Link Building in 2023

Get ready for another exciting episode of The Majestic SEO Podcast as we bring together Alexandra Tachalova, Jason Morris, Victor Karpenko, Amit Raj, and Tamara Dzajkovska to share their insights and predictions for the future of link building, and what you can expect in 2023.

From building authority online to future-proofing your SEO, this episode will be packed with actionable tips and expert advice that you won’t want to miss. So, whether you’re a seasoned link builder or just starting out, tune in on May 3rd and get ready to take your link building game to the next level!

Watch On-demand

Listen to the Podcast

Transcript

David Bain 

What link building strategies are recommended in 2023? Welcome to The Majestic SEO Podcast and live stream. I’m your host, David Bain, and today we’re talking link building in 2023. Specifically, what link building strategies are recommended in this year 2023. So let’s get straight into introducing today’s panel starting off with Amit.

Amit Raj 

Hi, I’m Amit, I’m the founder of ‘The Links Guy’, which is a link building company. And I’ve been building links since about 2015. I’ve built links for all kinds of industries. I think I started at the funeral industry, which is a bit morbid, but I’ve kind of worked in all kinds of industries.

David Bain 

Out of interest was, was that for a funeral business, or was actually for an agency specializing in that type of client?

Amit Raj 

It was actually a kind of funeral service, they compared funeral service companies and like people within the funeral industry, so things like people that create things like if you have to put ashes and certain urns and things like that, like all kinds of companies. So I mean, it was pretty good at that time, although link building wasn’t made easier back then.

David Bain 

Well, we’ll talk about what was easier in the past, and what works well now just in a little bit. So let’s move on to introducing the rest of our panel. So move on to Victor.

Victor Karpenko 

Hey, what’s up? I run an SEO agency called SeoProfy. I’ve been doing SEO for 16 plus years. And I really like link building. And I guess I can share a lot of interesting things about it.

David Bain 

Thanks for joining us Victor, and also with us today is Alex.

Alexandra Tachalova 

Hello, everyone. My name is Alex and I’m the founder of Digital Olympus. We are a link building agency and we try to take a very different approach. So we tried to build a result oriented link building campaigns. So basically, we try to understand how to deliver tangible results with the help of links, rather than just building links. But for sure, we do also just a lot of links just because there are different type of clients. Not necessarily each and every client has a need to be involved in into a strategic campaign, I would say.

David Bain 

Super great to have you, Alex. And Jason.

Jason Morris 

Hello. My name is Jason Morris. I’m the founder of Profit Engine. We’ve been a link building business since 2017. I started myself on Upwork on my own and we’re a family business as well, two of my boys work for me, which is quite unusual. One of them’s been in the link building industry for a while working for another company. So that’s been good. And we build things for agencies, and for Ecommerce and other other areas as well. So we got a volume business on one side, and a more bespoke business on the other, which is really where we we came from.

David Bain 

Superb. Thanks for joining us, Jason. Also with us is Tamara.

Tamara Dzajkovska 

Hello, everyone. I’m Tamara, and I’m based in Macedonia. Up until very recently, I was the head of the link building division at a digital marketing agency called the White Light Digital Marketing. And currently, I’m working independently as a freelance SEO specialist and link building specialists. I’m very excited to be joining this discussion today with some of the industry’s pros that I learned from and thank you for having me, David.

David Bain 

So five great panelists today. We’ve got a few people watching us live as well. So if you’ve got any specific questions about linkbuilding, make sure you fire them into the chat area. And then we’ll try and cover them as part of the live discussion as well. And if you’ve got any of your own tips or suggestions or like to share what tactics that are currently working for you, feel free to share them in chat, and we’ll try and incorporate them in the discussion as well. But let’s move on to the first question or topic area. And let’s go to Amit for this one. So I’m at what like link building tactics that used to work well, you’re saying that you got started in link building in 2015, but aren’t a good idea in 2023?

