How To Increase Your Website Traffic With Link Building

Atiba de Souza: Yo, let's talk backlinks and link-building strategies. I know, it's a huge topic in the SEO world, and we're going to dive in today and I'm going to share with you a site that I love that helps me and my agency a ton, but we're going to talk a little bit too about some strategy today with link-building.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to Traffic Keys. I am your host, Atiba. And if you're a business owner and you're looking to drive more eyeballs organically to your website, you're in the right place. I've been doing this for over 15 years, guys. And I'm here to teach you everything that I've learned in all of that time, helping so many different clients for absolutely free here on Traffic Keys.

And today we're going to dive into link-building. But first let's consider where does link-building fit in the entire scheme of everything. When we're talking about driving traffic, where does link-building fit? Now, I've got three keys, three keys to your traffic. So I recall Traffic Keys, three keys to traffic.

First, you must know your audience. The second, is your content strategy. And then the third is SEO, search engine optimization. Now within the realm of SEO, there's actually three different types of SEO. There's On-page SEO. There's Technical SEO. And then there is Off-page SEO and a huge part of that Off-page SEO, is all about link-building. And so that's what we're diving into today. We're looking at that section of your SEO that makes up your entire framework of driving traffic to your website. Now it's important to understand that there are two ways to look at links, two ways to look at links. And what we're talking about is backlinks as they're called, right?

So a backlink is when someone else's website links to your website. When someone else's website links to your website, that's a backlink. Right. That's a backlink. So, there are two ways to look at this, guys. Two ways. The first way is you can build backlinks that actually drive traffic to your website directly because there are enough people going to that webpage on that website, where your link is, but they're going to find it, they're going to click on it and they're going to come to your website. Great example of that would be like yellowpages.com for example. Okay. People go to yellowpages.com to find other places where they can go to get whatever service they're looking for. Right. Other places to go or other types of content that will be great.

There will be like review content. If someone wrote a review of you or a comparison between your company and somebody else's company. I link on there would drive traffic directly to your website as well. So that's one reason to build backlinks. Right. Is if you're trying to drive traffic from that link to your website.

Now, there's another reason. And this is the one that most people focus on and that is Google runs a bit of a popularity contest. You remember when you were in school and you had to vote for class president? Right. Very often. It wasn't about what their platform was and all the things that they said that they were going to do.

It was a popularity contest. Who was the most popular won the election. Well, Google is somewhat similar to that. That a part of their ranking system is a popularity contest that says, "Hey, who in the world is talking about you? Who in the world has a link to your website on their website. And how important is that person in the entire world of that website, in this case, in the entire world? And how relevant is their website and their content to what you're talking about?"

So, for example, let's say you own a local auto body shop and Car and Driver wrote an article about body shops in your area and they listed your website and your company in that article. Well, as far as Google is concerned, that's pretty darn impressive because Car and Driver is a big name in the auto industry.

And if they put a link on their website, endorsing your auto company. Then that says that Car and Driver endorses you and Google then says, "Ah, you must know something about this topic." And so, the second reason to build links is because you've got to win this popularity contest with Google, because it is a ranking factor that determines how high up you get in the Google search order.

Right? You want to get to page one, you want to get to the top of page one. It's very difficult to do it without links from other sites, excuse me— that are related to you. Now, let's consider for a moment, let's say it was Alaska.com. Okay. And it talks all about living in the frozen north and it's the most authoritative site on living in the frozen north— I don't know if this site exists and if it does, and that's what it talks about, great. If it, doesn't sorry, alaska.com. Eitherway, let's say that that's what they were. And they wrote an article and included a link to your auto body shop in Tampa, Florida. Well, they're not really an authority on auto— in anything, according to Google and so the fact that they may have a website that's really reputable and they're talking about you. Yeah. Google's going to notice that, but they're also going to say, "But why are they talking about you? Because they don't know anything about your industry." So, that link is not going to be as valuable as some others, like say, a car and driver link. Does that kinda make sense?

I hope it does to you. Okay. So, that's a bit of the backstory. Now let's get into the asking and answering this question. So how the heck do I do this? How the heck do I do this? And what's the strategy? The number one, what I'll say to you is link-building is a multi-tiered strategy. There is no one sure fire bullet.

