How to Efficiently Manage Your Link Building Project

In the SEO industry, link building remains as one of the most effective methods of improving your website’s ranking. With more than 1.7 billion websites existing in the world wide web, the competition for the top SERPs is tight.

So if you are looking to increase your chances of gaining a better spot, especially on Google’s search results, you’d better start rolling out some link building projects for your website. But if you are already handling multiple SEO projects at the moment, how can you run your link building more efficiently? Follow these simple steps and start building your website’s SERP rankings through link building.

Create a detailed link building plan

Just like any other projects, you need to first create a plan before moving on to your next steps. To run a successful link building campaign, you will need to plan how to handle everything. Planning is a crucial step as this is the time for you to identify what your goals are and how you will work on achieving it.

As part of your plan, you will want to write down your specific goals in conducting a link building campaign. Do you simply want to increase traffic, improve your website’s ranking, or to build your brand’s reputation? Or is it all of the above?

Based on what your goal is, you can then move forward with identifying how you will meet your goal. Will you need funds to pay for links? Will you need to hire a writer to submit articles? By planning, you will have a direction on how to accomplish your link building project and achieve your ultimate goal of improving your website’s ranking.

Focus on relevant niche

To optimize your link building efforts, you will need to focus only on building links with relevant websites. Nowadays, search engines, especially Google, have been streamlining their ranking criteria and giving importance to relevance and quality of links. So if you don’t want to penalize the website you are working on, you should stick to linking with websites within a tighter, more pertinent niche. 

For example, if you are building links for an event planning business, you should build links with websites that are related to weddings, birthdays, flower services, catering, and the like. See to it that you provide them with a good reason to want to link with your website, too. For that, you can start by creating quality, highly informative articles that people within your niche will find useful.

Authoritative sites see to it that they offer articles that their site visitors will want to read and use as resources. Your website will benefit from doing just the same.

Research websites and contacts based on your niche

Once you have identified the niche that you will want to work on, you can now start scouring the internet for websites that you can use for your link building campaign. You will want to create a database containing all websites that you can connect with, including their contact details and the different means that they will allow you to link with them.

Some websites offer guest or  sponsored article submissions, while others allow paid link placements. Depending on your preferences and your needs, you can choose any or all of these options to get more links towards your website. Just see to it that the websites that you are contacting are reputable and that they belong in the same niche as yours.

Implement and follow a process

Once you have your contacts ready, you can now begin your outreach. But more than just requesting for websites to link to you, you will also need to make sure that you are keeping track of everything that you are doing. Once you start communicating with multiple websites, you might find yourself getting lost or confused. So if you want to make sure that you are doing everything correctly, you might want to organize your files and follow a process if you want your link building campaign to be a success.

Link building requires a variety of tasks — from researching and preparing a list of websites to communicating or negotiating with website owners/managers and preparing your links or articles for posting. Then once you have your articles ready, you have to submit it for review and wait for updates from your contacts. If you did a great job preparing the article, chances are, your contacts won’t have to request that you alter any parts of the article in accordance with their guidelines. Afterwards, you will still have to wait for further updates to see if your article is published, including the links you want included for your website.

So yes, link building will require lots of work and monitoring. But if done right, your efforts will pay off and you can eventually boost your website’s ranking. Just be sure to always follow your process and see to it that you document everything so that you won’t have to lose track of any work you have so far done.

Use tools to document your campaigns

Needless to say, you will need to take advantage of technology to keep your link building campaign running smoothly. Apart from maintaining a database of your contacts, you should also consider using a project management software that will make it easy for you, and for your link building team, to monitor the progress of your campaign. 

Many visual project management tools are now available online, most of which are implementing the Agile methodology. Be it Extreme Programming (XP), Scrum, Crystal or Kanban project management, these are all designed to make it easy for project managers to keep track of their processes more efficiently. Moreover, with a project management tool at hand, you get better visibility of what is going on with every step that you and your team takes for your link building campaign.

Conclusion

Whether you are running a campaign for your own business or you are offering link building services to other businesses, it matters that you get to manage your campaign smoothly and conveniently. Without proper planning, research, documentation and project management, the whole campaign might not work out as well as you would have hoped. So see to it that you take all these steps to help your link building campaign become a success.