Thanks Nick, great article again. Just one question concerning the broken links. Where shall I look for broken links? And if I find one, what do I do then? Sorry, I really didn’t get it. Reply
Hey Kati – Thanks! So I wouldn’t consider myself that great at link building, but here’s how we leverage broken link building in the B2B space; The best way to think about this is from a solutions perspective; where you’re helping someone else solve a problem and in return you’re earning a link. We find broken links by crawling sites within our target niche and looking for links that return a 404 or 500 status code. Once we find a broken link we pull a link report for the URL to discover how many websites are currently linking to the page that no longer exists. The strategic play from a link building perspective is to align content on your site (either new or existing) with the content that was on the now broken page, and then to contact all of the sites that are linking to that old page, via a now broken link, and make them aware that 1) they have a broken link at “URL” and 2) they can update their link to point instead to your page as a direct replacement. Reply
That’s a great idea – why did it never come to _my_ mind before? I will think about it. Can you suggest any useful tools for finding broken links outside our own website? Reply
Nice article, Nick. Another thing I’d add is to think differently about keyword volume. Ranking a website for a bunch of keywords which have ‘only’ a few hundred searches a month could be a game changer for a B2B organisation with a high customer lifetime value. Yet I’ve heard of businesses turning their nose up to SEO because “the volume isn’t there”. Sure, if you’re going on the opinions of expert SEOs who dominate well-searched B2C niches, then the volume isn’t there. But they’re playing a different game to many B2B companies, and if you can rank for a keyword with 200 searches a month, you can probably capture 2-5x that in long tail traffic, which is definitely worthwhile for most businesses. (Google KW Planner – which is probably the most-used tool for estimating volume by newbie SEOs and client-side execs – isn’t great at showing accurate data for low-volume keywords, which exacerbates this problem.) That’s my 2 cents, and now I have a question for you. For B2B resource/outreach-based linkbuilding efforts, which types of sites do you tend to get most links from? Do you frequently get links from other (non-competitive) B2B vendors’ sites? Or are you more successful with niche industry news sites/blogs, or consultants/employee’s personal blogs? Cheers, Brian Reply
Thanks so much Brian. You’re absolutely right, and this is actually how we approach keyword research for all verticals; we pay specific attention to the intent of the terms way above and beyond their search volume. I’ve also notice that if a keyword doesn’t maintain the minimum trend of 10 searches/mo for a certain number of months, it won’t even be reported as having any volume in the eyes of Google. Where consistently the keywords that make the most money have the lowest search volume because they’re long and complex. Onto your question: when doing content-based link building (which for us is our standard approach to resource-based) we tend to land links from larger topic-specific guides and blogger-driven publications. To be more specific on that last piece; the pitch isn’t usually “hey you should add a link to our great resource into this existing page you’ve already published” but more so along the lines of “hey we know you write about these topics, we did a bit of research and found this relevant topic that you haven’t written about yet — here’s some research we’ve done on it that would help support a post about XYZ that we think your audience would be very receptive to based on x, y, and z” We definitely see way more placements from industry specific pubs/blogs opposed to vendors. If you’ve figured a scalable way to land vendor links I’d love to hear about it 🙂 Reply
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