High Quality
Link Building Services
High Quality Link Building Services
White-hat content marketing built to engage people and search engines.
What is Link Building?
Link Building is a content marketing strategy that can help you reach your target audiences by improving your search rankings and your web presence. Picture your website like a resume for your business, and links from other sites like references. The better your references, the more likely search engines are to think your site is worth promoting in organic search.
How do you get a reference? Same way you do in real life, you provide value. In the case of digital marketing, this means creating high-quality content that is engaging, informative, helpful, or funny that references your site via anchor text.
The number of unique referring domains in your link profile is the #1 ranking factor. Effective link building campaigns improve this ranking signal, improve search rankings, and increase organic traffic. Our advanced link building strategies come from a decade of experience in online marketing and doing successful link acquisition at scale for hundreds of agencies and brands.
Our 50+ person editorial team is comprised of industry insiders, journalists, professors, creative writers, veteran bloggers, and content strategists who know exactly how to make content compelling for each of the publications we target in a campaign from mom and pop blogs to marquee publications (ex: Forbes, Huffington Post, Harvard, New York Times).
Powerful Links, Compelling Content
We have the highest-powered links in the business, where most SEO companies cap out at DA 40, we go up to DA 90.
Every high-quality link we place is pitched to publishers organically in an original piece of content (article, blog post, press release, etc). Our unique high-quality content is drafted specifically to provide contextual relevance to the anchor text linking to your website, and written to fit the audience and stylistic guidelines of the publications we’re targeting. We run our link building tactics and publisher outreach at scale, allowing us to consistently acquire high-quality links.
While many SEO companies will focus on guest blogging, we’ve worked hard to build a number of direct relationships with marquee publishers so that the majority of our content placements appear fully organic (without sponsored tags or guest post attribution). Our editorial link building strategy allows us to attract links that send the most topically relevant link juice from these publishers to your domain, pushing you higher in the rankings and increasing traffic to your site.
How It Works
REQUEST
Tell us your website and the search keywords you’re hoping to target.
REVIEW
Our SEO expert link builders will review your order and reach out if they have a suggestion for optimization, then handoff your placement requests to our editorial team for ideation.
RELAX
Our editorial team will complete content creation and then pitch content until it’s accepted by a publication, and ultimately goes live.
RANK
As a LinkGraph client you will have full visibility into your campaign through your customer dashboard, and check the status of each link in your order in real-time. Our dashboard also includes tools to help you track changes to your keyword rankings, run a backlink analysis, view domain metrics for your links, and allows you to download unbranded CSVs for white labeled reporting.
Pricing
Domain Authority (DA) is a metric that predicts how likely a site is to rank in the search results, or how authoritative the site is in the eyes of search engines. The higher the DA of a site, the more likely a reference (dofollow backlink) from that site to yours is to increase your SERP. We offer self-serve link building products through DA 50+, for link building over DA 60 please see managed campaigns.
DA 60-90+ Premium Links
For link building over DA 60 please see managed campaigns, our premier link building service.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I buy links, but you choose the anchor text?
Sure, just check the “choose for me” box and we’ll do the keyword research for you.
What should I pick for keywords?
There are really two strategies: branded anchors, and search or keyword anchors. Branded anchors will help increase your web presence (when someone searches your brand, you’ll pop up in articles all across the internet). Branded anchors usually point back to your home page and help raise the overall DA and visibility of your site.Search or keyword anchors are terms that a user is likely to search for in google when they are looking for a site, products, or services like yours. The more specific the search term, the more likely the user is to convert when they hit your site. For example a used car dealership in downtown atlanta is much more likely to see conversions for “used cards in downtown atlanta” than they are for “where to buy a used car?”
Remember to be thoughtful about the amount of exact match anchor text in your backlink profile. Google’s algorithm updates (Penguin, Hummingbird, etc) targeted sites with a high percentage of exact match anchor text (70%+), causing them to lose rankings in search or get penalized in extreme cases.
Do you work with companies in XYZ niche?
