How We Build Links at PhastRank Digital Agency [Our Process-Driven Approach]
Having worked in the link building campaigns of some SaaS companies in the last few years, we understand that quality link building at scale requires a process.
Without one, you’re most likely not to see any tangible results from link building in the long run.
Here, we’re going to show you (our client) how we do everything in-house.
That way, you can track our progress and hold us responsible if we don’t follow through on our promise.
This is exactly how we build links at PhastRank Digital Agency
Let’s get started.
Step #1: Link Building Campaign Kickoff Meeting With Client
For us, this is a MUST.
And the reason is simple.
If we don’t understand your business or know the goals you want to achieve with link building, it’d be difficult for us to do it the right way.
At our agency, our goal is to work with you long-term to achieve these goals for your business.
So, as soon as you come on board, this is the first step in our process.
We have a couple of questions we’d like you to answer at this stage, and will send them to you before the kickoff meeting.
Step #2: Website and Content Analysis
During the kickoff meeting, we usually gather some important information from you such as your SEO history, competitors, existing link building process, and so on.
Armed with these details, we now proceed to analyze your website and existing content.
The reason we do this is to have an overall idea of:
- Current link profile
- Anchor text distribution
- Website overall history
- Existing content on your website
- What other competitors are doing
- Opportunities to explore for the link building campaigns.
To make this happen, we use a combination of SEO tools such as Scrapebox, SEMrush, Ahrefs, and so on.
Step #3: Outline the Link Building Campaign Strategy
The website and content analysis provide us with insights on the strategy to use for your link building campaign.
As soon as that is done, we’ll now provide you with the strategy we want to use for link building.
From our experience, not all SaaS niches require the same approach to link building. So, we study your website and come up with a unique approach that will work fine for you.
At this stage, you’ll have access to your client tracking sheet and we’ll provide you with the following details
- The link building strategy(ies) we’ll be using for your campaign
- The content we’d be building backlinks to
- The anchor text we’d be using for each content
- Other additional information
Step #4: Create a Link Building Campaign Persona For You
As soon as we’ve figured out the link building strategy we want to use for your campaign, the next thing we do is to create a persona for the entire link building project.
If you already have a persona created for your company, we’ll proceed to use that one exactly.
However, if you don’t, we’ll do that on your behalf.
Some of the things we’d be creating for this persona include:
- Gmail address
- Writing samples on some publications
- Social media profiles; if needed
- And so on
After creating the persona, we’ll share all the details with you (including passwords), so you can monitor everything from your end too.
Step #5: Find Relevant Opportunities For Your Content
This is where the real link building game begins and where things start to get even more interesting.
This step is crucial to the success of your campaign. This is because, without any opportunity, there’s nowhere or how we can promote your content.
At this stage, our link prospectors go all out to find relevant opportunities for the content we’re promoting.
To make this happen, we make use of a combination of free and paid tools.
Usually, we start with Google using some search operators targeting your niche. If we get relevant results from those, we’d record them into the tracking sheet.
We also utilize Scrapebox to scale things up and to get even more results.
Aside from Google, we also have a look at other search engines such as Yahoo, Bing, and DuckDuckGo.
We do this because we always want to widen our search horizon and position ourselves to get better results.
Other tools we use for finding opportunities; include SEMrush and Ahrefs.
Want all these done for you?
Step #6: Sieve Out Opportunities That Doesn’t Meet the Criteria Set For Your Campaign
During the kickoff meeting, we usually ask to confirm the criteria you prefer the websites we’d be doing outreach to meet.
This varies greatly from one company to the other depending on your current site’s metrics.
For some SaaS companies, they prefer links from websites with a specific DA or DR. While for others, they’re more concerned about the overall site health and the monthly organic traffic it is getting.
That’s why we take a deeper look at the opportunities we get for your campaign and remove the ones that don’t meet the set criteria.
To make this happen, we use the URL Profiler tool. That way, we can get all the details we need and proceed to the next step.
Step #7: Determine the Ideal Prospect For Each Website
To reach out to the right person, we need to know who they are, right?