Amit Raj 

I’ve got something that’s not perhaps a tactic, but I feel like it’s an approach to link building. So I don’t know this is a bit of a cheat answer. But I think this is one of the things that I’ve seen. You’ve all seen these kind of emails saying things like, I really love your site, or I really love your blog, this kind of fake personalizing. So that obviously doesn’t work. It maybe does work at scale. But I feel like when there was a shift towards using things like AI writers, I feel like the personalization becomes very disingenuous. It’s very try hard and even trying to do heavy personalization, I believe it works. That’s what I used to do way back. And at the start when I was doing it by myself, it’s very difficult to scale. And I think if you go really deep with your personalization, you can kind of run the risk, if you don’t know where to stop is going off into like a less relevant area. And you get into some really weird conversations like we’ve sometimes done outreach, and we’ll talk about something and we ended up having a conversation about the guy’s car and his Mustang. And you know, what kind of gearbox he had, like, I mean, that’s an extreme example. But it’s those kinds of things. It’s the approach to personalization, I think has changed a lot. And it’s something you have to be very mindful of, especially with all this AI and this push towards automation. I guess the short answer is you have to be very careful what you do with personalization.

David Bain 

So are you saying that nowadays, when you’re doing outreach, using automated personalization is a mistake?

Amit Raj 

I believe it works at scale, but I believe it’s kind of people turned off by it, because it sounds disingenuous, it’s that thing where you just know that something’s not actually human. It’s like those things when you look at an AI headshot, and you know, you can kind of see that it’s not a real person, I believe it’s the same kind of thing. I personally believe AI has its use, but I’m very careful about what we use in outreach, and how we use it. So people may disagree with me, that’s just my stance on it.

Alexandra Tachalova 

May I ask, what do you use instead of personalization? I mean I partially agree with you, but if we are going to put aside personalization, and still going to rely on email outreach, what kind of options do we have, how we can make a hook?

Amit Raj 

Yeah, I believe you still have to personalize. But I think there’s a balance between generic personalization and then you’ve got the heavy personalization, which we’ve gone in between the two for the past couple of years. I think for heavy personalization there’s a point of diminishing returns, where it’s not actually giving you more results, it’s creating other issues, like it’s not less efficient, and it causes burnout. So I think personalization is still good, but you have to find the right balance, and this is particularly when you’re doing at scale. I think if somebody was doing it for their own blog, it’s fine, they could probably personalization heavily and it’s fine, because they don’t really need to build a lot of links. But at a certain scale, I believe it becomes quite difficult. It’s like you’re not really gaining anything. And you might be better served with like, segmented and themed templates, and perhaps even targeting those based on a sub-segment of the batch, which for instances, like if you’re reaching out to small businesses, we need to talk to them differently compared to like a large business, because their needs are different.

Alexandra Tachalova 

I still think that there should be some decent efforts in terms of personalization, for instance, it’s not necessarily about going deep and in my understanding, it’s more about using some parameters that are quite easy to scale. So for instance, it’s quite easy with the help of apollo.io to get the niches of the business that you are outreaching, so you can use this parameter or the city, the location, where the person is based that you’re planning to outreach. So something along the following client that might work as a hook here because this person, the one that that is going to outreach me and you can see that there were some homework behind the scenes. So in my understanding there should be something about ‘you’, because it’s good that we are talking about email outreach, because I believe that cold email outreach is dying down. So basically, that is the last days of cold email outreach in the way we do it. Especially with the market recession, we started receiving cold email outreach pitches from really big companies like HubSpot, Salesforce, etc, because everyone kind experienced a little bit of a panic mode, and I understand the market really slow down. So everyone tries to be kind of safe and continues to generate the same revenue streams most probably, but the way they do things, is kind of showcasing that it’s no longer the way of getting things done, because whenever I look at their pitches, I feel that there is a big misconception between how things might be delivered, versus the way that they’re actually done.

David Bain 

I just want to give Bilal a quick shout out as well, you’ve been sharing some good content in the comments live on YouTube, and talking a little bit about things like white hat link building. So is it possible to be entirely ethical in the eyes of Google, with your link building tactics? Is it still possible to get away with certain things? What could you get away with in the past and what can you get away with now? I just want to say one other thing about outreach as we’re talking about outreach. I get quite a few emails asking me things like, can I appear on your podcast as a podcast guest? Or can this person appear as a podcast guest. And what I’m looking for within the email is a demonstration that they’ve actually listened to the podcast. And if that’s not there, then I am highly likely just to completely ignore the email and not get back to them because it’s just a mass email, I would imagine the same kind of thing applies to outreach for content, you know, unless they’ve actually demonstrated that they’d been on the site and demonstrated why they feel that they’re relevant to the site, you, you’d be much more likely to consider them, and that’s the kind of thing that you’d probably include in an outreach email as well. So just just a couple of general thoughts there as well. And feel free to comment on them as it as we move around. But let’s now go to Victor. So Victor, what are your thoughts in general about what link building strategies perhaps used to work well, but aren’t so good nowadays?

