Strategic Link Building: Why You Don't Need To Outrun Lions

Posted by oline123

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

One of my favourite SEO anecdotes goes like this: two men are walking through an African game reserve when they come across a lion, one of the men calmly puts down his backpack and slips on the running shoes he has been carrying.

The other man chuckles and says, “You’ll never outrun a lion."

To which the other man calmly responds, “I don’t need to outrun the lion; I just need to outrun you."

SEO, contrary to popular belief, is not about ‘beating Google’ or ‘cracking their enigma code’; it is about beating the competing websites on the keywords that matter to your business. This means SERP analysis and competitor analysis should be key components in shaping your SEO strategy.

I am not advocating creating a carbon copy link profile for your site by building competitor links like for like. This methodology is about learning from their site and link profile in order to close the natural search gap; understand what is working (and to a certain extent, the limits); and then eventually to outmanoeuvre them.

In this post, I am going to explore a number of different eCommerce verticals and identify what I think makes that SERP ‘tick’ as well as the different link building tactics which can be utilised to ensure natural search dominance.  

I wholeheartedly believe that when it comes to link building, quality and sustainability are the ‘end game.’ Google will eventually fully understand the true quality of a link. However, different markets have different ‘requirements.’ If you understand what it takes to rank in the market you are trying to target then you can ensure you are working strategically rather than adopting the “throw links at the wall and see what sticks” approach.

I will also be exploring how analysing the counterpart market in a more SEO-advanced country can help you understand the future of your home market.

The Data

Far too often in the world of SEO, sweeping statements and all-encompassing judgements are made with little evidence or data to back it up. This is just a snippet of the research I carried out which helps to underpin the conclusions I make later in this post

SERP 1 – ‘online shopping’ Google.com.au

According to SEOmoz’s Keyword Difficulty tool, this keyword has a 71% difficulty rating.

On the face of it, this would seem like a highly competitive keyword to try and target.

The number 1 result (http://www.oo.com.au) has over 36,000 external links, a high domain authority (59), and a domain mozRank of 4.9. A seemingly challenging keyword target. Don’t get me wrong, it won’t be easy; however, if we dig below the surface, we can get a clearer picture of just how OO.com.au is ranking which can help shape our link building strategy.

Link Quantity

Number of external links to the root domain according to OpenSiteExplorer

#1 – OO.com.au	#2 – TopBuy.com.au	#3 – Buyii.com.au
36,478	6,706	11,967

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 84,683

Anchor Text

Percentage of links with ‘online shopping’ as anchor text

#1 – OO.com.au	#2 – TopBuy.com.au	#3 – Buyii.com.au
17%	3.7%	3.8%

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 7.35%

Link Quality

Percentage of links deemed to be of ‘low power’ by Link Research Tools. Cemper (the makers of Link Research Tools) guard their link power algorithm closely, but they have said that the link power is usually measured by looking at the number of links pointing at that page. A buried page in a rubbish web directory is likely to be considered low power as there will be very few links and certainly very few good quality links pointing at that page.

#1 – OO.com.au	#2 – TopBuy.com.au	#3 – Buyii.com.au
94%	94.2%	91.1%

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 77.01%

Link Target

Percentage of links that point at the homepage according to Link Research T ools

#1 – OO.com.au	#2 – TopBuy.com.au	#3 – Buyii.com.au
78%	76.2%	88.7%

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 73.37%

Link Status

Percentage of external followed links according to Link Research Tools

#1 – OO.com.au	#2 – TopBuy.com.au	#3 – Buyii.com.au
94%	73.4%	90.1%

*The average of the remaining 7 top 10 results = 89.13%

Link Locality

Percentage of links from .au domains according to Link Research Tools

#1 – OO.com.au

#2 – TopBuy.com.au

#3 – Buyii.com.au