Use tools like deep research in Chat GPT for finding link opportunities efficiently.
- Keep in mind the principle "what's in it for me?" during outreach to create win-win propositions for potential link partners.
- Effective outreach involves offering value, like financial incentives or unique content, to successfully build links.
Video
How To Take Action
I would suggest implementing a quality-first approach to backlink building for your business. Start by creating valuable linkable assets that naturally attract backlinks. Think about unique resources such as interactive infographics, calculators, or data-driven content that can provide real value to your audience. Leverage any existing resources you have, like a personal brand or proprietary data, to give these assets added credibility.
A good way of doing this is by using the 80/20 rule for creating content. Make sure 80% of your content has proven success through industry-validation and user signals—like high engagement on Reddit or other platforms. Allow the remaining 20% to be experimental, exploring new angles that might significantly pay off.
Once you create these assets, don’t forget to promote them. Use internal links on your site to give these assets more visibility and ensure they pass on link equity to commercial pages. Also, prioritize outreach effectively. Focus on sites that align with your industry as well as any local opportunities. To streamline this, maintain a "dream 100" list of top sites where you'd like your links featured.
When reaching out to potential link partners, always consider “what’s in it for them?” Offer something valuable, whether it's content assistance or financial incentives. This turns link building into a win-win situation, improving your chances of getting positive responses.
Lastly, don't shy away from using tools for deep research to save time in finding link opportunities. Prioritize high-quality, relevant links over a large quantity of less impactful ones.
Quotes by Author
"Do backlinks still matter for SEO? The short answer is yes because they're the foundation of Google's original page rank algorithm"
"Focus on quality over quantity"
"A rising tide lifts all ships"
"Founder or expert-led link building is by far the most powerful technique"
"Don't be thinking about you need to get a link, think more about what's the value proposition that I am giving"
Full Transcript
so over the past decade of doing SEO I've acquired hundreds of thousands of backlinks and today I'll show you my exact blueprint for getting highquality backlinks that actually improve your SEO performance so let's begin with the most important question which is do backlinks still matter for SEO and the short answer is yes because they're the foundation of Google's original page rank algorithm and countless independent studies in the SEO industry have proven the impact of backlinks on organic search performance like back Linko who found that a site's overall link Authority as measured by hre's domain rating strongly correlates with higher search engine rankings semrush study had similar conclusions the more backlinks a domain has the higher its position on the surf and just to top it off HRS found that the more backlinks a page has the more organic traffic it gets from Google but let's make one thing clear when it comes to link building focus on quality over quantity now the question is how do you actually get quality backlinks well it's simple but not easy you must begin by creating assets that are worth linking to and that's when the reverse Silo comes into play so instead of slamming commercial pages with backlinks which leaves a huge risky footprint you'll acquire most of your backlinks to linkable assets and then those assets will internally link to your commercial pages and this method Taps into the idea that a rising tide lifts All Ships In other words you can build site Authority through your linkable assets which will raise performance across the entire site the reverse Silo also greatly reduces link building related penalty risk which is the most common form of penalization from Google so now you're probably wondering what types of assets should you create well before you create any assets start by identifying existing assets that you can leverage for example the first thing we do when beginning a new link building project is to take inventory number one does the business have a figurehead personal brand or subject matter expert who can participate in expert roundups respond to press inquiries or go on podcasts founder or expert-led link building is by far the most powerful technique you can use for example look at how many backlinks Gary ve has acquired it's 99% through the power of his personal Brand number two does the website already have free resources like tools or software and number three does the business already have proprietary data that can be used for marketing purposes now let me tell you something that might surprise you your standard how to or listicle content is not that effective for attracting backlinks there is some evidence that longer content does attract more backlinks but it's a certain type of content you need to create content that's engineered to acquire backlinks so start with the 8020 rule 80% of your link bait ideas should have some type of validation I'll explain what that means in a second and the other 20% are what I would call a crapshoot these are higher risk bets but they could have outside size returns because you'll be using linkbait angles that don't have validation but first here's how you validate a linkbait idea number one is total linking rot domains and this is the number one because it