Link Building Case Studies From My Own Experience

One of the key things I wanted to include in this book right from the start was realexamples of link building – good and bad. The only way I can do this is by giving you examples from my own experience. I’ve built a lot of links, but I’ve also failed a fair few times too – not scared to admit it!

So this section has a number of examples that I am able to share, however, with all of these, I haven’t been able to tell you exactly who the client was. I hope you understand the reasons for this, but the main reason is that they all operate in very competitive markets and sharing exact information on links and sources could damage them – the last thing I want. Having said that, I have tried to give as much information as I can.

Case study 1 - Ego bait for links in the garden sector

Background: This client operates in the garden sector and is a very large UK ecommerce website. The goal was to get links from some influential bloggers who operated in the garden sector space – of which there were are fair few. These bloggers had strong websites and big followings, so getting them on board with the brand and happy to endorse them was a key goal.

What I did: I started with a simple ego bait campaign and it was on a pretty small scale, I targeted just 10 websites that I wanted to get a link from. These websites fit a set of criteria:

★ Had a homepage PageRank score of 3 and above

★ Talked specifically about the products sold by my client

★ Had clear authors i.e. I could find their names

★ Had clear contact details

★ Had a decent community of followers

I used simple Google searches to find these sites, looking for things like “gardening bloggers” and “home and garden blogs”. After I’d found these 10 websites, I went to each one and wrote a paragraph describing what they covered, what made the website good and why someone should take the time to read it. I also picked out a noteworthy piece of content if I could find one. I then created a new page on the client’s website – I had to use their news section rather than a blog – and pasted in the content I’d written about each website. I also included the title of the website, a small screenshot and a link to them.

Getting my hook: As I was doing this, I realised that I needed to find a way of getting them to want to link back to the page. Yes, I was going to ask them; but is there a way I could make it worth their while without paying them?

The answer was to make a competition out of the page. So I rewrote my introduction and the title of the page to be something along the lines of “Vote for your favourite UK garden website”. My thinking was that I’d allow regular website visitors to vote for their favorite website by placing a voting widget on the page. My hook was in place – if a website wanted to win the vote, they’d need to link to the page so that their visitors could go and vote!

I created a free poll using Poll Daddy, pasted the code onto the page and I was ready to promote it.

How I did outreach: Promotion was pretty simple – I just emailed the 10 websites I’d found and told them about the competition I’d put together. I didn’t make a point of asking them for a link. Instead, I just said that they were free to share the poll with their readers so they could vote for them. This meant that they naturally linked to the page.

Result: Out of 10 emails, I got 7 links. I was pretty happy with this because I probably only spent half a day of time on this, plus two of the websites on my list were the BBC and About.com! So I was pretty happy and got some nice links. In fact, one blogger I contacted asked if I could create a badge for her to embed on her site. So I quickly got our designer to create a small badge which we sent her.

Case study 2 – photos to get links in a very technical, B2B industry

This is probably my most successful piece of outreach in terms of time spent and conversion rate. I have to also admit that it wasn’t planned at all; I saw an opportunity and got to work without really thinking too much

Background: My client operates in a very technical industry. It has a decent community of active bloggers and a wider appeal to technology websites, so link targets aren’t in short supply. However, I was having problems with making this client link worthy – their website was quite old and in all honesty, didn’t deserve links, so outreach was really hard.

That was until the client called me one afternoon and told me that the BBC had picked up on one of the stories from their PR company but not included a link. The client was asking if we had any BBC contacts that we may be able to hit up, so I started the process here to try and get in touch with someone.

The hook: While this was happening, I took a closer look at the coverage and the reason why the BBC had covered my client. The reason was that they had a genuine news story connected to the London 2012 Olympics, so it was pretty timely. But more importantly, I noticed that they’d republished a photo that my client owned the rights to. I had my hook!

What I did: When someone republishes a photo that belongs to you but doesn’t link to you, you have a perfectly legitimate reason to contact them and ask for a link. So I set about finding other websites that had also used the photos and coverage the client’s story. I used three techniques to do this:

★ I ran basic Google searches for the client’s name plus the headline of the story, along

with a few variations

★ I ran the photos through Google image reverse search

★ I setup Google Alerts for the client’s name plus the headline of the story

Through all of these methods I was able to find loads of websites that had covered the stories

and used the photos. I went through these one by one and checked to see if they were linking

to the client. A fair few were already linking, but I found 16 websites who weren’t.

The outreach: I managed to find contact details for all of these and quickly started to email

them. I thanked them for covering the story and using the photos; then politely asked for

them to add a credit link for the photos to the homepage of my client.

Result: Out of the 16 emails I sent, 15 linked to me. I was pretty happy with that! The only

reason that I missed out on one of them was because he’d already linked to a press release

from my client which was hosted somewhere else. Otherwise, I’m sure I’d have gotten 100%.

