As the holiday season approaches, it’s time to plan your link building campaigns for 2015.
Before diving in, it’s crucial to define what success means for your efforts. Here’s a checklist of potential goals you might aim for with your link-building strategy:
- Grow Domain Diversity: Diversifying the domains linking to you is more important than the sheer number of links, so finding new link sources is essential for effective inbound campaigns that enhance SEO.
- Capture Seasonal Trend Traffic: Increase your site’s visibility by capturing seasonal trends and the associated links.
- Enhance Keyphrase Page Performance: Focus on improving pages targeted at key phrases like “Christmas toys.”
- Engage Social Influencers: Create engaging seasonal content to gain visibility through social channels.
Any of these goals can form the foundation of a successful campaign, aligning with key performance indicators (KPIs) like improving rankings for seasonal keywords or capturing a specific percentage of market share from seasonal trend traffic.
Prioritizing your goals is important to avoid spreading your efforts too thin. It will also help you determine the type of campaign that will best meet your strategic objectives. For example, video content aimed at seasonal trends might be more suited for capturing seasonal trend traffic and engaging social influencers rather than acquiring new domain links.
Once your goals and priorities are set, it’s time to design projects that target specific KPIs. Let’s focus on setting concrete KPIs, determining measurement methodologies, and establishing time frames.
Growing Domain Diversity
For domain diversity, measure both campaign landing page diversity and overall domain backlink diversity. Start with a benchmarking phase, followed by an appropriate measurement period, as building links that show up in third-party tools takes time.
Using multiple tools for backlink measurement is advised to provide context to your performance. Google’s Search Console is a useful tool because the value of a link is ultimately judged by Google. Other third-party tools like Ahrefs can offer deeper domain analysis and historical graphing, facilitating competitive benchmarking.
Benchmark against three or four main competitors for:
- Total links and domain diversity for all pages.
- Total links and domain diversity for your target seasonal hub page.
By February, third-party tools should show a clear picture of movement for your site and competitors. Calculating a relative performance rate for improvement from your benchmark, alongside your absolute performance change, will illustrate overall gains within the competitive context, which can impress stakeholders.
Capturing Seasonal Trend Traffic & Improving Keyphrase Rankings
To capture seasonal traffic, forecast trend volumes using Google Trends and identify uptrending generics and breakout terms. Be creative. Look into industry trends discussed in trade magazines, conferences, newsletters, and even conduct surveys if you’re in B2C. Test your ideas with focus groups or customers, considering upcoming trends or releases that could capture attention.
Build a list of terms or groups of terms to target. Benchmark your current ranking positions and set target ranking positions for the buying period to drive traffic. Match keyphrase targets to your site’s landing pages. Tools like Screaming Frog can help identify current landing pages for key phrases.
Evaluate if these are good landing pages. If not, plan content builds for new pages. Use your web analytics to review last year’s traffic to these pages as a benchmark, and set goals for traffic increases through improved rankings and content projects.
For first-timers, consider quantifying the potential increased revenue from traffic uplifts or the value of capturing the same traffic via PPC or programmatic channels to justify additional resources for your inbound projects.
Targeting Social Influencers
Use tools like BuzzSumo to identify key influencers for your seasonal keyphrase targets. Analyze content that has performed well in the past for these terms and pull backlink information to understand its link-gathering potential. A strong crossover indicates an engaged social audience with a high likelihood of linking, making them ideal for a successful inbound project.
Final Thoughts
Get into the holiday spirit early, put on your festive gear, and let the creativity flow. Start planning your inbound campaigns now to outmaneuver the competition.
