Minty Digital is a Digital Marketing Agency which specialises in Search Engine Optimisation and Google Ads services.
Today we are going to talk about how we use Dux-Soup LinkedIn Automation alongside other Marketing Automation tools to help generate SEO links for our clients.
Introduction to Link Building and its importance for SEO
Alongside other methods of SEO, building quality links has always been a tried and tested way to build authority to a website, and subsequently increase its rankings and traffic.
The higher the site authority, the more valuable the link. Links pass equity from site to site and work as a reputation indicator for Google.
For example:
1. Your gardening company website sells lots of equipment online such as gardening tools, flowers and more.
2. Although you know you are a reputable company, you are out there competing with thousands of other websites within the same sector, so Google needs an indicator as to what website should be most prominent in the search engines.
3. 2 years pass, and in that time you have been able to generate links from a number of high quality websites by featuring in their blogs, or by creating your own amazing on-site content, and they in turn have linked back to your website.
4. Once Google sees that you have these high quality sites referring to your site, it then sees you as reputable and will push you up in the search results.
So, how do we build the links?
Marketeers for years have been involved in a number of ‘quick win’ schemes such as paying for blog posts, and bulk buying links, but Google has time and time again said this is a no go, and even has a platform for reporting spam links on its blog!
That’s why it’s important to have a clear strategy in place to build white hat links. This can be time consuming, but by using marketing automation tools you can help streamline the process.
How we use automation tools to build links.
We want to share with you 2 methods we use to build links for our clients. Over the years these have helped us secure high quality backlinks in publications ranging from small personal blogs, to national newspapers.
Method 1: Creating high quality content
This method of link building outreaches high quality and relevant content to our network.
If, for example, you have a client within the travel industry, a relevant topic for right now could be something along the lines of:
‘Which countries will you be able to visit in the next 6 months?’
After you create your piece of high-quality content, you can then take your outreach campaign to Dux-Soup.
The process will work as follows:
Step 1: Create your connections
Run an exact match search on Dux-Soup by using a term such as ‘travel journalist’.
Tip: Make sure you use the “quotation marks” as this will only return results which have the exact term.
After you have this screen up, run Dux-Soup with a simple outreach message along the lines of:
Hi _FN_,
I’m reaching out as we have created an awesome content piece titled ‘article name here’ which we would love to share with you.
If this is of interest, it would be great to connect.
Tip: Always use the _FN_ to insert the first name of the connection, this helps personalize the outreach message and will give you a higher chance of connecting.
Step 2: Follow up, follow up!
After you have let Dux-Soup run and connect to Journalists, you’ll have received a few accepted connection requests.
After people accept our connection we always follow up with around 3 manual messages to catch people’s attention.
This step is important, as it’s so easy to give up after connecting when you don’t get a response.
The reality is people are busy and might not have the time to reply so you must follow up to get the best chance of a response.
We also export our connection data into Google Sheets and try to manually outreach to journalists who don’t respond to our requests.
You can outreach in several ways, from emailing the website of the company they work for, to tracking them down on Instagram!
It’s a time-consuming process, but the end results are worth it.
Link Building Method 2: Listening in to our network
This ties in well with Method 1, and helps further reinforce the importance of growing your network for the niche that you work in.
Journalists are always on the lookout for contributions to their articles, so by building a solid network you can keep an eye on these requests and respond in real time.
We listen in through the following channels:
By building up a solid list of contacts using Dux-Soup, you can look out on your feed for requests from journalists who are looking for article contributions.
HARO provides journalists with a robust database of sources for upcoming stories and daily opportunities for sources to secure valuable media coverage.
We use it to listen out for requests from journalists looking for article contributions in our customer areas.
This in turn has helped contribute to SEO improvements on our client’s websites such as:
What does the future hold?
In the future we are looking to use Dux-Soup even more for our PR and Content campaigns.
We’ve built up a lot of connections with Journalists in the UK and Barcelona over the past year and the exposure we have been getting for our clients and Minty Digital has been incredible.
We will also look to integrate Dux-Soup with our other marketing tools to help automate lead funnels and sales processes.
We hope this blog has helped give some insights into how we use LinkedIn and marketing automation tools to aid our SEO Campaigns.
If you have any questions about any of the above, feel free to contact charlie@mintydigital.com and I will be happy to give some further insights.
About the Author
Charlie Clark is Owner of Minty Digital, a Google Partnered Agency who combines Paid Marketing and SEO to create integrated campaign strategies for global e-commerce clients.
Charlie has advised strategies to a number of businesses worldwide ranging from startups to global organisations, such as IKEA & Decathlon.
