Achieving true link building services at scale (and eventually improved rank in search engines) only happens after you reach the organic traffic tipping point.
It’s the coveted position where your quality content achieves enough SERP visibility that you start to receive regular inbound links as a reward for your hard work.
But this isn’t something that occurs just after a few months of effort.
Scaling your link building to the point that you receive daily, quality inbound links from other bloggers can take years.
There needs to be a consistent purpose in order to enjoy sustainable results.
More specifically, quality backlinks at scale should be the aim of every webmaster.
But building truly natural backlinks at scale can be time-intensive and expensive.
In this blog post we discuss:
- the difficulties in scaling link building and
- how to scale your broken link building with a great (internal or outsourced) team.
Let’s get at it!
Table of Contents
Is Your Link Building Stale?
When you first launch a link building strategy for your website, it’s easy to see progress. Each step feels like you’re taking a giant leap toward something exciting and opportunistic. You go from zero backlinks to 10 backlinks – all the way up to 100! Your efforts are being rewarded and the data is there to support your expensive and time-consuming investment. Then, rather suddenly, it all slows down. It’s not that you’re moving in the wrong direction, but just that you aren’t making any significant gains.
At some point, every business finds itself in a build-links rut where the underlying strategy becomes stale, repetitive, and low-returning.
Nothing seems to work and the excitement of progress wears thin. The competition is surpassing you and all of those little techniques you were using so successfully six months ago no longer seem to provide much of a jolt.
Listen…we’ve all been there. Every business finds itself in a marketing rut from time to time. And if you’re truly invested a link building strategies, you’ll reach a point where you feel like you’re treading water. The first step is to recognize that this is where you are. The second step is to create scalable systems and structures that help you break out of the rut.
6 Ways to Scale Up Your Link Building
Scalable relationship-build links is a sexy term that rolls off the tongue and instantly makes you sound smart, but what does it mean?
It means getting more consistent high-quality links built to your website:
Most people have an incorrect view of what scalable Backlinking is. As digital marketing expert Geoff Kenyon explains, the majority of businesses and marketers try to find a way to transform Backlinking into a process and scale link building the production of that product. But this almost always leads to something gimmicky and unsustainable – like automated directories, link networks, comment and forum spam, the purchase of sidebar few links, and automated social bookmarking.
While there’s a time and place for trying new things, the truth is that the staples of link-building have remained relatively consistent over the years and will continue to be predictable in the foreseeable future. If you’re failing at scaling different link-building products, then perhaps you need to be scaling your link-building processes, perhaps using a productized method of SEO sprints.
A good goal would be to identify the biggest pain points in your current (manual) link-building process and to improve and streamline it wherever possible. If nothing else, you should be on the lookout for opportunities to spend your time and creative energy more wisely. For some brands – perhaps yours included – this looks like this:
1. Create More Linkable Assets
Content is the foundation of any good link building campaign. This sounds rather elementary – and it is – but it’s amazing how many brands take shortcuts and invests in link-building without first establishing an inventory of quality content.
In order to generate links, you need linkable assets. Every brand’s linkable assets will look different, but there are certain elements and characteristics that define this type of content:
- Content should be evergreen and timeless, so as to continue providing value long after publication.
- Content should be relevant to your target market.
- Linkable assets should be visually pleasing. Written content still works, but it should be formatted and supplemented in a way that appeals to visual thinkers.
- Focus on link bait type articles (e.g. common statistics, listicles, etc.)
The more sticky, linkable assets you have, the far greater your chances are of generating backlinks over time. Try as you might, there’s simply no replacement for quality content.
2. Establish a Link Building Teams
As Google’s Matt Cutts once said,
Link building is sweat plus creativity.
When building links efforts go stale, it typically has something to do with the people running the campaign. Generally speaking, they lack the expertise to take the strategy to the next level and are tired of doing the same old repetitive tasks with minimal understanding of the “why” behind them.
To scale up your efforts, you need a team of people who are highly skilled and trained at crafting content, finding and securing building links opportunities, monitoring progress, and doing technical SEO work. Some of these people may work directly for you. Others may need to be outsourced, but your building links team should include:
- Project manager
- Outreach process reps
- Outreach manager
- Writers
- Editor
- Publishers
If you’re looking to hire writers, I suggest ProBlogger’s premium job listing. For $75, you’re likely to receive 100+ candidates to review:
The best link-building teams for agencies are those that perform white-label link-building at scale.
