What is link building?

Before we begin, it is important to understand what this strategy is all about. Link Building is an important marketing practice and one of the main pillars of SEO, which aims to increase the authority of your site through the generation of links to it.

Considering this and that in Latin America there are more and more blogs and influencers that set trends and constantly talk about brands on their websites, we must know the details to take into account to choose the right person to talk about our product or service.

We must not forget that the objective of link building is not to provide us with referred traffic. Thanks to quality sites linking to us, we can achieve greater authority in the eyes of Google.

For this we must take into account the following points:

1- Knowing our keywords

Keywords are the words that people use to search in Google. The search for keywords should be the basis to start our content strategy since, in order to generate the content, we must know the words that users use to reach our website.

2- Study the competition

On the other hand, once we have determined what our keywords are, we need to know what our direct competitors’ keywords are. We need to know what they are working on, what keywords are working for them, and what we can contribute that they are not offering.

3- Make partnerships with websites that suit your business

Bloggers or influencers will be the main link to achieve our goal. But before contacting them, we must know what we want to position to fit perfectly with the theme of the site. In this way, we will be working towards the naturalness of the link, since we must not forget that link building is a tactic that can be penalized if we do not do it in the right way.

Therefore, when we contact the influencer in question, we must emphasize that the post must be as natural as possible, giving the impression that we have not contacted him, and that it seems that he recommends us without prior agreement.

What should the generated content look like?

The keys to useful and attractive content for Google (and users) are two: quality and original content.

Mainly, the content must be of quality for a very basic reason. There are thousands of content on the Internet on the same subject, so Google will show before those that have a higher quality than the rest, with the objective that the user who searches receives the answer to his query.

But, what is quality? Quality content is well-written content, without spelling mistakes, structured by paragraphs related to each other, with coherent sentences, optimized with internal and external links, H2 subtitles, and keywords in bold, as the most important aspects.

As for originality, what happens is that there are many quality contents on the same topic. Then, as a differentiating point from the rest, it is important that the content is original and provides something new that the rest does not provide, so that, along with quality, its originality is highlighted by search engines.

These two variables will make that after publishing original and quality content, it will be positioned in search engines and will be shown as an outstanding result.

How do we choose the ideal influencer or blogger for our link-building strategy?

We have already discussed the quality parameters in terms of the content to be generated by the blog in question, but now we need to talk about the quality of the website. The more authority the linking site has, the better our strategy will work. For this reason, we need to use programs like MOZ or Majestic SEO to measure the quality of a website and check whether or not it is worth collaborating with them.

MOZ metrics

The Domain Authority (DA) is a value that determines the authority of a web page or an entire domain. When we talk about authority, we refer to the weight that a site has in the field of organic ranking. Its values range from 0-100 and represent the authority of a complete website. Moz calculates this metric in combination with the other link metrics like MozRank, MozTrust, the total number of links, etc.

Majestic metrics

Majestic SEO offers several metrics, the best known of which are Citation Flow and Trust Flow.

Citation Flow is a metric designed to inform us how “influential” a site is over another, according to the number of backlinks linking them. That is, if different domains link to each other, their CF will increase. It is not the quality of the links that matter, but rather the quantity.

And what’s the difference with Trust Flow?

A site can have a lot of links, but only some of them will be quality and “trusted”.

By quality links we mean if they come from a related topic, with original content and, above all, real traffic. The Trust Flow gives us the parameter of quality of the incoming backlinks to a domain because they count the number of clicks that a user must make from a trusted site to reach ours. Generally, it is of lower value than the CF, since you can have many links but not all of them will be of good performance. Even if we make sure we have very few high authority links, there will always be low authority links randomly created in blogs, forums, etc.

Here is a selection of fashion, beauty & travel bloggers for you to consider in your next link-building strategy:

Fashion Diaries

Pamela Stupia, is a journalist, blogger, YouTuber, and author of two sagas of juvenile books. She has been working for more than 10 years in technology digital media and a few years ago she started writing about other topics and that’s how the blog was born. Her main topics are fashion and beauty for young people.

In her blog, you can promote keywords related to fashion and makeup, related to How to searches, such as: how to combine [garment], how to do my makeup for [conference], etc.

Get glam

Verónica Frágola, better known as Fruticienta. She has a degree in advertising and worked for some years in the marketing area of a cosmetics company, which allowed her to obtain the necessary knowledge about components, ways of use, skincare, and so on. Today she shares this learning and mainly the experience of using products through her blog.

In her blog, you can boost keywords related to informative searches of beauty products, such as: which is the best [product], how to use [product], etc.

Argentina and the World

Federico and Sol, an Argentinean couple who share their experiences traveling around the world. There you can find posts for each of the places they have visited, telling about their experiences.

In their blog, you can boost keywords related to informative searches concerning tour packages, airlines, lodging, etc. such as: what to do in [place], the best hotel in [place], cruises to [place], etc.

I already have the links generated, now what?

As we have seen, link building for SEO takes an important effort on our side, so once we have generated the links on the websites we must check them to make sure that the work has not been done in vain. Here are some of the most common problems that can ruin your strategy.

1- The generated link is nofollow

Links are intended to be used by both humans and robots. The details behind how they do this are different, which makes it possible to control where search engines can and cannot go. All we need to do is verify that our link does not contain the rel = “nofollow” attribute as this would be telling search engines not to follow this link.

2- Too many new links overnight

If you get a lot of new backlinks in a short period, Google will suspect foul play. They know that you can get thousands of links by paying or using link spamming software.