proves linkability so the first thing you want to do is try to find linkable ideas specifically in your industry but don't be afraid to look at other Industries and find Opportunities there and then apply those to your industry so in this case I'm going to be using HVAC so usually what I'll do is I'll go into sem rush and I'll search very broadly the industry and I'll just see the sites that are ranking really well because if they're ranking for a really broad term there's a good chance that they probably have a significant link profile and so what I'll do is I'll look at the ones that are specific to that one industry I don't look I don't care about the broad ones Home Depot these broader ones those aren't important I want to look at the ones that are very specific to the industry we're attacking so in this case I found one right here and what I do is I go to the backlink analytics section and then I go to index pages and I sort by domains and what I'm doing is I'm trying to find pages that they created that have attracted a significant amount of backlinks okay so right away I was able to find this one here which looks like a glossery and so what this tells me is that these comprehensive glossies that kind of are term based seem to be really effective for link acquisition because not only has this glossery itself like the broader glossery attracted a lot of links but so have each of the individual pages that they've built out as well so what this tells me is we could likely emulate something like this we could take this framework and apply it to the campaign that we're working on okay another example here is looking at this website once again I found a calculator just by looking at the pages that attracted the most backlinks on their domain so once again I get an opportunity to take this framework and apply it to our industry knowing that is already proven to attract back links okay we're not necessarily going to copy this exact topic here but it's more about the framework that works and we know for a fact that terms work large you know a list of terms and definitions and a calculator works as well but just to top it off I went and looked at this Government website and see what types of pages they've attracted and once again a calculator seems to be another one that seems to be very very effective for link acquisition number two are user signals so user engagement on ideas is a strong signal that a concept could be effective however it's not perfect because some ideas do well on social media but don't work well as link based so finding ideas that have proven linkability is the number one strategy but you should also be looking for ideas that have a lot of a user engagement so the best way to do this is just to go to any platform where you can you can find user signals so Reddit is a great example of this because we can actually drill down to the subreddits so I went to Home Improvement and searched for HVAC but I could also search for AC repair and furnace repair and all kinds of other stuff but but basically what I'm doing is I'm looking for ideas that have generated a lot of interest a lot of user signals and then what I can do is I can take these ideas and create an asset knowing that there is a lot of demand there and so we can use linkability and user signals together linkability is the best one but user signals are a close set so now that you know how to find link bait ideas here are some linkable asset Frameworks that are proven to work so I've already showed you some really cool link bait ideas that you can get just by looking at competitors and looking at platforms like Reddit or where users hang out okay but there's just some proven Frameworks for link bait that that just work basically across any industry and so the the ones that I really love to use use are for example calculators like this okay so calculators tools free software whatever it is these are really really powerful and so this one has a ton of links so just a small example another is these animated types of infographics these are really difficult to make but man they can really produce a significant amount of backlinks and you can tell the amount of effort that was put into this is very extreme but in the context of HVAC you could certainly create this type of animated infographic about how furnaces work or how air conditioners work like you could definitely build something out like this and then another one that I like are just rankings this is another beautiful one where they're ranking law schools these tend to attract a really good amount of links and you can tell they're very simple but they've got a lot of filtering mechanisms in place so you basically you know build out the full ranking list and then you've got some filters as well that can help you kind of increase the depth of this and you can tell once again a lot of time investment was put into this and that's the one Trend you'll see for the the pages that tend to attract the most backlinks there was a high amount of effort and investment put into them that's just how it's going to be okay and then the final one that's just my go-to across every industry is just data driven content if you can use your own data that's even better but you can also curate data like this one from exploding topics they just curated a bunch of data from a bunch of different sources they designed it really well they made it really readable and it's perfect for linkbait so once you've built out your linkable assets now you can just sit back and let the back links roll in that would be nice wouldn't it but of course that's not how it's going to happen you could create the most helpful linkable