Backlinking: Does It Work? It’s a $6 Billion Question…

If you don't have a backlink strategy for your long-term marketing plan, you could be losing potential business. Is it worth the loss? Have a look at Canva. They managed to uncover a $6B in valuation from investing in their backlinking strategy. Those are staggering numbers. How can that help a small to medium size business? Easy. It starts with a plan to build out the same strategy on a scale that works with your business goals and budget.

The SEO is always the big wheel. It takes time and energy to build momentum, but... once it gets going watch out. PPC is great as part of a strategy and should definitely be part of it. However, building content with an SEO focus is a long-term investment, like annuities. It takes a bit of effort for SEO but it's a constant, it continues to educate after the article has been written. In contrast, when you run "Paid Per Click" ads, once the money has expired so has the ad. Diving into the strategy of backlinking, you must first understand what the search intent is. Once this has been determined, you are able to build out the structure of content for your landing page. For example: let’s use a pest control company as our medium. First, to understand the intent of the person using Google, keyword research is conducted. We are not looking only for volume, but also the intent on why they’re searching, using these keywords. Breaking this intent down into four categories helps to define the "why". Back to our pest control company, here are the four categories.

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Is The Intent:

1. Informational - Are they looking to learn (e.g.“who is pest control”)


2. Navigational - Are they looking for something specific (e.g. “pest control blog”)


3. Transactional - Are they looking to purchase a service (e.g. “pest service”)


4. Investigational - Are they comparing companies (e.g. “pest service vs. doing it myself”)

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Once we have established the intent of the person searching, we can start building out the framework. Let’s choose the Investigational Intent. Here we would create two different landing pages on each category that would be weighted in each opponent. “Pest Service” would be heavy on the benefits for pest service-then create a hook. “Doing it myself ” would be weighted heavy on the steps to do it yourself with a relief valve to have a professional service which would link to a pest service landing page. This is where the fun begins. Each one of these landing pages acts as a parent page. Then we can dive into building out the children pages*. The children pages work as subcategories under each landing page. So imagine every bug that is in your area has it’s own page under the category of “pest service” or “do it myself ”... and this is where most sane adults throw in the towel. As you can imagine it can add up pretty quickly. One parent page could potentially have 70+ pages of content. This is why it is time consuming. If you like investing on steady growth with minimal peaks and valleys, backlinking is your ticket. Having more children pages than the "Old Woman Who Lived In A Shoe," we have to keep them organized. How do we do this? It is all about planning and building structure.

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This starts with the overall root system of how the pages work, in the diagram above. Next, we get into the page structure. This has to be consistent across all pages to maximize performance. See the diagram below for the “doing it myself ” structure.

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• H1 Title How do I [keyword] in [location]?
• Button >Download [company name] checklist now
• Sentence Don’t let [keyword] ruin your days. Put together a plan to eradicate [keyword]. Or you can have worry free [company name]
• Image Image of assets
• H2 Title Enjoy your [location] lifestyle free of [keyword]
• Body 2-3 paragraphs with 3 keyword references and bullet points
• CTA Hire a professional to rid of [keyword]
• Title [company name] is your trusted provider in [location]
• List 5 Steps for managing [keyword]
• Body 2-3 paragraphs w/ (2) H1 referencing keywords
• Accordian 2-3 FAQs in response to [keyword]
• Quote Testimonial

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Building a backlinking outreach program takes a great deal of effort and time. It is well worth the investment. Capturing backlinks from third parties like bloggers and journalist essentially is a public relations dream. Having an outreach team to listen and respond to any mentions, comments or posts to layer on to the SEO and backlink strategy can have amazing results. Creating responses built off of a sales email formula can improve the impact of the strategy. Below is a framework for an outreach email to bloggers and journalists:

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1. Lead with empathy
2. Include the name of the article or post in the email
3. Using "here" for the URL link instead of having the whole address
4. Adding an appropriate image to stand out
5. Bolding the ideal anchor text for the link

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This takes a great deal of research to methodically go through influencer’s posts to find the right match for your service. Anything easy is never good and anything good is never easy. Back to Canva and their results, it was a 5 year investment that paid off. This strategy created 4.24M backlinks from 100,000 extremely credible domains that generates 270M visitors per year in just organic traffic. Mind blowing. See how you can take this strategy that Canva employed to work for your company with a FREE 60-minute strategy session.Contact GOMINGO today to discuss an SEO and PPC strategy that will help you reach your business goals.

Read more from Foundation about Canva's backlinking empire building by clicking here.