Victor Karpenko 

I think I will try to filter because everyone is talking about white hat links, and we see the opposite for every niche we work with. That’s why we developed a lot of internal tools just to analyze data first, and then see what we should do. Right. So we can see who is selling links, how much this links are for, how many of them your competitors got, what anchors they used, what what type of the links like for example, we can be like homepage, outreach links, link assets like a statistics post, or is it actually outreach links where people like didn’t pay for it and stuff and we also can see hidden links such as the links from PBNs, we made our own crawler that like every three months, takes about seven terabytes of space on servers that can see the hidden links from other crawlers. So basically, what I’m trying to say, I don’t know what works specifically for some niche if I’m not working within this niche, but I can see what is happening there. I can see if someone actually build outreach, or they actually use redirects that are hidden through all the like, even through Majestic, even through ahrefs even through other link crawlers. And we basically aggregate the data and just trying to see, okay, what’s their strategy, what they did, and what’s our source actually, because at the end of the day, the main idea of link building is to rank, right? It’s like, sometimes I joke because link building is not a part of SEO, SEO is a part of link building, because when you’re good with technical, good with the keywords, and good with the intent, you your page answers the right intent, the whole other part is link building. And right now, what I see, and this depends on the niche, but links from main pages still work, not the one that are spammy, but the ones that are niche, specific, unique, or super trusted. Outreach works really good. Outreach with Tier Two links works even better. Outreach when you do the article, like right now, like, Parasite SEO, everyone does it right now, because I’m more from affiliate side than from agency side. And we do rank super competitive keywords in one or two months, just just because we do amount of words optimization of this page, and then you build links on this page. But think about if you’re, a normal product, and you don’t want to get traffic from these pages. So let’s say we talked in the beginning about funeral SEO, we actually have agency that does funeral SEO services. So yeah, so let’s say you want to rank for funeral SEO, you rank and you don’t get any leads. But what actually do funeral SEO owners want? They want to generate more leads, right. So you create an article for this, you publish on third party source and build outreach to this article, and the webmaster, like where you place this article will be happy because his page will also get some traffic, get some more trust, and if this article was quality enough, it’s it’s good. So I wouldn’t say like main pages for outreach only works, I see a lot of cool stuff with the statistical posts, where people do amazing link assets. But it takes time, and most of us, most of the clients don’t have this time. So yeah, I would just leave on this to like outreach, any type of outreach articles and links from home pages.

David Bain 

That’s a good. That’s a good topic in itself talking talking about time. What are the most effective link building strategies in terms of time of impact? Tamara, what are your opening thoughts?

Tamara Dzajkovska 

Well, I would say slowly is the fastest way to get where you want to be, I guess with links, but it doesn’t apply to all because, as you mentioned, some clients want fast results. I will say that when I started, and in the agency setting, I was working, and we were building sponsored posts, so sponsored guest posts, posts you pay for to post an article to acquire a link. Back then it worked pretty well, and that tactic that was quantity over quality would help you improve your rankings faster and gain some traffic. So this would be sponsored articles that go on niche relevant websites that have some decent metrics. But what I came to understand, especially when in 2021, I think that Google issued a spam update, is that most of the websites that we will get this kind of as sponsored posts were on sites that are SEO farms. I believe that this link building tactic does not work really well right now. I assume it can be incorporated. You can still publish sponsored articles on good websites, but yet again, maybe combined with white hat link building tactics and focus a lot on quality content, but in general, the quantity over quality I don’t think that is working anymore, and it’s more quality over quantity. In saying that, maybe later on, I can just tell, talk about some tactics that work well now and after this update, but to answer the question, what link building tactics used to work well, but are not a good idea now, I think that this fast link building approach to sponsored posts that you pay for, it’s not really a smart idea right now.

