Table of Contents
The podcast all started from a single email.
One of Nathan Gotch’s email newsletter editions caught my eye:
Nathan, SEO expert, creator of the Gotch SEO Academy, co-founder/CEO of Rankability, was writing about SEO for a new website, specifically about creating linkable assets.
I realized that I get a lot of questions about link building for new websites: What kinds of tactics work? How long does it take? How expensive is it?
So, I thought, who better to invite onto our pod than Nathan himself?
Actionable Takeaways
Here are some quick actionable takeaways from our chat.
1. Build a Dream 100 Link Prospect List
Borrowing from Russell Brunson’s concept, Nathan told me about this awesome idea to identify the top 100 sites in your niche that you’d dream of earning links from. Then, this becomes your link target list. It helps you keep focused on quality over quantity. It can also set a foundation for relationships that can also lead to links.
2. Focus on Link-Worthy Assets, Not Just SEO Content
How-to guides and long-form posts are great for ranking—but not always for earning links. Instead, prioritize referenceable assets like proprietary or curated data and statistics and other content that provides information gain. (This is the essence of the passive link building guide we just wrote.)
3. Assess Link Opportunities with the Referral Traffic Principle
One of the ways that Nathan thinks about backlinks is to ask: “Could this realistically send us traffic or drive a conversion?” If not, it’s likely not worth your time.
This single question can eliminate 80% of poor-quality link opportunities and push you to invest in higher ROI prospects, according to Nathan.
4. Go Slow & Strategic with Outreach
For high-value sites (your Dream 100), treat outreach like relationship-building. Avoid the “hard sell”.
5. If You Don’t Have Value, Expect to Pay
When you’re just starting and have no brand, no content, no audience—money often fills the gap. I don’t love telling people to buy links, but in some cases paid collaborations, contributor placements, or sponsored content may be necessary early on. (I’d avoid those guest posting spreadsheets however.)
Transcript
Here is a slightly edited transcript of our talk.
Vince Nero: Hello everyone and welcome to the BuzzStream Podcast. My name is Vince Nira. I’m your host and today I’m thrilled to be joined by Nathan Gotch. Thanks for joining, Nathan. How you doing?
Nathan Gotch: My pleasure to be here. I’m super excited.
Vince Nero: Yeah, so you might know Nathan from the Gotcha SEO Academy. He’s got a book, also co-founder and CEO of Rankability.
I, I’ve been following your stuff for a long time on your newsletter and I see you on social media all the time. We are just kind of meeting for the first time here. But one of the things that kind of just stood out to me was a recent email that you had sent through and as part of your newsletter, and it was really about building link to a brand new site. This has been something that’s really top of mind to me. It comes up a lot when I talk to people in the industry. Some our customers, those are some of the questions that they have. So I thought it would be great for us to get into this. So that’s what we’re gonna be talking about today.
But reminder to everybody before we get into this. And subscribe, share some love, comment, ask questions, interact with this stuff, share it with your colleagues. The more that we get this stuff out there, the more I can have great guests like Nathan on the podcast. Alright, so Nathan, let’s get into this.
Like I said, you got a newsletter and you talked a little bit about link building to a new site. Let’s kind of address, the elephant in the room and this thing that people talk about these days and are links valuable?
Does Google think links are valuable anymore? Do they matter?
Nathan Gotch: Yeah. It’s funny I’ve technically I’ve been doing SEO since 2011. So I started doing full-time in 2013, but from like 2011 to 2013, I was doing like a lot of gray hat, a lot of, much riskier tactics. Then 2013 to 2015, I was, my tactics were still very sketchy, but they got a little bit cleaner. And then 2015 I actually got nailed because of my link building behaviors.
And so one back then. As many people were, by the way, I wasn’t the only one doing this, but there was a lot of people were doing this was building out private blog networks. And at the time that was the tactic because it was so effective and it was almost like, why? Why even do outreach? And when you can just rank, it’s so much easier.
You build a fake website, Google thinks it’s legitimate and it works, right? And links were working like that until it didn’t. And what happened is Google really started to get. Extremely good about catching these footprints. And as a result they caught my footprint and my whole network.
So they took down, I had hundreds of sites in my network.
They took it down and, clients got penalized manual actions and it was a big, huge thing.
Fortunately, I got all the manual actions removed, right? And so this is like my link building origin story. So I’ve been through a lot of these, a lot of these cycles.
And it’s funny because, I wish I could say that things are different.
But in the reality is that like at the core backlinks continue to be like the most important ranking factor.
And I would say there’s been an introduction of other signals that are also significant because prior, let’s say from, let’s say like 2011 to maybe as far as 20 16, 2017, I would say it was pretty much just like.
Links, right?
Links from like high quality links.
Either strong or relevant, either or, were very effective, just that alone.
But Google started to get pretty smart and they clearly, at this point, they’ve introduced a couple other variables to confirm that your back links are legitimate.
And so before it was like, just get links.
Those are votes. That works.
Now it’s get back links. You also need to have the user signals in place.
