Focused on new link acquisition for your clients or company? Link building is always a slog, but Rand has a PR-focused tip that makes it much easier to find people and publications that’ll cover and amplify you. Check it out in this week’s edition of Whiteboard Friday!
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Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we are talking about the easiest link building tip in the book. It is PR-focused, meaning press and public relations focused, and I’ll dive right in.
If you are trying to get some new links for your new client, for your website, or for your company, start with this process.
Step 1: Identify some of your site’s or your business’ unique attributes
- The type of company that you are. Are you a startup or a scale-up? Are you mid-stage? Are you a small business? Are you a family-owned business?
- What’s the background of your founders? Do they come from a special place, something that is unique? Almost certainly the answer is yes. But in what kinds of ways?
- What type of financing do you have?
- What is your customer focus, your customer target?
- What is your purpose, values, culture?
- Geography. Sector or market.
- Other attributes, like accessibility. Maybe you do a great job of serving differently-abled folks. Maybe you are a very sustainable business, a super green business. Maybe you have a very high bar of ethics. Or your facilities are absolutely outstanding and super Instagram-worthy.
Step 2: Find 5–10 others that share these attributes
Whatever it is, some combination of these, you’re going to take and you’re going to find other people who share those attributes, other businesses, some other businesses that share some of those attributes or some combination of them. For example, I’ve taken a type of business, a startup, and a geography — startups in San Diego. Or a type of financing, angel-financed, but a type of business that is unusually angel-financed, a physical, retail location business. That’s fairly atypical. B corps, a benefit corp that is in the healthcare space. Again, somewhat atypical, somewhat unique. A black-owned business that’s in tech. Tragically, also unusual.
Step 3: Find publications and people that have covered/amplified others like you
Now Step 3, I’m going to find publications and people that have covered or amplified other people like you, some combination of other people like you. So we’ll start with my first example here — startups in San Diego. If I am a startup in San Diego, I will plug in several other startups in San Diego.
So I did a search “startups in San Diego” in Google. I found Cloudbeds and Hire A Helper, two startups that are in San Diego, and I find a bunch of coverage opportunities by searching for the combination of the two of them. Cloudbeds and Hire A Helper leads me to ProgrammableWeb has a page that lists both of them because they both have APIs. San Diego Startup Week lists both of them because they were both panelists or speakers there. Snip2Code has a machine learning directory because they both had some interesting uses for machine learning that they applied. Tampa Bay Times covered both of them because of a data content piece. These are your link opportunities, your press, PR coverage opportunities.
You can repeat this again and again with combinations like this. The best part is you are using just your brain and Google search. Super, super simple. Of course, you could take this and you could apply this, you could plug in the websites for Cloudbeds and Hire A Helper to Moz’s Link Explorer, and you could get a bunch of other link opportunities. You could plug those two in and you could plug in your own website, and then you could say, “Show me sites that link to these two, but not to me,” through the Link Intersect function.
So there are ways to advance this with tools, but this is some of the simplest, best ways to launch to get coverage, to get people to know you and like you and start to have heard of your brand, and to get those links that Google is going to need to rank your website higher.
All right, everyone. Hope you’ve enjoyed this. Look forward to some of your tips and advice around easy, PR-focused link building tips. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
