Many SEO’s have got carried away in the past with building links rather than earning them through genuine marketing methods. This is what has caused many of their websites to become penalized by Google.
They were forcing links by building them. Whereas if they only relied on normal marketing tactics, the links would only have been given to them if they were relevant and earned.
This is why most of your link building strategy should be centered around pursuing an overall digital marketing strategy that relies on the basic principles of marketing.
Not only does it reduce the risk of you being penalized, but you’re also far more likely to be featured in larger, more rigorously edited publications that can give extremely powerful links.
What is ‘Genuine’ Marketing?
Genuine marketing can be classified as any activity that you would do if search engines didn’t exist. For example; even without search engines you would interact in forums, engage on social media and post articles on large websites for publicity.
But you wouldn’t build websites on expired domains to link to your website, i.e. PBN’s; you wouldn’t build 100’s of directory submissions or tens of thousands of blog comments.
Google is really smart, and they want to reward businesses for engaging in successful marketing campaigns because that is representative of a company that the public is engaging with.
If you just continue to do what you would have done regardless of the existence of search engines, you’ll find that you’ll rank far better.
Therefore, any SEO agency should consider itself as a digital marketing agency because their goal should be to market your business.
Communities
One of the most underrated marketing tactics that can have a big impact on your SEO is community interaction. This can mean marketing through Reddit, engaging in niche specific forums and being active in the comment section on large websites.
In recent years many SEO’s have shied away from forums and blog comments because they have been abused by spammers. However, using them in the way they were designed is a great way to drive traffic to your website today and to also build links that will improve your SEO and send you organic traffic in the future.
You can earn links on forums by contributing high quality content which is great for building your reputation and brand but also for creating do-follow links. These types of high quality contributions can often be referred to, increasing the authority of the link each time.
Social Media
Social media is often underutilized by many online businesses because they believe that their audience isn’t interested in using social media. They couldn’t be more wrong.
The average age of a social media user is rising each year, and that means that regardless of your target demographic, they are almost certainly on social media.
Make sure that you’re interacting with them in some way.
However, social media can be much more powerful than this. The way that we love to use social media is to reach out to blog owners and writers at large publications.
If you can put your awesome content in front of those people, then they are far more likely to reference it in their work and link back to your website. This can lead to you getting links from publications that would otherwise never know about your company.
If you’re interested in getting links from large publications like NYT, Huffington Post and Readers’ Digest, this is one of the easiest ways to network with writers.
Influencer Marketing
Leading on from that, influencer marketing has become somewhat of a buzzword in the past years, but it’s also one of the best ways to build those HUGE links that can make a campaign sparkle.
The first step in your digital marketing campaign should always be researching, and as part of that research, you should create a list of the top influencers in your industry.
Even if you work in a peculiar industry like waste removal, you’ll find that there are people who lead the niche in one way or another. These are the people who you want to recommend you business because their opinion is trust and often their websites will be authoritative because of it.
Hopefully, you see the trend in our advice here; you should be engaging in real marketing that will drive traffic and customers today. The primary benefit to that should be obvious, but secondarily you’ll also see the benefit from the links that you’re gaining through this marketing.
Influencer marketing doesn’t have to mean paying people to speak about your business; it could mean networking with them at conferences and then creating joint content. You see this often with YouTube celebrities who will cross-promote each other by appearing in each other’s videos.