You also likely need to have the brand signals in place. ’cause otherwise if you don’t have those two elements, the links look extremely sketchy.
So things are a lot different now.
So I’d say like before, it was probably like links were, I don’t know, let’s say 40% of the equation, right?
Like they were like, if you were in a pie, it’d probably be off, just my opinion, 40% or so. I’d say now it’s probably down to 25%, but we’re still talking like a quarter. Like it’s significant. And of course these are my made up figures here, so don’t quote me on this, right? I know someone’s going oh, he said 25%.
That’s all. But I’m just saying just based on like overall strength of effectiveness.
And so for me, like there’s a lot of, we can talk about different ranking variables but links to me are still so critical and in fact A lot of the time when I’m trying to improve a site I go through a process and it begins with starting with the technical side, then getting into the UX side, then getting obviously into the content itself and the relevance of the content.
And then finally the last piece is that link building pie and or link building section.
And there so much time needs to be spent there because you can see it everywhere. There’s a reason why Forbes dominates. There’s a reason why Healthline crushes it. Like they all destroy everyone because their sites are incredibly powerful.
From a link building perspective, it’s not super, it’s not a secret at this point. Like you can put any of the top performing websites in hres or SEMrush and you can see. They have incredible link profiles. And of course correlations, not causation, but I would say that’s a pretty good factor as far as overall site authority being a significant variable.
And so for me, links are huge and I’m excited to talk about it because there’s just a lot of things about it because it, funny enough is I obviously, I have a content optimization software rank. But I still tell people like, you can use our tool and you could build out the perfect piece of content, but if you don’t have any authority, it’s not gonna do anything unless you’re competing with like wildly uncompetitive keywords.
But even if there’s just like a minor amount of competition. It’s not gonna, it is not gonna, you’re not gonna get the result you’re hoping for. And sometimes people will use, not even our tool, other tools and think oh, I optimize my content. Why am I not rich yet? And it’s little more to the equation than that.
So yeah, 25% more.
Vince Nero: Yeah. Yeah. So that, that’s a great segue into just this idea of what makes a healthy link profile. Like, obviously, you can look at Forbes, you can look at Healthline, and it’s easy for them, right? To do what they need to do because they have such a great link profile.
Like I talk about link building as almost like pouring fuel into the fire. Like you said, like you need a tool, like a Rankability or a, or just sound, SEO best practices on your content first.
Like your site needs to have good SEO. You can’t just pour links into it and expect it to rank. So I think yeah, that they are in hand with each other, I think.
But let’s talk a little bit more about that link profile. ’cause you mentioned like the Forbes and let’s do it from this, I guess standpoint.
If you had to build a perfect link profile, say you are starting out the brand new site, what does that look like? If you’re strategizing what maybe the mix of a good link profile, what would that look like?
What does a good link profile look like?
Nathan Gotch: Yeah. So I I glad you asked that because I actually, I stole this idea from a different industry and have applied it to link building. This concept actually from Russell Brunson, which is like the Dream 100, so he came up with this idea of okay, if you wanna promote your product, you need to find the Dream 100, like influencers, websites, podcasts, whatever it is cool in your industry to go attack, attack those.
So what I did is I took that idea and I applied it to link building.
So for me, this is like the ultimate hack as far as like making sure you’re staying in line with focusing on quality over quantity, right?
So what you do is whatever industry you’re going after, let’s say, I dunno, let’s say you’re a, let’s just use SEO since it’s easier.
Okay, so let’s say you’re in the SEO industry and you wanna go after your Dream 100, right?
We’re selling SEO software. We wanna go Dream 100. I’m just gonna find the top 100 websites that I wanna get links on and it’s gonna be obviously Search Engine Journal, search Engine lands SE Roundtable.
It’s gonna be Buzz Stream.
I’m gonna go through that whole list and that 100.
Once I’ve established that, and funny enough, is when you go through this process, it’s actually pretty hard to find a hundred really good sites in those industries.
Yeah, I was gonna say like there, there really aren’t that many, which is crazy because you realize wait a second here.
If there aren’t that many, then if I just focus on these, it’s probably gonna have a massive impact.
Because even if you get, let’s just say 25% of those, that’s gonna be a significant impact on performance. And the thing is, the top 100 websites, a lot of ’em link to each other. So you’re gonna have that kind of, the side effect of that as well, because there’s just gonna be so much authority passing in that the group of the hundred to.
So for me, that’s always where I begin a link building campaigns.
Like who, who are those top 100 websites?
And just depends on the industry. Sometimes you really gotta start to expand the relevance out a little bit more. So may, maybe you’ll be at SEO and then maybe you only get to 50. Okay, now let’s look at the top like digital marketing sites, then let’s expand out and you can just keep, putting on those layers.
Vince Nero: Do you use minimums. Like DR authority, like DA/DR or something like that?
Nathan Gotch: Yes. But initially for me it’s about relevance.
So I wanna focus more on the relevance first because truthfully, if you’re even able to find these sites, they probably have authority, they probably have traffic.