This is why we ensure that after sieving out the opportunities that didn’t meet our criteria, we identify the decision-maker of the website we’re reaching out to.
In some cases, the name of the decision-maker will be found on the website.
Sometimes, we have to dig deeper before finding the right person to reach out to.
This at times, means that we have to peruse the company’s social media profiles on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.
This process is critical, as our goal for each campaign is to get as many responses as we can.
And to do that, personalization will go a long way.
Step #8: Find and Verify Email Addresses Of Prospects
Now that we’ve cleaned our prospects’ list and ready to begin the outreach process. The next step is to find and verify the email addresses of the prospects.
After all, without knowing the email address of the prospect, there’s no way we can convince them to give us a backlink.
At this point, we make sure that we not only find the email address of each contact but also verify that they’re correct.
To find the email addresses of the prospects, we use Hunter.
To verify the emails and ensure that it’s for a real person, we use NeverBounce.
Step #9: Personalize Each Email Before Hitting The Send Button
As mentioned previously, a key part of our process which makes it successful is the fact that we personalize our emails.
For SaaS companies, this is even more important.
From our end, we’re not just helping you get links, we’re helping you build solid relationships that will help your business in future.
This is why we make sure that every email we send out is fully personalized.
This is where our in-house copywriter comes in.
To create the personalization messages, we take a look at different platforms such as recently published posts, social media posts, opinion pieces, and so on of the prospect.
That way, we have a robust idea of who the person is, what ideals they stand for are, and how best to approach them.
Step #10: Reach Out to These Opportunities
After creating the personalization message, we begin the outreach process immediately.
We have in-house outreach managers that take care of the whole process.
Although we have some templates in place, the outreach manager ensures that they tweak it to fit in perfectly to the prospect.
Our go-to tool for outreach is Buzzstream.
This is because it makes it easy for the team to track everything all in one place.
With Buzzstream, we know those who opened our emails and those who didn’t.
We can also track and manage a lot of metrics related to the outreach on the platform.
Want Us To Build Links For You at Scale?
Step #11: Follow Up If Necessary
Experience has shown that most responses to cold emails are from follow-ups.
And that is why our outreach managers are trained to ensure that every email sent out is followed up.
Ideally, we allow for about 3 days between the first and second email.
Also, we wait for about 7 days between the second and third email.
If after about 3 follow-ups (Within a span of 2 weeks) and the person didn’t respond, it most likely means they’re not interested in our proposal.
In such cases, we stop sending them follow-up emails.
Step 12: Offer Something Of Value (AKA Quality Content)
Having worked in the link building campaign of SaaS companies in the last few years, one thing that stands out is that to get a link from anywhere, you MUST be ready to offer value.
Simply put, link building is a form of value exchange.
The value could be in the form of a comprehensive content on your website which they can link to and it’ll add value to their audience.
It could also be creating an infographic for content already written on their website.
The kind of value you’ll be exchanging here depends on the link building strategy that’s been used.
For most of our SaaS link building campaigns, we’ve discovered that guest posting works best most of the time.
Though we don’t focus on it solely, it’s been proven to be the most effective for us.
So, if a prospect responds positively to our outreach email and requests that we should submit a guest post, then we’d have to do that.
We have in-house experienced guest post writers that take care of this step for us.
The goal here is to ensure that we write a guest post based on the publication’s guidelines and land you a link successfully.
Step #13: Record and Track The Entire Process
This is the final step in our process-driven approach to link building.
We make sure that we record and track the entire process in our customized Google sheets, which you’ll have access to.
That way, you can know the exact number of prospects we reached out to on a monthly basis, where we stand with them, and the number of links we’ve built so far.
Also, we’ll send you a visualized monthly report so you can have an idea of how our link building outreach have helped your organic traffic, month over month.
How Effective Is Your Process-driven Approach to Link Building For SaaS Companies?
You might be wondering if how we build links at our agency is any effective.
Well, we’ll like our results to speak for us.
Using our approach, we have landed our clients some powerful links on these high quality websites.
