If you’re only using one link building strategy, you’re putting your business at risk.
In this video, I break down why one-size-fits-all approaches are almost certainly increasing the risk profile of your strategy and what a smart business can decide to do instead.
Video Transcription
Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Content & Links. Today I wanted to share my opinion on the dangers of one-size-fits-all link building.
So, something I see some of our clients do and some companies do in a, I think, pretty risk-inducing way is they’ll leverage just one vendor who only has one card in their bag of tricks. So, what I mean by this is typical approaches are one of a few things.
One is they’re broken link building, and that’s what they do. They’ll basically build links to resources pages via link pages. That works, but the problem with that if you see any kind of resources, this is not every market on the web.
They tend to be more serious on average, so if you’re a B to C lifestyle site and you don’t map to one of these personas that exists on most of these link pages some of these vendors will say yes to taking your money, but then will basically go and build either non-relevant links or two, they’ll put some content on your site that just makes no sense for you.
And when you see it live and you also generate links to this content that is just completely non-relevant, because they gotta force this peg in this square hole, or whatever you wanna call it, it’s actually going to perform increasingly worse, and also in the worst case scenario, get you penalized.
In the best case scenario, it might pass value but I would not be happy or be able to sleep well at night thinking about the future value of that overall.
Other ways that these can be issues is if you have a vendor who just does guest posts say, and that’s just their one angle is that they have this network of sites or they go externally and do guest posts. That is going to one, just have a higher risk of devaluation.
So if you just have this one company, who has this one approach, where all of their links look identical, you’re going to have that risk of Google saying that this no longer passes value anymore. So you build risk as a company basically leaning into that one strategy.
So overall my general recommendation is to have a balanced approach that maps to what your business does overall.
So for many of our clients we have a national news approach because their buyer persona does make sense to get links from that sector. We have other clients that we do do resource link page link building for because maybe they’re in the senior market and that’s a natural section for them to get links from.
And then we have lifestyle clients where we’re just doing mid-tier blogs because resource pages would make no sense for them and also national news make no sense for them either.
So we mix up approaches often offering several different ways that they can generate links and of course even this approach is not only what I would suggest our clients generate links with. In a perfect world, they also are naturally augmenting what we would do with their own brand-building activity, with traditional PR, all of those things that can build a well-diversified strategy.
Link building, in a way, is just like investing in the stock market. Hopefully it doesn’t crash, but the general feeling is you want to be diversified, you want to be playing in lots of different buckets, in order to maximize the approach there, and also get in front of as many people as you possibly can.
So as a link builder, as someone generating links or getting links, I generally suggest to have an approach that is getting you a diversity of outcomes, because that’s going to be most likely be the one that Google rewards because that’s just how the web operates. It’s not 40 billion guest posts or 40 billion resource link page outcomes.
Diversify, invest in index funds, invest in the index fund equivalent of link building with your approach and I think you’ll see really long term viable success with your strategy.
So I would love to hear what your thoughts are on this idea. Please give us a thumbs up if you liked it. Let us know what you thought in the comments, and thanks for watching.