So I spent a lot of time on that first, because once you establish the 100, then you can actually look at each opportunity and start to examine, okay, how, what would it take to actually get a link on this site?
And sometimes you’ll be like. It’s gonna be really hard, so you may have to push them down the priority list a few of ’em, and shuffle through and be like, okay, I see opportunity here.
Now we can talk about strategy on how to get links on really, let’s call it high quality sites because you can’t go to a link vendor and find these sites to just go and buy them.
Some you can, but for the most part it’s not that easy. Like you’re not gonna find BuzzStream on one of the link vendors, shop my list type of thing.
It’s just not gonna happen.
So there’s a different strategy that you have to deploy. So like for example, let’s say I wanted to get a link on BuzzStream. Having done this podcast is probably a pretty good idea, right?
So building a connection, building relationship, this is one way to get a link, right?
There are so many different techniques you can use, but you can just look at the site itself and start to explore.
One thing I like little—I don’t wanna call it a hack—but one thing I love to do is look at their external link profile. So, I’ll look at who they like to link out to their outbound links, and I’ll start to formulate, “Oh, I see they like to link out to data a lot.”
So then I could start to think okay, maybe I could create some data-driven assets that would act as bait because I know that’s what they prefer to link out to, or, oh, it looks like they like to link out to influencers. That’s cool. Maybe I could figure out an angle there. So it’s just trying to find what angle’s most relevant to that site.
And of course there’s, nothing’s a perfect strategy, but the way I look at the top 100 is don’t view it as you need to get these links tomorrow. View it as okay, I’m gonna take, I’m gonna take this slow. I’m gonna take ’em out to dinner. I’m going to I’m gonna wine and dine ’em. It’s gonna be a slow process, but you know that if you get even just one of those links it’s more powerful than probably.
20 to 40 different websites combined. So it’s just one little philosophical thing that I’ve developed that’s helped me stay focused on what I need to do.
Vince Nero: I love that. There’s so many parallels I’d say to like the digital PR side of things, the PR side of this industry. Where it’s when you’re starting out with a client, I hear so many of the digital PR agencies talk about this.
A client has their wishlist of, I, I wanna be on these 10 media sites. Or they’re, you could easily do this, and it’s the same exact strategy you’re building relationships, wine and dine in, you’re figuring out what they like to link to, how they like to write their headlines, how that, what type of content, what type of images they like to share.
Yeah, it’s just the exact kind of parallel there. So that’s awesome to hear.
And I hadn’t even really thought about link building from that perspective of almost, like you said, it’s not quantity; it’s quality. Then the strategy becomes knocking off this hit list of sites you want to get links from.
Nathan Gotch: Yeah. And then another thing, too, is that I’ve also come up with a principle called the referral traffic principle, which to me is the way to determine if you should invest your time, money, or effort into an opportunity.
A link opportunity should be based on the fact that if you get a link from this site, what’s the likelihood that it’s actually going to drive a conversion?
And what you’ll find is like a lot of sites, if you truly are objective about it and you say, is getting a link from a mommy blog gonna convert from my rank ability, SEO software? Oh man, that’s a stretch. Like you start to really see I don’t know about that. Even if it’s parenting.com or something, whatever.
It’s one simple question can eliminate probably 80% of opportunities, which is good because ev if everyone else is just, throwing stuff at the wall as far as their link building campaign, you being much more strategic and focused and doing that seem, at least in my experience, it seemed to be much more effective.
And you don’t, it’s actually not as much work either, which is cool.
Vince Nero: Yeah. Yeah. So you hinted at this a little bit. Say you have, you’ve built your 100, right? Even if you’re a new site, you could do this.
Let’s talk about identifying those topics. You mentioned some of ’em, the podcasts the influencers, the content.
Yeah. What does that strategy look like for identifying content that works to build backlinks?
How do you identify the strategy that works to build backlinks from a particular site?
Nathan Gotch: Yeah, so obviously there’s many different techniques for getting links on these sites. I think the, one of the easiest is if you have a, some sort of figurehead at the company. Trying to get them to either get on the popular podcast ’cause a lot of these large media sites also have a podcast, right?
So that’s like the easy way in to get in there.
But if you can’t do that, then trying to become a contributor for that site as well.
So a lot of these sites they they’ll never use the word guest posts, but in reality, they really are guest posts, right?
Because guest posts is like a bad, a bad phrase to say, don’t say that.
But it’s, that’s really what they author.
Those are like the two best techniques, but they’re also the hardest to actually make happen.
Because you need to have some level of authority. If you’re just Joe Schmo who just started a company, you’re not gonna get an author account on one of the top media sites, right?
So it is it is a situation where the rich get richer.
And the people who already have authority can get the best links.
And it’s this, I don’t wanna call it unfair advantage, but it is. Right?
Now the question is going back to the original premise of what we’re talking about here, which is like a new website.
So let’s also assume this is a new brand, right?
No one knows who they are, they have no brand equity. And you’re starting from ground zero.
