The importance of link building hasn’t diminished for the past few years. But the way of doing effective SEO has gotten harder.
Getting the organic traffic and rankings you want today isn’t quite the same as the old days where you could buy a few links and attain a top 5 ranking in a matter of weeks.
Although SEO has gotten harder, interest still remains relatively high:
So the question is this: how the heck can you still acquire strong, authoritative links in today’s world?
One answer is right under your nose: reaching out and getting placed on link roundups.
But wait, what is a link round up? Most of the time, link roundups are weekly or monthly summaries of top links that sites share. We have one of our own called ‘5 Marketing Bullets’ where I share 5 marketing pieces that I found interesting for the week.
It looks like this:
They’re simple to do and chances are, blogs in your niche are doing something similar. In this post, we’ll show you how to go about finding link roundup opportunities so you can build relationships with other blogs and acquire more links to bolster your SEO efforts.
Read More: The Ultimate Guide to Link Building with Content
Using Twitter’s search is a nice free way to start your prospecting efforts. Let’s stay focused on the topic of ‘SEO’ for this post. Here’s what you need to do:
Explore:
Now, go back and do this on Google.
Add your results to a spreadsheet (we’ll use Google Spreadsheets for this example):
Columns:
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Often times, you’ll see blogs name their roundups as something different. It just takes some digging to find out if they’re actually doing roundups.
Search Engine Land is one of the top digital marketing blogs so I decided to take a look to see what they have. As a rule of thumb, the bigger the website, the more likely they are to have link roundups (simply because they need to publish a larger volume of content).
Upon scrolling to the bottom of their homepage, I spot something that seems like a link roundup:
And what do ya know, it is:
Key Takeaway: Make a list of your top favorite niche blogs and go hunting for link roundup posts. Add them to your outreach spreadsheet as you go.
Bonus: Here’s a list of marketing blogs that regularly do link roundups (h/t Traffic Generation Cafe):
BuzzSumo shows you how many social shares a post has gotten as well as who shared and linked to it. Again, start with ‘keyword’ + ‘link roundup’ and see where it takes you. Here’s an example of what we found with ‘seo link roundup’:
Outreach can be done at scale using tools like Outreach, Pitchbox, Ninja Outreach and more. It goes without saying that each e-mail should be personalized to increase your conversion rates.
That brings us to the next point: all of this can fall apart quickly if numbers aren’t being tracked. How many links do you want to acquire per month? What is the average DA of the links you acquired? How has it affected your organic traffic?
“Don’t mistake motion and progress. A rocking horse keeps moving but doesn’t make any progress.” – Alfred Armand Montrapert
After you’ve started to develop a relationship with these other blogs, keep it going. Relationships aren’t a one-off transaction. Continue reaching out to see how you can help and give more than you take. Try to see what they’re struggling with and actually be interested in helping them. Who knows, the relationship might just lead to bigger opportunities down the line (like a speaking gig).
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Link roundups are a great way to start relationships with other blogs while acquiring strong links at the same time. Publications are always trying to create more content and link roundups are a nice add-on to every content toolbox.
Just remember that link roundups can’t just be a collection of random links; the content needs to be exceptional and remarkable to make it into a link roundup (nobody likes sharing crappy content).
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