We must keep in mind that the “short period” is key in these cases. If it took us a long time or if we constantly keep getting new links day after day, it won’t look suspicious. Some of the larger sites like Wikipedia gain thousands of links daily and don’t have to worry about their rankings.

3- Anchor texts are poorly optimized

When creating a link, it is recommended to be specific with the anchor keyword or anchor text (that is why it is very important to do keyword research to know which one is the right one). In these cases, the ideal is to specify to the blogger in question what will be our main keyword to use.

Conclusion

Influencer marketing is a rapidly growing business strategy. Both companies and bloggers or influencers work to benefit from these relationships, so the trend will not change in the future.

It is important to remember that before our main marketing strategies, influencers are in a position to help and not only from social networks. If we want to expand the reach of the brand, find new customers, and improve our SEO at the same time, we recommend implementing this strategy, and if you need help, you can always contact puntorojo.

La entrada Link Building: How to capitalize on collaborations with bloggers to improve your site’s ranking on Google? aparece primero en SEO Blog Punto Rojo.

They say that facing our fears makes us grow as people.

Overcoming fear and implementing a product review strategy grows our sales.

Reviews are an almost perfect mixture of SEO & sales. It can help us rank for the terms most relevant to our niche, and build trust that generates conversions & all in a scalable way.

Users increasingly trust reviews. According to a study by Search Engine Land, 88% of people trust an online review as much as a personal recommendation.

The demand for this tool is reflected in the demand for reviews in Google searches.

Google Trends shows how in the last two years the relevance of “reviews” in Google is growing:

The studies and the metrics indicate that reviews must be more and more relevant 

Studies & metrics indicate that reviews should be more and more relevant to improve our e-commerce and increase our conversion rate.

Here are 4 points to keep in mind for our review strategy & what we should prioritize for it:

Trust = Conversion

The foundation of any kind of transaction or negotiation is trust. For online product sales, trust is even more important (and more difficult to generate!).

We have to understand that the content of our e-commerce is our physical store “salesperson”. What information we communicate, where we communicate it, and how we communicate it can be (and should be!) your main differential vs. the competition.

Reviews are comments or recommendations made by users who have already interacted with your product or service. It allows the potential customer to better understand what they are buying and knowing this, minimizes the margin of error of “expectation vs. reality.”

As consumers, we are aware that the products that we buy and the services that we hire are not perfect. And as digital experts, we know that from the brand, we can never highlight its deficiencies.

As people, we know that understanding everything that goes into the purchase of a product or service (especially when it has a high value) is key in the decision to buy.

To be able to show our products/services with our technical explanation, to accompany it with images, with videos, and to be able to accompany it with real product testimonials is the closest thing to transforming an online shopping experience to simply an excellent shopping experience.

SEO is content

Generating excellent content is the key to your SEO positioning & to beating the competition.

While there are technical aspects of SEO, all strategies end up revolving around content creation, optimization, or accessibility.

When it comes to reviews, we know that users value reviews with text over those that are just stars. A Fan and Fuel study found that 73% of users prefer a written review vs. just a rating.

Although we can work with short-tail & long-tail, brand or non-brand, primary or secondary keywords from product cards, categories, or blogs… these sources have limitations.

Mercado Libre, one of the best SEO optimized platforms in LATAM launched its review strategy almost 5 years ago thinking about improving the shopping experience and filling a gap in its SEO strategy, and content.

The reviews are generated by your clients. This means that your clients generate content with keywords that Google uses to rank your site. Let’s see how these two reviews contain a lot of keywords:

This transforms the reviews into one of the richest sources of unique and valuable content for SEO.

Bad reviews are good reviews

The increase in the frequency that users use reviews is teaching us a few things.

Users are realizing the “truth” behind 5-star reviews. They understand that when they see 5 stars on a product/service, they think one of two alternatives: a) this product has no reviews or b) the owners or employees themselves are generating the reviews.

Receiving a negative (or not as positive as we want) review is not a shot in the foot for your brand’s reputation; it is an opportunity to understand where there is room for improvement and an opportunity to potentially build customer loyalty.

Non-response is not a solution for reviews we don’t like and the key to making your reviews contribute & contribute more to your business is to respond to negative comments.

Ignoring a negative review runs the risk of appearing that we don’t care about our customers’ opinions or that we are not willing to help them.

Imagine the relevance of responding to reviews that Google takes as a factor to position your Google My Business.

In addition, that a brand responds to a customer’s concern or dissatisfaction is encouraging for a potential customer.

 Competitive Advantage

Now, we understand the value & potential of a review strategy, but how do we put it into practice?

Here are 6 tips to apply, optimize & make the most of your review strategy:

1. Enable reviews on your e-commerce product pages: Retailers who choose not to display this information run the risk of that sale going to a competitor.
2. Capitalize on your negative reviews: Although it sounds counterproductive, allowing & responding to negative reviews helps us build credibility & trust.
3. Prioritize the generation of reviews for products that have a low number of reviews: The goal is for all your products to have a handful of reviews, not just your most relevant products.
4. Prioritize even more the generation of reviews for high ticket value products: You can help drive a sale by removing the fear or lack of knowledge about a product by sharing experiences from other customers.
5. Quality > Quantity: a 4-star review of 110 words has much more value for SEO & customer trust than 5 reviews that say “good product”.

Identify reviews qualified with “Certified User”: Identifying customers with “certification seals” (similar to Trip Advisor for example) increases the probability of purchase by 15%.

I hope these tips will help you leverage reviews in your digital strategy and increase your sales!

La entrada SEO Reviews Strategy: 4 ways for your customers to help you sell aparece primero en SEO Blog Punto Rojo.