The best thing to do there’s two, two ways you can approach it. Let’s say we’re going after the top 100. Number one is looking at the site itself and looking for gaps in their content.
So what I’ll do is I’ll, I will run I’ll look at their site and let’s say it’s let’s say it’s Search Engine Journal, and I’m selling content optimization software.
So I’m gonna go into their site and I’m gonna start digging around and see like how much have they actually covered this topic.
And then if I see, they haven’t covered the topic very well.
That could be a entryway for me to get in.
So trying to find and of course maybe they have covered it well, so I move on to the next tactic, which would be examining their external link profile, like I mentioned, and seeing what’s that content framework, or let’s say three to 10 content frameworks that they seem to like, they seem to prefer.
It’s pretty obvious in a lot of cases because most of the time, like what, ’cause I’ve studied so many outbound, weirdly, this is like a weird obsession of mine, but studying like what websites like to link out to and it’s pretty obvious.
It ends up being stuff that’s very referenceable, right?
Citation so that would be statistics, data, things that support an argument that they’re trying to make.
And one business that does this incredibly well is Exploding Topics. Of course. Brian Dean.
Okay. He’s the master.
And one thing that he does exceptionally well, and this is like a, this is his ultimate talent, and I love, like I modeled a lot of the things that he does because what he’ll do is when he finds a particular template that works, like a style that works, he will just repeat it over and over and over.
Because once you figure out what works, you might as well just double down on it. And I. Not to reveal my secrets here, but on YouTube I’ve done the same thing many times.
If I find a framework that works, like a certain style of video that works, I’ll just do the same video again, just in shift it around a little bit, but it’s the same bones if you want to call it that.
So just some ideas there and honestly, data, and we can talk about different like link based frameworks, but those are some ideas.
Vince Nero: Yeah, I, so I think that’s where I’ve been leaning in the past past year. I’d say and I, we made a pretty big shift, I’d say, in our content focus.
And I think it’s this idea that to succeed in SEO going forward, especially in AI. Getting mentioned in the chat GPTs and the AI overviews of the world, you really do need to have, everybody talks about this, the hot term, like the information gain, right?
Like your content needs to have something that is unique that is not out there.
And to me, it’s exactly what you’re saying.
Like this statistics post, like those, have that inherently part of them.
And if you could do it with your own proprietary data or survey data or something that’s fresh, right? Like obviously that’s the golden recipe right there.
But let’s talk about some other tactics out there.
We mentioned podcasting looking for gaps and being like a guest contributor. I love that as, I talk about that in like the guest blogging. Strategy.
What about stuff like the niche edits, link insertions, do any of those work broken back building resource pages?
Do those work anymore?
Do traditional link building tactics like broken link building still work?
Nathan Gotch: Some of them, yes, for sure. I think niche edits when they’re done correctly, definitely do work.
I think there’s a lot of vendors out there that sell niche edits, and I can tell you they’re glorified hacked links.
And you don’t want those, right? Those are not good unless, if you wanna get tactical about it, you could technically use ’em on tier two.
If you really wanted to get aggressive, you could theoretically do that, but they’re pretty dangerous.
And a lot of people that sell niche edits actually are just selling hacked links.
Which is a pretty nasty part of our industry. But if you wanna do it a clean way, there’s definitely, money exchanges, hands, it’s the way it is.
Once you’ve got connections with authors and and you build those connections, they don’t expect to do things for free. And people don’t realize this is for non SEO people, but don’t realize how much stuff is manipulated like by us, essentially.
You like I feel bad saying that, but it is true.
There’s a lot of stuff I’ll get a small example, like I had, sometimes I’ll get like podcasts, outreach, like emails for me. Hey, you come on my podcast. And I got one the other day and they were like, Hey, yeah, come on our podcast.
Okay, tell, share the details.
And I was like, all right, this is already sketchy. But then of course they replied back oh, okay, this is actually a paid podcast. And I’m like, okay. And you, but it’s so twisted because people will listen to a podcast and think that person was on there just because, they were legitimate.
But they’re on there ’cause they paid to be there. Yeah.
And that’s the world that we live in.
And that’s the same thing with links.
Doing outreach these days, it’s very hard to get a response from, “Hey, you got a broken link. Can you gimme a link?”
Doesn’t work. And in fact, even I, I even do tell a lot of my members in the academy the first thing you should lead with is paid collaboration. Just straight in the subject line. Paid collaboration.
Yeah, because and I’ve actually tested this significantly in open rates, if you put paid collaboration in the subject line, your open rate is significantly higher.
Like significantly. And I only knew this because I get similar requests for, my brand.
People reach out to me, and then when it’s paid collaboration I will open it.
Doesn’t mean I’m gonna do it right, but I’ll probably open it just to see what it’s about.
Yeah, I would say like the old tactics that you still see in some old blog posts, they like, of broken link building hey, your site is hacked.
Or Hey my favorite one is, Hey, you’ve got grammar and spelling errors.
Come on. That’s not gonna do anything.