In fact, most of our revenue is from other agencies who use our systems and processes to scale up their link building efforts.
3. Research the Mess Out of Your Competition
It’s good to be focused on your brand, but be wary of putting on blinders and ignoring the world around you. There’s tremendous value in doing market research and understanding what your competitors are doing with their link-building efforts.
There are an array of tools and resources you can use to study the competition, track their backlinks, and build custom profiles on their progress, but Scrapebox is one of the best. Among its many other features, it lets you harvest thousands of URLs, perform extensive keyword research, and get a better idea of how you match up with the competition.
4. Do Some Rigorous Prospecting
You aren’t prospecting enough. If your link building strategy is stale and you’re finding it challenging to scale up, you’re not doing enough outreach to potential link building partners.
Rigorous prospecting will help you find opportunities. You’ll miss way more than you hit, but that’s fine. Quality outreach with a large number of prospects will ultimately yield a return.
The IFTTT tool is perfect for streamlining some of the challenges that come with constant prospecting and outreach. For example, you can set it up to send you an email any time someone mentions your brand on social media. This reminds you to personally follow up. The options are endless.
5. Build Powerful Relationships
So many marketers and SEO experts try to build a scalable link building campaign in a silo. They try to game the system and figure out ways to squeeze in a link here or hack an opportunity there. And while there’s something to be said for hustling, nothing replaces relationships with other humans.
In order to truly establish a scalable Backlinking campaign, you need to build powerful relationships with other bloggers, webmasters, marketers, business owners, and social media influencers. Even in the digital age, the need for professional networking is alive and well.
When you have a relationship with someone that goes beyond the surface level, you’ll find that your requests for backlinks and brand mentions are a lot more effective. Relationships breed trust – so make sure you’re prioritizing them!
6. Look for Syndication Opportunities
Syndicated content is important part of building links at scale.
Syndication is the process of publishing and re-publishing content automatically across a series of websites and in a variety of formats, such as a blog post published on your guest post website and then re-published on another blog or website.
This can be done through guest blogging, press releases, RSS feeds, social media syndication, and more.
If you want to scale your total link profile, content syndication is one of the quickest ways to accomplish that end.
Ask your SEO agency what syndication opportunities they are taking advantage of to build quality links back to your website.
In doing so, be aware that not all syndication opportunities may come from quality sources.
Be on the lookout for poor-quality indicators that may increase the volume of toxic links to your site.
We have discussed how this works previously using both press releases and podcasting.
7. Using ChatGPT to Scale Link Building
Using generative AI, including ChatGPT, as a means of scaling link building is tempting.
While we don’t offer this as part of our standard link building service, the process for scaling using ChatGPT (or other artificial intelligence software) would likely look something like the following:
- Create your off-site content using ChatGPT as the source for the body text.
- Use OpenAI’s playground to ensure the copy passes HuggingFace or Originality.ai scans (we cover this in-depth in our post on how to detect AI content)
- Insert your links of choice, including natural anchor text variation.
- Source quality publications willing to accept your content placements.
- Rinse and repeat.
There are pros, cons and obvious risks in the execution of such a strategy, only one of which is filtering for quality.
Proceed at your own risk!
Achieving Link Building Scale
Reaching scale in link building will likely require a great deal of upfront input, but once you start to see 5, 10, 20 and even 50 organic inbound links per month without more outreach effort on your part, you know you’re well on your way to scaling up your backlinks.
But getting to that link building tipping point takes a village.
It takes time, energy, and money.
To see it flatline before your eyes is nothing short of gut-wrenching.
You will need ample budget and resources in order to achieve the scale you need to succeed.
But you won’t be stuck forever. By focusing on the implementation of a scalable link-building process, you can create a system that grows with your business over time.
At SEO.co, we’d love to come alongside you and assist in casting a strategic Backlinking vision that elevates your brand.
If you’re interested in learning more about our industry-leading white hat linking services, we suggest checking out our all-in-one link building guide or if you are an agency looking to partner on white label SEO please don’t hesitate to contact us today!
Over the years he's written for publications like Forbes, Entrepreneur, Marketing Land, Search Engine Journal, ReadWrite and other highly respected online publications. Connect with Tim on Linkedin & Twitter.
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