SEO

Best Link Building Tools For SEO [2025 Honest Review]

As considered to be the UK's best link building agency, the most common question we've been asked is what are the best link building tools for SEO we use to scale our campaigns.

In this 2025 review, we're sharing our full list. 

These are the tools we rely on daily legwork to find quality link prospects, manage outreach, track results, test new link building strategies, and improve results across our clients' link building campaigns. 

For a quick look, here's our top pick for each key task:

Best Tool for Competitor Link Research, BackLink Analysis, and Link Prospecting: Ahrefs

Ahrefs is our top choice for getting deep insights into your competitors' backlinks. With their tool features like Site Explorer, Link Intersect, and Content Explorer, you can find highly relevant, authoritative sites linking to others in your industry and quickly build a list of targets. It's a good starting point for high-impact prospecting and scalable link building campaigns. 

Best Tool for Finding Emails: Hunter.io

Once you have a solid list of link targets, Hunter.io helps you find accurate email addresses linked to each domain. Whether you're searching by domain or by name and company, Hunter makes email discovery quick and reliable. It also verifies email deliverability to reduce bounce rates in email outreach campaigns. 

Best Tool for Email Outreach: SmartLead  

SmartLead lets you send personalized cold emails at scale. With unlimited inbox rotation and a unified inbox for all replies, it keeps your outreach organized and effective. It's built for link building teams that care about deliverability, automation, and landing high-quality link placements. 

7 Best Link Building Tools For SEO (Our Top Picks)

Below are some of the best link building tools for SEO that we personally hand-picked: 

1. Ahrefs (starts at $129/mo)

Ahrefs is our top-picked link building tool as an agency, considering it is highly useful for a wide range of tasks in link building. 

It offers one of the industry's largest and most updated backlink databases. It assists in most of the tedious tasks of prospecting and analyzing the types of backlinks of competitors and other relevant sites.

Let me walk you through some of the tasks we use it for: 

Competitor Backlink Research

Feature: Site Explorer

One of the best ways to start your link building campaign is to look at where your competitors have acquired their backlinks, especially those currently ranking for your target keywords. It shows you where these links come from and helps you generate ideas on what specific link building strategies have proven to work and which ones you can replicate for your campaign.

Ahres helps you conduct thorough competitor backlink research. The Site Explorer feature shows you all the backlinks pointing to any domain, URL, or subdomain. Whether you want to reverse the entire domain's links data or a specific page/content, you'll have it assembled with Site Explorer. 

The best part of Ahrefs is its ability to filter backlinks based on your desired link metrics. And if you're a UK newbie link builder, you can choose the "Best Filters" so it would do the filtering for you on websites that are do-follow, in-content, DR30+, 500+ organic traffic, and less than 200 external links on a page - it's the default setting, but you can customize it to fit your needs. 

For any link building campaigns we start, I filter sites based on DR and traffic alone (DR30+ and organic traffic of 500+). With that quick analysis, I can decide if exporting the list, analyzing it further, and reaching out to the same link prospects is worthwhile. 

I dig deeper into some links for advanced link building strategies by filtering them based on link type, destination page, or number of referring domains. For instance, if I want to see listicles (for SaaS link building), I'll filter links from external links (7 to 30). 

Another example is filtering sites to homepage links to find branded mentions (with links) or valuable links through digital PR campaigns (which mostly link to brands' homepages). 

Discover Link-Worthy Content Topics

Feature: Content Explorer

Creating linkable assets starts with assessing which topics are link-worthy. This means that when you start publishing and do a little bit of outreach, you'll have chances of earning backlinks from target publishers.

 

With Ahrefs' Content Explorer, you can search for any keyword and see pages that earn the most links. You can filter sites based on metrics like referring domains, traffic, social shares, and by language, date published, or Domain Rating. 

For example, if you want to search for industry-related topics, you can search for "statistics" and "topic" and filter them by referring to domains (>50), English language, and publication dates from the past year. 

If you're doing broken link building, it's a good place to find defunct (404) pages that you can recreate and get backlinks by either reaching out to publishers who linked to the dead page or finding new links pages that are topically relevant to your republished content. 

Find Link Prospects That Haven't Linked To You 

Feature: Link Intersect

When Ahrefs launched this feature years ago, I was one of the first SEO specialists to try it, and I knew it would be one of the best features of Ahrefs. Rightfully, it did so, as Link Intersect allows you to compare your site to competitors and shows domains that link to them but not to you. Other SEO tools haven't replicated this invaluable feature at the time of this writing. 

This task alone, doing link intersect, cuts prospecting time in half (even 70%) by pointing you to sites that are clearly open to linking to similar content or businesses. If pages link to 2 to 3 of your highly relevant competitors, they would also link to you, assuming you have a similar or better value proposition in your email outreach. 

Reclaim Broken Links and Lost Opportunities

Feature: Broken Link Checker

Link decay happens when one of your links is broken. Either the hosted page removes your link, or it is removed by error or by purpose. This is often the case with many of the websites that are earning links. 

Besides actively pursuing links every month, it's a good practice to look at your site's broken links and see which ones you can recover. Given that you've tried to get those broken links in the past, it would be worthwhile to retrieve them with a quick nudge in your emails. 

Track Your Backlinks

Feature: Backlink Alerts

There are a handful of free alert tools, like Google Alerts, but if you purchase Ahrefs, take advantage of its Alerts feature.

You can set up email alerts for new or lost backlinks to any domain. Ahrefs notifies you as links appear or disappear, keeping your campaigns updated in real-time. So, you can either follow up with lost backlinks to reclaim them (as I mentioned earlier) or replicate the strategy that allows you to earn new passive links (without doing any manual outreach). 

SharpRocket's Take on Ahrefs:

As a link building agency in the industry for over a decade, we've used Ahrefs for every possible task related to link acquisition. It is a powerhouse SEO suite as it also assists in SEO audits and keyword research, making it cost-efficient for agencies to have it in their SEO arsenal.

The only caveat is its starting price. For the UK's newbie SEO professionals or starting SEO agencies, $127/mo may be too steep, especially if you're still building your client base or working with limited budgets.

It's smart to start with lighter tools or use Google extensively for link prospecting or other free link building tools that cover the basics of using Ahrefs. Once you begin scaling and need deeper backlink insights or faster and more streamlined processes, investing in Ahrefs becomes a more justifiable and high-impact investment. 

2. Hunter.io (Free + starts at $34/mo)

Discovering and vetting relevant and high-quality link prospects is only half the job. The other half is finding a way to contact them. There are many email finder tools (and we've tested most of them), but we couldn't find one that is of maximum use with Hunter.io. 

 

The best use of Hunter is that it helps you find valid email addresses tied to websites, companies, or individuals. Instead of manually searching for the contact person's email using Google or X search, you can click on the Hunter Chrome extension, which instantly gives you the available corporate emails.

The accuracy of finding emails for outreach is essential in ensuring you get positive responses in email, compared to randomly emailing non-corporate emails (which leaves you with no chance of responses).  

Hunter is the best choice for targeted link building that caters to editors and specific departments of companies. It includes names, job titles, and departments, providing you with ready access to decision-makers and editors without wasting hours of time. 

Another overlooked feature of Hunter is that it checks for deliverability in real-time. It verifies the domain, checks the syntax, and tests whether the mailbox exists, all without sending an email.

Email verification is crucial to reducing bounce rates, avoiding spam folders, and protecting your domain's sender score (though most link building agencies use a domain similar to their clients' domain for outreach to avoid flagging the real brand domain's sender score). 

If you're a little nerdy, Hunter shows the probability of the email address's existence, which gives you the confidence that it is the actual email of the person you want to reach out to. 

SharpRocket's Take on Hunter:

If you're doing a handful of link building campaigns, Hunter is ideal for solo SEO specialists or early-stage SEO agencies to streamline their process for finding email contacts (which, in our experience, consumes most of the link building efforts).

Its paid pricing of $34/mo saves you hours of manually searching for the right email address, which you can instead spend on major link-building tasks. 