There is no silver bullet on how to build links. It does not exist. Okay, because the reality is even two companies in the same industry, in the same area would need to use different link-building strategies, but it may be very similar, but they're also going to need to be tweaked because it also depends on their website, the content, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And definitely when you go cross industry, different industries, you need to build links differently. Okay. Link-building is a popularity contest. And so, you have to become more popular than your competition. That's the goal. And that's why every website has to have its own strategy because the strategy is about what you want to accomplish as it relates to your competition in link-building. What you want to accomplish as it relates to your competition in link-building.

So that also means you need to have a really, really good understanding of who your competition is and what they've already done. What they've already done. Okay. If you don't know how to do this, there are tons of tools that can help you with this. I'm going to list some of them down below. One of them that I use.

One of my favorite tools is SEMrush. It will help you do competitive analysis. Okay. But it gives you competitive analysis for your entire domain. Alright. But what you're going to want to do is get even more granular. At some point and hopefully soon, because this is where the real fun begins in terms of raising your rankings in Google.

You want to do competitor analysis on a page by page basis. So you want to compare your article that you wrote on topic A, to your competitors article on topic B, not on your entire website to their entire website. It's on a page by page basis because Google ranks webpages. Not websites, they rank individual pages and they compete against other individual pages.

The tool that I use to do that as Surfer SEO. Surfer SEO, and I'll put a link for that down below, they have a fantastic audit tool where you can take the article that you wrote and they will audit it against your competition that's on page one for you and tell you what you need to do. But that's not why we're here.

We're here to learn about building links, but you can find Surfer SEO and SEMrush in the description down below, links to both of them. But here's what I want to share with you today. Okay. My friends, over at Fat Joe. Now, Fat Joe does a lot. Now, but when they started, they were all about link-building.

They were all about link outreach. Okay. And that was their thing. And they've grown to do a lot more than that over the years, but at the core of it all, it's all about helping you build your link profile. Build your link profile. And I told you that when you're considering link-building, you need a strategy.

And that strategy talks about building out your profile. If you're a local business, then you need local citations. Fat Joe can help you with that. If you are even if you are local or regional or national, you need to look at what else do I need in my link profile and consider the different tiers of your link profile that you need to build and Fat Joe can help you with all of that. Now, they don't do strategy. So you still have to do the strategy and understand they're just a service to do execution. That's what they help you with. They help you with executing your strategy. So, I'm going to jump in here. Okay. And these are the different services here, and we're just going to go through a couple of them right now.

And you see under link-building, they have all of these different options for helping you build links. All of these different options here. And this gets into, again, when I'm started talking about your profile. So in your profile, you should have some Blogger Outreach links, you should have Niche Edits, you should have infographics. You should be considering your Content Syndication. Okay. A multilingual outreach may not be appropriate for everyone, but if it's appropriate for you, then yeah. You want to consider that as well. And they even do media placements for you. Big art media placements as well. Okay. So all of these are different levels of your link profile that you need to be considering.

Okay. You need to have some in everything. Maybe not multi-lingual if you don't serve multi-lingual markets, but in all the rest of them, you need to have a plan for each area. So now, I'm going to jump into Blogger Outreach, and we're going to talk about what this is here for a moment. So, according to Google's terms of service, in order to be listed in Google, you cannot purchase links.

If you purchase backlinks to your website, according to Google's terms of service, Google has the right to ban your website from their surface. You don't want that. No one wants that, but Google also says you need links in order to win the popularity contest, well, how are you going to get them? Well, you can get them organically.

And sometimes, or the organic means that people found your content and they liked your content. And then they linked to your content. Well, how are they going to find your content if it's not going to show up in search? Yeah. That's when we start getting into some outreach stuff now. So you may be doing outreach where you're sending out your content to a bunch of people and hoping that somebody likes it and we'll link to it.

That's tedious. And time-consuming. It is, it is. Right. But what Fat Joe does for you as they do the Blogger Outreach for you. So they have an entire network of thousands of bloggers in thousands of industries that talk about thousands of topics. And when you have some content that you want to promote, write an article you wrote, a product, whatever it may be.

What Fat Joe will do is they'll go into their network of bloggers and find someone who has a blog that talks about your topic. Remember, we talked about relevance earlier, right? That it was more relevant to be on Car and Driver than Alaska.com. Same thing here. They're going to go out and find bloggers who have blogs and have already written content that's relevant to yours.