David Bain 

Jason. Do you agree, disagree or have something else to add?

Jason Morris 

I think so much of what we do in SEO and link building is niche specific, because certain niches have a tolerance for risk more, certain niches are different. I would agree with Tamara that we’ve seen if it’s got ‘write for us’, or ‘sponsored post’ on the site then we have an 18 point checklist now that sites have to go through that we manually do. And part of that is to get rid of anything that’s got ‘write for us’ or ‘sponsored post’ because I agree, I think Google have picked up on that and they’re not stupid, they know and they’re link farms. But I think things like PBNs that people talk about they still work. I mean, Victor’s obviously got the tools and knowing there’s tools out there that you can find them. We’re an agency, but we we also run our own affiliate sites, and we test things as well and we see what works and things like Parasite SEO, those sort of things absolutely work. And just before we get into the whole white hat, black hat, you know, I think it’s all a bit of a weird argument, I think, by agencies to sort of set themselves apart, you know, Link building is against the T’s and C’s of Google as a whole, you know, and then to set it apart slightly, that we do our outreach and offer something of value, well the website want’s value back, because that they are not going to give you a link for nothing. But the it’s a misnomer of thinking it’s sort of paints link, you know, we’re about making a client’s site rank, that’s what they want. So we do what we can to do that, as long as we’re not doing anything that’s illegal. You know, we need to think about what works and what doesn’t, and things that used to work, other educational links got hit a couple of years ago, but then we’ve been building for a client, just educational links. And the reason they work is because they’re an educational provider. So that works again, but they got hit, and I know sites have got it really badly for that. So I think it’s niche specific, I think everything’s on the table. But I think Google’s they’re smarter than than we think. And what I would say is we’ll probably go on to this, but AI content is the big leveler. That’s going to change a lot of things. And I think his link links and link building over the next couple of years are going to become highly valuable.

David Bain 

Jason, you were talking about Google’s messaging that essentially, link building is bad and all you have to do is publish content, and people will actually link to you if your content is good. Does that mean that link building every single type of link building is grey hat or black hat?

Jason Morris 

I think it does. I think the only thing they’ve ever come out and said is one of them said that they like quite like Digital PR. But Digital PR again, I think the jury’s out, because it’s branded. And it’s it’s more homepage based, which is great for your overall value. But it doesn’t help if you’re trying to rank for certain keywords. It does help overall, as long as it’s part of another link building overall. But I think it’s all gray hat. I just think people like to tell themselves, it’s not. And I think a lot of link builders kid themselves as to see what they feel that they’re doing. We are operating on the edges of what Google considers good or bad. But then Google are a business that wants people to click on their paid ads, you know, why would they not? But I think the issue we’ve got is it’s hard baked into the algorithm. They can’t get away from it. And especially as AI content grows and grows, what are the metrics besides links are they going to use? I mean, maybe they will dial it down, but it’d be interesting to see how it pans out over the next two years or three.

David Bain 

So let’s dive into the AI. Amit, where does AI fit into linkbuilding?

Amit Raj 

One of the things with ChatGPT and AI again, like I said, I’m not a fan of relying on it for outreach, maybe I know I’ve been following a lot of these guys that do cold sales emails, and they are quite big on using it because of this volumes that they’re doing. So that’s fine, that works for them. I think it has more for use, where we are trying to use it is probably at the prospecting level. So I believe using it for things like maybe cleaning and analyzing data sets. Perhaps if you’re trying to segment lists at the prospecting level is pretty good, you give it a bunch of websites, it’ll tell you the brand mission of every site, things like that, if that’s something that’s useful to the list, maybe for competitor analysis, it can be useful because you have such a mixture of links and from different industries, you want to segment we can use probably AI to do that. And I guess that leads to focus on the more creative aspects of link building, whether that’s you have to you know, produce content or you have to personalise outreach if that’s where the time needs to be spent, things like that. That’s where I’ve seen the use, I just haven’t we’ve not tested it enough to see if this is a game changer for link building. It’s kind of prospecting. I feel like it’s, we want to use it for that

David Bain 

Victor, is AI really a game changer for link building?