3. Journo (starts at $49/mo)

If you're monitoring digital PR campaigns and want to launch one for your website or for an agency client, you need tools to facilitate strategies such as expert commentaries, data-driven PR, and reactive PR.

 

After HARO's shutdown, many PR professionals and SEO specialists have been looking for reliable alternatives to help them offer real media connections. 

Fortunately, we have Fery Kazsoni of Search Intelligence, who's in the nitty-gritty of digital PR and recently launched his digital PR platform, Journo. 

Unlike HARO, which is heavily US-centric focus, Journo offers a wider range of localized media in the UK and a more structured system of responding to requests. It doesn't overwhelm users with irrelevant queries but delivers targeted opportunities that align with your industry and expertise, making it easier to land quality brand mentions that come with earned backlinks.

Get Featured by Responding to Media Requests

Feature: Quote Responses

Journo gives you real-time access to journalist requests, which is the best use of the tool. These journalists seek expert inputs, brand examples, case studies, or quotes for specific stories.

It puts your business in front of journalists who are actively writing instead of contacting them firsthand without brand recall. Using Journo activates the discovery mode of journalists, which increases the chance your pitch gets noticed and positive responses. 

Start by creating a client campaign and correspondents. These team members or client representatives will receive and respond to journalist queries. You could create a profile on behalf of an expert or be an industry expert. 

Set up a profile with complete company details, position, description, and social media profiles. Make sure you have these filled out properly, as this is where journalists would likely base their decision on which correspondent to choose from, based on your expert inputs.

Once your profile is set up, you can proceed to Quote Responses.

What I like about Journo is that it filters responses based on the following:

• Industry or topic
• Status (pending, responded, urgent) - helps you prioritize the most urgent quote requests.
• Set bookmarks either with labels of topics or the client's name (i.e., tags)

These neat features help you organize your media requests, unlike HARO, where you can only categorize media requests using labels in Gmail. 

Journo makes it easy for any SEO specialist or digital PR expert to respond to media requests using their clients' respondents' profiles. They know that the majority of users of their tools will be SEO, digital PR, and digital marketing agencies, so they make sure that responding to media requests is as seamless as possible.

They also have a feature where you can dictate your answer (using your microphone), so if it's not you would be responding, you can hand an expert from your team to dictate their answer (without them writing their inputs from scratch). You'll then edit their answer and send it instantly through the Journo platform. 

Ask for Expert Insights to Add Credibility or Find Relevant Angles

Feature: Request Expert Quotes

This feature of Journo works in reverse: you submit a request for expert input. So, for instance, if you're writing a blog post, guide, or content piece and want to add quotes from real practitioners in your industry, you can use the tool to invite experts to contribute their insights.

Doing so helps you solidify your content assets with experience and expertise (E-E-A-T SEO approach), crafting more helpful content for your target audience. 

Instead of soliciting expert inputs on X, LinkedIn, Reddit, and other platforms, you go straight to real experts hungry to give their contributions on Journo. 

Generate Content Ideas for Digital PR Campaigns 

Feature: News Explorer

News Explorer is a powerful research tool inside Journo that lets you search, filter, and analyze media coverage from past stories. The best part of this feature is its pre-determined keywords, which are exact titles and content ideas patterned after stories that Search Intelligence has encountered with its hundreds of digital PR campaigns.

For example, "expert reveals" or "survey reveals" makes it easier for digital PR or SEO newbies to find data-based or breaking news instantly without rigorously finding them on Google News or other news-related search platforms. 

Journo's News Explorer also has other interesting features that make it savvy for data campaigns:

• By country - filter results by UK, US, CA, and AU.
• By data published - filter results by date published by year, month, or week. 
• By news outlets - filter results by specific news outlets in the UK, US, or Global News (e.g., The Sun, The Verge, or Bloomberg).

This level of control helps you refocus your research and focus only on the stories that match your campaign goals.

For example, if you're planning a digital PR campaign targeted at the UK market, you can filter stories published in UK outlets in the past months and search for keywords like "survey shows" or "study finds." This reveals which data-led stories gained traction recently, inspiring your pitch's next content and direction.

You can also sort by "must be entitled" to find only stories where your keyword appears in the headlines. This is useful when studying what types of hooks catch editorial attention. 

SharpRocket's Take on Journo:

Journo is an incredible tool for anyone in the digital PR space. It helps with the ideation and content creation process. Like any other tool, leveraging it for optimal success requires executing and aligning actions with campaign goals. 

The real value comes when you dig deeper into the research phase and turn the ideas you generate using Journo into link-worthy digital PR pieces that actually reflect your current media interest. 

4. Link Launch (Free) 

One of the biggest challenges in SEO is proving the real impact of link building. LinkLaunch helps you justify the value of every single link-building investment. It combines traffic potential, cost modeling, and ROI forecasting in one dashboard, giving in-house SEOs and agencies the data they need to get more buy-ins from stakeholders (for in-house SEOs) and increase link building budgets with clients (for agencies). 

 

You can use LinkLaunch's Click-Through Rate (CTR) Model to forecast potential traffic gains. It already has default CTR data by search position. From here, you can set a realistic ranking goal (e.g., position 4). LinkLaunch calculates how much traffic each position could deliver for your keyword. 

Then, tie it all together with the cost per link and ROI by setting a fixed cost per link (e.g., $250) or using custom pricing tiers. Choose your campaign durations (e.g., 12 months) and target position. LinkLaunch then estimates the number of links needed and weighs the cost against the projected traffic increase. 

SharpRocket's Take on Link Launch:

Link Launch is incredibly useful to justify your link building investment or ask for increasing budgets to target more competitive keywords or sustain rankings. I recommend this for anyone doing SEO client work for agencies and enterprise SEO specialists who find it difficult to get approvals and buy-ins from stakeholders and defend links with data. 

5. SmartLead (Free + starts at $39/mo)

There are many feature-rich and more popular outreach tools, such as Buzzstream and Pitchbox, which I personally tried and found to be highly useful for agencies and in-house SEO teams. Buzzstream is one of the simplest outreach tools, and Pitchbox is for scalable enterprise link-building campaigns with hundreds to thousands of link prospects. 

 

Among all these best outreach tools, our top pick is SmartLead, given its affordable pricing. It starts at $39/month for 6,000 emails per month, compared to Buzzstream's $24/month price for 1,000 contacts. SmartLead makes it feasible for anyone starting outreach campaigns or just having 1 to 4 small-scale link building campaigns. 

Rather than figuring out how the outreach tool works, the easy interface of SmartLead allows us to spend more time on actual outreach, crafting emails, sending them out, and responding to link prospects. 

Given that it can track key metrics in real-time (emails sent, open rate, reply rate, positive replies, and bounces), we can assess the results of each outreach campaign, even run an A/B test to see which performs well and refine the campaign as we see fit. 

6. SEMRush (starts at $139.95/mo)

If you're only paying SEMRush for link building tasks, it's not worth it, given that its immense value comes from non-link-building tasks such as competitive intelligence, keyword research, site audits, and content gap analysis.

 

However, SEMRush is an all-in-one SEO suite that can help you streamline some of your processes, particularly in generating keyword ideas using actual data from your site, competitors, and other winning websites. 

SharpRocket's Take on Link Impact:

If most of your SEO work involves link building, consider Ahrefs. If you focus on content creation, topical maps, and keyword research and are outsourcing link building, you may want to choose SEMRush, as it is highly accurate for this competitive keyword research and analysis. 

7. Grammarly (Free + $12/mo)

Grammarly is actually a writing assistant, but it has helped us improve grammar, clarity, tone, and originality. While those things can easily be achieved with basic communication skills, for link building and SEO specialists, Grammarly helps ensure you're creating the highest-quality content possible, whether for writing guest articles, outreach emails, or internal content assets (guides, linkable assets). 

Beyond its ability to assist in creating polished linkable assets, it helps to avoid duplicate content in guest posts by scanning them against billions of online sources to detect unintentional plagiarism. 