And then they're going to say to that blogger, "Hey, we'd like you to write an article. And in that article, we'd like you to also talk about this company here and put a link to them." Now, the blogger is going to see that and they say, "Great, you're going to pay me to write? Well, I'm a blogger. That's what I do. I write. So you're going to pay me to do that. Great." And they're going to write the article and they review you. They may say something about you. What have you. But then you'll get a link on their blog, back to your blog. You'll get a link from their blog back to your blog. And that, my friend, is completely legal because what we've done is we paid the blogger to write.

We didn't pay for the link. We pay for them to create content. Now in that content, they included a link. That's perfectly fine. Google is OK with that. Alright. So, when you come in here to the Blogger Outreach, you'll notice that Fat Joe allows you to choose the domain authority. That's what DA right there stands for. The Domain Authority of the blog.

Now you don't get to choose which blogs you want it to go on, but you can choose which domain authority. And this is very, very important. And it's important because, again, getting back to your link-building profile. You need links at all different domain authority levels. You need people of all kinds talking about you, because if, let's put it this way, if the only two people talking about you're the president of the United States and Oprah Winfrey, Google's going to say that's not really realistic because if those two people are talking about you, we expect a bunch of other people to also be talking about you.

Right. So, when you're looking at your link profile and building your link profile, and you can see your link profile and see a lot of this stuff in SEMrush as well, which I do have a link for down below. And that's what I use to check my link profiles. Okay. You want to have that range of different domain authorities.

So when you're in here and you're looking to do Blogger Outreach, you want to basically paying bloggers at all different levels of the domain authority. Now, it's also important that you know your domain authority. My strong suggestion— this is what we do. This is what we've always done is let's say our domain authority is at a 25 and we want to buy— you know, we want to support some bloggers and do some Blogger Outreach.

Great. And we had a certain amount of money to spend. What I would do with that money is I would allocate most of the money to buy placements that are above the DA, that is our website. So our website is a 25. So I will buy stuff at DA 30, 40, 50. I spent most of the money there and then I'd probably spend 30, maybe 40% of the budget max, usually around 30% of the budget on DA 10 and DA 20 placements as well.

Okay. So I'd spend the majority, 60 to 70% at my DA level and above and 30 to 40% at my DA level and below. This gives me nice distribution, very nice distribution on my link profile. And now you may be looking at some of these prices and it's like, Ooh, $482 for one link. Yeah, $482 for one link. And so you may not be able to afford to do of these, all at once. And so strategy wise, you may say, okay, "I'm going to build 12 links this year, or I'm going to build six links this year— whatever your number is or in next 6 months, whatever your time period is. And that's how you spread the distribution around if you can't do it all at once and that's okay.

That's perfectly fine. Perfectly fine. Okay. So that's the Blogger Outreach. Next is their Niche Edits. Now, Niche Edits are very similar to Blogger Outreach, but they have one major distinct advantage over Blogger Outreach. Okay. When Fat Joe does Blogger Outreach for you, they go out to their network and they ask in their network who has experience and they find the people who have experienced with your topic and in your niche and they asked them to write an article. Now, this is a brand new article that's never existed before. And once it's published, Google, then, has to find it. Google, then, has to index it, Google, then, has to send traffic to it. And so it takes time. Absolutely takes time. Niche Edits, however, what Fat Joe does is it goes out to their network and says, "Who's already written about this topic." Okay. You've got an article that you already wrote about this topic, I have a company here that I think will add value to your article. If you include them in some way, and they negotiate the way into your article. If the blogger agrees, the blogger edits their article to include you, information about you and a link back to your website, and you say, "Well, why is that so much better?"

It's better because the article already existed. There's already traffic going to the article. And so, you are cutting off all of that upfront time of getting the article written, hoping that Google finds it, hoping that Google index it, hoping that Google likes it, hoping that Google ranks it, hoping that traffic comes.

You cut all of that out and you go zooming to the end because you already know there is traffic coming to this page. There's already traffic coming. Now, in terms of tiers and levels, it works exactly the same as the Blogger Outreach. You get to choose which domain authority level that you want to do the niche edit. And my advice to you here is exactly the same as my advice to you before, you want to spread the love over all the different domain authorities. You want to spread that love. Okay. Alright. So, very simply my two favorite things here, the Blogger Outreach and the Niche Edits. I do some of each. Some of each.

