Growth Hacking: The Ultimate Growth Hacking List for Digital Marketers
January 27, 2021
The Shark Tank Effect: A Case Study on Sales Traffic & SEO
February 9, 2021How to Automate Your Link Building for SEO
The term “automated link building” likely conjures up thoughts of bots and artificial intelligence inserting links in massive volumes across the web.
If that’s what it does for you, then you’re in the wrong place.
While AI for mass production of automated content through the use of open-source GPT-3 technology is getting better, its use case is still in short-form content.
We even used OpenAI to develop our own GPT-3 tool at AI.DEV.co.
Unfortunately, though, OpenAI currently lacks the ability to provide quality content flow in anything over about 400 characters. This deficiency makes them great for creating content for social media posts and product descriptions but is lacking when it comes to anything long.
When our team creates content, we always like to do it with real people in mind. Yes, the web crawlers will read it, but clicks, conversions, and dwell time ultimately come from people, not robots.
Moreover, even if you could automatically create content, vet it for quality, create natural internal links, and vet outbound links for natural variation, getting the content on top publications would still be necessary.
So, how do you automate your SEO (search engine optimization) link building efforts? In this post, we outline how our link building campaigns actually work, including how our internal standard operating procedures are structured for:
- Creating massive volumes of content
- Getting the content published in top publications
- Driving traffic through links, referrals, and search engine rankings improvements
What you’re looking to achieve is some replication of natural link growth that looks like this:
Let’s dive in!
A Team of Writers
First and foremost is your team of writers. Ultimately, you need the best writers possible. The best SEO writers include the following characteristics:
- Their quality is impeccable. We vet writers for quality. Yes, we have editorial review of all content, but we also trust our writers for their honesty, integrity and ultimately their quality.
- Their content is unique. While this goes without saying and we still run everything through Copyscape, the writers should be trustworthy to create something that’s never been seen before.
- They are fast. Some firms pay W2 employees to pump out massive amounts of content. While the price per word might be comparable in this case, we like to find writers who are entrepreneurial minded and can pump out massive amounts of quality work. This represents an aligned incentive structure wherein both parties win.
- They stick to deadlines. Client work always has a definitive start and end date. We need writers who can deliver based on client directives.
- They know how to use the software. With the volumes we produce for ourselves and our clients, we need to stay organized.
But how do you find, vet and hire writers with these qualities? It can take months of vetting and cost thousands to find those with the prowess to cover your respective market niche. Click on the aforementioned link to learn about how we’ve done that.
This post is about automating the building of links. Understanding that automating your link building requires a team of writers well-versed in the topics your links will cover.
SEO Link Building Project Managers
Your project management team will include:
- The best writers
- A team of guest blogger outreach professionals
- Content editors who will review content for style, grammar punctuation and links so anchor text is varied
- Content publishers, or the folks who take the written content and submit or publish it.
From content idea generation/pitching to the final editing and publication, there is a great deal that is included in both people and process.
The Right SEO Publishers
Not only will you need the right team for writing content, editing your content, and getting it published, you need to have quality websites on which you can publish the content your writers produce.
We have our own internal blueprint process that we have established over the years that gives us an advantage in the following ways:
- We have been at it a long time and have networked with over 500,000 websites. We reach out to at least 20,000 new publications each month.
- We have pre-vetted our publishers for quality. We are constantly culling the herd for low-quality publications.
- We have access to unique, niche publishers with high authority in nearly every imaginable niche and we’re building more relationships regularly.
- The best publications (and therefore the best links) are getting tougher to get from top publications.
Keep in mind, building these relationships are not a “one-and-done” task. Continuous outreach for obtaining high authority publisher placements will be necessary, especially as you exhaust your link opportunities and need additional niche placements for further link diversity and backlink growth.
Finding these publishers is a process, not an event. You’ve got to keep your line continuously in the water.
To truly automate your link building strategy you should have a team that is completely devoted to this task alone.
The Right Project Management Software
There are a multiplicity of project management software tools available. Email is wholly inefficient for the scale automation at this level requires.
Find a project management software that performs the following functions:
- Allows interaction between writers, editors, project managers and account managers
- Allows separate project and task interaction with the blogger outreach teams publisher manager(s) and content publisher(s)
- Separates tasks based on role and responsibility
- Task alerts, timelines and integration with email
Ultimately, all project stakeholders will need to own their place in the process. The right software can be critical. We use Asana, but that’s just us.
Black Hat Automation
This post would not be complete without a nod to the black hat strategies for link building services automation.
Here are a few that readily come to mind:
- Automated directory link submission
- Automated blog comment and backtrack links (a.k.a. spam)
- Automated local link citation (a.k.a. spam)
- Automated forum posting and response backlinks (a.k.a. spam)
- Automated guest post publication on a private blog network (PBN)
Legitimate websites almost always have filters in place to avoid these types of tactics. Furthermore, low quality links of this nature are not congruent with long-term link building strategies. Then again, if you’re comfortable with burning a domain and a brand’s reputation, then by all means…
Conclusion
There is a difference between automation and scale. Automation can be done with a good standard operating procedure (SOP) and team. Automating at scale depends on the scale.
Startup search engines automation should be done with less scale until you have a good base, but true Fortune 500 SEO link building tools outreach for established websites requires the same processes, but more publishers and people.
Unless you’re using AI and running a private blog network, truly putting your link building on autopilot at any level of scale requires a team of competent people, the right software and some internal training for executing flawlessly.
That’s not how the most legitimate link building campaign work. If you’re looking to truly automate your backlinks, get in touch. We can help.
- What Is Second Tier Link Building & How Can it Boost Your SEO - February 18, 2023
- How to Optimize Your Website Footer - February 17, 2023
- Traffic Dropped, But My Keyword Rankings Are Holding. What Happened? - February 12, 2023