So I think the best way to think about it is like, what’s a serious win-win for both parties.
That’s it.
Sometimes you can build a mutual relationship where like you can both get a win-win.
So we’ll probably exchange brand equity between us in this interview, right?
Like we’re gonna both share this interview, we’re both gonna get benefit from it, right?
And that’s a win-win. But a lot of the time when I see people’s outreach, and I know you guys probably have way more data than I do about this, but at least on my end when I see the outreach a bad performance is usually because the value proposition is so poor, right?
They reach out, hey, it’s basically Hey, do all this stuff for me for nothing. Yeah. Yeah.
Vince Nero: Yeah. Yeah. That’s, and that’s the name of the game, right?
Again, like you could draw that across anything sales, emails, obviously the PR emails, you gotta have some type of value that you’re giving people.
I go all the way back as far as like one of the first marketing books I ever read Seth Godin, Permission Marketing.
And like the idea that like you need to provide value to the person.
So they give you permission to invade their, your personal space, which was used to be your inbox.
I feel like that when he wrote that, it wasn’t, the newsletter was kinda in its infancy, not what we’re at now, but yeah.
I love it, Nathan, I guess let’s get a little bit more into the paid.
So it sounds like even when you’re first starting out, you do need to be prepared to pay for these links.
Are there ones that you don’t need? Can you break down like what, how you could evaluate it for someone who’s doing this from scratch?
Like, when I need to pay versus not?
Do you need to pay for backlinks when you first start?
Nathan Gotch: Yeah, so if you’re, if essentially if you don’t have an asset. To work with, you’re probably gonna have to pay.
Vince Nero: That’s the value?
Nathan Gotch: Yeah. Like you need to have some sort of value to share, otherwise expect to pay.
So now there, so the workaround here obviously is to look at what has performed well in your industry.
And, but I also will look outside to other industries.
So one of the things I will do is, ’cause I have a whole database I keep track of, which is super geeky, but I keep track of content assets that performed really well from a link-building perspective.
So I have a whole like swipe file of them and I look at like the exact frameworks that have worked and sometimes it’ll be like, it’ll be like in the plumbing industry and it’ll be like this weird kind of content.
I was like, ah, that’s strange, that attracted 300 referring domains.
Like why did that attract that?
And I can actually take that framework and apply it in a different industry knowing that it likely is untapped.
So there, I feel like there’s, you gotta do both and so on one side, like stick with what you know works and put your own spin on it.
So what I mean by that is take one of your competitors, put ’em into Ahrefs or SEMrush, see what their top pages are as far as links, and then you say, okay, script timers seem to be a pretty good tool that people like to link to.
We’re gonna build out a better script timer and then reach out to those same prospects and see if we can catch a few, right?
That’s a totally legitimate model can definitely score you some links.
The challenge is you’re not usually gonna beat the person who is a first mover on that idea.
So whoever was the first mover gets all, gets 80% of the links on that idea. So yeah, you’ll get the scraps, which is fine in a lot of cases, but that’s why you do wanna have a little bit of both.
So there are the known link frameworks, and then the ones that I would call more experimental.
And you know that, that’s what I found. I’ll give you a small example in the context of my business.
This is like in 2016 or 2017.
I found the key word best CMS for SEO. Okay?
And at the time when I did the research on this, I looked at the top 10 of course, and they were all the same.
It was a generic list of CMSs without any real reason why they were the best for SEO.
What was the, there was no legitimate reason, right? It was just like WordPress, Weebly, and it was just like going down the list. I’m like, okay. I was like what if I created something that like I actually gathered data.
And tried to prove what was the best CMS for SEO. So I did that.
I think I looked at 10,000 keywords and built out this data-driven piece of content and basically prove that WordPress was the best shocker.
Now this isn’t to say using WordPress will get you better results than using Weebly or whatever, but it’s more that the sites ranking the best just happen to also be on WordPress.
So it’s, you can get, it gets tricky with correlation on there. Yeah. Which is every SEO study, I feel. I know. It’s so hard to syn, do a singular isolated variable like that. You just really can’t do it.
I just know the different CMSs I’ve worked with, WordPress out of the box is better, just generally it seems in a lot of cases, right?
A lot of CMSs have caught up, but generally that seems to be the case. So anyway, I created this data-driven piece of content and that hadn’t been done before, right?
No one had done that and now, like I, I think I’d be HubSpot in all these different websites.
And funny thing is just to prove how powerful a good angle is. In the blog post and it’s not in there anymore.
But at the time it was very short. It was just like the raw data some graphics.
And then at the end of it, I said, just to prove that word count doesn’t matter.
I’m gonna show you this blog post is gonna rank without have being, having significant words.
And I said it in the blog posts. Yeah, it did rank. And you can go back and look at the historical data and this was like, I think maybe like a year ago, finally started to fall a little bit.
And so that means from like 2017 until 2023, like that’s almost six years of rankings with a very simple case study.
And what I did is when I, ’cause I tracked, like I know it’s old school, but I still track individual keyword rankings ’cause it helps me stay on top of movement. I started to see it was falling a little bit.