Victor Karpenko 

No, but in some ways, yes. For example, if you do outreach post work, and you want to do it, like super cool, now you can generate it. And now you can use not like 600 words, 800 words, 1000, you can do like skyscraper 4,000, or 5,000 words for your keyword that you also want to rank with this outreach. If you have the right prompts, you can generate it and improve it with Jasper or with other tools and make it even better than the writers that were writing before. And we also using right now, them to try and to understand the strategy. Let’s say you have all the data. And you need to analyze and we mostly don’t separate, like white hat, gray hat, whatever hat it is, we’re just trying to see what we can do better to rank for this keyword groups faster, and what do we need to do, what’s the budget or the source we need to use to rank and AI help us with the prompts to give us it’s pretty good actually. Before I always refusing stuff in the beginning and say our it’s not gonna work we build this tool. But then when my programmers show that it actually doing pretty good stuff. Yeah. So writing content for guest posts or the for the links will place there. It’s a game changer because it’s cheaper and faster.

David Bain 

A comment in the chat, talking about how the massive amount of content that’s being generated nowadays, because of AI, perhaps means that links are becoming more important, because only the content with links is the content that Google is going to consider. Alex, what are your thoughts on that?

Alexandra Tachalova 

I’m being honest, I don’t really believe much in AI content. I’ll explain my point of view, just because we work with a lot of clients that are part of very competitive niches, where the quality of content plays a bigger role, rather than the number of links. I would say and also the overall domain authority, becomes kind of an accumulated power, I would say, because you can’t really change it within a month, two months, 12 months, right? So that is something that you really have to work on. The problem with content that I see right now, especially after the recent Google update, is that we all know that you have to create long form content. But the problem is that not necessarily all long form content is the best content just because it’s not necessarily answering the user query. So we have a few clients that actually got a serious decline in terms of traffic and positions because they were following that concept of creating very long in-depth content that is covering various topics, and subtopics, that I would say that are relevant to the main topic, but it’s not necessarily what users wants to see. They want to go straight to the main topic, rather than reading some chapters about what did that, what did this, etc. They want to go straight to the main part to get their answers. And as a result, I saw quite a lot of movements in search engine results, and sometimes Google actually prioritized the content that wasn’t so long and was more direct in terms of answering the the user research part.

Now circling back to links, and how important they are, as SEOs, as marketers, we think of links as something that basically can be valued to be a metric. But if we start thinking of links as a part of something bigger, as as a part of our marketing strategy, and think of links the way actually Google wants to think of links, okay, link is a recommendation, and if we start from this, forget about metrics, and start thinking about, how can I get this recommendation and integrate these recommendations in my marketing strategy, okay, I want to get links from relevant websites in my niche, what I can do? I can launch a podcast, for instance, right. And if I launch a podcast, and start connecting with people from the niche, sooner or later, they’re going to link back to me. And then, besides links, I’m going to increase my brand awareness, I can run some cool marketing campaigns with those people, and so on and so forth. And I think that’s the future of link building, that is the future of links. It’s not really an isolated thing, that kind of can’t be put aside, right of your brand of your marketing strategy of the way you run your business, it’s actually an essential part of your business. So that is what I think about link building on a general note.

David Bain 

That’s great. And I loved a few things that you said there, you talked about the quality of content being more important than the links. And the phrase that really jumped out at me was ‘links are part of our marketing strategy’. And that really has to be emphasized, because I think even SEOs sometimes, are maybe guilty of thinking about link building as some kind of separate campaign, while the think about the sexier aspects of SEO strategy or technical things, whatever that happens to be and what happens to be appealing for them. And your SEOs are used to things like new websites being launched without them being involved. And just being told just to SEO with this, you know, we’ve put a new website live. And that’s a big frustration for SEO, but I’m sure a big frustration for link builders is there’s all the content we’ve just published, or will you do your link building stuff now? It’s probably just just the same kind of thing. I saw you nodding away Jason to a few of those things.