Grammarly has been highly useful for outreach specialists in detecting the right tone, recommending softer or more direct alternatives, and tightening up long-winded sentences or awkward phrasing that could harm our outreach pitches. 

SharpRocket's Take on Link Impact:

Grammarly isn't a direct link building tool, but it supports the vital process of content-led link-building campaigns: content ideation and editing. For teams producing content at scale, it adds a layer of quality control without slowing them down.

Which Tool Fits Your SEO Strategy?

The right tool depends on your campaign goals, team size, and, of course, budget. Below are helpful questions to help you decide what to use based on your specific SEO needs. 

What Budget Do You Have to Work With?

If your budget is tight, free options like manual Google searches for link prospecting and limited versions of tools like Hunter.io can help you get started. These are best when you're still learning the ropes or handling outreach in small volumes.

But once you're scaling, investing in paid tools becomes necessary. So, tools like Smartlead, Buzzstream, or Pitchbox (for large enterprise link-building campaigns) can help automate outreach and follow-ups (saving hours of manual work). 

For backlink analysis, investing in premium link intelligence tools like Ahrefs, MajesticSEO, or SEMRush is best to provide you with deeper data and better accuracy. 

The bottom line is that if you're serious about link building and want real results, it's worth allocating part of your SEO budget to tools that increase speed, accuracy, and outreach success. 

Are You Working Solo or with a Team?

You don't need full team features if you're a freelance or solo SEO specialist tasked with link building. You can use spreadsheets to help you organize your link prospects and outreach campaigns, which can take you far. 

However, if you're working with a team, whether for an agency or with multiple websites as an in-house SEO specialist, then collaborative tools become essential. Link building tools like Pitchbox and Buzzstream let you assign roles, manage conversations, and track multiple campaigns under one account, helping you avoid duplicated effort, inefficiencies it may, and missed follow-ups. 

How Much Link Data Do You Need?

Not all backlink analysis tools offer the same depth. If you need detailed, thorough competitor backlink profiles and link intersect features, stick to major link intelligence tools like Ahrefs. 

Cheaper tools may look appealing but often come with smaller link databases or outdated indexes, which can lead you to miss high-potential link opportunities. 

Do You Need to Report Results?

Clean reporting matters when working with clients, stakeholders, or internal teams. It shows them that clarity matters. So, tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush, SmartLead, and Pitchbox offer built-in reports with visual summaries, link status updates, and campaign metrics. 

If you spend hours building reports manually, switch tools with auto-reporting features (of course, you'll make filtering with the exported data only show what matters). 

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See our link building services if you need help facilitating these link-building tools. We'll do all the legwork for you. Book your strategy call. 

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by Venchito Tampon

White Label Link Building Guide for Agencies: Process and Best Practices

I've had conversations with companies and SEO agencies directly outsourcing their white-label link building projects to developing countries like the Philippines, where a skilled team can deliver topically relevant backlinks at a lower cost.

Without building an internal outreach team, these agencies want to scale fast, meet client demands, focus on their core SEO strengths, and keep profit margins healthy. 

White label link building services allows them to do exactly that. They focus on client relationships, strategy, and reporting while their offshore team handles the heavy lifting: prospecting, outreach, content writing, and link placement. This setup works well for both sides and is becoming a common business model in the sEO industry.

In this guide, we'll cover what white label link building is, who uses it, how it works, and waht to look for in a provider. If you're an agency looking to grow without hiring, this guide is for you. 

What is White Label Link Building? 

White label link building is an offshore service where the SEO provider builds backlinks on behalf of another agency. The agency delivers the results to its client under its own brand, putting all the legwork for its link-building partner. 

Who Uses White Label Link Building Services?

White-label link building is widely used by service-based agencies that want to offer SEO without doing the actual link building work. These businesses resell link building under their own brand while a third-party provider does the research, outreach, and content placement.

Here are the most common types of users:

1. SEO Agencies

Some SEO agencies handle keyword research, technical audits, and content strategy but outsource link building to save time. Instead of fully hiring an outreach team, they work with a white-label partner to build the right types of backlinks at scale.

2. Digital Marketing Agencies

Agencies that focus on social media marketing, paid ads, or email marketing often add SEO to their mix of services. Since link building requires a separate skill set, they use white-label providers to deliver results without hiring more people and creating a new set of in-house processes to train link buliding specialists.

3. Web Design and Development Companies

Web agencies build websites and often get asked by clients how to rank better on search engines like Google (and show up on LLMs like ChatGPT and Perplexity). Instead of saying no or referring the client elsewhere, they offer link-building through a white-label provider and keep the business in-house. They operate this way to increase their client base and get more margins.

4. Freelancers and Solo Consultants

Freelancers who manage SEO for clients may not have the time to do outreach or write external content ("guest posts") to acquire backlinks for their clients. With white-label support, they can take on more clients and deliver results faster.

5. Startups and Niche Service Providers

Smaller agencies or startups that are growing quickly may not yet have full SEO capabilities, as many are focused on product or service delivery, other marketing channels, and customer service. 

White-label link building lets them offer results-driven services while focusing on client relationships and sales. It also enables another B2B type of service (offering SEO services besides their core product offerings).

Benefits of White Label Link Building for Agencies

White label link building gives agencies a clear path to grow their SEO services without increasing internal workload. It's a practical way to meet client demands, keep operating expenses low, and improve performance—all under the agency's brand. 

Below are the most important benefits of hiring a white-label link-building partner. 

Scale Without Hiring

Many agencies hit a ceiling because they lack the resources, team, and capabilities to handle high-volume link building. Hiring, training, and managing a full-time outreach and content team takes time and money, let alone taking months to fully systematize the process and quality of results.

White-label link building actually removes this barrier. Agencies can serve more clients, take on larger projects, and expand their offerings. This makes it easy to grow from 3 to 50 clients without changing internal operations. The partner handles execution, while the agency focuses on client acquisition, account management, and reporting.

Faster Project Completion

Link building involves many steps: link prospecting, backlink qualification, outreach, content creation, and outreach follow-ups. By leveraging white-label link building services, you take these steps systemized. They have outreach templates, active contact lists (relationships with publishers, bloggers, and journalists), and content teams ready to work.

You can report all lives links at the end of each month (as part of your SEO reports), avoiding delays that comes with lack of manpower and capabilities for in-house link building. 

Lower Costs and Better Margins

Building an internal team involves fixed costs: monthly salaries, software subscriptions (e.g., Ahrefs), training, and management overhead. White-label providers operate on a per-link or per-campaign basis, making the costs of outsourcing more flexible and predictable. 

Agencies can simply mark up the service and offer it to clients at a profit, increasing the overall revenue without adding extra burden to the team. 

Access to Experienced Link Building Experts

White label providers specialize in link building, many are fly-by-night companies, but there's still a handful of best white label link building agencies like SharpRocket that truly has mastered the craft of link development. 

They have rigorious processes, systems, high-level capabilities, and inside-know hows for every industry, that strengthens their core service in providing the highest quality of backlinks. 

So, agencies gain access to this type of expert-level service without spending months building even the basic skills themselves, which ensures links meet the quality standards. 

Your Branding, Your Reputation

White label means the client never sees the third-party provider, this both takes pros and cons scenario, where if the agency fails to meet the link requirements, it could negatively affect the branding of the agency and failing to meet desired expectations and results.

However, if they hire the right white label link building partner, and it delivered what they agreed upon, it significantly impacts the agency's reputation, building client trust even more, and avoids any confusion about who's doing the work—this keep the agency's brand front and center.

How It Works: The White Label Link Building Workflow

There's nothing complicated with white-label link building. If follows a clear process, where the agency manages the client, the provider manages the links. The clients sees the results, but only the agency's brand is visible. 

Here's how the process usually works, step by step:

Step 1: The Agency Signs a Client for SEO Services

The agency offers SEO services to its clients, or upsells it from another service they already render. For instance, after working on a website revamp, they found issues to solve, by optimizing better their client's website to help them gain more search traffic. 

