Focus less on quantity and more on quality, relevant links

Jo says: “Stop building huge numbers of low-quality irrelevant links and focus your efforts on a smaller number of quality relevant links.

We can all go out and build loads of links, but Google is going to start disregarding them when they realise they're not relevant to your business or your niche.

If you're not building links in the way Google wants, by using paid-for link building or other manipulative tactics that Google does not value and doesn’t want to encourage, you're wasting your time, your money and your energy. Focus that energy on building a smaller number of quality links that are relevant to you and the users on your website. Hopefully, Google will reward you for that effort.”

What would be an example of an irrelevant spammy link?

“We see a lot of these links in niches where it is more difficult to do SEO, like gambling and online crypto sites. They do voluminous link-building and digital PR, and they will do anything to get a link.

They will talk about any subject, despite the fact that it might not be relevant to their niche or their business. When online gambling firms are talking about motor vehicles or days out, that is not relevant to what they are selling as a service or what they're providing to visitors to their website.

They are typically links that are built in masse using dodgy, black/grey hat tactics.”

How do you define relevant, high-quality links?

“Those are links that are really relevant to users of your website. Build links that talk about content that’s relevant to the people who would naturally be visiting your website anyway. Know your customer base, whoever that may be, and talk about things where you have real expertise, experience (the new E in EEAT), and authority.

Anything that you can talk about with authority is going to increase that trust in what you're doing on your page and what the page that's linking to you is doing. Use that overall EEAT strategy to build relevant links.”

How do you measure the potential value of a link?

“That is difficult. We know various metrics like DR, Trust Flow and DA. We've either used them in the past or our clients use them, and we all know that they exist, but we don't want to use them alone. We want to have a more holistic view of links going forward. DA and DR, for example, can be gamed and manipulated, so we don't want to use them as our only benchmark for what a quality link is.

In the industry, we assume that Google's going to get smarter at ascertaining the value and relevance of a link, probably with the help of AI and other things it's employing. You have to be quite clever. Look at each link individually and try and work out: Is this relevant? Is this showing a source? Is this adding more context or information to a user's journey? That is what Google originally wanted links to be.

We sometimes forget the history of links. We use them as an SEO tool and forget that they are supposed to be citations. The original idea comes from how you would reference things in an academic paper. We want to go back to that. We want to go back to a link being something useful that adds context, extra clarity, or a trust marker to a website.”

By holistically, do you mean things like position within the content as well as the likely traffic of the page?

“Yes and no. I try to stay away from talking about traffic, particularly in digital PR. I can't promise you that a link is going to bring through loads of traffic. I wouldn't want to sell a links-based service with traffic in mind because that’s very hard to predict.

When I say looking holistically, I mean how useful the link is. That can include where it is placed in the content, but that wouldn’t be a huge quality marker. Look for how useful that link is and what it shows about both a piece of content and the person providing that content.

I really like links to About Us pages when an expert is telling me something in a news article. That link should take me somewhere that will explain why I am listening to this person and why they are an expert – particularly when you're talking about YMYL sites. If someone's giving me health information or telling me what to do with my finances, I want to know why I'm listening to them and why their advice is worth taking on board. Links that take the user somewhere they can check that person’s credentials are really good links.”

Are links from author bios at the bottom of guest blog articles still worthwhile?

“If it shows you that the author is an expert in what they're talking about, then that's absolutely valuable. Author pages on guest posts or publications let the reader know that someone has spoken about the subject before or has a vested interest in the topic because it's something in which they have an academic or business background. It’s an EEAT-friendly way of showing why this is the right person to get that information from.”

In terms of digital PR, is it still likely that multiple press organisations are going to link to you if they like a press release that you've distributed to them?

“I hope so, but the onus is really on the digital PR expert to ensure that the campaigns are relevant and they’re not creating campaigns that have absolutely nothing to do with a client's overall business or expertise.

Digital PR is getting busier. There are more of us and there are fewer journalists, so it's a really hard nut to crack these days. Now, there’s a higher expectation from the press that, when you present a campaign for a client or do some newsjacking and send expertise from a client when a story breaks, that client is really relevant to the news story. They should have real expertise and a real background in the subject that you are putting their content forward for.

It’s all about that expertise. Are they an expert? Do they have experience in this? Do they have the authority? Can I trust them talking about this?”

If an SEO wants to incorporate more digital PR elements into what they do, what should learn they first?

“Newsjacking is a great thing to master. It is hard work, though. I’m not going to pretend it's an easy thing to learn but it is great, particularly if you work with some experts in your area.

If you're an SEO for a site that works with insurance experts, there are always news stories that need the opinion of an insurance expert. If you've got those people and you're already using them on-site authoring pages for you, then you can absolutely use that off-page to build links, build expertise, and build the brand. You've definitely got to remember the brand element of this.

Also, go and find who is writing about your space. Whatever space you’re in, there'll be journalists who are dedicated to that. If you’re in skincare, you'll work with dermatologists or a skincare brand. Go and find those beauty journalists whose job is to write about skincare day in and day out. Build those relationships and then, when they need a comment or some expertise, they will come to you. If you're going to do a campaign, you want to be able to send that to those journalists and know that they are going to trust you, print your content, put it on their website, and link back to you.”

How do you conduct outreach and cut through the noise?

“One of the things we hear from journalists all the time is that they are inundated. Before digital PR existed the way it does now, I was a journalist myself and I would get 300 emails a day. Now, I speak to journalists who have been on annual leave for one day and come back to inboxes full of thousands of emails. That's overwhelming and scary to think about.

Cut through that noise by not sending out irrelevant press releases. Don’t send out content/quotes you've generated on ChatGPT that aren’t providing expert analysis and aren't trustworthy. You've just got to be doing the best you can, sending out really high-quality stuff to the relevant people. If you're a motoring journalist and I'm sending you a skincare campaign, you're not interested and I'm going to get blocked.

You want to spend time understanding who is covering your niche, who is writing about it, and who is interested in it. Don’t blanket spam every journalist in the US and the UK with every campaign you do. You're going to clog up their inbox and you're going to annoy everyone.”

Is it ever worthwhile paying for links?

“I don't think so. I know that people do it and I know that it works, but I’m not sure about the long-term value. Just because something works in the short term, that doesn’t make it the right long-term strategy.

There are lots of things that you can do in digital PR that get you a really quick win but I'm not sure about their longevity. If I sent a press release to every single journalist, without doing my due diligence and looking into whether it's relevant, I would probably still get a link or two out of it. I'm not going to do that because the short-term win isn't worth the long-term damage it does to my reputation.”

How do you determine what links you would like to get?

“You can use tools like Majestic to go and look at what your competitors have got. I like to do it one of two ways. I want to see where competitors are getting links from, to see if we can go and get those links as well, but I also look for the gaps. Who aren't our competitors getting links from and can we get links there?

A lot of people chase the big national links – they want to be in the BBC or the New York Times – but some of the most powerful links, in terms of their SEO impact, can be a lot more niche.

Getting links from smaller, specialist websites that are hyper-relevant can have a much more powerful SEO impact than big sites, even with a lower DA or quality score. Don't be clouded by the idea of getting big, glamorous links all the time. Look for the hyper-relevant niche links too.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2024?

“Stop sending out thousands and thousands of outreach emails to try and build links. Focus on building on-site content that is link-worthy and send that out to a smaller number of really relevant journalists.

The best outreach is done manually. You can buy software that has the names of journalists. It does save time but it is expensive, and the best outreach is done through manual research.”

Jo O'Reilly is a Digital PR Consultant, you can find over at ‘Jo O'Reilly’ on LinkedIn.