Transcript
Hi guys. And welcome to another edition of Zupo's SEO Talk & Tea.
Today's conversation is about how link building to product and service pages is often difficult, if not, almost impossible at times. What we're going to discuss is the workaround strategies to get around that.
But again, this is the Zupo's SEO Talk & Tea, so I am going to recommend, I mean not recommend, I'm going to introduce our team today, which is the Keemun black tea from Tea Station. Tea Station is OG, old school boba shop that kind of was one of the first iterations of the boba shop wave. I bought this years ago because I used to think that there's a specific Tea Station in my area that made some really bomb black tea. Essentially, it's milk tea when you add the creamer and sugar. I just don't know. They had some really good black tea. So I bought the black tea leaves and I still have them today.
But anyways, let's go ahead and get brewing and talking about the conversation at hand, which is talking about how link building is so important and how you need to drive links to your site for products and services. But link building to actually to your actual products and service pages can be difficult and the work around. It was a really long props. But you'll see what I mean in a second.
As we have discussed in other videos on our SEO blog, you need to be driving links and referring domains to pages on your website, and you're not supposed to only drive them to your homepage. Ideally, you would be driving them to certain products and services, because if you have a breadth of different products, let me do the breadth of different keyword groups are trying to optimize for, and you need links and referring domains to go to each of those different kinds of keyword groups.
So let me use an example again. If you're a pizza shop and you are trying to rank for a pepperoni pizza, sausage pizza, and breadsticks, those are three different keyword groups. And you need to have links going into those different three keyword groups. If you have a pepperoni pizza page, a sausage pizza page, and then a breadsticks page, you would need to have links or ideally have links go to each unique page, not just the homepage, but each page. Because for example, let me kind of add one more layer to it. You have a competitor that only sell breadsticks and their breadsticks page has a 10 links going into that page and your page has zero. This breadsticks page probably has a likelier chance of ranking. So you need to drive links specifically to the breadsticks page to help get you onto that same level. So that's a good example of what the lay of the land might be.
Now, the problem is link building to service product pages or what they call sales pages can be difficult because a lot of directories do not allow links that are not your homepage. And then when you go out there and you guest post, or you write for different publications, a lot of publications tell you, you are not allowed to link to sales pages. You were only allowed to link to pages that are supplementing your discussion, showing a research study, or just generally informational, right?
The other way around that as a third option, which is a little bit more black hat, which is you could buy links, driven to products and service pages. But that gets very black hat and spammy and Google does not love that stuff. And you can kind of go down a black hole of negative SEO that can ultimately penalize you.
So for today's video, we're going to talk more about the white hat. The black hat, you can be successful with it and there are ways to do it, but let's today talk about just the white hat side. I think if you want to say above board, this is a conversation about that.
Again, like I mentioned, you can not really drive links to your service pages. You can really only be driving links to informational pages, which in your website's cases, probably blog posts. So the strategy that you have to use is, let's go back to the pizza example. Let's say you have breadsticks, sausage and pepperoni. But let's just focus on the breadsticks today, right?
So if you have a breadsticks product page, but you want to drive links to it and you go out there. You go right on guest posts, you get featured on podcasts, you go on videos. You just try to get your name out there and you're telling them, "I only want to talk about breadsticks," or "I want to kind of shine more lights to my breadsticks offering." And they're like, "Yeah, that's fine. Talk about breadstick or whatever. That's fine." And you'd write the piece and you go and give your speech. And then it's like, "Hey, can I drive a link to my product page?" Oftentimes, editorials guidelines will say, "No, you could not drive that link to your product page."
So here's the workaround. And I want to give a shout out to Andy from Orbit Media. I think his last name's Crestodina. I might be butchering that, but I know his name's Andy. He gave this speech at [Mos Con 00:00:04:37] and it was very influential for my own style of thinking. So we want to give a big shout out to Andy. You probably will never watch this, but if you are, thank you so much. I just want to give you credit for this mind shift that you gave me on this other side.
But the concept he talks about, now we actually use today, is yes, you have your breadstick page, but there is no reason why you can't blog post about it. So let's say you've written blog posts on your site about why your breadsticks are amazing. The how to make your breadsticks, the process you guys take. What your breadsticks taste really good with, how to pair with something. Let's say you just have a library of blog posts. Well, that's the answer. The answer is when you go guest posts on other websites, and you're trying to drive links back to your website, you do not drive it back to your service or product page because you can't. But you have blog posts that are informational, that meet the guidelines of most editorial publications.
So what you can do then is let's say you have the breadsticks pages, and then the other blog posts you have is what your breadsticks pair well with. Well, when your guest posts, you can say something like, "Hey, remember breadsticks are always good with pasta." So in that sentence, you can link back to your blog post that talks about your guide to pairing breadsticks with other foods. Therefore, the editorial publication will accept that you are driving a link to a blog post that is specifically optimized for breadsticks.
And here's the final key. On that blog post you must have internal link drive to your actual breadstick product page. That way, even though you cannot drive a link to the product or service page, you can drive a link to a blog post, the internal links to that service or product page, which therefore passes the link equity. Of course, in a perfect world you want the link to go straight there, but we don't live in that world. We live in a world where a lot of sort of publications need to safeguard their... The quality of the posts they're putting out. So they will accept that guide you have, and therefore you can still get all that link equity from all this visibility that you are doing.
The workaround is you need to be creative, but you just need to be, I guess, valuable, right? I guess that's the best way to put it. You have the product and service pages, just make sure that you have extra blog posts that actually provide value and then go to other blog posts and publications. Write for them, link back to your whatever offer or your blog posts and then interlink to your product or service page. That's specifically for a guest post opportunity.
There are other opportunities, for example, where companies will offer... Do some soulful good, "Hey, to commemorate this month, we're giving out a thousand free pizzas." And all the news goes for it, right? Like, "Oh, they go to all link back to it." What I would do there then is you have a unique page saying, "Hey, we're giving out free thousand pizzas. You know what? They're going to be pepperoni pizza." Or "We're going to give out 250 pepperoni, 250 sausage," and then down the line. Well, you could do that and have a unique page, but then make sure that page, which you're going to get all the press about is internally linking to your product and service pages. So the 250 pepperoni pizzas you're giving out, why does... That can internal link to your product page about pepperoni pizzas. And that's how you pass that link equity.
You can still link build effectively. You just need to be a little bit more creative. And then internal links and blog posts, or just some version of internal linking architecture is your key to the workarounds.
This is a great concept that I use extensively in my own SEO strategies. He's a genius kind of pitching this out there and sharing this with Mos Con audience and everybody all in the online world, I would kind of suggest the same. When you're linking think beyond your homepage. If you can get your product or service pages, but you're most likely not going to be able to, drive them to strategic blog posts or campaign pages that internally link to your product and service pages.
So this video is a little bit longer, but I think it really deserved it. It's a really awesome strategy that I think a lot of businesses need to take on a little bit more. I use this one very extensively as well. Hopefully, you guys can use this for your own SEO strategies.
After going really deep and really intense into that topic, I need some tea now. So I'm going to go and enjoy my tea. If you guys found the video enjoyable, found it valuable, please like, and subscribe. I'm going to go ahead and enjoy this tea. See you guys again soon. Thanks everybody.
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