Yes, we are capable of handling technical writing, niche topics, e-commerce sites, product pages, and restricted industries.
What is Domain Authority (DA)?
Domain Authority is a scale from 1-100 that rates the likelihood of a website have a high search engine results position (SERP).
Can I buy more DA50+ links than you allow in the slider?
Yes. However, one of our SEO experts will check your backlink profile first to make sure that you don’t throw the balance/distribution of your backlink profile enough to risk a manual penalty. The goal of link building should be to create equity for your site that lasts over time. SEO should be treated as an investment, we want to make sure clients new to SEO are investing wisely.
What happens if content you placed disappears?
If a publication goes out of business within the first year of us placing content for you, we’ll replace the link. If content is removed from a site for any reason and your link is broken, we’ll replace the link. The publishers we work with are independent from our company so they do have the authority to make changes to their sites, but if anything ever goes wonky we’ll make it right. No worries.
What is the delivery time?
We have most content published in 30 days or less. Occasionally for niche sites it can take a little longer to build links if we haven’t developed any publication relationships in that sector before and don’t have visibility into upcoming editorial calendars – but we’ve got the process down to a science and after tens of thousands of placements, we have yet to be unable to deliver for a client. Our outreach team specializes in building relationships with publishers through high-quality content and trust.
What if I write my own content, will that reduce the cost?
Nope, it’s actually far more efficient for us to write content already stylistically matched to our target publications. Instead, it’s more helpful for you to focus on:
- link reclamation / broken link building by setting up redirects for any broken links pointing to your web pages
- improving internal linking to your important landing pages
- disavowing bad links in your backlink profile can also help improve your rankings
- create new high-quality linkable assets and build resources that we can use for link building and increase your ability to earn links. We can also create high-quality onsite content for you.
- focus on improving important onpage SEO / technical SEO like content quality, SEO tags, page speed, and schema.org markup
Can I review the content before it goes live?
We guarantee that your placement will always be positioned positively, but the products on this page are not eligible for content review or approval prior to publication. Content is frequently tweaked for each publication we pitch to, and often goes through a rapid editing process with the editorial team of the target publication. Allowing for client review and approval would mean missing publication windows in the fast-paced editorial world.
If you absolutely must review content for approval, check out our managed SEO campaigns. When we’re able to plan for editorial calendars a few months out we have more room to craft and review content collaboratively with our clients who work with us more regularly.
What will published content look like?
Request samples (we’ll send over relevant examples).
Do you have any other helpful beginners guides to SEO, SEO trainings, and other SEO advice?
Yes! We have a variety of SEO knowledge resources on our blog, including:
- SEO 101 Guide
- Beginners Keywords 101 Guide
- On-site Content 101 Guide
- A primer on preparing your site for link building
Contact an Account Manager to learn more about the SEO training classes we offer on the advanced SEO strategies we have pioneered.
What other services do you offer?
LinkGraph offers a variety of SEO products and services as well as free SEO tools, and all of our strategies are white hat SEO.
Actually, can I talk to someone?
Absolutely, feel free to reach out to us via our phone number (929) 377-1035 (or schedule a quick consultation) and speak to someone live.
Are your strategies “white hat link building”?
Yes, all of our link building campaigns are 100% white-hat! We only engage in outreach with publishers that exceed our strict quality score KPIs.
Spammy links or “black hat links” from low-quality sites are easy to identify based on several metrics, including the publisher’s trust flow, organic traffic, backlink profile, and outlinking profile. Low quality link building methods like blog commenting, duplicate content syndication/article spinning, and cloaking can all result in a manual penalty from Google, specifically Google’s Penguin algorithm. We’ve helped websites in need of toxic backlink remediation from such link schemes recover their website rankings from black hat link building campaigns and negative SEO attacks that caused them to lose search rankings. If you need help recovering from a penalty, please get in touch with us.
What is your philosophy on “follow” vs. “nofollow links”?
Google has made clear that it only considers “follow” links to your site for ranking purposes. As such, we only target publishers that provide dofollow links, not nofollow links.
