Transcript
Hi guys and welcome to another edition of Zupo SEO Talk and Tea.
Today's conversation, link building with your customers and clients. This is an interesting conversation because link building is already difficult enough. Oftentimes what helps you be successful in any business, initiative, marketing initiative and especially an SEO and even drilling down more link building is using the assets you have. So today I want to have that conversation.
Before we begin, I want to introduce the tea we have today. Today we have a jasmine green tea from the company black and bold. Again this is a gift from my housemate who bought this because they donated the proceeds to ... Where is it? Disadvantaged and domestic youth in the US. It's always cool to give back and also I'm just a fan of jasmine green tea. I actually forgot we had this and so last night I saw this as I was prepping and I was like "Oh my god, we should have some jasmine green tea." But let's go ahead and get brewing and get chat.
So link building with your customers and clients. This can be a little bit awkward in the sense that when you're trying to link build, you don't necessarily want to bug your customers and clients with weird requests. But oftentimes there is a one win in this sense. What can often happen is your customers and clients already know of you and they already trust you so asking them for a link is a little bit different from then a cold email. But the problem is it's going to be out of the blue. Is that something you can really ask somebody?
So some of the strategies and the most common one that you can use is you can go to your customers and clients and say "Hey, can I give you a testimonial on your site about your business?" Everyone could always use some more testimonials and so a lot of companies ... What you can do is you can say "Hey, I would love to leave a testimonial on your website. And in exchange, could you just ... Where I leave my testimonial, my name and my company, can you link back to my company? Just so ..." In exchange, right? That's a pretty fair way to do it. Oftentimes what I'll work with my clients is with their customers or even their vendors, we'll try to link build like that, leaving reviews on other people's websites and then getting a link back. This is one way to do it. I would say the great thing about this one is you can get on someone's home page doing this. If you can get on their home page, a home page is usually the most powerful section of someone's website. And so you'll get the most SEO value by being on their homepage.
The second thing I will say is you're not going to scale that very far. You won't get a handful of links like that. Again it's depending on your type of business and the number of customers and vendors but I've seen that you can get a healthy prop of links and referring to [inaudible 00:02:40] but don't confuse this with a long-term SEO strategy. I perceive this one as more of a building block, more so than a long-term one. So that's one way.
Another way you can do it is some companies have partner pages, where they will list all the partners they have. Another easy one for you, say "Hey, can we be added as a partner. So that on your website, can you link back to us, even through the image or the text?" That's always great too.
And then the third, of course, is you can always collaborate on content. If you have a blog, which you probably should if you're doing SEO, you can always add content to the blog and then say "Hey, can we do a collaborative blog post? Where I know your company talks about this, we would like to come in as a vendor." This is essentially a digital PR but with your customers and clients. This is another way to do it where you're still providing value for your customers and also getting a link back.
So again, on this topic, I don't want you to confuse this with this is a link building strategy that will last you. That would be your long-term strategy. There are only a few strategies that I have seen. You know I say that a lot about one strategy that I have seen that can be a long-term strategy and it's very niched in so the most common example is web design companies. Web design companies love to put "Designed by" and then whatever their company is on the bottom and then link back to their homepage. That is a long-term strategy because if you have a lot of people having their site designed by you, then you can have thousands and thousands and thousands of links going back to your website. That's great. So that's another way but unfortunately I've only seen that work in the web design industry. So saying all that, unless you're a web designer and you have that scale of clients, that strategy isn't always going to work for everybody.
But to loop back to what I was just saying, link building with your customers and clients, again, it is a great kind of ... I think of it as a stimulus. It's a great way to link some referring domains, it's not necessarily a long-term strategy but you've got to utilize every asset you possibly have. So I do encourage you to do that with your customers and clients.
All right hopefully that was helpful, guys. I'm going to go ahead and pour my tea out. If you found the video valuable, please like and subscribe. I hope to see you guys again soon.
Thanks, everybody.