Jason Morris 

That’s one of the things I find frustrating, we want to be part of the journey of a marketing journey, because especially they’ve got bottom of the funnel content they want to rank for, and we don’t know half the time, and you’re not part of that, you come in at a later stage, so I totally agree. I also agree on AI and on the the content issue. So we do affiliate sites where we’ve built out tons of AI content, just to see what ranked and then we’re going to replace that. But for some of the clients that we’re talking about, like Alex will work with, and like we work with, the contents got to be on point and right, and links just become a part of that. I think for AI, we’re using AI at the moment, we are just developing a link audit solution. And we’re using AI within that we’re using AutoGPT, and we’re starting to look at how we can parse that data. So if a client says I’ve got 10 keywords, here are my competitors, how many links do we need to rank? No one knows for sure, but it’s just starting point that we can help them work with them. So we that’s what we’re doing. That’s how we’re using it the moment you’ll be able to then come up with a solution to say, well, you need this many links. And then also looking obviously, at things that we’re seeing is more important now like Link Velocity. I think Link Velocity is, you know, one of those things that we’re seeing as important is to keep that link building going, we would say that we’re link builders, but it’s true.

Alexandra Tachalova 

Exactly, it’s consistency.

Jason Morris 

Exactly, so when you say well, we’ll do it for a few months, and then we’ll leave it, it’s like ‘no, no, no, don’t bother then’. This should be an ongoing thing. We’re link builders, so we will say this, but it’s absolutely true, because it should be part of what you do. I mean, what is the Internet? Its links and content, that’s it in essence, that’s what it’s about. So I think AI is going to be huge and it’s going to have a huge effect. I don’t think we really understand exactly how at the moment, but for many companies, the content is part of the journey, its the way that they sell to clients, and AI in that is not going to work. Supporting content, possibly. I think you can do it. I think none of us know, really. And for me, I’m fascinated with the whole AI thing I really am. But as far as linkbuilding is concerned, we’re not seeing a lot of use of it for outreach templates, or things like that. For us, we changed our outreach templates, and we’re now pitching, trying to pitch content ideas or trying to pitch things around what the client site wants. Because if it’s me, I want someone to pitch to me something that is like, what am I looking to rank for. So if a client was weak, if we can find low value keywords, or low hanging keywords with a low score that we can help the rank for? That’s my value to them, because I don’t really want to give them money. So if I can do something like that, then we will do. But I have no idea at the moment. I think it’s too early to sort of say at the moment.

David Bain 

Yeah, if going back to your previous point of the the velocity, using the word that you use their Jason of links, suddenly changes suddenly stops, then it’s a sure fire signal to Google that whatever you did before was artificial when it shouldn’t be ranking at all. Tamara, what is your favorite link building tactic? What what link building tactics work best in 2023?

Tamara Dzajkovska 

I just wanted to comment quickly on the AI discussion. So I do agree with Amit and Victor that ChatGPT can be used right now used as one more tool to kind of get creative with, maybe try to do some prospecting with and also agree that you can use it to maybe work through the content, you’re writing a bit faster. But I agree with Alex’s point that it doesn’t necessarily make the content better if it’s longform. So yeah, it’s very exciting, I guess. And as I said, it’s another tool to to get creative with and try, but when it comes to link building, I also didn’t find it any specific use that will kind of speed up or improve the process.

When it comes to best link building tactics in 2023. What I would say is that everything that will acquire you a quality link, that has high relevancy in regards to niche content and context is a good thing to acquire. So all the well known tactics that work before are working now, like a guest posting, HARO, PR links, brand mentions, I will say that everything that would get you a quality link that will stay long term and support a healthy, natural looking backlink profile is a good tactic to use. So I maybe want to add there that when the algorithm change happened that I mentioned before the spam update within the agency I was working and we kind of revisited an old tactic focusing on page specific metrics.