As such, they offer a full SEO package that includes technical SEO, on-page SEO, content strategy, and link building. When a client signs up, the agency includes link building as part of the package, even if they don't handle it in-house, or if they do, they don't have the capability to scale the work.  

Step 2: The Agency Submits a Link Building Request to the Provider

The agency sends a request to the white label partner, which includes links that pass on certain link metrics (e.g. Ahrefs' Domain Rating, organic traffic (estimate), topical relevance), as well as the number of links pointing to desired target pages. 

Some providers, with SEO consultants, suggest link targets or provide recommendations as to how many backlinks to build each month based on the client's website domain authority and how fast to acquire links ("link velocity"). 

Step 3: The White Label Provider Handles Prospecting, Outreach and Content

The white-label link-building agency starts and executes the actual link building process, which includes:

• Finding relevant websites in the client's niche (link prospecting)
• Qualifying backlink sources based on set link metrics
• Reaching out to editors or site owners (email and other forms of link outreach methods.
• Pitching for either link inclusion, link request, or value-add outreach forms (i.e. content, data, visual assets, co-marketing, etc..).

White label partners share a live dashboard or spreadsheet that shows every live link each week and provides a detailed backlink reporting at the end of every month (or agreed timeline for reporting). 

Different agreements between agency and provider has unique expectations, timelines, and deliverables in their own right. However, having a good workflow will help agencies stay efficient and effective, so they can focus more on agency growth, communication, and strategy. 

Risks and How to Avoid Bad Link-Building Providers

White label link building can certainly help your agency, but only if the provider delivers top quality. Bad links can negatively affect your clients' rankings, trigger penalties, or lead to lost trust (and of course, waste of money and resources). 

Below are common risks and how to avoid them:

Spammy or Low-Quality Links

There are many fly-by-night agencies that offer cheap links, mostly placed on PBNs (private blog networks), link directories, or websites with poor content and low authority. These sites often exist only to sell backlinks and have no real audience or actual organic traffic (they're not ranking by themselves for any relevant keywords). 

Make sure you ask for real examples of live backlinks before committing to a white label link building agency. Visit the websites to see if they are active, and topically relevant. You can use tools like Ahrefs to check the sample's link hosted website, and see if they have organic traffic and decent backlink profiles. 

Irrelevant or Off-Niche Placements

Connected to what we mentioned earlier on link metrics, getting backlinks from unrelated websites weakens any SEO strategy and is only a pure waste of time. 

So, confirm if the white-label link-building service can provide backlinks that are topically relevant to your industry (either giving you actual live backlinks or case studies with industry-relevant clients). 

No Transparency in the Process

Some white-label link-building providers do not share where the links are placed, how they do outreach, or what the content looks like—all look suspicious. This lack of visibility makes it hard to measure the quality of their work or explain actual results to your clients. 

Work only with providers who offer full link reports with URLs, anchor texts, domain, relevance, organic traffic metrics, and placement context. Avoid providers who withhold key information. 

Missed Deadlines and Poor Communication

A provider who delays delivery or fails to respond to emails can hurt your workflow. Your client expects regular updates. If you don't receive links on time, your agency's credibility takes a hit.

So, start with a small test in order to evaluate responsiveness. You can ask about delivery timelines before signing any agreement. Check if they have a dedicated account manager or support channel, or directly you to talk to their agency's founder or CEO, much like with how SharpRocket operates their white label link building services. 

Duplicate Content or AI-generated Junk

Some providers obnoxiously use low-quality AI content or duplicate articles to get links placed quickly, and more often than not, these articles are rejected by editors. They don't contribute any value to the website's SEO and its ability to be recognized as helpful content. 

Ask who writes the content (if they're written by native English writers or are done in-house or completely outsourced). Review sample guest posts to check writing quality.

Best Use Cases: When White Label Link Building Makes Sense

White label link building fits where it needed the most. Here are some common scenarios where white label lin kbuilding provides strong support and practical advantages. 

During High-Growth Periods

When your agency signs multiple new clients in a short time, link building can become a bottleneck. Prospecting, outreach, and content creation all take time, resources, and capabilities; even with a solid SEO team, delivering quality links for several clients at once can overwhelm your internal resources.

Outsourcing link building makes sense if you want to handle a higher volume without missing deadlines or lowering quality.

When Launching New Services

Many agencies start with services like web design paid ads or content writing, then offer to cater more with SEO and link building. Building an in-house team for a new services takes time (than people expect it to be), and the learning curve can be steep. 

White-label link building gives you the confidence and the ability to launch an SEO offer right away (of course, with the right market fit and expertise). But for link building alone, you don't need to hire outreach specialists and writers. You get a complete execution system under your brand, allowing you to test, improve, and scale the new service faster. 

When Clients Expect Faster SEO Results

Some clients expect noticeable SEO progress in the first few months. While content and on-page work take signficant time to show results (usually 6 to 12 months), high-quality backlinks can speed up rankings and visibility (with the right technical SEO, on-page SEO and content foundation in place).

White-label providers already have systems in place—relationships with publishers, active outreach pipelines, and writing teams. They can deliver links faster, enabling you to meet client expectations and show early quick wins in your search engine optimization campaigns by tapping low hanging fruits.

When Quality Control Becomes a Priority

As your agency grows, maintaing consistent link quality becomes more difficult. Different team members may use different link building strategies and outreach methods, content may vary, and results may not align with the SEO strategy.

A strong white label SEO partner uses a tested and repeatable system, follows guidelines, uses approved anchor text mixes, and provides full-detailed reports. You need this consistency across all your client campaigns. 

When Entering a New Geographic Market

If your agency is expanding to a new country or region, you may not have local contact or publlishers to support link outreach. 

It makes sense to have a white-label link-building provider with global reach or region-specific link sources that can help you build location-relevant backlinks, especially if they already operate in that target region (e.g., UK, US, AU, or Asia-based placements).

When Competing for Highly Competitive Keywords

As obvious as it may sound, ranking for competitive keywords often requires authoritative and robust backlinks from high-authority websites. 

Generally, white-label providers have existing relationships, ongoing outreach campaigns, or a solid strategy to tap these A-tier publications that can help place your links faster on high-DR websites—helping you close authority backlink gaps quicker. 

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SharpRocket, The Philippines' Top White Label Link Building Provider

Since 2015, SharpRocket has been delivering quality link-building services to SEO agencies, eCommerce founders, and enterprise in-house SEO specialists. We've helped clients from startups to Fortune 500 companies scale their link building projects with topically relevant and authoritative links.

Need help with link building? See our link building services and schedule a strategy call. 

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by Venchito Tampon

Luxury Travel SEO: How to Attract High-Net-Worth Travelers

Unlike mainstream travel, luxury travel SEO is uniquely challenging. 

The target audience caters to a small, specific group —high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) and ultra-high-net-worth individuals (UHNWIs) with distinct search behaviors who expect highly personalized curated experiences. In other words, it requires finesse to satisfy them with content. 

To make things even more challenging, many keywords you need to rank for are contested by international giants like TripAdvisor, Expedia, Booking.com, travel agent sites, and other serious competitors. 

Topping it off, publishing generic travel content is a sure-fail to engage your audience, given the discerning tastes of HNWIs. 

We’ve worked with a few luxury travel SEO brands, and in this guide, we’ll share tips on how you can navigate challenges associated with this niche industry if you have a client of yours. 

1. Target Zero to Low Search Volume but Highly Conversion-Intent Keywords

Luxury travel-related keywords typically have low search volumes, but their profitability makes them worth pursuing. 

For instance, phrases like:

• “Private yacht charters Maldives”
• “Luxury safari lodges in Africa”
• “Exclusive ski resorts in Switzerland”

Those keywords are particular but command strong purchase intent. While it may not be a “best practice SEO” to pursue low-search-volume keywords, let alone zero-volume ones, if you know your customers are searching for them, it’s time to incorporate this into your keyword research strategy. 

