Niche Quality SEO Off-Page Techniques
Off-page SEO hasn’t been all about links. We have social data, brand signals (linked or unlinked mentions), citations, reviews and sentiments that search engines can use in evaluating relevance, trust, popularity and authority of a website/page.
For link building in 2016 and beyond, the ability to understand these external website concepts and to use effective off-page SEO techniques can help you with in influencing a website’s ranking power.
- EXPAND LINK LISTS WITH SIMILAR CONTENT PROSPECTING TOOL
Websites that linked to a content or resource similar to an asset page published on your site are more receptive to outreach than any other link prospects primarily because of their linking history. When they had linked to a particular page, they are likely be interested to its similar resource and consider it for a possible linking opportunity.
Topical relevancy and higher link acquisition rates are some few notable advantages when you reached out to said link prospects.
Given this, here is how you can find these high-quality backlink sources:
STEP 1: Enter niche-specific keywords (related to your content) in Skyrocket’s Similar Content. This tool will automatically generate high-quality prospects that are linking to the top ranking pages for searched keywords.
STEP 2: Export domains and list them in a Spreadsheet or you can plug them to your favorite outreach tool.
STEP 3: Reach out to webmasters and publishers of those potential linking sites and ask if they’ll be interested to look at your content piece. Here is one example of an email template that you can use, which is actually for follow-up purposes.
Hello [ NAME ],
I contacted you a few weeks ago to share a resource that I thought you may
find of interest, and you informed me about your upcoming blog/site
update. I was wondering if you’ve been successful in the update and had a
chance to review my message; a copy of which is provided below for
reference.
We’ve launched a really detailed guide to [ TOPIC ] and I
thought you might be interested in seeing it — [ URL ]
If you are still updating this page –
[ URL ] then perhaps our guide might
make a useful addition.
Please let me know if you have any questions. And if this isn’t for you or
you’d rather I didn’t get in touch in future please let me know and I’ll
be sure not to send you any other messages.
– [Your Name]
2. LEVERAGE CONTENT TEMPLATES WITH BUZZSUMO
The ability to scale content assets without sacrificing qualify differentiates average content marketers from excellent ones. A year ago, Ross Hudgens shared one strategy on how to create incredible content assets at a low cost. It is with the use of content templates.
Content templates are simple formats of successful content assets from other verticals or other brands that can potentially be replicated to your own content marketing campaigns. Two good examples of these content templates are these posts by Hubspot about habits for hyper-productive people and habits for content marketers.
The Hubspot’s content marketing team found this “habit-type” content template to be a good blog post framework. People simply want to emulate habits that make other people successful in whatever field they belong. Thus when you publish content like this, it easily gets traction from many people — acquiring multiple social shares and earning referential links from publishers.
How to find content templates that are likely to earn links naturally?
STEP 1: Find popular content-producing sites in your industry and use Buzzsumo to look for their most-shared content pieces.
STEP 2: Take note all possible content formats and list them down in a Spreadsheet.
STEP 3: Create content pillars based on your preferred content formats. This would require testing but when you see results from first published content, you can replicate this to every sub-niches in your vertical (check out my definitive guide on blogger outreach) .
3. LINK TO INFLUENCERS WITHIN CONTENT
Though Google doesn’t count outbound links as a direct ranking factor, knowing how to properly link to relevant sources externally is still a best practice in the search industry. External linking to credible resources and useful content produced by influencers helps an initial boost of promotion to your content piece. Maximizing this strategy is a sure way to put more eyeballs to your asset.
How to execute this properly?
STEP 1: Search for influencers in your niche whom you can easily connect with. You can use Buzzstream or a simple Google search to discover this kind of people.
STEP 2: When starting to create content, try to find relevant blog posts of influencers. You can use the search phrase, site:domain.com “keyword”or site:domain.com intitle:”keyword”. The latter search strings are more useful because it provides the most targeted results — finding pages that discuss the whole topic, not just including your keyword in one paragraph.
STEP 3: Once you publish your content, reach out to these influencers using direct email outreach. Results from this are either social shares or contextual links from publishers. Even if you got one social share from an influencer, this can be worth a hundred of traffic to your site.
Hi [ NAME ],
I saw your website and found that you linked to one blog post about [ TOPIC ].
Just thought that you might find my definitive guide on [ TOPIC ] also useful. It is a rich content that contains an [ DESCRIBE YOUR CONTENT ].
[ URL ]
Kind regards,
[ YOUR NAME ]
4. BUILD HIGHLY-CONVERTING MICRO SITES
If you’re aiming to capture small segments of your target market, one way you need to invest in is creating micro sites. This method can enable your brand to build high quality links your competitors can’t easily copy, as well as give your site more opportunities to attract potential clients/customers.