I remember reading somewhere I apologize that I am not sure who I’m quoting right now, a guy saying that if you want to boost the rankings of a page for a certain keyword, you can get a link from a page that ranks number one for that keyword or ranks well for the keyword. So that is of course not always doable, but kind of focusing on finding pages that focusing on a page specific metrics, in saying, for example, the URL rating that certain tools show, the page also has like good referring domains or links pointing to it, and it ranks for certain keywords and terms that you also want to rank for, and receive some organic traffic, then it can be a good page to build or acquire links from. What we did usually is kind of a content upgrade or content refresh of the page and high keyword relevancy, I would say, worked well. So we kind of shifted the strategy from guest posting and those sponsored posts to more of like, deciding and finding pages that rank well for certain keywords that we’re targeting for website, and we’re acquiring links for it. And it did work well. So yeah, I think it’s one tactic that can be used right now amongst everything else that I mentioned already. And guest posting, of course, I think that regular guest posting is primarily focusing on well researched, high quality in depth content and that answers the readers question, and maybe also focusing a lot on the value of the audience. I would say niche relevant guest posting, to get the best value of the link plus the value of the audience that you want to kind of target.

David Bain 

Thanks, Tamara. To finish off, let’s have a quick fire round. So to give everyone no more than one minute each, and I’m gonna give you two questions, you can answer one of two questions. Question number one is, how do you find link building opportunities? So this could be quickly the research process, or the software or something else? Or how will link building strategy continue to evolve in the future? Let’s go to Jason first.

Jason Morris 

I’ll answer the one on on prospecting because we’ve talked about this a bit. I think, Alex, you’re the same as me, Pitchbox user. So Pitchbox is a solution that I use and have been partners with the guys for years. They’re phenomenally good. Amit, I think you you use them as well, do you?

Amit Raj 

Yeah we use them as well.

Jason Morris 

They’re a fantastic tool. It allows you to be able to do outreach at scale, but then keep it quite granular. So that you can look at things like if you want to do a product launch, or you can look at things that have talked about product, and it’s got the search operators already built in. So that you can just pull that data straight in pull competing domains from ahrefs, and then we can pass that through Majestic, which we love. So we can use all of those things to look at the opportunities and set a level for an opportunity. So it for us, it was a game changer to use Pitchbox. And now, so much of what we do, we’re sending out I mean, 1000s and 1000s of emails, and we wouldn’t have the business we have without Pitchbox because it’s allowed us to be granular, but granular at scale, if that makes sense.

David Bain 

Thanks, Jason, as part of this quick last round, I’ll also ask you where can the listener find out more about you.

Jason Morris 

My company is myprofitengine.com, so you’ll find me there, and I’m on Twitter @jm0rr1s as well.

David Bain 

Superb. Thank you, Jason. Amit, how do you find link building opportunities? Or how will link building strategy continue to evolve in the future?

Amit Raj 

We’ve done the bog standard kind of pulling things through Google using advanced search operators, extracting in bulk. However, we still take a fairly manual approach to vetting every target, we put it through some checks, and we want every target to be relevant, because obviously that affects the outreach further down the line. But we’re also experimenting with a few things, for instance, like scraping from Google Maps, because we want something that’s really tight and specific to a certain type of business. But at the same time, you need to filter through that list quickly because you want the sites that have blogs and are likely to take guest posts, which you can only do it through probability in terms of how many outbound links they’ve got or what patterns they’re using within the site. So we have to combine that with something like PowerShell scripts along with Google Maps. And we’re not just sticking with that, we want to try a few different things to see what we can do to get niche relevant target lists at scale. So Google Maps PowerShell, we’re trying all kinds of things

David Bain 

I love down in the weeds tactic discussion there, so I appreciate that. Amit, where can people find you.

Amit Raj 

You can find us on thelinksguy.com. You can get us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, it’s all linked on the site as well.

David Bain 

Lovely, Thanks, Amit. And Victor, what question you’re going for?

Victor Karpenko 

I’m going to for research question, how do we find links? So I would just connect what Alex said, because the cold outreach, emails are little bit dying, so we do keyword group based outreach. So let’s say, I want to rank for ‘personal injury lawyer in Los Angeles’, I just analyse what people have on this cluster, who already links to them and do cross analysis with my website, what link I have, and what do I miss. So by knowing that my competitors already there, it will be way easier just to outreach these websites and add to my database. So what I believe in the future is because we have like about 100,000 websites which we keep in our database, it’s ranked by language by geo etc, it’s our database with everything we need. So our SEO can in and say, Look, I need lawyers, I need English language I need like local specific, let’s say Los Angeles and give you the list. But our tool, don’t our outreachers opportunity to outreach what they want, we only give them opportunity, what do we need currently, like, for example, if we work on the lawyer, keyword group, they will outreach only the links we don’t have in our database. So that’s our approach and minimizing the time and efforts for all of the team. So I’m a more introverted SEO, right? So I don’t want to talk to a lot of people at the same time, I just want links, right? So my, my ideal ideal situation is to go and say, Look, I’m starting this project for brokers in Chile, language Spanish, I need outreach main page, and whatever, just send me. So by doing this, we give a task to our internal outreaches, I need this and just give me the options, and after this, I plan anchor strategy and all the other stuff.