For example, you can see in the above image that “private yacht charter Maldives” only has an estimated 0 to 10 search volume, but it is worth ranking given its conversion potential. A quick look at the ranking pages reveals that some pages rank as competitors' homepages, with few curated lists of private charts and product listing pages. 

If your site can create a product listing page targeting these long-tail keywords (much like what you do for an eCommerce SEO) or a roundup page, you’ll have chances of ranking for this type of keyword. 

If you’re doing client SEO, starting from a medium-to-high authority is typical when working with luxury travel SEO - as they have acquired passive links and built substantial brand share in their own rights. 

 

Given that, it’s a good thing to maximize their existing domain authority to quickly rank for long-tail keywords and gain momentum through multiple ranking for variant keywords with topic clusters and dedicated landing pages. 

2. Create Content That Resonates with the Luxury Market

Content marketing for luxury travel SEO starts with aligning the brand voice, style, and tone with every content asset you create. You can’t simply create content assets that don’t speak your brand’s language, as this will not represent your client well. 

Invest first in understanding your client's business — this will be a cornerstone for navigating the content marketing journey. 

Here are examples of content themes you could generate on your site: 

• Behind-the-scenes access to luxury destinations, such as private islands or hidden vineyards.
• Profiles of premium services, like Michelin-starred dining or bespoke spa treatments (these could also yield organic traffic if they have dedicated pages to rank for each keyphrase). 
• Tailored itineraries for unique travel preferences, such as family-friendly safaris or romantic getaways.

A few good examples are “5 Private Islands in the Caribbean You Can Rent” and “The Travellers’ Guide to Exclusive Culinary Tours in Tuscany.” 

Publishing these thematic content helps bring potential customers closer to their purchasing decisions. Balance this informational type well to create a content moat in your niche. 

Rank for “Best Luxury [X]” Lists

The pages on the best X lists are among the rankable content types. They not only assist potential customers who are still deciding what solution provider to choose but can also help reveal differentiated products/services in a certain category, helping customers make the ideal choice. 

Examples of this are​​ “best luxury hotels in Paris” and “top private safari lodges in Kenya”. 

Organically, you should be included in these “best luxury X” lists if you’re the best in a particular area of expertise. If you’re good at what you do, publishers will likely see you best fit to include in their roundups. Usually, it's easy for a niche like luxury travel to determine the best based on reviews, recognitions, and award-giving bodies. Conversely, creating your own roundups is a way to show up in those lists. 

Remember that people searching for the best luxury X lists are likely seeking unbiased, curated recommendations. Not beating your competitors is ethical and helps you build brand authority. It also makes your product/service more premium than others on the list, and it’s a matter of how well you showcase the actual value of your offering. 

Ranking the best luxury lists can help prepare your site to show up in AI search engines like Gemini and ChatGPT, as most luxury travelers may be using AI search to get quick answers. 

Enhance Copywriting for Affluent Audiences

Copywriting 101 in luxury travel SEO involves addressing customers' pain points, using aspirational language, and providing vivid descriptions. Your copy must serve your HNWI and UHNWI audience. 

One way to do that is to highlight exclusivity and prestige (e.g., “Unparalleled privacy and bespoke services designed for your ultimate comfort”). Remember that people at the highest status level want privacy. 

In addition, you can input words that evoke sensory imagery (e.g., “Experience the serenity of your private overwater villa with panoramic ocean views”). A more detailed description of what your place looks like or what makes your private charter worth their investment makes it easy for them to see the entire experience (or at least a glimpse).

3. Leverage Enterprise Link Building and Corporate Partnerships

One upside for well-known luxury brands is how easy it is to execute enterprise link building. Being prominent in the offline world makes getting attention (done wisely) easier for creative, linkable assets to attract passive backlinks. 

If you’re starting in luxury brand client SEO, use link analysis tools like Ahrefs to examine your site’s backlink profile quickly.

Analyze the pages currently getting the most inbound links and the types of pages linked to (destination pages of the client’s site). This way, you’ll know exactly what’s already working and what’s worth doubling efforts on.

For instance, given the corporate relationships, you’ll find many corporate brands organically linked to your client’s site. 

Of the many advantages that luxury companies have, one of my favorites is having strong relationships with powerful, influential, non-competing entities that have monster websites of their own. Leveraging partnerships with them will bring financial breakthroughs and synergy for content marketing and link building. Collaborating on thought leadership campaigns and product placement is a great way to maximize the value of a partnership and enjoy the SEO and branding benefits. 

Another way to capture partnership leverage is to write high-utility content pieces for luxury blogs or publications. The social proof accompanied by being a luxury brand (and its association with other entities) makes it easier for your team to pitch publishers (that others in the space don’t get easy access to). 

Recognizable Thought Leaders 

Thought leaders' advice is constantly sought and rewarded with everything from praise to financial compensation. If you run a luxury travel brand owned by a major enterprise, your company and some of its employees have a good chance of being recognized as thought leaders in your industry.

Leverage thought leadership even more by translating it into content and campaigns to get you more traffic and links. Work closely with product marketing and ask them about hot trends in your business. 

Get their thoughts on customer needs and wants. Then, you should be able to list a set of themes and topics that will drive your content and target the right people. 

Effective enterprise link builders and content developers can create whitepapers, blog posts, videos, and SlideShare presentations from collaborations between the content team, product marketing teams, product development departments, and your sales force.

Tool Creation

When it comes to linkable assets, we often think of blog posts, infographics, and videos—one of the areas that we need to remember about as a potential link magnet is good functionality. You see, people don’t go online just to find information and to interact with people via social media platforms. We also go online to find solutions to our problems. 

One of the easiest ways to provide a solution and, in return, get the right types of backlinks is by providing a tool that users can enjoy on your webpage or download and install right on their devices.

You’ll see several tools in the travel space, such as trip cost estimator, but nothing close to helping high-net-worth clients with luxury travel. 

One tool idea that you can make is an interactive tool that allows users to estimate the cost of their dream luxury vacation based on their preferences, such as destination, duration, accommodation level (5-star resorts, private villas, etc.), transportation mode (private jets, first-class flights, yachts), dining preferences (Michelin-starred restaurants, private chefs), and special experiences (hot air balloon rides, safari tours, private island access).

By doing so, you’re creating a unique tool that can earn backlinks your competitors can’t easily replicate with their own link building campaigns.

4. Build High Authority Backlinks with Digital PR

The constraint most link builders and digital PR specialists have is in the story template - what types of stories are aligned to the brand that also resonates highly with top-tier publishers and journalists?

Luxury travel brands have a natural advantage when it comes to digital PR. If you’re working with well-known brands, you must monitor every brand story your company is shelling out to keep building high-authority backlinks to your site.

Here are a few content themes that really work effectively in the digital PR space:

• Experts reveal whether you should [topic]
• The most popular movies to [topic]
• The best [topic] songs
• best/worst/tools [topic]
• [industry] expert explains how often [topic]
• why/why not you should [topic]

Let’s have quick examples. For a private jet brand, here are some ideas we can generate:

• Experts reveal whether you should charter or buy a private jet
• The most popular movies to watch while flying on a private jet
• The best travel songs to play on your private jet
• The worst myths about private jets (debunked by experts)
• Aviation expert explains how often private jets are the best option for business
• Why you should choose a private jet over first-class flights
• The most popular action movies featuring private jets
• The best private jet apps to plan your next trip
• Luxury travel expert explains how often you should fly private instead of commercial
• Why not all private jets are created equal (what you need to know before booking)
• The best luxury lifestyle songs for a private jet playlist
• Sustainability expert explains how often private jets impact the environment
• The most popular movies to inspire your private jet dreams
• Top tools to enhance your private jet experience
• Why you should rent a private jet for special events
• Experts reveal whether private jets are more eco-friendly than commercial flights
• The list goes on, but remember, it all boils down to executing the idea of pitching journalists your content or story. 

This ideation tool can help you generate insights for your digital PR campaign.

Simply plug in your domain, and it will help generate a list of creative ideas you can start working on best on what you think is relevant and best fit.