asset in history but if you don't promote it it will fall on deaf ears so here's what you can do to give that linkable asset a nice lift number one leverage internal linking so one of the quickest way to get visibility and Link Equity sent to a new linkable asset is just to leverage your existing link equity on your website so look for internal linking opportunities to link to your new linkable asset and so what I'll do is like let's say it was you know for this one best CMS for SEO I can just search for CMS and look for every time that I've talked about content Management systems and then I can look for an opportunity to to just put an internal link to that new asset so tap into what you already have first and then move on to the other tactics number two Outsource your Outreach another thing you can do is you can actually just Outsource your link building and I do recommend this in addition to using all the tactics I've showed today you should develop your own in-house link acquisition techniques and content promotion methods but Outsourcing is like pouring fuel on the fire and it can actually help you scale a lot faster so one of the companies I do recommend is digital. PR and they're going to help you get Links at scale and they're going to use a bunch of different PR techniques that are all super valuable but they can also help you promote those linkable assets that you've built so I highly recommend them because they really get the best back links and as I mentioned in this video earlier you should be focused on quality over quantity if you're still focused on quantity you're living in the past because at in this day and age don't even waste your time with those low Authority mommy blog links those things do not work at all what works now are strong links from trusted entities a service like digital. PR can help you get those really really premium super powerful links that will actually move the needles so I'll have a link below the video where you can learn more and number five do your own in-house Outreach and one principle you can use is what I call the referral traffic principle just ask yourself one simple question will this website drive us relevant referral traffic that has a high probability of conversion ask this question about every link building opportunity now this doesn't mean that we eliminate opportunities based on this criteria alone but it simply means that we prioritize and allocate more resources towards the best opportunities and vice versa you can also use what I call the relevancy pyramid to prioritize the best backlink opportunities so when it comes to prioritizing your link opportunities focusing on relevance is the number one thing that you should do this does not mean that you should ignore link opportunities that are highly trusted from trusted entities you should continue to get those links but when it comes to you you've got a big pool of prospects that you're looking at you should prioritize the ones that are most relevant so one thing you can do is create what I call the dream 100 for your link prospects which means you're just going to identify the top 100 websites that you want to get a link on and so let's say in the context of SEO me getting a link on back Linko or semrush or HRS those would be in my dream 100 okay because they're such powerful backlinks they're highly relevant and they're from Super trusted entities in the industry that I'm working in and so that's what you want to identify and what you'll find is just to identify a hundred is actually very difficult there's typically not that many super high quality websites in most Industries so th those top 100 you got to treat them like gold and you want to try to get links on them you want to focus on developing that relationship very slowly because if you if you just get if you were to get links from the top 100 websites in any industry it's nearly impossible to not see results in your SEO like it it's just literally not possible if you got a link from the top 100 websites in any Niche it's it's you're going to do very very well when it comes to SEO so one method that I tend to use to figure this out is what I built which I call the relevancy period I built this many years ago I still use it today because it just works so well and it's very simple as you find your link prospects you just put them into these buckets okay so one 100% relevancy so if we're working with a HVAC company in St Louis the best link that we could possibly get on the planet is from another HVAC company in St Louis okay but what's the likelihood that our competitors are going to link to us well extremely unlikely okay so that's why it's a very small pool up here and you know it's just not likely we're going to be able to get those links the next best thing is go down the pyramid so from there now we can start to look at still opportunities in St Louis but maybe just not direct competitors so we could be looking at plumbing companies we could be looking at electricians we could be looking at foundation repair anything related to Home Services is going to be fair game that we could attack in St Louis then from there as we go down now maybe we'll start looking just outside of St Louis at other Home services companies in other states right or even maybe in other counties okay and we just keep expanding out that way and just focusing on our industry and then from there you know what you can do is even just focus focusing on the St Louis opportunities that are not necessarily Niche relevant that could be getting a link from the Chesterfield softball league or the Ballwin theater okay those links are really really valuable because they