Linking for multiple clients

[Alex_Ratynski]

We own a small web design company that both creates the sites and then does the seo marketing for them once they are created.  The business has grown to have over 100 customers.   However, as we sell more sites we find our SEO team is somewhat short staffed.  So far, the area that suffers the most is the link building aspect of SEO.

The sites we build are for dentists and usually only contain 10 to 20 pages.  Enough to list the services they offer and where they are located.  Here is my question:

We need to get the most effective links possible for over 100 sites with just a couple of employees.  What would be the most effective links to try for.  We cant chase down every stray link for our doctors.  And, we don't have time to do in-depth research for each client each month as we are already pushing ourselves to the limit.  In time, we will have more employees to help share the SEO load.  But for now, where should we be spending our time most effectively?  We can usually only budget one or two hours per client each month for linking.

Thanks for any advice you can offer.

[DanDeceuster]

If all you have is two hours per client then there are two options you could be doing:

1. The most effective thing you could do would be to build citations and listings in local directories. These links will help immensely because they will also push up the dentists site in Google Places as well.

2. If you aren't concerned with Google Places, then in only an hour or two each month I would comment on as many dental/health related blogs as you can with a real name and not spammy comment. This is the fastest way to create a halfway decent link.

Good luck!

[AlanBleiweiss]

I have to agree with Daniel's first suggestion, and at the same time, caution that the 2nd suggestion could rapidly backfire because just one link from one blog is very insignificant in the long run.  Multiply that by multiple doctors - how long do you think you'd be able to get away with the blog comment path before someone smelled a rat and reported it as spam?  In the blink of an eye.

Local citations, local directories, and local listings and Yelp, CitySearch and the rest.  Coupled with high quality unique content on each site where you seed location info into the on-site optimization.

[DanDeceuster]

Well I would hope no one would smell a rat and report spam because I would hope they would leave real comments as real people with real names. I agree, blog comments are pretty insignificant, but in bulk they are quite helpful for local non-competitive phrases. You just have to do it right, which a lot of people can't seem to do for some reason.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Agreed Daniel.  I'm just looking at the scale of it. 100 sites.  All from the same source.  The amount of time involved to do that just doesn't seem to be a wise use of productivity to me at that scale.

[DanDeceuster]

Oh I see what you mean, like getting links on one blog to all 100 sites? I don't know if that is how I would go about it. I would spend 2 hours browsing around different blogs and leaving comments for one guy, then the next 2 hours doing it for the next guy, etc. I don't know that I would repeat a lot of blogs or posts. It would be pretty tedious but if you only have 2 hours a month and won't do Google Places work, then it beats writing a single article or submitting to spammy free directories or making hundreds of bookmarks.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Right that's what I'm concerned about. Needing to be extremely careful in how the work is done.  I pity the person having to be responsible for that if they're not aware of these issues.  That's all I was trying to get across.

[Alex_Ratynski]

Thanks for the input.  We have an employee that only does Google places right now.  They contact our doctors and make sure the PINs are done correctly, as well as uploading pictures and video.

I will be sure that we are getting the most out of directories as we can.  As for the guest commenting on other blogs, we train the doctors to do that.  However, most don't have time.  It is difficult for us to find blogs all over the country for different dentists and put a link on each one.  I will give it a shot though.  Thanks for all the feedback, and if anyone else has a thought I would be happy to hear their ideas.

[SebastianDyer]

Have you considered hiring a contractor? If you're in a position where you can't afford to hire more staff but can afford to spend a bit, I would suggest hiring a freelancer to increase the number of hours spent monthly.

If you can't do this, you are really limited to Daniels suggestions (minus the blog comments bit) and possibly some generic press release and article work - keep it clean and unspammy.