Reactive PR with Celebrities

A good majority of affluent clients in the travel niche are celebrities. While confidentiality is essential in a digital PR campaign, you can monitor and react to celebrity news through expert commentaries—we call, “reactive PR”.

Reactive PR, often called newsjacking, is a public relations strategy in which brands or businesses respond in real-time to trending news, events, or public discussions to gain media attention and engage their audience. This approach can immensely speed up the process of obtaining DR or DA90 backlinks, as most publishers are hungry for news stories and additional commentaries during this stage. 

However, reactive PR requires speed and creativity. So, you must keep up with the latest news but remain relevant to your client’s brand.

5. Create a Seamless Website UX/UI

Even the best SEO strategies will only succeed if your website’s user experience meets the expectations of luxury travelers. A poorly designed site undermines the perception of quality and exclusivity.

This is a no-brainer for the luxury travel industry. You want to invest in premium web design that reflects your brand’s luxury ethos through a clean, sophisticated layout, intuitive navigation, high-quality visuals, and interactive features like 360-degree virtual tours.

Your website should be mobile-friendly, as many affluent travelers conduct searches on mobile devices. 

6. Hyper-Local Campaigns for Easy Link Building

The local scene in link building is more advantageous in acquiring low-hanging fruits in SEO. The more local your approach to digital PR and other link building strategies, the easier and higher likelihood you’ll increase your site’s ability to get links.

Given that local publications often have less competition for stories and are more likely to cover niche angles, you can tap into different local cities depending on the locations of your target audience. 

For example, a “Top 10 Most Luxurious Airports in Europe” campaign can be pitched to local newspapers in cities that house these airports, or a “Best Luxury Cycling Routes in France” could attract interest from French regional travel sites. This approach brings more upsides if you’re a global luxury travel brand, as you can target different cities in different countries (now, having multiple angles you can make for a single story).  

You can also check out this guide on how to build backlinks in a very small niche. 

 

Luxury Demands Finesse—So Does Your SEO

You are not dealing with a typical customer, so your luxury travel SEO should reflect the exclusivity and quality of your brand. Accompanying these results are your keyword rankings and higher search conversions. 

Implementing these strategies, you will do what your brand deserves and what you hope to be known for in the travel space. 

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by Venchito Tampon

SEO Retainer Guide: À La Carte or Full-Scale Link Building?

Do you need SEO every month?

Short answer: Yes.

Long Answer: You need consistent SEO work required to adapt and sustain results. And even if you’ve maintained top search rankings for your head terms, there’s still room for growth for any type of business. 

SEO retainer is a service agreement where an agency or consultant provides ongoing SEO support and implementation for a monthly fee.

I’ve seen marketing agencies and companies realize more today than before how continuous work is necessary to sustain SEO results, given the ever-changing search landscape, surprising core and other Google algorithm updates, and new players in every industry trying to dominate Google’s SERPs. 

Of course, getting buy-in from in-house stakeholders (Head of SEO, marketing manager, and VPs of Marketing) requires arm chests and tools of persuasion, managing expectations, and in-depth expertise of your offer. 

But compared to years ago, selling and hiring agencies for monthly SEO retainers who can do the job is much simpler. 

In this guide, I won’t cover full-packaged SEO retainers, which includes technical SEO, on-page SEO audit, content asset creation, analysis, and reporting. Still, I’ll go deep into one essential SEO retainer facet: link building retainers. 

The Value of Link Building Retainers

You’ve seen this everywhere—link building agencies selling one-time-off packages, a few to a couple of links in a single project, with guarantees of quick results. In a nutshell, it’s like link building - selling pancakes.

While it’s true that there are certain times when link building is needed or when having few links to certain pages boosts their individual rankings, treating link building like quick magic for your website is not a good thing.

For the most part, competitive brands still engage in long-term link building, as they see it not just as another SEO activity but as part of a robust branding campaign.

Viewing link building from a sustainable perspective keeps your focus on creating a flywheel effect on your search traffic as you see incremental (and even exponential) impact on one of your pages and on the total link equity and brand strength of your website. 

À La Carte vs. Full Link Building Retainers: What’s Typically Included?

If you’re looking to hire a link building agency or consultant, you’ll probably choose between these two types of link building retainers: à la carte and full link-building retainer.

À La Carte Link Building Services

This type of monthly retainer allows clients to purchase specific link building services or packages at the pace of their needs. It’s usually a one-time or occasional purchase, ideal for businesses with very limited budgets. 

If you’re getting à la carte link building service, you should have a particular link quantity and quality in mind—the number of links and predefined metrics for links (e.g., Ahrefs DR30+, Majestic Trust Flow 25..), as well as the type of links, whether it’s a guest post, niche edits, local citations, or a few foundational links.

In this case, the client specifies the pages and target keywords the links should support. The link building agency must provide all this information, and at the end of the timeframe agreed to deliver, it would show up on reports, including the exact link placement for verification.

A very straightforward way to purchase a service. You’ll have full control over the preferences of both the quantity and quality of links you want to build. 

However, the downside of an à la carte link building service is the lack of ongoing strategy and optimization. As you’ll only get plain deliverables of links, you can’t expect the link building agency you’re partnering with to provide you with the next optimization efforts. In other words, you only get the execution part, not the strategy service. 

This requires you to fully strategize the more granular details of your link building campaign, aligning it with your entire SEO campaign before hiring an à la carte link building agency. 

I won’t recommend this type of service if you don’t have a solid running SEO team and an SEO strategy at the start. You may be building tons of links, but if they don’t align and integrate well with your top-eye-view SEO strategy, they will only make a minimal impact. 

Another drawback of getting à la carte link building services is the minimal support you can expect from an agency or consultant. It’s a piece-by-piece type of work where service providers hand over a list of live links, and that’s pretty much what you can expect from them.

Full Link Building Retainers

Full-scale link building retainers involve comprehensive strategy development and execution to manage the entire link acquisition process.

If you’ve been doing link building, you know that it involves link strategy development, link research (link prospecting), link qualification and approval, content creation, and outreach campaign development —all of which are critical to the success of the backlink campaign. 

Partnering with full link building retainers isn’t cheap. After all, the immense value you’ll get is hands-off tasks from strategy to execution, which require hours of time and mind work to execute correctly. 

This type of link building retainer is more appealing than à la carte retainers, as it includes a free consultation in addition to the link building package itself. 

For example, SharpRocket is a full-scale link building retainer covering everything from strategy development to relationship management. In detail, we start with competitor backlink analysis and link gap analysis to see how many quality links we have to build to dominate the top 3 spots for your target keywords (assuming we already have target pages to build links to).

Then, we determine the appropriate link types for the client’s business. If it’s a local client, we focus on local links and citations. If it’s a B2B SaaS, we focus on tech and other vertically related links, publishing, and news sites. 

Other agencies build generic, one-size-fits-all links to all their clients - which diminishes the link value. Remember that certain link types have been working effectively for the ranking sites. You just need to figure out what those are and how to incorporate them into your link building campaign. 

You can check out our link building services to learn more about how full-scale link building services work. 

The best thing about hiring full-scale link building retainers is the trust you can build upon the agency’s expertise and processes. From their years (even decades) of SEO experience, they’ve dealt with different industries and types of clients, and they could identify similar patterns that could work for your website - customizing the entire strategy and execution so you can gain top-of-the-bar results.  

Hiring a full-scale link building agency is beneficial from both financial and relationship perspectives for big agencies and enterprise link building campaigns. Given that it takes 6 or 12 months to onboard a new service provider, having someone continue doing the link building work could adjust to the agile movements of the SEO campaign. 

How to Choose the Right SEO (Link Building) Retainer

1. Evaluate Their Backlink Profile 

It’s easy for an agency to say they’re building high-quality backlinks, but unless you see what kind of quality they’re talking about, you shouldn’t rely on their lip service. 

One way to examine this even before inquiring about their services is to look at their agency’s site backlink profile. 

