Thea Partridge — April 25, 2017 We all want our company websites to rank highly in online search results so that consumers can find our products and services easily, however some companies have considerably bigger wallets available to achieve this than others. Many brands think the answer to being found online is to pour considerable budget into PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising in order to instantly increase the number of hits to their website. This is all well and good in the short term but the problem is that when you turn off the ad spend on your PPC; this is mirrored in a huge drop in traffic.
Improving your sites SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a far more sustainable long term solution to being found online and there are many strategies that can be adopted in order to do this. Obtaining links from websites with a high domain authority remains one of the best approaches to SEO, but getting these valuable links can be pretty costly. Even bloggers will charge brands to include a link back to their website, so the question is – how can you improve your website SEO when your wallet’s been clamped shut? Fortunately, it is possible to improve your SEO by obtaining free links back to your site. Here’s three ideas you can try out.
- Brand Partnerships
By developing suitable brand partnerships, you can start to address the challenges presented by falling organic search results and the prominence of PPC and paid social. You can build numerous valuable links back to your website if you leverage brand partnerships correctly, but there are several things to consider first;
- Partnerships must be mutual and produce value for both sides. How will you ensure that this is the case for all involved?
- How will you manage expectations, transparency and the KPI’s behind the partnership?
- How will the brand content weave in a link to your partners’ website in an authentic manner, and vice versa?
Crack these key points and you’ll be in a good position to kick off a great brand partnership that stands to produce a positive brand halo effect on both sides, not to mention boost both sites SEO. And, the more partnership campaigns you run, the more links you stand to obtain and the better your SEO!
- Strategic Blogger Outreach
Bloggers are inundated with outreach requests, but if you take a strategic approach to your outreach you can achieve some great quick wins. Here’s how:
- Simply source suitable industry bloggers that have press pages. You can do this by carrying out a simple google search for ‘relevant industry bloggers’ that are ‘followed by the press’.
- Then create content about your chosen blogger and post it on your blog. For example, it could be content about the 11 top bloggers in your industry and why you should follow them.
- When you share the content on your social channel, be sure to tag in the bloggers who the content is about. Sure enough, if they like what you’ve said about them, then they will share it with their followers, resulting in free positive brand exposure for you.
- Once you have done this, follow up with the bloggers directly on the phone to see if they would also be happy to link through to your content from their press page and bingo, free links!
- Good Old-Fashioned Trade-Offs
If you can’t offer a blogger any money for a link to your site, then offer them something of even greater value – your time, experience and skills. Bloggers may well need additional support with graphic design work, social media advice or even content creation, so carry out some research, find an area where you can add value to them and then put forward your proposal. Be sure to ask for a link back to your website from their blog in exchange. Also ensure that you honour any agreed trade-off because a sure fire way to get your brand slatted on twitter is by shunning a blogger!
If you get the opportunity to implement any of these approaches, then do get in touch, we’d love to know how you get on.
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