One good example of this branding strategy is how Aleyda created two micro sites that provides a lot of value to the SEO community — All SEO Guidelines and The Marketer Toolbox.
Both of these sites target segmented audiences, the first one helps SEO practitioners (both in-house and agency-level) while the second one focuses more on marketers and tool creators.
Now, how can you identify your specific market segment and create a micro site out of it? Below are a few steps to get you started, but if you want to take the whole process, you can check out this posts by and this guide by..
STEP 1: Go to your Google Analytics data. Look at the top performing posts with high conversion rates.
STEP 2: Determine what market segments you can tap that isn’t going too far from your main content theme. For example, in my case, I can create micro sites for link building tools and templates/checklists for link acquisition given that I’m currently offering link building services.
STEP 3: Once you choose an overall theme for your micro-site, buy your own domain name and hosting. In terms of the site’s content development, you can produce scalable content pillars like round-ups on an actionable topic, interview series and user-generated content.
5. USE INTERVIEWS AS GUEST ENTRIES
Guest blogging has been an effective off-page SEO technique for many startup marketers building their own brands from scratch. What makes this more effective is the ability to craft solid content that isn’t a carbon copy of another piece or a revision of a blog post published on one popular blog.
The challenge in guest blogging is really writing an expertly-written content that won’t just acquire a single link but will potentially get second-tier links from blogs linking to the contributed piece.
One way to be able to do this is using interviews as guest entries for other websites. Given that answers from industry experts are most likely to be actionable, helpful and experience-based, they can be considered as solid content for guest blogging. Here is how you can execute this process:
STEP 1: Find publishers and book authors using Google search or influencer prospecting tools.
STEP 2: Reach out to these niche experts and do an interview with them. Below is an email copy you can use:
Hey [ NAME ],
I hope you’re doing well.
Just want to tell you that, [ WEBMASTER NAME ] who manages the [ SITE NAME ], gave me an opportunity to guest post at [ URL ] and am planning to do a short written interview with some of the below bloggers and I was requesting if you can be one of them.
- INTERVIEWEE’S NAME 1
- INTERVIEWEE’S NAME 2
- INTERVIEWEE’S NAME 3
- INTERVIEWEE’S NAME 4
If so, I’ve attached a short written interview that you can use to share your tips or ideas.
If you’re interested in including screenshots as part of real life example, you’re welcome to do so.
The topic of discussion is [ TOPIC ]
Cheers
[ YOUR NAME ]
STEP 3: Use their answers as guest content for your target blog. Check out these examples of interview-based guest posts.
6. COLLECT LINK PROSPECTS FROM LISTPEDIA
Using social media platforms like Twitter for link prospecting is a strategic approach for link builders to find new bloggers and publishers that aren’t yet found through Google search. With this, you can expand your list of outreach targets without actually depending on search engines as your primary source of target domains.
Besides getting additional backlink sources, you’ll also be able to tap influencers that have strong massive reach both in web publishing and social if you try using social media as your main link prospecting tool. In other words, you get more benefits when you do an outreach to them since they won’t only be linking to your content, but they’ll also share your content to their existing followers. This can allow your brand to acquire more backlinks from their followers’ blogs as well.
You can start this by using simple Twitter searches to find bloggers in your industry. However, if you are doing bulk prospecting, you can scale the process by using Listpedia.
Listpedia is a new self-made search and creation Twitter tool that can generate massive Twitter lists relevant to a particular keyword.
Here are three steps on how to use Listpedia for link prospecting:
STEP 1: Go to Listpedia and search for a particular audience you are aiming to reach out to (e.g. personal finance, finance or insurance).
STEP 2: Check each individual Twitter profile in the search results to see if they have their own blogs or websites.
STEP 3: Once you think a particular website passes your link metrics (Ahrefs rank, DA or Trustflow), you can include it to your outreach list, find his email address and send a pitch via email. Below is an email copy you can use:
Hey [ NAME ],
I saw your profile on Twitter while doing my research, and also saw that you are part of this Twitter list [ URL ].
Just thought that you might find my post about [ DESCRIBE YOUR CONTENT ] really useful. [ YOUR CONTENT URL ]
Have a great weekend!
All the best,
[ YOUR NAME ]
7. INCLUDE POST-PREVIEW AS ADDITIIONAL PROPOSITION TO CONTENT
Creating remarkable content may require experiences and case studies from your own brand that gets people into action — after they consume the content. Case studies that take days, weeks or even months is really time-consuming for content creators.
