When creating a digital marketing strategy, you will need to consider the power of link-building and how it can supercharge a campaign.
It’s likely you’ve heard a lot about link-building when it comes to SEO, but there is also a strong and important connection between link building and PPC marketing.
We are going to explore the relationship between link-building and PPC, and how you can use insight from your paid campaigns to inform your strategy and drive better ROI for your business.
Why is link-building important?
Link-building plays a key role in your overall digital marketing success, and here are a few reasons why:
- Google values quality links
- Links can point to valuable content that ranks
- Links are a way to pass value, power and trust
- Google deems it unnatural for a site to have no backlinks
- Links are needed for a site to be discovered
How to build quality links
We know that links are essential, now let’s take a look at some of the best ways to gain links in the current digital marketing climate.
3 types of link-building
1. Guest posting
Guest posting is the process of writing content for another company’s site. Guest bloggers will generally write for similar blogs within the same industry, aiming to attract quality traffic back to their site to boost domain authority.
Guest posting, otherwise known as contributed content or article marketing, has been a popular method for link building for years. That’s because it is a great way to increase levels of trust from your audience, and generate quality signals that search engines will favor when it comes to ranking sites.
Top tip: When utilising guest posting, be sure to avoid ‘stuffing’ the anchor text with commercial keywords as this can be deemed unnatural by Google.
2. Digital PR
Digital PR refers to the proven PR tactics that earn organic backlinks. So, this could mean long-form blog posts with links, linkable infographics, interactive content and more. These assets can be promoted to PR journalists or publications so that they can use them and link back to your site.
Whilst this is a great way to drive valuable traffic from a trusted source, it can be more challenging than guest posting because journalists will only respond to content that is generally very high quality and relevant to their own audience. When successful, however, this method can help you to gain some very valuable link equity.
3. Removal of unlinked brand mentions, errors and broken links
Perhaps the hard work is already done, but something has gone wrong with an existing link. Sometimes, backlinks are lost through routine maintenance, or a linked URL has changed and the hyperlink needs to be updated so that it’s not leading users to a dead link.
You may also find that a blogger has mentioned your brand or used a content asset, but not linked to it.
In this case, all you will need to do is reach out to the right contact. A quick email to the webmaster may be enough to resolve the issue and get your links working again.
Combing PPC with link-building
So where does PPC come into all of this? For many PPC marketers and PPC agencies, their data will, of course, be used to inform an existing or future paid campaign. However, to drive maximum value and improve overall strategy, we’d recommend using this data to inform other areas of your online presence, such as SEO and link-building.
There are a number of ways PPC data and analytics can be used to inform and optimise your SEO link-building strategy.
Let’s take a look:
PPC data can identify your strongest landing pages
You may find it difficult to gauge which pages would be the most valuable to target in a link-building campaign. This is where PPC analytics suites can be used to offer a quick, easy and precise breakdown of all of your landing pages, right down to the keywords and how they are being received by your target audience.
By analysing metrics such as conversion rate and clickthrough rate by keyword, you’ll find it much easier to prioritise pages for your link-building campaign.
PPC data can be used to spot low performing pages
Now to look at our previous point from another angle, PPC data can be used to spot those pages that are not performing so well, but do show some potential.
For example, you may find that on some pages you have a strong clickthrough rate (CTR) for a specific keyword. But, you may also find that a small number of people are actually downloading your product or using your service once they click through.
This suggests that people are interested, but your content needs to be improved to encourage them to purchase or convert. This is a great opportunity for you to update existing content so that people stick around once they click through to your page. Improving these pages will also help you to attract new links. After all, people will want to link to high-quality pages.
Use PPC to spot spikes in demand
Use pay per click data to analyse your ads and the average cost per click (CPC) for specific keywords. This can then be used as inspiration when looking for topical content. For example, if an ad suddenly drives an unusually high CTR, it may be time to start discussing this topic in your content, essentially ‘riding the buzz’ around topics that are popular amongst your audience.
Suggested CPC can be an indicator of when a certain type of content or topic is gaining traction, so that you can get ahead of the game and post popular, relevant and quality content that people are talking about online. This should help to drive those valuable backlinks.
Final thoughts
The key learning here is that a data-focused link-building strategy will provide better results…and PPC provides just that!
PPC data can help to inform your strategy as well as optmise an existing strategy. Identify how well specific pages are performing through PPC insight, and then prioritise valuable pages for link-building as a result.
Get in touch with our London PPC agency
If you have any questions regarding your link-building strategy, or simply want to speak to a local PPC expert regarding an existing or upcoming campaign, feel free to get in touch.