Linking for multiple clients
-
We own a small web design company that both creates the sites and then does the seo marketing for them once they are created. The business has grown to have over 100 customers. However, as we sell more sites we find our SEO team is somewhat short staffed. So far, the area that suffers the most is the link building aspect of SEO.
The sites we build are for dentists and usually only contain 10 to 20 pages. Enough to list the services they offer and where they are located. Here is my question:
We need to get the most effective links possible for over 100 sites with just a couple of employees. What would be the most effective links to try for. We cant chase down every stray link for our doctors. And, we don't have time to do in-depth research for each client each month as we are already pushing ourselves to the limit. In time, we will have more employees to help share the SEO load. But for now, where should we be spending our time most effectively? We can usually only budget one or two hours per client each month for linking.
Thanks for any advice you can offer.
-
Have you considered hiring a contractor? If you're in a position where you can't afford to hire more staff but can afford to spend a bit, I would suggest hiring a freelancer to increase the number of hours spent monthly.
If you can't do this, you are really limited to Daniels suggestions (minus the blog comments bit) and possibly some generic press release and article work - keep it clean and unspammy.
-
Thanks for the input. We have an employee that only does Google places right now. They contact our doctors and make sure the PINs are done correctly, as well as uploading pictures and video.
I will be sure that we are getting the most out of directories as we can. As for the guest commenting on other blogs, we train the doctors to do that. However, most don't have time. It is difficult for us to find blogs all over the country for different dentists and put a link on each one. I will give it a shot though. Thanks for all the feedback, and if anyone else has a thought I would be happy to hear their ideas.
-
Right that's what I'm concerned about. Needing to be extremely careful in how the work is done. I pity the person having to be responsible for that if they're not aware of these issues. That's all I was trying to get across.
-
Oh I see what you mean, like getting links on one blog to all 100 sites? I don't know if that is how I would go about it. I would spend 2 hours browsing around different blogs and leaving comments for one guy, then the next 2 hours doing it for the next guy, etc. I don't know that I would repeat a lot of blogs or posts. It would be pretty tedious but if you only have 2 hours a month and won't do Google Places work, then it beats writing a single article or submitting to spammy free directories or making hundreds of bookmarks.
-
Agreed Daniel. I'm just looking at the scale of it. 100 sites. All from the same source. The amount of time involved to do that just doesn't seem to be a wise use of productivity to me at that scale.
-
Well I would hope no one would smell a rat and report spam because I would hope they would leave real comments as real people with real names. I agree, blog comments are pretty insignificant, but in bulk they are quite helpful for local non-competitive phrases. You just have to do it right, which a lot of people can't seem to do for some reason.
-
I have to agree with Daniel's first suggestion, and at the same time, caution that the 2nd suggestion could rapidly backfire because just one link from one blog is very insignificant in the long run. Multiply that by multiple doctors - how long do you think you'd be able to get away with the blog comment path before someone smelled a rat and reported it as spam? In the blink of an eye.
Local citations, local directories, and local listings and Yelp, CitySearch and the rest. Coupled with high quality unique content on each site where you seed location info into the on-site optimization.
-
If all you have is two hours per client then there are two options you could be doing:
1. The most effective thing you could do would be to build citations and listings in local directories. These links will help immensely because they will also push up the dentists site in Google Places as well.
2. If you aren't concerned with Google Places, then in only an hour or two each month I would comment on as many dental/health related blogs as you can with a real name and not spammy comment. This is the fastest way to create a halfway decent link.
Good luck!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is there an extra SEO benefit for linking to pages that link to you?
Currently working on a link-building strategy and have gotten a few mentions. Just curious if there is any SEO benefits of linking back to the pages my site was mentioned and linked on? Would love to hear your thoughts, thanks!
Link Building | | Derrald0 -
Link Auditing
Anyone have any useful ways to link audit? I'm stuck picking up the slack from a previous worker who decided buying links was a great idea for our clients.
Link Building | | CGR-Creative0 -
RSS feed links
Is this an RSS feed link? How was this page generated? http://blog.moregoodfoundation.org/category/technology/feed What causes it to show up as a backlink in open site explorer? And how would you go about removing these links? Lots of questions there 🙂 Thank you.