When you start to see that slow, painful fall and you’re like, oh, okay, there’s some sort of decay going on.
Maybe it’s dated now. So, all I did was I did the same exact study again, but with today’s data.
I did an updated study. I just refreshed that study.
I kept all the old data, the historical data and just updated with new, with the new data.
And it popped right back up. ’cause it has the links to support it.
There’s, it has all the, all the links, people that have linked to it.
So just a small example, like when you do find an angle you, it’s really powerful, like insanely effective.
So yeah, we can talk more about angles and content, but that’s just one thing is like data’s your own data. As you said earlier, your proprietary data is the best type of link that you can build. I think personally.
Vince Nero: OK, You are a brand new site? Maybe you’re even an education site or something. You give like tutorials or something. I don’t know why it wouldn’t be on YouTube, but you don’t have a lot of data. How do you get the data to do it? Yeah. What are some strategies you use there?
How do you recommend people get proprietary data?
Nathan Gotch: Yeah, there’s basically only two types of data you can ever really have, which is proprietary, meaning you, you collected the data somehow, you did your own study, right? So that’s number one. That’s the hardest by far to do that.
Number two is you can just go and get other people’s data, and that’s also effective.
That’s really effective.
In fact, that’s what exploding topics did. They would do TikTok, user statistics, and they would gather data from a bunch of different sources and put it into one piece of content.
And because people are inherently lazy, they will just link to the one that curated all the data.
And it’s a very effective strategy on that front. So you can do both. I, and I think you should do both in most scenarios.
I want to mention one particular thing, which took me a while to understand. Just informational content in general was a good idea for attracting backlinks, right?
But that’s not necessarily true.
There’s a lot of informational content that’s actually not the best. I’m not saying it can attract links, but the how-to, the listicles, and the long form content are very good for SEO purposes, like actually ranking in Google and driving traffic, but not so good for link bait.
So it’s I think sometimes it’s a little counterintuitive for people like I built this like 8,000 word masterpiece, but I’m not getting any links.
And it’s because it’s not, it’s hard for that to be a referenceable piece of content, although it’s very helpful, that’s why it does, will do well in Google, but it’s not necessarily good for the way people link.
And so we can, there’s, this is why these frameworks are so important because like we talked about data and statistics, but another highly linkable one are tools, right? Free tools, free software, insanely linkable.
And that stuff works like crazy. So there’s just a lot of things.
And even small, like another small thing, and this is the unfair advantage of SaaS by the way SaaS companies just get tons of links.
Like when I was doing much more like agency work whenever I had a SaaS company sign on, I was like, ah, yes, because I knew. So many links going to their homepage, right?
Yeah. SA companies just get links like crazy.
Vince Nero: I actually Ahrefs put up this big list of SaaS companies that are the best bootstrap backlink builders, they called it. So it was like 50 essentially SaaS companies that I went through and evaluated how they got their links, the strategies behind it.
One of the things I saw. To speak to that specifically, like a lot of homepage links, you end up on a lot of these, just like a review. Review posts where it’s like, Hey, I’m gonna, here’s a listicle, or I’ve reviewed X, Y, Z over the course of the year. And I didn’t connect the dots until I was doing this.
I realized, I started I was getting a lot of these requests where it would be like, “Hey, we’re doing a review of the best SEO plugins and we want to include BuzzStream Buzz Marker.” And I’d be like, great, thanks. And they’re like. Oh but you also have to give us a link back to something.
Oh, yeah. So it’s like this mail link exchange.
So with that in mind, I’m looking at these sites and a lot of them on this list got hit by the most recent June links spam update.
And what you’d see is traffic going up with link profile, back referring domains going up and then all of a sudden the organic traffic like plateaus while the links are still going up and it was, you’d see it right from that links spam update.
My hypothesis is, again, correlation causation here, but my hypothesis is those types of links just being on these like listicles are potentially just not valuable anymore or not as valuable.
It could very well be that just that this is a strategy that a lot of these SaaS companies take and they’re just, that they’re using that link exchange, veiled Link exchange tactic.
And that’s the reason. And a lot of these same sites are on those. So again, correlation causation, but I do think there’s probably some types of links that are more valuable than others.
If you’re just listed on a list with a bunch of other sites, is that as valuable as an-depth review where somebody, mentions you, or a informational post where they mention, rank ability as a specific SEO tool that does a specific thing, like the context behind it.
Yeah. It’s just an interesting anecdote when you say that. ’cause I do think that does make it a difference.
Nathan Gotch: Yeah. And I think it, I think a lot of it too probably has to do with the ratio of links going to the homepage compared to other pages on site. I work with a lot of local businesses, there tends to be a lot of poor distribution of links.
So they’ll have 99% of their links hitting their homepage and they’ve got like a thousand pages on their website.
Like none of them have links, so essentially what is the signal you’re sending to Google?
The signal you’re saying to Google is that you are not an authority. You like, people don’t like your stuff, right?