Case study 3 – sports related interactive infographic

Background: This client had a blog and had done a few bits of content before, but we wanted to create better content and get more diversity into their link profile. We also wanted to get a bit of volume as well as the quality.

The content we made: So we created an interactive infographic that looked at the history of football games between clubs over many years. Users could filter the data within the infographic to view their own team and could see a range of statistics related to them.

Because this was interactive, it was quite hard to share and embed on other websites – this caused us a few problems because a few bloggers wanted to embed it for their users. They really liked the functionality and how the infographic worked, but they wanted their users to interact with it on their own website. Our time was quite limited so we were not able to do this, unfortunately. The best we could offer was for the blogger to take a screenshot and use that instead.

This meant that it probably wasn’t as successful as it could have been, but it was the best we could do with what we had in terms of budget.

What I did: For link targets, my brief was to get quantity so I set about finding a big list of relevant link targets. I started first by finding lists of sports bloggers in the UK which gave me lots of good sites to look through. I then started finding bloggers who wrote specifically about the teams that we featured in the infographic. After this, I discovered a small community of websites that covered football statistics and data visualization; so I added them to my list, too, and made them a priority. I found all of these simply by using a few advanced search operators and finding lists of bloggers – very, very simple.

Result: Approximately 80 websites contacted, 22 links built. I was reasonably happy with this given the time I had but felt I could have done better if I’d have been able to offer the interactive infographic as embeddable.

Case study 4 – building links to a microsite

The background: I wanted to include this case study because it is a little bit different in the approach. This campaign was actually one of my hardest ones because, no matter what we tried, we couldn’t get content added to the client’s website. We’d been promised a new CMS and blog for over a year and it had never materialized. So, in the end, we took things into our own hands to prove a point and to show what we wanted to do – by doing it.

What I did: We setup a microsite using a simple Wordpress installation. On this we built a one page infographic around an upcoming sports event in the UK – so we knew lots of blogs would be talking about this story so there would be lots of link opportunities for us. I wanted to share what worked best with this case study.

The outreach: We asked bloggers about what we had in mind BEFORE we even started design. So we came up with the idea, got a bit of data and put together a few lines of text describing what we were doing. We also put together a few bullet point “headlines” of what data the infographic would visualize.

This was sent to a few bloggers and we asked for their opinion on what we had, in particular we asked:

★ What they liked

★ What they didn’t like

★ What was missing

The final point was crucial; they were able to tell us exactly what was missing from our data. We weren’t subject matter experts, but these guys were; so they were in the perfect position to tell us what was interesting. We took this feedback and gave it to our designer. Once the final infographic was created, we sent it again to the people who gave us the original feedback. We also sent it to other related bloggers and it was received pretty well.

Result: Approximately 110 websites contacted, approximately 35 links built. It actually did a lot better on social media and got lots of tweets and Facebook likes, so we were very happy with the traffic it received and it ranked very well around the time of the sports event that it was covering. Once the client has a CMS and blog in place, we will probably move the content and redirect the link equity using a 301 redirect or the rel=canonical tag. This will naturally lose some of the link equity but this is what we had to do in order to get stuff done!

Case study 5 – guest blogging in the design industry

I wanted to include a case study on guest blogging because I know it is a popular tactic right now and I wanted to share how I’ve used it. This particular case study isn’t actually from a recent client but the numbers and conversion rates are pretty typical for my own work. I’ve used approximate numbers in this case study because I no longer have the exact list of contacts and links that I got.

Background: The client in this case wanted volume of links and whilst they didn’t want low quality, they understood that their website wasn’t very link worthy which reduced their options quite a bit when it came to techniques to use. Rather than wait around and wait for them to make the site link worthy, I started with some guest blogging to get a few links coming in. Their niche lent itself to design, which opened up a decent community of bloggers, even at this time which was a couple of years ago.

What I did: I used a few advanced search queries to find websites who had posted guest posts previously and were design related. This gave me a huge list, which I went through manually and checked the metrics for – at the time I didn’t have the tools to do this automatically! I ended up focusing on a list of about 20 who I’d contact with my first round of outreach.

The outreach: I quickly brainstormed five or six possible article titles that may interest the design bloggers I was contacting. I picked two or three for each email I sent, tweaking the I chose based on the site itself. For example if they had a Wordpress category, I’d be sure to include an article on Wordpress. The email was very simple and focused them on the article titles I was pitching and gave a little bit of background on the client, looking back on this, I probably didn’t need the client

background.

The result: I had to do a follow-up email for a few of the bloggers but from about 20 emails sent, I placed 12 guest posts. At the time, I used exact match anchor text pointing back to the client category pages but if I did the same again now, I’d focused mainly on branded or partial commercial keywords as the anchor text.

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