Link building- Point us in the right direction

[jannkuzel]

We are currently fixing crawl errors and other on page issues and have taken on board that 'content is king' and have invested a lot of time and resources into writing unique content on each of the several hundred pages on our ecommerce site (not just to avoid duplicate content but add researched content that will hopefully enhance the user experience and allow them to make the best choice of products) and earlier this year started blog writing regular content about updates, industry trends and current events e.g. Euro 2012 (all content relevant to our sector and/or products).

So we are actively working to improve our SEO (and also have regularly updated social media accounts with healthy number of followers) but the problem is link building as we work in a sector where the content isn't really all that exciting so getting link backs from sharing our written content is rare and also doing an infographic and/or guest blogs would not bring anything exciting.

So how do we go about building white hat links? The only thing I can see is maybe doing press release submissions but from research there is mixed feelings about this.

Any advice that could point us in the right direction would be appreciated.

[StephWeigert]

You could publish your content on social media platforms or try to write a guestpost on a blog which has a lot of authority within your branch. There's always something thats fun or interesting to read. Maybe write about 10 reasons why your products aren't boring or something like that.

Also read Hannah Smit's post about boring niches creating great content

[EGOL]

I don't know what you are selling, but I would consider writing SuperExpert content about the products that you sell.

• How to select the right one

• How to use it

• How to fix it

• How to get the most out of it

• Information about vintage products

When people write to you about your products a lot of those messages can be the starting point for a great article on your website.

I try to do the above at a level that is far superior to anything that the manufacturer does.

[DougRoberts]

I don't know what niche you're in, but can you exploit the "real-life" relationships the business has? Are there opportunities to build links to suppliers, partners, customers, trade associations, sponsorship etc?

It's often overlooked, but where there's already a business relationship you may find it significantly easier to build meaningful authentic links than if you're starting from scratch.

[jannkuzel]

Thank you Pr0mosZ- we publish out all our fresh content to social media platforms and thanks for the article and the guest blog suggestion- I have looked into this before and was finding it hard to locate a good quality blog that allowed guest posting but will continue this search.

[jannkuzel]

Thanks EGOL for the suggestions. Great points - this is exactly the sort of points we cover in our blogs.

The general frustration is that some websites in the industry have 5-10x more links than us (some even started business after us) and we are finding it hard to think of ways to increase our linkbuilding organically.

[jannkuzel]

P.s this question came about after a SEO company visited our offices looking to sign us up. We told the representative that using the (amazing!) help of seomoz tool we are sorting out onpage errors ourself and do regular content writing on blogs and regular differentiated posts on a range of social platforms. And the representative then offered to increase the ranking of one of our main keywords by us signing up to £XXX a month.

This is where we got confused- and maybe you guys can help us out (without giving away any industry secrets :p), we could not understand what the seo company would do different from what we were doing ourselves (and they wouldn't really go into detail either).

[Andropenis_Australia]

It's a good question. Google blabs non stop about natural links and ranks websites based on links (big part of ranking anyway), however how are those of us that can not get lots of natural BL's compete against those who have obviously bought thousands of links?

Google is very retarded at times as it seems to reward websites doing the wrong thing over the ones who are doing the right things.

When you find out, let me know.

[First-VehicleLeasing]

Have you tried looking at where these links to your competitors are coming from? It may be that whoever is linking to them may link to you with a little encouragement.

[StephWeigert]

They probably have a big network of sites they can put on links I guess. I don't know your site and don't know the keyword so I don't have a good answer to your question. But if they didn't want to be specific on what they are doing different it probably isn't the partner you look for to do your SEO. In my opinion sharing knowledge and building good relationships with customers is key, ofcourse you won't tell all the secrets but if an agency can't help you by answering your questions then why would you hire them?

[jannkuzel]

Thanks for the advice. But like I commented below we will still be a long way away from catching up with other companies in the sector. We are tempted at times to sign up to a SEO agency but find it hard to understand what they would do additional to the quality content work we spend time doing already.

[jannkuzel]

Yep you're totally right - we didn't go with them but while considering their proposal got thinking about what they would do differently to what we are already doing. Maybe in the near future we will approach a seo company ourselves and pose the questions in this thread but for now we're still confused. Thanks for all the help thus far.

[StephWeigert]

In my experience small SEO agencies sometimes have a more personal approach. Maybe it's a good idea to invite 2-3 agencies and you begin straight away with your questions. I have found myself in the same spot with a company who didn't want to tell about their methods and 3-6 months later they went out of business because they bought old authoritative domains and transformed them into blog networks/linkwheels. Nowadays when we want to hire a certain company we go to smaller agencies and tell them we don't want bla bla but easy answers in normal language and feedback. Good luck with your business.