’cause if we’re viewing links as like a, as votes, you’re, it’s essentially giving that signal off to Google.
We are not, you should not trust us essentially. Yeah. And this is why when I jump on a campaign, I’m first looking at that link distribution.
’cause you can run in Screaming Frog, you can just link up the Ahrefs API, and you can see like the ratio of links going to internal pages. If that ratio is really off, this is one of those things you can’t really like, prove per se, but I just think about from the perspective, like what makes sense as far as trust?
And if you look at a site that is really trusted take like backLinko for example, one of the most authoritative sites now that SEMrush owns it.
But look at the, if you did a crawl on backlinko, you would see that probably 80% of the pages on that site have backlinks.
Like it is so astronomically high that you’re like, okay, this makes sense that they’re an authority, ’cause they, they have links to basically everything that they publish.
And this is something that, going back to link building practices like you see a lot of people, they invest all this time into content and all these assets and stuff they build and then they spend like a minute on link building.
You need to spend an equal amount of time promoting it or more honestly, in most cases.
I think this is a while back, Derek Halpern, who does not blog anymore, but at the time when he was running Social Triggers, he said, you should spend like 20% of your time on content.
The other 80% promoting it.
I’m like an advocate of that. I think that’s the way to do it.
Too many people get in the hamster wheel of creating SEO content, like they publish and ask okay, what’s the next one we’re gonna publish?
It’s you didn’t even promote that one. Why are we moving on to the next one?
But yeah, I think that’s one probably variable there with those SaaS companies, like so many homepage links.
And also another fast, now I’m learning this by the way, ’cause I’m obviously building my own SaaS company and.
It’s odd to get links like raw followed links from websites like that to a SaaS company because a lot of the SaaS companies have affiliate programs, so it would like, it doesn’t make sense to get a link that stick out.
It’s odd because if they have an affiliate program, let’s say I was promoting BuzzStream, I wouldn’t link to you guys with a followed link. I’d link with my affiliate link so I can make some money.
And that, that, that wouldn’t give you any value as far as passing link equity.
So it’s just odd in that way.
Vince Nero: I was gonna say, do you think it’s the same with service pages, product pages, like getting a link, like it’s very.
That was one thing that stood out to me too, like looking at some of these link profiles and some of these sites, it’s like the ones that weren’t doing as well anymore.
Yeah. They just had a ton. Like you go to the anchor text breakdown and it’s like a ton of anchors to whatever best time tracking software or something.
It’s like these exact match. So what is the solution then?
Like you said, spread it out amongst everything. As much as you can, spread it out amongst your informational content and your homepage and product pages.
Just make sure it’s equal.
Nathan Gotch: Yeah. I don’t think there’s obviously there’s no perfect ratio that Google’s probably using where oh, you have 50%, therefore you’re penalized.
It’s definitely not like that. But I think if you can make it a priority to really strengthen the assets that you have before thinking about volume.
And I think having a lot of authority and reading a lot of good content is going to be highly beneficial. Also, make your link profile look a lot more realistic because, at the end of the day, as you mentioned, product pages, category pages, local lead generation pages, and local service pages are not linkable.
They are not like, like very rarely is there a e-commerce category page that deserves backlinks. Like it’s extremely rare.
And there’s some exceptions like Dollar Shave Club for example.
They had this like beautiful product page with this really viral video and they attracted a bunch of leads from other like marketing blogs and other things like that.
And that was highly effective.
One other example of this recently is, a lot of people got hit by the Helpful Content Update and a lot of people did not recover from that.
But the website that did this really was—I think it’s House Fresh—the one. And what they did is what I actually saw. They created this really controversial, like Google hates us type of thing. And it was so intelligent because what it did is I actually have a framework now for it.
I call it marketer bait because there is such an enormous market for link opportunities when you think about your pool of prospects.
There are so many marketing blogs and SEO blogs. So you can actually create an asset that appeals to that market and get a bunch of highly relevant links.
That’s exactly what they did, and that blog post they created got so many backlinks and I knew when I saw that happening, I was like, just watch. Watch how well this performs after this. And they’re like one of the only sites that saw an actual legitimate recovery.
Not, I don’t think they got to their previous levels, but like enough to say okay, they did something right in between, the updates.
What a surprise. It happened to be backlinks.
Vince Nero: Yeah, I love that. Yeah, no, I’m definitely monitoring HouseFresh pretty closely.
But yeah, I mean there’s so many that got hit by. And didn’t really do much. Like they just stood by. All right. So Nathan let’s before we wrap up, I want to just hit a little bit of the outreach side of things.
Because I know you mentioned one of the biggest mistakes a lot of people do make is that the kind of lack of value.
Is there anything else in there, suggestions, tips for outreach when you’re doing more of this traditional link building building outreach?
Do you have any outreach tips for when users are doing more traditional link building?
Nathan Gotch: Yeah I think it depends on the, and I hate to say this, but there is different tiers of prospects, right?
So like the tier one prospects, let’s call ’em, would be the BuzzStreams of the world, right?