However, there is one way to easily add data-based experience that won’t cost you money. That is, including a data from an influencer/expert you’ve had a relationship with. Since there is a connection involved, the influencer won’t look at it like stealing his ideas as you initiate asking for a permission to use his data.
I did this strategy when I wrote my old post on increase blog traffic where I included an experience-based tip from Roel Manarang — a local-based social media marketing expert. He backed up his claim with a case study of a Facebook strategy, not even shared on his blog, at the time I inserted his technique to my blog post.
Here is how you can use post-preview in your content creation phase:
STEP 1: Identify influencers you had relationships with (grab your list from off page SEO techique 3). Filter the influencer list by expertise these influencers have been known for (i.e. link building, off-page SEO, conversion rate optimization, etc..) and choose those you think can collaborate with you once you create your next content.
STEP 2: Reach out to influencers and ask if they’ll be interested to add some insights to your upcoming post. You can try this email outreach copy below:
Hello [ NAME ],
I know you’re quite busy today. But just a quick heads-up if you’re interested to contribute insights to my upcoming post about [ TOPIC ].
I would like to know if you have any experiences and tips regarding [TELL MORE ABOUT YOUR UPCOMING POST].
Let me know your thoughts.
All the best,
[ YOUR NAME ]
STEP 3: Include the influencer’s tip to your content and start to promote it to people who might like your link to your post.
8. IMPROVE RELEVANCE WITH BRAND KEYWORD INTEGRATION
Google understands the relevance of a brand towards its connected domains in the industry sphere based on the keywords and context of each content produced in the website. Knowing this, you will create additional content based not only on the industry terms you want to rank for but on keywords you could potentially rank.
This is doable in three steps.
STEP 1: Go to Google Keyword Planner and plug in your homepage in the landing page search. You will then see a list of keywords Google considers to be relevant industry terms of your brand
STEP 2: Choose among the list of keywords which of them you will likely to target for your next content.
STEP 3: Include industry terms when writing your content in order improve LSI relevance of your website.
9. GIFT GIVING TO BUILD RELATIONSHIPS
Engagement marketing involves two sets of groups: those who are part of your networks and those you still need to reach out to — commonly referred as “direct outreach”.
The good thing with direct outreach is that you don’t need to invest a huge amount of money and chunks of hours to start with. There is actually a less-costly way to effectively build relationships with influencers and authors who are part of your direct outreach.
James Norquay from Prosperity Media showed how a set of cupcakes from his client can strengthen relationships built with their brand partners.
Another example of this link relationship building technique is when Larry Kim of Wordstream sent letters of appreciation to customers and to people who became a great part in building his brand.
Want to know how to execute a strategic approach in engagement marketing? Here are actionable tips to start an effective community engagement.
STEP 1: Identify one valuable thing you can offer to your brand followers or potential brand ambassadors.
STEP 2: Think of ways on how to deliver your gift to your list of recipients. It could be through international or local shipping and/or online transfer system if your gift is a virtual product.
STEP 3: Once the gift is released, you can track web and social mentions from influencers using BrandMentions.
10. INVEST IN GETTING REFERENCES FROM Q&A SITES FROM REAL PEOPLE
The nature of searchers in this age of web usage is leading towards search activities in very niche-targeted search engine sites and community sites, where people would look for answers to their frequent questions from niche community sites instead of going straight to their favorite search engine tool.
Identifying these websites where a portion of your target market hang out can allow you to acquire referential links that your competitors haven’t thought of building for their own sites.
The community-based backlink below is a good example of how powerful branding could help you semi-automate your brand’s link acquisition process. If you look closely at the answer, it is not a result of our marketing work, but from a person who trusted our expertise — Anton Shulke. We actually did a webinar for his website and the benefit becomes mutual in the form of a link pointing to our brand.
How can you leverage branded link acquisition (off-page SEO) in community sites?
STEP 1: Create a list of outreach prospects that include your current brand followers, customers and clients. Your brand followers could be any person you’ve built relationship in the past either through content distribution, exchange of business ideas or as simple as being your co-member in an offline/online niche group.
STEP 2: Look for relevant discussions that can potentially drive highly converting visitors to your site. In my above example, the keyword that I used is best SEO agency in Manila. The trick here is to use the site: search operator plus the keyword — e.g. site:quora.com “best X in Y” to generate targeted discussion pages.
STEP 3: Reach out to your outreach prospects and ask if they can participate in the discussion. If they are your loyal customers/clients, they’ll likely give a recommendation to your brand.
OTHER USEFUL RESOURCES:
