How to Manage Advanced Link Building Campaign

Link development is a resource-intensive process that demands a lot of work behind the scenes before securing a single backlink.

While most SEOs see the visible part of success – links and their impact on a specific site’s ranking and organic performance, the invisible part (process) of starting, executing, and improving link building campaigns is an essential skill set.

Goal Setting and Managing Expectations

In starting a link building campaign, it is imperative to identify the primary reasons why you should do link building (or build links) for a client.

Integrating it into overall SEO (and digital marketing) campaigns helps link builders align their individual tasks to the overall objective of the brand and manage expectations set towards reaching SEO goals.

On top of detailed tactics, the strategy revolving around link building campaigns should mainly focus on the following:

• Improving the site’s domain authority and search ranking capability to get top spots for its targeted keywords (as higher domain authority can help the site gain better search visibility for its head terms and long tail keywords).
• Enabling content discovery through links from other authority sites in the industry.
• Building up the site’s overall link authority to improve crawl rate, as trusted backlinks can help crawlers find and index new pages and their deeper pages on the site.

Once you’ve identified your site’s primary reasons for link building, it’ll be much easier to align your resources with your primary goals.

Your goals will establish your actions for every facet of your link building campaign.

If you’re working in an SEO agency, make it part of your protocol to conduct initial meetings with clients to understand their current SEO context. A few of the details we ask questions about our client include but are not limited to:

• Initial client impressions (SEO expertise, technical resources, specific preferences, etc..)
• Initial performance expectations (e.g., is there an initial target number of links to build?)
• Initial rankings and traffic data

Asking these critical details will help set the tone of the campaign and may help you manage expectations when you start laying down growth opportunities.

Team Bandwidth

Set up a good team structure to organize your link builders’ tasks and gain insights into your campaign’s current state.

Consider the following questions to guide your team structuring process:

• What is the quota we need to deliver for our clients?
• Are there minimum or maximum link deliverables we can make (generally) for clients regardless of industry? Or, if categorized in industries, is there any estimate or range of backlinks?
• How many link prospectors and outreach specialists are needed for each client?
• How many clients can your team heads capable of handling?

As a link building agency, we assign difficulty scores to each client based on niche difficulty (how easy or hard can we acquire links in the industry?) and niche consistency (have we gotten links from the same sector for our past clients?).

These two assessments can help dictate how confident we are in delivering initial deliverables for the brand.

This stage can also help you track your team’s performance and discuss tasks requiring more urgency and consistency with your team.

Performing Link Gap Analysis

One of the visible ways to track the progress of a link building campaign is by assessing how close you are to reaching the top spot for your target keyword/s.

Link gap analysis determines the estimated number of quality backlinks you must acquire based on current referring domains of the top pages in Google’s SERPs.

I’ve covered in this guide the exact step-by-step process for link gap analysis, but to summarize, here are the essential steps to take:

• Step 1: Collect DR20+, in-content, do-follow backlinks of your target page and its competing ranking pages.
• Step 2: Deduct qualified links of your top competing page from your page’s qualified links.

Here’s a document that walks you through the process.

Initial Link Opportunities

Securing link opportunities with quick turnaround allows for building the momentum needed for a sustainable link acquisition campaign.

Develop a list of the best link building strategies scalable enough for any industry (or most industries included in your target client base).

This activity also assists in getting buy-ins from potential SEO clients trying to understand your processes and strategies.

By proposing exactly the initial link building tactics to pursue, it would give them an overview of how your team would attack the link building campaign based on your current available resources.

Setting Up A Link Building Team

Strategizing the team’s structure affects the operational efficiency and consistency of output.

While there is no standard blueprint for link building team structure, it is based mainly on different considerations (and business decisions):

• Is the agency specialized in one niche (or market segment?
• How many similar campaigns does the agency manage to serve?
• Is there a strict requirement for the number of links (for agencies) instead of delivering a few yet quality numbers (for in-house SEO)?

All these will differ based on the needs of link building campaigns and the preferences of the link building team.

Here are two conventional structures when building a team of link builders:

Sioed Structure

It is the conventional method of structuring teams with multiple departments with similar skill sets.

For this type of structure, you’ll notice having teams for:

• Link prospecting (web research)
• Outreach
• Content Management

These teams are managed by one or two department heads who will cascade all vital information about the campaign, including link targets, overview of clients, etc.

This link building setup initially flows from the link prospecting team (as they’ll assess the available link opportunities) and then transfers all qualified link prospects to the outreach team for contact.

Once the outreach team has positive responses for content (i.e., guest posts), the content management team will brainstorm content ideas and generate content for these responsive link prospects.

Functional Team Structure

Teams in this structure have their link prospectors, outreach specialists, and content managers. Each team functions like a military unit capable of handling multiple clients depending on their bandwidth and quality of skills.

Most link building (and SEO) agencies run this structure to infuse collaboration within teams, as each team must work as one to deliver expected links.

Creating SOPs

Developing SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) ensures consistent team deliverables and client communication quality.

In link development campaigns, there are two essential workflows any team (or agency) must create:

Prospecting Workflow

This phase must include a step-by-step procedure from identifying prospecting keywords to qualifying domains/pages based on standard link metrics.

To give you an overview, here is what our process looks like:

1. Identify Prospecting Keywords – brainstorming for topics and specific keyword phrases that align with the client’s niche and goals.
2. Input Keywords To Tools – we run this keyword list through tools such as Ahrefs’ Content Explorer and Web Explorer to automate a list of potential domains/pages. Note: we still use Google Search and advanced search operators to find relevant prospect linkers manually.
3. Refine Prospects – we eliminate any prospect that does not meet our relevance, trust, and authority numbers criteria.
4. Identify Contacts – we look for appropriate emails and/or website contact forms for suitability in outreach.

Different tools have emerged to semi-automate minor link prospecting and qualification tasks. Creating your in-house tools increases your leverage in efficiency.

Some micro tasks you can now start building with your development team include:

• Query Generators – combining topics or keywords with search query strings to produce different variations of keyword phrases that can be plugged into Ahrefs’ Content/Web Explorers.
• Blacklist Domains – creating an inventory of blacklisted domains/pages that are either irrelevant to any industry or not suitable for contact.

Pro Link Prospecting Tip:

We leverage simultaneous prospecting for link building strategies for a diversified and holistic approach to web research. It also expands our link lists better than solely relying on a single link prospecting method.

The way we attack this is to use both a manual Google search strategy and automated research features of Ahrefs and SEMRush to generate a list of relevant domains initially. By then, we’ll have more link opportunities in the process.

Outreach Workflow

Outreach bridges the gap between link prospecting and the actual placement of links, given that this phase is where rapport-building and value-adding approaches are mostly seen.

We simplify our outreach flow for the benefit of incoming outreach specialists and to wholly focus on the value of pitches rather than the complexities of each step.

Here’s what our outreach flow looks like:

1. Template Creation – we craft semi-personalized initial email templates that align with the client’s standards and consist of persuasion and rapport-building elements to entice positive responses.
2. Personalization – we add a few personalization cues to templates scalable enough to initiate the outreach sequence.
3. Initial Outreach Stage – we send multiple emails simultaneously using our custom emails and agency outreach accounts. This is where A/B tests are conducted to identify winning initial email templates.
4. Follow-up Emails – we use automated and manual approaches when sending follow-ups after three days of non-response.
5. Value Exchange – the entire outreach flow works deeply to exchange value with potential prospects through content contribution, fixing link errors (e.g., broken link building), or other value-adding methodologies to request/add links on their sites.
6. Quality Control – after every outreach campaign, we analyze the data and identify further improvements in email copy, additional insights for new value-added content, and new discoveries for audiences we can provide to link prospecting (web research team).

Pro Outreach Tip:

Create a list of blocklists for domains/pages that include:

• Domains of direct competitors of clients
• Not to contact domains, such as affiliate partners, responses with notes “not to contacted”) compiled mainly by the outreach team.

This activity simplifies outreach flow, cleans irrelevant data numbers in response, and links placement rates for future outreach campaigns.

Content Creation Workflow

This process is designed for link building strategies that require content creation for external publications (i.e., guest posts).

Agencies have different approaches to generating guest blogging ideas, and they are entirely contextualized based on the team’s capabilities and industries.

Here’s a quick way to understand our content creation workflow:

1. Setting Objectives – we define objectives based on prospects’ responses to outreach specialists and their link acquisition methods. If it’s purely content refresh, content creation aims to add new sections (or edit a part of the content). In contrast, an entire guest post request must align with the client’s goals and relevance to the intended publication.
2. Content Generation – we use human writers (with AI tools for topics and outlines) to develop content assets.
3. Content Quality Check – our content managers/writers review the content for quality and relevance.
4. Client Approval is an optional part where clients may want to see and review content before they go live. Conservative and majority enterprise brands demand review to ensure alignment with their branding guidelines.
5. Content Delivery – we send it back to outreach specialists so they can forward it to the publication editor/blogger. Once the content goes live, we nudge our clients with the link to the article.

Link Building Progress Reports

Creating a progress report for a link acquisition campaign is primarily based on what’s needed initially by the client.

The quality and fulfillment of published links must be a top priority, verifying each backlink aligns with the campaign objectives and meets the necessary criteria.

Elements of Quality Link Assurance:

Link Placement

Immediately check if the link is correctly placed on the target page of the site. Link placement affects its likelihood of receiving clicks from users.

Target Page and Anchor Text Usage

See if the backlink points to the desired target page and if anchor texts (head term or long-tail keywords) are appropriately used.

Dofollow and Nofollow Attribute

If done with the intent to pass link juice to your site’s target page, confirm it as required by your link acquisition campaign.

Link Metrics

Review the domain and page where the target backlink is hosted when servicing SEO clients. See if it passes your agreed link metrics with the client.

Continuous Development

Given that link acquisition is an iterative process, you can identify changes and improve elements after each successful outreach campaign.

Always on the lookout for opportunities that can improve your current link acquisition process and take your client’s business to the next level.

This may come in the form of generating new content assets that will allow them to acquire more links, rankings, leads/conversions, and potential partnerships.

The key part of robust client engagement when servicing link acquisition is providing strategic direction for review as a consultant.

It may be as simple as recommending new target pages that need more links to improve the pages’ rankings and suggesting new linkable audiences to target for content publishing (to increase the likelihood of passive links).

Our link building agency helps SEO agencies, SaaS companies, and eCom businesses generate relevant, quality backlinks. Don’t hesitate to drop us a line today to see how we can help.