That would be what I’d consider a tier one prospect.
Really trusted company, really trusted entity.
For those types of prospects, I’m gonna be a much more delicate with my outreach.
I’m not gonna be, so let’s automate this whole thing.
It’s gonna be much more okay let’s figure out how to kinda squeeze our way in here.
So one of the, so let’s, we’ll go down the list of like how they kind of changes based on tier.
So let’s say a tier one prospect. I’m probably, what I love to do is have some sort of question. I just like to leave I like to call, it’s called like dipping your toes in the water.
And so usually what I’ll do is I’ll find the prospect and I’ll just I just got a response today from a podcast.
And all I did was I said, Hey I saw that you have a podcast. I was just wondering, are you guys still accepting new guests? ’cause I would love to geek out about SEO.
That’s it. There wasn’t like, I wasn’t like, here’s my huge pitch and no I’m just asking a simple question. ’cause the thing is, when you open loops work really well, it’s hard for someone to look at a question and be like, I’m gonna ignore this.
It’s a lot harder, right? Yeah. So I, if you can, I always like to have some sort of question like, Hey, are you guys are you adding new resources to your resource page?
Hey, are you guys are you accepting new guest authors?
Just some question. And it’s a good way to get that lead in to then work into maybe building some sort of partnership right in that one.
Take it easy is what I’m saying.
Like you wouldn’t believe how many people just burn bridges in their outreach.
Like the emails I get are just crazy.
Some of the outreach emails are like, they’re going right in front of my throat and I don’t even know who they are.
Like just right away give me everything right now.
And it happens on LinkedIn too, I’m sure you’ve experienced on LinkedIn, it’s for the kill.
And like you gotta take it slow.
And the, and this goes back to that Dream 100.
You have to treat that Dream 100 like you are gonna marry them.
That’s how important they are because you don’t get you don’t get a lot of shots at those. Like you gotta take it really seriously.
’cause if you burn bridges with one or two, maybe even 10 of them, they all know each other, they all work together.
They all like there’s connections there. And you don’t wanna be known as oh yeah, that guy who like harassed me for three months to get a link. So it’s understanding, the communication element of this as well for those tier ones.
Vince Nero: Go slow is the thing. Yeah. I love that. It reminds me of a really good piece of outreach that I received. I have this folder now where I screenshot and save Good and bad.
And one of the good ones, it was didn’t ask for anything. It was showing me a piece of content and was just like, and it wasn’t I think they were doing outreach on behalf of somebody else, but it actually worked out really nicely.
’cause it was as if say you created some report and then you had me do the outreach and I reached out to somebody else and was like, Hey, have you seen Nathan’s new study? What’d you think of this one particular stat that he said, what do you think of this this tactic that he has?
And then just opened the door for me to be like, oh I, that was cool. And then you’re like, oh, this is actually a cool piece of content.
They never once asked me to link to it, but then it was on my radar and it was clearly very relevant.
Like it was like a link building statistics post or something, and it was like very relevant to me and something that I would reach out or would naturally link to.
But it was just this like, they call it like subconscious marketing or something. Yeah. This is cool, isn’t it?
Nathan Gotch: Yeah, no, that’s, I like that it’s like tapping into your expert ego to try to get some feedback in that way.
So I like that. That’s a good one. I might steal that one.
Vince Nero: Yeah. I’ll send you that, but we’ll, I’ll put it in like the show notes.
Yeah. Nathan, man, this has been really awesome. I feel like we could have a part two of this. I, we didn’t get to touch more much into AI and how that’s gonna change everything.
I think, but one of the takeaways from my talking with you is the care it takes to do some of this link building.
The focus should be on quality building, quality assets, and quality outreach. And the more you do that, the more success you’re going to have.
What would you agree with that?
Nathan Gotch: Yeah. I, the way I think about it too is like I, I think sometimes there’s this tendency like when you create link bait that the first piece of link bait that you create is gonna be a home run.
And that’s a huge mistake I see a lot of people do.
Oh, I’ve spent so much time building this link bay, and no one linked to it.
And I’m like, okay, then do another one.
Don’t just stop, like this isn’t this isn’t a one and done thing.
It’s as simple as putting more lines in the ocean.
The more lines you put in the ocean, the more likelihood that some of those will attract links.
It’s classic 80 20 rule.
So if you just do it once, you’re not tapping into the equation that, we’re basically bound by. Yeah.
So yeah, and I know you worked for Siege Media and Ross loves to do a lot.
He’s very link bait focused and I know that’s the focus over there and I just think it’s so important ’cause if you can do it the right way, ’cause we both know that the only way to truly scale link building is through content.
It’s the only way to actually achieve that kind of scale of the link profile. And if you’re not getting a lot of back links and you’re having to buy them, you can only buy as many links as your budget allows, and you’re always going to be capped. So you, I’m not saying I’m not like.
I’m not one of those hardcore, don’t buy links type of people.
I’m not on that front, but at the same time, you need to be building these assets to start building that passive link machine.
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