still have that local relevance and they're still coming from a trusted entity in the location that you're attacking you can blend those together and so the point is is as we go down and we open up the relevance there's going to be more opportunities but it's best to just focus start at the top on the best ones and then just work your way down that pyramid as you keep tapping out each tier so now that you know what good link prospects look like it's time to find Opportunities so now at this point with deep research which you can use in chat gbt and across a lot of other large language models you can find link opportunities really really easily because this will just go out and find them for you so the key to making this work though is you need to have a good standard operating procedure so as you can tell I uploaded an sop for our donation link building and then I just had the tool go and find these opportunities and as you can tell I did very broad for this first one but you can narrow this down and just focus like on a per City basis and with very little work it took about nine minutes and it found all of these beautiful donation link building opportunities and this would have taken like you know my team members tell me how long it takes them and sometimes it can take a couple hours to kind of go through all these prospects filter through them make sure they're a good fit and then also identify how much it's going to cost like and put that into a database so it's very timec consuming so now with this it's much easier okay way easier you can get the opportunities and then you can just Dive Right into doing the Outreach and acquiring the backlink so definitely use this deep research function it's going to save you an incredible amount of time for your link prospecting so now that you know how to find the best link prospects there's one simple rule to improve your Outreach success which is understanding the principle of what's in it for me and so this is the final link building principle of the day and this is all that you need to know to have success with your Outreach yes there's technical elements of Outreach like have you warmed up your email how what's the velocity of your Outreach is your Outreach positioning actually good is your copyrighting good like there's a lot of little kind of technical details that you can test and improve over time but this is the core concept that's going to determine how successful you are so the number one thing you need to understand is when you reach out to someone you need to be thinking about a win-win for them okay don't be thinking about you need to get a link think more about what's the value proposition that I am giving to this Prospect what is this offer that I am presenting to them that's actually good for them because every person is thinking about what's in it for me and so I get you know 10 sometimes 20 Outreach emails a day in my inbox personally and I'd say 99% of them are all about the other person and what they want very rarely does someone reach out and say say hey I'm going to do this for you if possible would you be willing to do this for me they try to like good Outreach is based on win-wins both of us get an equal amount from the equation right and so you have to figure out what that angle is so there's a few angles that are proven to work number one let's just be honest here it's money money is hands down the number one value proposition so if you can just give a really good Financial incentive you tend to get an advantage over other people okay it's just a fact and the Rich do get richer when it comes to link building okay because they can invest more in the best opportunities aside from that also there's other things you can offer you can offer free trials you can offer extended trials you can actually give them content you can write content for their website so you need to give something to get something back and so if you're looking at your Outreach and trying to figure out why it's not working don't focus on the little micro tactics yes those things matter but the thing that really matters like the huge lead Domino success for outreach is the value proposition think about what's in it for me from their perspective so what I showed you today is just a tiny little snippet of what's possible when it comes to link building because I spent an enormous enormous amount of time putting everything I know into a system that now people inside of got SEO Academy have access to not only do I show you how to do all of this step by step but I give you a a 117 page sop on how to do every single thing and on top of it you're also getting at you're getting a database of Link bait ideas and all kinds of other stuff and also my link building template where you can actually go and scale all of these link building efforts and so on top of it you're not just getting the training you're also getting direct access to me twice a week with coaching so if you have any link building questions which to be honest is a common question we talk about like I'll actually just show you we'll go over to support and just search if we search just backlink in here you'll see how often we talk about this I mean there are uh 391 videos in our platform that talk about backlinks okay so this is a very common topic inside our program and that's because it really matters when it comes to seos so I highly highly recommend if you haven't before apply for got SEO Academy if you're serious about getting really really good SEO results and ultimately be able to get the best backlinks possible so I'll have a link below the video where you can reply and once again thank you so much for watching