How do you form relationships with publishers?
There’s really no magic, it’s a lot of outreach, and a lot of rejection. Here’s our new
publisher outreach email stats from December 2018:
- 293 new publishers contacted
- 51% reply rate
- 522 emails sent!
- 112 new publisher relationships formed.
Guide to Keyword Selection for Link Building
“Keyword” can be a bit of a misnomer in SEO. In SEO keyword really means search term. Search terms CAN be individual words (i.e. car), but are often phrases (i.e. used car). The longer the search term, the more specific a user’s search tends to be.
For example, used toyota camry is a much more specific search than used car. Specific searches usually indicate clearer search intent. Search intent refers to a user’s goal when they perform a search – the more specific a search, the closer a user is to completing their goal.
Search Intent
Let’s take a look at purchase-oriented search intent, a typical purchase decision process goes as follows:
- Establish Need
- Research Options
- Evaluate Options
- Make Purchase
Users will perform searches at each stage in this decision process, let’s use an example to look at how a user’s searches can reflect this process.
Micaela has just been hired at a new job and needs to start commuting to work. Let’s see how her searches map to the purchase decision process.
Establish Need
(Keywords are often questions, or broad open-ended searches)
What is the best way to get from Kearny to Newark?
Is Newark train station safe?
Parking in Newark
Research Options
(Keywords are information gathering, but more targeted)
Used cars
Best Used Car Models
Cheapest Used Car Models
Evaluate Options
(Keywords get more specific, compare options, or add criteria)
Used toyota vs. used honda
Used toyota camry under $2,000
Used toyota camry LE
Make Purchase
(Keyword is super specific, or purchase-oriented)
2003 toyota camry LE
2003 toyota camry LE kearny nj
In this example, Micaela realized she needed a car to get to work, looked into options for a used car, got more specific with brands and budget, and finally narrowed in on a specific model.
As a user gets closer to the point of purchase, their searches become more specific because they have a better idea of exactly what they want.
Specific searches tend to be LONGER (because they include more criteria), we call these more specific search phrases long-tailed keywords.
More specific searches tend to indicate greater search intent.
Section vocabulary: Search Intent, Search Term, Keyword, Long-Tailed Keyword
Using Keywords
When a user performs a search relevant to your business, we want that user to see your website listed in the search results. It doesn’t matter if you have the best products/services on the planet if a potential customer can’t find you.
There are two ways to use keywords to show up in searches:
- Buy Search Ads (Google Ads, Bing Ads)
- Optimize for Organic Search
Method for Using Keywords #1: Buying Search Ads
You can show up in the search results for various keywords by creating search ads that will display whenever a user searches for the keywords you’ve selected.
After you create an ad or ad campaign, the platform you are using (ex: Google Ads) will ask you to enter your target keywords. Pro tip: if you’re just getting started with ads, less is more when it comes to keyword targeting, it’s best to start with just a handful of high-value terms.
Method for Using Keywords #2: Optimize for Organic Search
The other way to show up in the search results for a keyword, is to optimize your site for that keyword. This is a two part approach: you first have to make sure your site has content relevant to that keyword, and then second you have to get some other sites linking back to yours referencing that content.
Buying ads costs direct money (you pay per click), and optimizing for organic search costs indirect money (time and effort to create content and optimize pages). So we want to narrow down our focus to just the keywords that are likely to provide your business the most value.
Remember: Ads can be quick wins, but will cost you more over time, they’re like renting space in the search results where SEO investments may take slightly more time, but you’re building search equity and earning your spot more permanently.
Ads are like RENTING space in the search results where SEO improvements are building you search EQUITY.
Keyword Metrics
Let’s put search intent aside for a moment, and look at the other ways we can establish which keywords are good targets for your business. Let’s use some of the searches our Micaela did while looking for a car as examples.
These are metrics we can pull via the keyword explorer on Ahrefs.com. Let’s walk through each of these and what they mean.
Keyword Difficulty (KD)
This is a metric that measures how difficult it is to show up in the search results for this term with SEO. The scale goes from 1-100 with 100 being incredibly difficult.