If you have link analysis tools like Ahrefs, simply plug in their agency website and have a quick assessment of their current link profile. See what types of backlinks they’re building. Are the links mostly organic or paid? Do they build editorial or contextual backlinks? From which industry do they focus on link acquisition? Is it relevant to the market?

Obviously, this isn’t 100% perfect criteria for determining whether they’re the right fit. But if they know how to grow their own SEO agency by building more quality links to their agency website, it definitely attests to how well they can take care of you as their prospective client - for the least part. 

2. Ask For Samples of Links and Social Proofs

I’ve observed this a common request from prospective clients in our UK link-building agency—they usually request samples of links and clients we’ve worked with (ones we can disclose to the public).

The reason is plain simple. If they can provide you with the exact link placements they acquired for a specific client, you could tangibly assess their link types and quality. And it should be based on either topical relevance, link metrics (e.g., Ahrefs DR30+), trust, and thematic flow. 

It would be a plus, of course, if they could show you case studies from clients within your industry, as the types of links they would typically tackle would be similar to yours. 

When it comes to social proof, be careful. Some case studies of ther agencies are copy-cat or plain screenshots of organic traffic reports using SEO tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush. They don’t mind getting other agencies’ social proof. 

3. Understand How They Measure Results

Like any other SEO campaign (and any business initiative), you should measure results. Evaluating progress (or regress) helps marketers improve their work through adjustments.

When you meet with your prospective SEO link building retainer, confirm they could align their work with your SEO and business objectives. Ask, what types of metrics do they look at? Will they provide performance reports? 

These questions help you understand their exact deliverables and approach to link building. If it’s all about links to rankings without consideration of how your brand will be perceived in the market, think through it.

4. Ask Who Will Handle Your Account

It’s a nightmare for companies to see SEO agencies today only working directly with account managers. That’s not to say it’s not a good communication model and way of collaboration for both parties.

However, if you can speak and work directly with both an account manager and SEO strategies or are fortunate enough to even talk to the CEO who does the strategy work, who will relay the progress of your campaign, you will have more confidence and trust in the results you can expect from them. 

5. Relay Confidentiality (If Applicable)

If you work for big corporations with strict branding and legal requirements, remember to tell your partnered link building agency about these. They should be aware of any confidentiality concerns before the link building campaign even starts.

This way, you avoid running issues in sharing data that shouldn’t be disclosed as the campaign runs. 

Make The Right Choice For SEO (Link Building) Retainers

These tips will increase your chances of partnering with the correct link building agency or consultant for monthly link building retainers. As every investment needs to see ROI, deciding on your non-negotiables is critical when picking the right outsourcing firm for your business. 

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by Venchito Tampon

SEO for the Google Maps Pack: Rank Better Locally

The Google Maps Pack occupies prime real estate on search results pages. It gets more clicks than your site will receive from ranking top spots for local organic search listings, making it an imperative area of local search optimization that marketers must take advantage of.

Even if you rank #1 for organic search listings, it’s still an excellent addition to your arsenal to dominate Google Maps Pack.

I’ve used it to rank one of my local businesses—a coffee shop in Bulacan and our franchise in Taguig—and have been driving nearby customers, making it one of the important channels to drive more physical visits to our stores. 

 

Here are some tips for leveraging SEO for the Google Maps Pack. 

1. Claim Your Google Business Profile (GBP)

If your brand is famous in the industry and many customers visit your location, you may have a Google Business Profile visible on a search. You just need to claim it as its rightful owner.

Otherwise, if the store hasn’t opened yet, like in our case, weeks before our store opening, we already created our Google Business Profile for our upcoming branch. 

Simply go to the Google Business Profile and follow the verification process. They usually will send you a code by mail or phone. Once verified, you can edit your Google Business Profile and optimize it for local searches. 

Once you have claimed your Google Business Profile, fill out all the necessary details, including your Business Name, Address, and Phone Number. Spend as much time as necessary adding other important details in every information field. 

The goal here is to provide as much context about your business as possible for Google to recognize it and to provide business information for your potential visitors. 

2. Ask for Customer Reviews

Getting legitimate customer reviews helps Google recognize the authenticity of your brand and gives potential customers a glimpse of your business’s customer experience.

Whether the reviews are positive or negative, what matters most are actual reviews from your customers. 

Here’s how to encourage customers to review your GBP:

Politely ask customers for reviews after a sale or service. Train your front liners (customer service or sales team) to request a GBP review from every satisfied customer. It doesn’t hurt to ask. 

Send follow-up emails or texts with a direct link to your GBP review page. This could be through Viber or any other digital channel. 

Another effective way to get reviews is incentivizing customers to review your product or service. For instance, during my honeymoon with my wife, we had a relaxing spa in Bangkok, Thailand. After the spa service, we were asked to scan a QR code, incentivizing us for the review - getting 50% off for the next visit. 

You can also apply the same strategy to acquire new reviews for your GBP. Display signs in your physical location, encouraging people to give feedback. 

Pro Tip: Respond to every review, whether positive or negative. This shows engagement and increases trust signals with future customers, showing you value every customer experience.

3. Choose the Primary Category That Aligns With What Customers Search

Google allows you to select a primary category and up to 9 secondary categories. Choosing the right primary category will enable you to appear first on Google Map Packs for specific search queries. 

For instance, if you own a Bakery, choose “Bakery” over “Restaurant.” Match your primary category to your business’s core offerings.

Next, the second categories allow you to target additional search queries. For example, in the given bakery example, you could add “Catering” or “Dessert shop” as secondary categories to broaden your reach, enabling you to dominate Google Map Packs for any of those search queries. 

4. Achieve NAP Consistency

NAP consistency refers to having the same Name, Address, and Phone Number across all online platforms and websites. Getting this right helps build your business's legitimacy in the eyes of Google. 

By using tools like BrightLocal, you can automate monitoring of NAP across local citations and directories, helping you edit those profiles to match your business's exact NAP. 

5. Get Local Citations

Part of doing link building for local sites is getting as many local citations as possible for your website. Create business profiles on Yellow Pages, LinkedIn, Yelp, and local business directories, as well as social media profiles such as Meta Page and LinkedIn Page. 

Make sure NAP is also consistent across these local profiles. 

You can use Whitespark to find more citation opportunities and manage the consistency of NAP details across these platforms. 

6. Publish Localized Content

Increase the frequency and quality of localized content you publish on your site. Targeting localized keywords (e.g., "coffee shop in Bulacan") can help you dominate in more localized rankings. 

Part of localized publishing is the ability to use local language and references that resonate well with your audience. So, for instance, if you want to write an article about “Top Coffee Shops in Manila,” you must include the specific places and addresses of these coffee stores while giving people exact directions.

If you ever visit the place, you may also recommend your favorite beverages. Adding personal insights and experiences could increase user engagement and enhance the helpfulness of your content. 

7. Set Driving Locations to Your Business Address

Set driving directions to your business on Google Maps to make it easy for customers to find you. This is an underrated technique for climbing rankings on Google Map Packs.

As your potential customers use the directions on Google Maps, it generates positive signals for your GBP listing and improves more of its visibility.

 

How to promote driving directions:

• Share your location links on social media. Include it when you’re writing captions to entice your followers to use Google Maps when finding directions to your store. 
• Include your Google Maps and Waze links in email campaigns.
• Add “Find Us on Google Maps” to your website. Make it visible on the homepage, footer, or header. 

8. Get More Engagements With Photos

Legitimate businesses have actual photos of their physical store, of their customers, and of their customer experience.

Upload images of your store, products, and team regularly to your Google Business Profile. You can also use geotagged photos to improve location relevance. 

Tip: Ask your front-line staff to encourage customers to upload photos and reviews to your profile after visiting your business.

9. Infuse Attributes: Highlight Your Business’s Key Details

Attributes include features like wheelchair accessibility, vegetarian options, kid-friendly environments, and outdoor seating. These help your customers make the purchase decision, as they have nuances and preferences before visiting a store. For example, some customers would want to know if they can bring their pets to the store (so keyphrases like “pet friendly coffee shop” would be more likely their search keywords). 

