A Process for Content-Driven Link Building, presented at SMX Munich 2018 by Paddy Moogan

1. A Process for
Content-Driven Link Building

4. A Process for
Content-Driven Link Building

5. (Because links still matter, a lot)

6. But…

7. The best link building campaign won’t
rescue a bad website or product

8. Strategy &
Objectives
Ideas &
Validation
Production Promotion

9. #1 - Strategy & Objectives

10. What’s the goal?

11. Links

12. Rankings

13. Traffic

14. Conversions

15. How quickly?

16. Is content-driven link building going
to do this?

17. It takes time

18. It may not work

19. “I have three months
to save my business”
- A genuine enquiry we had

20. Your goal is to reduce risk across all
content that you produce

21. Your strategy needs to
have a low-risk element to it

22. Include tactics for producing “safe”
content that can be reused

24. This could be used across several
events and many local markets

26. #2 Ideas & Validation

27. What is the client comfortable with?

28. Do they have brand guidelines?

29. What formats are possible?

30. How wide can you go with ideas?

31. Types of visualisation

32. Types of visualisation

34. The story comes first

35. Validation

36. A good content idea

37. A good content idea
that get links

38. Validation

39. What’s the one thing we’re showing?

40. What’s the one thing we’re showing?
How are we going to execute?

41. What’s the one thing we’re showing?
How are we going to execute?
Who is going to link to it?

42. What’s the one thing we’re showing?
How are we going to execute?
Who is going to link to it?
How is it different?

43. What’s the one thing we’re showing?
How are we going to execute?
Who is going to link to it?
How is it different?
Why will people care?

44. You need to be able to confidently
answer these questions for every idea

45. If not – they don’t make it
through the process

46. #3 Production

47. Briefing is key

48. Build a culture of
open, timely feedback

49. Common production mistakes

50. Spelling, grammar

51. Cross-browser testing

52. Analytics code

53. Open Graph tags missing

54. Not mobile-friendly

55. #4 Promotion

56. Prospecting

57. Don’t skip the manual element

58. Reverse engineer similar content

59. It’s fine if it starts slow

60. Can you see the story?

61. Then we noticed something

65. Toyota logos…

66. We pushed that angle harder

67. 150+ pieces of coverage with 77 links

68. It’s ok to start slow, but watch the
coverage you get closely and react

69. Be sure to display big images within a
lightbox or popup

70. Don’t worry about content “going viral”

73. Launched June 2016, now has just
over 50 links and counting

74. We produced one content piece every
other month & kept building links into
older pieces

75. 6 months and several content pieces
for traffic to show improvement

76. We’ve now produced 15 pieces of
content for them
Not a single one has gone viral

77. Organic traffic up 53%

78. It’s consistency that
wins – not going viral

79. But consistency won’t save you if you
launch at the wrong time

82. US Election data from Google Trends

83. US Election data from Google Trends
Don’t launch you content here

85. Revisit content and relaunch

86. To wrap up

87. You can’t rely on links alone

88. There isn’t a single answer to making
your website link worthy

89. Brand, product, experience, price,
reputation, trustworthiness

90. Forget these, link building may
as well be dead for you

91. Build your process and trust it

92. Thank you!
paddy@aira.net