What does Keyword Difficulty tell me?
It basically tells you how much organic competition you’ll have for this term – how many other businesses have already optimized their site(s) for the keyword.
How do I use this info?
Use it as part of your decision for whether or not you’re going to target the keyword with organic optimization.
-
- Terms with a keyword difficulty of 35 or less are usually relatively easy to move with onsite and offsite SEO improvements.
- Terms with a keyword difficulty of 60 or more are going to take a LOT of SEO investment if you want your site to show up on the first page of search results.
If the KD is really high, but the CPC is really low, you may be better off buying ads than trying to rank organically. Remember though, CPC is typically an indication of how much buying intent there is for the keyword, so before bidding on a keyword with low CPC make sure it’s one that you believe will result in conversions on your site.
Example from Micaela’s Searches
The keyword used cars has a KD of 58, but a CPC of only $2.00. It would take tens of thousands of dollars to get a new site ranking on the first page of the search results for used cars. In this instance if you really wanted to target the term, you’d probably be better off targeting the term with CPC*.
*LinkGraph’s formal recommendation would actually be to select a different term to target altogether, one with higher search intent rather than spending money here on CPC.
Cost Per Click (CPC)
This is literally how much you’ll pay per click for search ads targeting this keyword.
What does CPC tell me?
A high CPC tells you that other businesses think searches using this keyword will result in a sale. The higher the CPC, the more valuable the sale is to other businesses.
How do I use this info?
A term that has low keyword difficulty but high CPC is a good candidate for organic optimization.
Example from Micaela’s Searches
The keyword used toyota camry le has a very low keyword difficulty, but the highest CPC on this list. You could probably optimize a single webpage, and do some light offsite SEO work and be ranking on the first page of search results for this term within a month or so. That might be more cost effective than paying $5 per click, especially over time.
Search Volume
This tells you how many users are performing searches with that term each month.
What does search volume tell me?
A high search volume tells you that if you rank on the first page of the search results for the keyword, you are likely to get a lot of users hitting your site.
How do I use this info?
If you’re looking at two keywords, they have similar keyword difficulties, similar CPCs, similar search intent, but one has higher search volume – that’s the one you should target with organic search optimizations (i.e. improving your onsite content to target that term).
Example from Micaela’s Searches
2003 toyota camry LE and used toyota camry le are both very low difficulty keywords, but one has 2,000 searches a month and the other has only 50.
If you’re in the first position in the search results you will capture roughly 33% of the traffic for that organic search. For 2003 toyota camry le that translates into 660 new users, for used toyota camry le that translates into roughly 16 users. Which term would you want to invest in given the potential return?
The VALUE of a keyword is the number of converting users that keyword can draw into your site. The number of users is measured by search volume, conversion likelihood is measured by CPC and search intent.
Remember – don’t get lost in the data! A keyword could have great volume, high CPC, low difficulty, and STILL be a bad choice for your specific business if the term has nothing to do with what you sell or offer.
High-value keywords are ones that bring CONVERTING users to your site.
Actionable Take-Aways
Rule #1: Always try to target keywords that are likely to bring users to your site who convert.
Indicators that a keyword is likely to convert:
- High CPC
- Very specific (long-tailed)
- Aligns with your products/services
- Clear search intent
- You’ve seen the term convert for your site already (through your Google Analytics, Google Ads, or Google Search console)
Rule #2: Try to pick keywords that will pull the MOST converting users into your site.
500 conversions is better than 50 conversions (remember best case scenario, in position 1 of the search results you’re only capturing 33% of the traffic). You can check the volume of keywords using our tool here.
Rule #3: Always do your keyword research before you start buying ads or investing in organic optimizations.
You can use keyword research tools like google keywords planner, Ahrefs keyword explorer, moz keyword explorer, or LinkGraph’s Top Keywords tool.
Rule #4: Spend wisely – know when to invest in SEO improvements vs. paid ads.
Invest in SEO Improvements in the following scenarios:
Low-Hanging Fruit
Quick win.