Navigate to the “Info” section in your GBP and select applicable attributes. Highlighting attributes not only improves your profile’s completeness but also appeals to niche audiences with a variety of preferences.

10. Upload New Offers to Your GBP

Regularly updating your Google Business Profile with offers and promotions keeps it dynamic and engaging. 

For instance, we upload limited-time discounts, seasonal sales, and new product launches to our Google Business Profile at Hills & Valleys Cafe.

It is suitable for local rankings and keeps our existing customers updated with our latest store campaigns, which would keep them visiting more often. 

Be Intentional in Ranking Your Google Maps Pack 

Maintaining a Google Business Profile may be an underrated strategy for some, but if taken seriously, it could drive more search visibility and foot traffic to your stores.

As more people use Google to search for nearby stores for their daily needs, you’ll likely attract new customers organically if you rank for Google Maps Pack, without spending a single dime on advertising. 

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by Venchito Tampon

6 Low-Hanging Fruit SEO Tactics: A Practical Guide to Quick Wins

SEO is a dog-eat-dog mentality, where one competitor can smash rankings in Google’s SERPs within weeks of implementation. 

Building momentum requires seeing quick wins from investing your resources into the right opportunities. It builds your SEO confidence and gets more acceptance from stakeholders. 

That’s where low hanging fruit SEO comes in. 

Low-hanging fruits in SEO represent opportunities that require minimal effort but deliver significant impact. 

Getting quick wins for your client's SEO is a major part of the strategy to get more buy-in for your client’s SEO investment and sustainably deliver results by managing expectations early on.

You can improve search rankings, traffic, and overall website performance by identifying and acting on these low-hanging fruit SEO opportunities. 

In this guide, I’ll give 6 actionable low-hanging SEO fruits to solidify your first quick wins. 

1. Optimize for Low-Hanging Keywords

You can significantly impact search traffic by moving a page ranking in position 6 to the top 3 spots. Instead of waiting for a new page to be visible on search, it’s always easier to move a page that’s been winning already. 

Use tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush to find keywords where your pages rank below 5th position - position 6 to 20. By moving these pages to climb their SERP rankings, you’ll expect to see an increase in search traffic. 

For instance, if your collection page ranks in position 15 for "violin for beginners”, optimizing it with richer content and better on-page SEO can push it to the top 3. 

2. Update Existing Content to Ensure Relevance 

Refreshing outdated content is another low-hanging fruit tactic with high returns. 

We experience SERP volatility more today than in previous years, with new SERP features being added to the mix and rankings pages shuffled to match user intent—so it’s a must to keep existing content updated to meet users’ needs. 

Go through each existing piece of content. Prioritize the ones that are performing but have had declining traffic in the past six months. 

When updating each piece of content, ask, "Is the information on this page still aligned with my target readers' current interests, challenges, and needs, and does it offer fresh, actionable insights to keep them engaged?"

Content updates require the author's expertise to see clearly which sections of the page need a revamp and what particular sections or new sets of questions to answer to add new information to the industry's body of knowledge. 

For instance, we published “how to start a coffee shop in the Philippines” a year ago, and I was looking for new sections to add or revise based on my observations in the industry. These are samples of our new draft sections:

• How to hire and train baristas—with sections to localize job applications and interviews to hire staff who live near the stores (an advantage point given the state of traffic in the Philippines).
• How to generate new ideas for menu selections and beverages—To keep up with consumers' changing demands and tastes, a new coffee shop owner must know how to offer a new product selection that best correlates to the current taste of their target customers.
• How to destress and prevent burnout for cafe owners—Cafe owners are concerned about getting burned out as they run their day-to-day operations. So, it’s important to add this section to help them maintain their mental health and sustainably operate their business. 

These new sections didn’t come from ChatGPT answers or regurgitated content from other coffee blogs. They are entirely based on my experience as a cafe business owner.

When updating content assets, you can interview experts and industry thought leaders for new strategies, insights, and research data to solidify the quality and ensure the relevance of your content piece (e.g. see what Ahrefs did with their list of link building strategies - they get fresh insights from well-known SEO practitioners).

 

3. Turn Unlinked Mentions into Links 

Unlinked brand mentions are mentions of your business or products on external sites that don’t link to your site. The bigger the site and the more products and content it churns out, the more unlinked brand mentions you can find. 

We’ve been using BrandMentions and Ahrefs’ Alerts to find branded mentions and get monthly alerts quickly. While, of course, there are other tools for this functionality, the best thing about these two tools is that they have a wider search database you can trust for more branded mentions. 

A couple of branded mentions you should convert into links:

• Editorial content that mentions your brand, product, or content 
• Press page and coverage of your expertise and thought leadership - mentioning names of authors, leaders, and personalities in your organization (best if you can publish author pages before you send emails so publishers can simply link to the author page).
• Mention on links/resource pages or “where to buy pages” with no embedded links. 

Do link outreach to site owners or publishers of pages that mention your site and ask them for backlinks. This link building strategy has a higher conversion rate than cold link request outreach campaigns. 

4. Don’t Neglect Long Tail Keywords 

The advice to go after high-volume, commercial keywords requires an understanding of the current context of the SEO campaign. 

If you have a site with significantly higher domain authority, you can publish new relevant content and expect it to appear on Google’s SERPs quickly. 

However, you can’t expect a relatively new site to dominate head terms very early on with no existing rankings from its other pages. 

To get early quick wins, target long tail keywords (keywords with four or more words) that have longer search strings than head terms but are easier to rank with content optimized with on-page SEO fundamentals. 

I find two ways helpful in looking for long-tail keywords that are easier to rank, assuming you’ve got content that satisfies user needs.

1. Use Ahrefs to find long tail keywords from a head term or topic you’re eyeing to rank for with your website. 

 

2. Find new long-tail keywords your pages can rank for. 

Go to your top pages and see which content captures rankings for long-tail keywords sitting below page 1.

With a few optimizations, such as adding new sections to rank for these long-tail keywords, your content would likely increase its search traffic. 

5. Publish More MOFU and TOFU Content

You don’t get sustainable rankings by expecting all product pages to rank for their commercial keywords. 

One holistic content strategy is to publish informational content for keywords that lead people to their purchasing decisions. 

With 15% of total searchers being new, content publishing offers an ocean of opportunities. 

Start creating content to tackle comparative keywords such as “vs” or “best” phrases, which often have low competition but high traffic opportunities. 

For instance, creating a blog post titled "Best Winter Jackets vs. Coats: What’s Right for You?" targets users seeking guidance while naturally incorporating relevant keywords. 

Build content that answers common user questions, showcases expertise, and drives product or service page traffic. Linking these posts to collection and product pages strengthens the structure of your website and distributes link equity across pages. 

Whenever you publish new content, ensure it links to related existing pages. This helps users navigate your site and signals search engines about the relationships between pages.

6. Collaborate with Active Authors 

One overlooked strategy in content publishing and link building is expert collaboration. 

Creating helpful content that satisfies users with new information takes a lot of work on the back end (research) and front-end publishing (editing). By getting new insights from other authors who are also practitioners in their industries, you solidify the credibility of your content piece, which increases its acceptance by your target readers. 

If you don’t have any authors in mind, start reaching out to them by first populating a list of active authors in your space. You can use Ahrefs to find these active authors. 

 

Another way is to publish “accepting guest post” or “become a contributor” pages to attract publishers to contact you for collaboration.

Obviously, not everyone is a good candidate, but getting one or two who surely know what they’re talking about is worthwhile for a content collaboration. 

Fire Bullets, Then Cannonballs

SEO, in offense, must be a combination of firing bullets and cannonballs. While aiming for greater impact with high-intensive efforts, you are shooting for results with bullets—low-hanging fruits SEO. This enables you to build a solid momentum of an SEO campaign.

While everyone waits for significant results from their high-intensity work, you get consistent, quick wins with your bullets. There are small things that you can add to your SEO arsenal, giving you a head-start advantage in your competition. 

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by Venchito Tampon