#212 Amit Raj – Link Building

Link Building with Amit Raj Today's podcast features Amit Raj talking about link building. Amit Raj is an SEO consultant and runs a link building company from his home in Glasgow. How do you help people through link building? A lot of the time Amit works with people who have SEO down; they've written all the content and ticked off the keywords and the Google Ads. But, they've hit a brick wall. They need an added edge. That's where links come in to get coverage. The more quality links you have is better than more links. Amit says it was in the earl 2000s where people went for volume but it's becoming apparent now that it's about quality. Ideally, you want quality and quantity. However, the most important thing is quality links and relevancy. How do you get links? After you build the foundations for your SEO, before you build links you need to think about your audience. Know what pain-points they have, what they find interesting and what they want to learn about. Make sure you have that on the site, or something else you can leverage to get links. The next step is to think about where you audience is; what other sites are they looking at? Are there particular publications they're looking at, or an industry blog they're always on? Then, you need to reach out to those sites. You might want to say: We have a piece of content it might be worth mentioning here, what do you think about it? You've got a piece discussing X. We have content that specifically narrows down on Y within that topic. There's a connection here. Now, you're not always going to get links but the majority of the time you will and they will be good quality. From those links and the relationship you build, you can ask to write a whole new piece for their site. Essentially, it just depends who you're talking to. Sometimes, you can ask to hyperlink a specific part of their content. Often people will ask for a specific anchor, such as 'SEO consultant' or 'SEO guide.' As a result, you're pushing Google in the right direction because you become linked with that anchor text. http://thenext100days.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Guest-blog-posts.mp4 Is link-building mutually beneficial? The person providing the link to your site will not necessarily benefit from the link. However, it will not do them any harm. As long as the content and the link is relevant, then you'll find it will benefit, even if it's indirectly. The worst is nothing will happen. So risk is really very minimal. Bigger companies vs smaller businesses If you contacted Graham or Kevin, they'd respond because they are small business. But what about larger businesses? Who do you get in contact with? If you're trying to write a guest article for someone, there's usually a content manager or blog manager within these big businesses. It will just involve some manual research. Often you might want to go to the editor but it depends on the company you want to write to or link to. With every client, Amit will contact bespoke. He recommend that, if you're doing link building or outreach, personalise as much as possible. At the very least, address someone by their name. Add a compliment and bring the value exchange. What are you offering them? Why does it benefit them? As long as you get these answers across, you'll get a good response. http://thenext100days.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/The-guardian.mp4 Amit says that, whilst getting a link from the Daily Mail may be nearly impossible, getting a feature where you perhaps provide a comment or interview (essentially, a contribution) are also really good. Journalists are always looking for these sort of things. How many links do you need? That can be variable. It depends on the industry you're in and how competitive it is. When Amit's team look at ranking, it's all about the industry and how many people are ranking for the key words you want to rank for.