Over the years, we have seen exponential growth in demand for SEO and digital marketing services.
Many freelancers and in-house marketers started their careers serving clients outside their organizations. It becomes part of their side-hustle portfolio, which later turns into running their own agencies.
As part of growing an SEO agency, it’s critically important to set up processes to scale activities — both inputs and outputs. This means as you get more clients to serve with your SEO services, you also develop your internal management system among your employees so you can provide effective results for clients.
That being said, one of the core areas any SEO agency must improve day after day is link building.
If you are running a marketing agency, you have two options: start an in-house team of link builders (or even train your existing employees for link building initiatives) or strategically partner with a link building company for SEO agencies.
Both works and require understanding scalable link-building strategies for clients of different types and industries.
So, here are five scalable link-building strategies for SEO agencies.
1. Resource Page Link Building
If you are looking for a long-term link building strategy, this one is for you.
Resource page link building means acquiring referential links from resource pages (pages that list external links to recommended resources and references on a given topic). You’ll find examples of this from .edu and non-commercial websites.
The conversion rate for this strategy ranges from 2 to 10%, depending on how persuasive your email pitch is and how comprehensive and useful your content is.
So if you’re aiming for 20 links every month for a specific client, then you must be able to successfully send at least 400 to 600 emails to resource page curators.
The main differentiator of resource page link building, among other link-building strategies, is comprehensive content assets. In some agencies, it takes them to hire content writers and web developers to produce a content asset worth linking (e.g., interactive content).
2. Strategic Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is nothing new in the SEO industry. Several SEO agencies are using it as part of their way of getting more backlinks for their clients.
Most guest blogging campaigns don’t provide much value to the end-users (target guest blogs) besides getting the link (a solo win for link builders).
It is best to consider valuable topics for your target blogs, such that you offer content ideas that will help them rank for their target keywords. With that, you offer something more valuable than the rest of the other guest blogging pitches. This gives you the leverage to become a regular contributor for them, a scalable process for guest blogging.
3. Local Linkbait Strategy
Several local businesses have invested in link building campaigns to help them rank for local pack search and organic search results.
The campaign for this game is geared towards getting local links that are relevant to the business.
One way to do local link building that targets relevant and local links is through a local linkbait strategy.
Linkbait, in essence, is creating a content piece that attracts your potential customers while at the same time inviting other individuals and local businesses to participate (which would have multiple benefits for them as they do so). Benefits include being featured on your blog, getting their visibility amplified as many participants will start promoting the content piece to their networks.
One example of a local linkbait strategy is creating a local content piece that targets non-competing local brands in your space. If you are marketing a hotel website in New York, for example, you can write a list post featuring the best local cafe shops in your city (nearby your hotel).
4. Link Reclamation Strategy
To some SEO and marketing agencies, the challenge lies when you are working with enterprise brands. They have higher expectations of the returns from their investments. They also wanted to build up their brands from their current standing (way above other businesses already).
One scalable link-building strategy for enterprise clients is link reclamation.
Link reclamation persuades people (publishers, content creators, and bloggers) who mentioned your content or brand without crediting you with links.
You can get started with link reclamation by plugging your client’s domain in any link analysis tools, preferably with mention or alerts feature.
One good example is Ahrefs. It has an alerts feature that allows sending you emails if any websites mention your product or brand. Check if those mentions have links on it.
Make a list of all websites with target pages that mentioned you but without links. Collect email addresses of contact persons. Send them emails persuading them to link to you (either give them guidelines regarding attribution licenses or simply request them for links).
5. Statistics-Driven Content Strategy
Search users are becoming more sophisticated in looking for valid sources these days. They want to validate the information they believe in it.
Content marketing and SEO teams can take advantage of this by leveraging this one scalable link-building strategy — a statistics-driven content strategy.
The process starts by discovering keywords with statistics in them (e.g., “startup statistics”) or question-type phrases like “how many startups fail in their first five years?”.
Then check the current search results to see what types of content resonates with the search users. There, you’ll create a content asset (an article, interactive type of piece, infographics, or any other content format that will differentiate yours from similar web assets).
Scalable Planning and Execution
Scaling SEO and marketing agencies require a full amount of effort, energy, time, and other resources.
The payoff is huge if the foundation has been built around processes to sustain output month over month.
The link-building strategies shared in this article can help you scale your backlinks to your clients.
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