Okay. If this is a website that— say, an e-commerce website where traffic matters? Then I'm going to go after more heavily in the link profile than Niche Edits, because I want to know and prove that, "Hey, we're getting traffic from these links." If this is a website that has a low domain authority currently, and we're trying to boost its domain authority, then I'm going to go more heavily into the Blogger Outreach and try to get more blogger articles written with high DA.

Because even though it's not driving traffic, what it says to Google is, important people are talking about me. Important people are talking about me. Okay. So that's kind of how I would spread it out there. Infographic Outreach and Content Syndication, these two here really support your Blogger Outreach and your Niche Edits.

These are add-on type things to do. Okay. After you've mastered your Blogger Outreach on your Niche Edits, these gives you incremental boosts, not major, major boosts. And then the last thing down here, the Media Placements. Media Placements can be very, very helpful and very, very good. The upside of Media Placements—and I'm gonna show you how this works here with Fat Joe and their pricing in just a moment, the upside of Media Placements is simply this, you get your article— oh sorry, not your article. You get mentioned in the right media source, then you— number one, can use their logo on your website for as-seen-on, as-seen-on whatever the media outlet was.

That's number one. Number two, they often have really great traffic and they're often, depending on the way Fat Joe does it at least, they're often very industry specific. Very very industry specific. So, you know that the traffic that is coming there is traffic that actually cares about your topic and your industry in your niche.

So, that's kind of how the Media Placements. Now, they are always growing this list of sites here where you can do Media Placement. Right. And as you can see, looking through this, it's not a huge, huge list. And so therefore, if your industry isn't in here, don't do it. Don't do it. If you've got a babysitting website, for example, none of these Media Placements here have anything to do with babysitting. So you wouldn't use it. You just flat out wouldn't use it. Now, Media Placements are going to be more expensive because you're expecting more bang for your buck. Right. But I would do these last. I would do these last. Absolutely last. I would focus my time. If I were you, I would focus my time on the Blogger Outreach and the Niche Edits.

Blogger Outreach and the Niche Edits really start the mass on that, and start getting traffic from there. Okay. Then you can move into the Content Syndication and the Infographic Outreach. But even these— they're important to your profile, but, if I were to assign percentages, I would say your Blogger Outreach and your Niche Edits, there should be 70% of your profile and the rest of that should make up 30% of your profile. 30% of of your profile. If you're in a local market and you're serving locally, then you also have to do local citation building and that should actually make up a huge part of your profile. Okay. 'Cause that will help you with your Google My Business, or actually Google Business profile, as they changed the name recently, it will help you with Google Maps, ranking in Google Maps which is super important. If you are a a local business. You know, a lot of people ask me about, "Hey, how do I rank for near me terms? You know, this, this, this near me. Accountant near me." Well, you can't. Put that in your content, Google doesn't write rank near me in your continent.

They see it. But what they're looking for are markers of where you are so that they can drop a pin and put you on the map. And one of the ways that they do that is with the local citation building. So if you say you're in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, great. But if you've built local citation to other sites that Google trusts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and they say you're in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Google believes it more and will boost your rankings even more.

Okay. So again, looking at your link-building profile, if I were you. If was on a limited budget, which most of us are. I would focus my money on Blogger Outreach and Niche Edits, Blogger Outreach, and Niche Edits, right now. If you are a local business that I would throw on top of that, the local citation building in the matter of fact, that's where I would start.

I would start with local citation building, then move on to Blogger Outreach and Niche Edits before I get into Infographics or Content Syndication or even Media Placements. Okay. When we're looking at building a link profile for one of our clients, these are the things that we take into account, and that's how we decide which links to buy and how many links to buy based on their budget and the timelines.

Okay. So, to backup and review. Once again, Fat Joe, strongly, strongly, strongly, strongly recommend Fat Joe, we've been using them for years. Love them. They've done great work. There is a caveat always when you're doing link-building, which is, it's a crap shoot. Okay. I'm just going to be honest. It is a crapshoot, not every link is created equal.

Not every link is going to work for every single website. It's just the way it is, but you have to do it. You've got to win the popularity contest and Fat Joe can help you do it. I've tried a lot of these link-building services. Fat Joe's the one I come back to time and time and time and time and time and time and time again.

Alright, everybody. That's my 2 cents for today on Fat Joe and link-building. Hope this gives you a bit of a glimpse into that category called Off-page SEO. Alright, I'll talk to you soon. Bye, everybody.