David Bain 

Tamara, which question would you like to cover?

Tamara Dzajkovska 

I would also just comment on finding opportunities and prospecting. I do also use Pitchbox, which is great. I also like to lurk into competitors website or any any website that I think can can give me opportunities that I’m looking for in a certain niche or for a certain client. So I do look at the backlinks profile for certain website or a competitor to find good websites to post guest posts on to find broken links, maybe to find some irrelevant added links that I would like to ask the website to replace with the link I want to that I’m building links to so yeah, I also do like to use ahrefs content explorer. As a link builder, when I’m working on a certain client, I basically see links and opportunities everywhere. Communities like Slack communities and also chat groups on Facebook, sometimes can can offer you some good opportunities to work with.

David Bain 

And where can people find you?

Tamara Dzajkovska 

LinkedIn, my LinkedIn profile is Tamara Dzajkovska, and you can contact me me there.

David Bain 

Lovely, thanks. Sorry, Victor, did you share where people can find you as well?

Victor Karpenko 

The easiest way is just go to datadrivenseo.com and subscribe for newsletter and probably I will start writing again, maybe anytime soon. So yeah, datadrivenseo.com

David Bain 

Thanks, Victor. And Alex, we haven’t forgotten about you. So which question are you gonna go and cover?

Alexandra Tachalova 

I think it makes sense to talk a little bit about the future of link building, and what we can expect to see. As for me, I think I have two main questions for which I don’t really have answers at the moment. Diversification of a link building profile, right, which is actually the hardest task if you can solve this. I would say it all comes down to your resources, right? Because even in our station, even being a link builder doesn’t really solve the problem just because. We also have certain limitations, so we can’t really acquire and we can’t really generate all types of things. So that is the first question. And the second question that I don’t really know the answer as well is how to actually build a link building strategy that will actually start working in the way that you will be receiving links organically. So if we can solve those two questions, the question will be closed. Because basically, I think that is that is the most important things nowadays – getting links organically, consistency, and getting different type of links. And once you can solve those two things, that’s it.

David Bain 

Where can people find you Alexandra?

Alexandra Tachalova 

You can find me for instance, on LinkedIn. Also, I do write some blog posts on our own website at Digital Olympus. So I think that will be the best way to connect with me.

Victor Karpenko 

Just to add, I think it’s a pain for every project to get links organically, right. But to get actually organically, you need to rank number one, so people find you, but before you rank number one, you need to do something.

Alexandra Tachalova 

Absolutely. I agree that there is no magic power that is going to bring your page at the top of the page. But there might be some solutions,. And I think there are certain ways, just looking at some brands that are kind of capable of doing that, that there are some certain ways of getting things done if you can combine SEO with marketing, I think that is the future of SEO as well and it’s not a standalone thing.

Jason Morris 

I agree, I think that brand is going to become more important over the next couple of years, the way brand is perceived, you can see the way things are changing, because the Internet is growing up. Brands dominate everything, which is unfortunate if you don’t have a big budget. I think the days of the small player, punching above their weight will start to disappear, unfortunately.

Alexandra Tachalova 

Building brands is the biggest challenge actually nowadays.

David Bain 

Well, let’s, let’s end in agreement. This is a kind of discussion that could go on and on and hopefully, hopefully we can get you back again and continue this.

You’ve been listening to the Majestic SEO podcast if you want to join us live next time set up at majestic.com/webinars, and of course check out the other series at SEOin2023.com.

Previous Episodes

Follow our Twitter account @Majestic to hear about more upcoming episodes!

Or if you want to catch up with all of our previous episodes, check out the full list of our Majestic SEO Podcast episodes.

Back