Get to Number One: Link Building Case Study
I’m Michael, the Digital Marketing Manager for Murals Wallpaper. Looking for a winning link building formula? Well, you are in luck. Follow this effective, easy to follow, easy to replicate link building strategy that took us to number one on Google for our desired keyword for your website today.
What was our goal?
Our mission was the same as many SEO specialists, to increase traffic and ultimately conversions to a section of our website. For this campaign we wished to build 3-5 good quality links to our London Wall Mural category.
What was our plan?
Part One: Establish our targets
First of all, we had to establish targets. Luckily, London is a very broad niche so there was always going to be scope to establish some quality link building targets.
To find our hit list we used Buzzsumo to establish the influencers within the niche. Once we had established the movers and shakers within the London blogging field we transferred our hit list to Buzzstream. In total we had established 25 link targets to approach but how were we planning to get our links?
Part Two: Getting a foot in the door
As I’m sure you will be well aware, bloggers these days are inundated with requests from online marketers and SEO’s asking them to link to their website or product. With this in mind, our task is to stand out from the crowd and do something that will catch the blogger’s attention.
To do this we needed some kind of bait to illicit initial contact and get our foot in the door. Having put our heads together, we decided we would offer personalised gift boxes to our hit list that would include samples and PR information about our last additions to the London Collection.
Part Three: Where the real marketing happens
After sending out the initial email to our 25 contacts we sat back and waited for replies. Out of those 25 contacts, 6 got back in touch saying they would be happy to receive a gift box and gave us their postal address.
With this open invitation to get our London based product under the noses of our London influencers, we had to make sure we nailed the gift box. We wanted to make the gift box personal; something the blogger would love whilst also making sure our product was featured in an inviting way that would make the blogger want to feature it on our site. We also wanted to keep our boxes around a budget of £20 each. So, what did we include?
Gift Box Itinerary
- Personalised Gift Box with bloggers name printed on purchased from Notonthehighstreet (we wanted to wow the blogger from the off)
- A Wallpaper backed notebook. We pushed the boat out and treated our bloggers to Moleskin notebooks. Remember having to back your books in school? To personalise our notebooks, we harked back to those days and got our graphic design team to take images of the blogger’s website or Instagram which we then printed on our wallpaper and attached to the notebooks.
- A Sharpie Pen. This is the pen favoured by journalists; we thought it would be a great gift to help encourage somebody to write about our product.
- Samples of our wallpaper featuring our London collection. As we are confident about our product, we wanted the blogger to feel the quality of our product and talk about this in their piece.
- Post cards featuring our London collection in room settings to give the blogger and idea of what the product would look like on a wall.
- A handwritten London post card. In this card we thanked the blogger for letting us send them a gift box, said we hoped they liked it and if they felt our London collection was a good fit for their London blog we’d love for them to write about it..
Part Four: securing the links
As we sent our gift boxes through recorded delivery, we were able to tell when they had been signed for. We wanted to strike while the iron was hot and so the day after the gift boxes were received by the bloggers, we dropped them a quick email.
In this email we said we were just checking up to see if they had received their gift box. We also asked if they would consider writing about the London collection as if so we would send them through some PR info about the collection as well as all the relevant imagery.
Link Building: The Results
Out of the 6 websites we approached, three have linked back to our site, one responded saying she would link but we would have to pay (we never pay for links so refused), two more promised to link to us within this month. We will keep on emailing the two who have promised to try and gain five links from the project but even if the trail goes cold, we are still happy with achieving 3 links to the category from the campaign.
Thanks to this link building campaign, we now rank top for London murals keywords after having lingered in third position for a long time. Since being in the number one spot
Would an idea for this work for your company? Also, can you see ways to improve our method? If so we’d love to hear from you.