Link Building | | ThridHour0 -
Linking Etiquette
Hi Moz Community, Long time lurker, first time poster. I work for a real estate firm and have recently done some link analysis. I'm noticing that my company is not getting linked to as frequently as we should be. Several news outlets (including NYT & Bloomberg) have cited our reports, interviews with employees and other original content belonging to my company without linking back to our site (although they do mention us).Some publications are even linking back to our competitors for similar content but not ours. Is it appropriate to reach out and ask for links from these outlets after they've been published? Does anybody have tips on making others aware we want links shared for future articles? Thanks in advance!
Link Building | | rlaughlin0 -
Link quality
Hi, Having read dozens of your blogs and found them highly informative, i have to ask a question. I am kicking oout our SEO company and have taken over the SEO myself with some excellent results. Our SEO providers tell me that links from any site (irrelevent of their DA) are good, providing they are comming from a relevant source. We are in the security industry and according to MOZ, we have a DA of 52. If i can get a link to our site from another company in our industry but they have a DA of 10, is this really beneficial for me? Info i have read in Moz blogs suggest it is n ot a good idea. Please help. many thanks Daddy Smurf
Link Building | | DaddySmurf0 -
Link building
I keep sending personal emails to website asking for a link form them but every one says no how do other website get so many links to there website whats the best software to use
Link Building | | homesandindustrial0 -
Links below the snippet
Hello, Does anybody know how can i obtain links under the snippet (see the example in the image attached) ? Thank you in advance! Cosmin zXhsG
Link Building | | cosmin_bicoiu0 -
Link Placement and Trust
Hey all I am looking at a new SEO campaign and am just starting to have a look at the competition and their links. This is a client in the website design industry who operates in a given city in the UK. Taking a quick look, the competition seems well established and there is plenty of companies ranking on the first page for all of the key terms. When I start to dig a little deeper though it gets a little more interesting and this maybe relatively unique to this industry but I think it also applies to spam links and any company that supplies white label website based services. Basically, the competition have lots of links. I have reviewed the top 10 competing sites across various terms and there is no shortage of links and lots of anchor text variations. Here is the stats from open site explorer for the one site that commonly comes up again and again. Page Level 61 - Page Authority 6.78 - mozRank 6.13 - mozTrust 30,144 - Total Links 30,064 - External Followed Links 33 - Internal Followed Links 325 - Linking Root Domains Domain Level 53 - Domain Authority 5.13 - Domain mozRank 5.10 - Domain mozTrust 47,969 - Total Links 44,788 - External Followed Links So, this gives us lots of nice metrics and the new deep analysis tool in keyword research easily allows us to get some more data on what exactly is driving the ranking of this site and the others who all rank in a similar way. Link Quality This is where it gets a bit more interesting and this applies to all the sites in the first ten results for the various keywords we are interested in (general keywords for the homepage at this stage). The links are primarily domain wide and in the footer. They are things like: website designed by x
Link Building | | Marcus_Miller
web design by x
website design
website design in <area name="">
<area name=""> website design
(you get the picture) Quality vs Quantity So, whilst the competitors have lots of links, from a reasonable number of sites, they are pretty much all site wide footer links. This is fairly clear when we look at total links 30,000 from only 300 sites. My thinking here is that the quality of these links is not that great: poorly positioned on the page domain wide narrow anchor text and in some cases no 'click to visit' type links Content These sites are pretty much all dull as hell. Service pages, clients, jobs done, maybe a case study but really, nothing I would really class as interesting (hence only links from their clients sites hey). So, my question is Has anyone built a campaign with quality vs quantity? Do you have any tips, experience or feedback? Our strategy will be built around great content, promotion of that content and much more (not explored that) but at the foundation it will be a content and promotion strategy. Really, if I break it down, I am looking at the above as 300 links, from the footers of various sites. If we were to get 300 links from quality sources and then bulk it out with some similar footer style links from the clients clients (they are not 100% keen on this so we may not go that route yet) then... these established big boys really should not be too difficult to topple in my mind given enough time, content and effort. What are your thoughts people? Anyone conducted a quality vs quantity campaign like this? Any feedback? Cheers
Marcus P.S. SEOMoz - is there any chance that a link trust or quality metric could be built into the tools at some point in the future as sheer volume, is not always the best indicator and as times goes on I would imagine that to be even more true.0