-
- CPC is high
- Search volume is high
- Keyword difficulty is low
- Search intent is clear
Precision Strikes
Quick win.
-
- CPC is very high
- Search intent is clear
- Keyword difficulty is low
- Search volume is low
High Return Investments
These are terms that will take you longer to rank for, but will have a huge impact on your business.
-
- CPC is High
- Search Intent is Very Clear
- Keyword difficulty is Medium or High
- Search volume is high
Consider buying Ads in the following scenarios:
Work Smarter Not Harder**
-
- Keyword difficulty is high
- CPC is low
- Search Intent is Clear
- Note: volume doesn’t matter as much with PPC ads
While We Wait
-
- CPC is High
- Search Intent is Very Clear
- Keyword difficulty is Medium or High
- Search volume is high
- You’ve decided to make an SEO investment in the term, but it’s going to be a while before you’re ranking on the first page of the search results.
Linkgraph’s Top Keywords Tool
If you’re interested in learning more about the best keywords to target for your site, sign up for a free account and check out our Top Keywords tool which will show you all your organic keyword metrics in one place, and even display the best keyword opportunities for your domain (DO – Domain Opportunity Score).
SEO Fundamentals
SEO’s Central Concept
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is about creating content that provides value to your audience and then making that content easy to find.
Content doesn’t have to mean written content, content can be rich media (images, GIFs, video, audio, etc), products, tools, services, forms, anything a person might be looking for and which would provide the searcher value.
Value can be entertainment value, informational value, functional value, perceived value, emotional value, and more. Remember: there’s just as much of a market for Instagram as there is for WSJ.com – so don’t make the mistake of dismissing types of content that may not feel “substantive” when thinking about content marketing.
The SEO Environment
There are two major spheres to consider when approaching SEO:
-
- Elements that you have full control over (your web properties); and
- Elements that you only have influential control over (everything on the internet that is not directly one of your web properties).
In SEO you’ll commonly hear these two spheres referred to as Onsite SEO and Offsite SEO, these are both parts of any complete content marketing strategy.
Pro-Tip: If you come from a more traditional marketing background you can think of Onsite SEO as referring to your owned media and Offsite SEO as your earned media, with both coming together as part of an inbound marketing strategy.
Onsite SEO
Onsite SEO refers to your onsite content and the onsite technicals for your website.
Onsite content is pretty simple, it’s the content you’ve created to be viewed/used by the people who visit your site.
Rule #1 – make good content that’s useful to people.
Onsite technicals are structural elements you’ve added to your site or site code to make your content easy to find and access (by people and robots).
Rule #2 – make your content as accessible as possible.
Offsite SEO
Offsite SEO refers to content that references your business and lives online, but NOT on your own website. Offsite SEO includes reviews of your business, social signals, structured citations, and link signals.
- Reviews:
Tooltip: Reviews can be found on sites like Yelp, Zocdoc, and through platforms like Trustpilot or Google Business.users of your products/services discussing the quality of what your business produces.
- Social Signals:
Tooltip: Examples include: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, LinkedIn, etc.social signals refer to mentions of your business on social platforms, as well as engagement users have with you via your own social media accounts.
- Structured Citations:
Tooltip: Examples of structured citations include: Google My Business (GMB) listings, Yelp listings, Yellow Page listings, etc.commonly referred to as business listings structured citations can be found on sites that provide users information about your business’s hours, services, and location. Structured citations have a significant impact on local search results.
- Link Signals:
Tooltip: These signals tend to come from a variety of sources including PR pieces, blog posts, online articles, links in social media posts, etc.these are other sites linking to you – users referencing you, your site, your products, and/or your business.
SEO Symbiosis
These two spheres (offsite SEO and onsite SEO) work together. Offsite SEO helps people find your site, onsite SEO helps them navigate the content, find value in your site, and convert for your business.
Live Account Managers
Questions about SEO? Help with your account? Facing an issue?
Call or chat with one of our SEO experts M-F from 9AM to 7PM.
