Challenge
On April 1st, 2019 Nicholas Rubright and Neil Emmett from cbdMD reached out for me to begin a link building campaign with a goal of making cbdMD the dominant force in organic search traffic online. They were absolutely crushing it with influencer marketing and across social media. However, arguably their biggest market is online and their competitors were dwarfing them by thousands of search traffic. For the sake of transparency we were 1 of 5 link builders on this project. However, we did earn a total of 123 live or agreed white hat relevant links with site traffic out of the total 392. These were big links from the likes of curetoday.com and psychcentral.com which has 1.8 million site traffic flowing to it.
Solution
The Essentials For White Hat Link Building Every white hat link building campaign we run follows the same process which you can read in detail in our article, “How To Build Links For SEO.” To no surprise we followed the same steps when setting up and executing cbdMD’s link building campaign. Domain Hosted Email Address: Firstly, we created a company domain hosted email that looked like this david.freudenberg@cbdmd.com. Doing so allowed us to use a more personal approach when doing outreach and receive a much higher response rate. Project Tracker: Every client we work with is handmade their own project tracker in Google Sheets. The project tracker gives you live updates on everything that has, is, and will happen for the link building campaign. Next, we attempted to obtain access to Google Analytics and Search Console to examine quick wins in the impressions and clicks where we may be able to exploit some good linkable assets. Unfortunately, the nature of cbdMD being a publicly traded company did not allow us access. Despite we trudged on to a 65% increase in organic traffic! Review the Anchor Text: Reviewing the anchor text allows us to make sure it is diluted and not spammy. Prioritizing phrase match and branded anchor text over exact match anchors. Content Audit: We reviewed cbdMDs content to find something suitable that we can leverage for links. The best linkable assets can be bridged to neighboring niches that have a large following and the content is solely educational in nature. At the time cbdMD had a treasure trove on content educating their audience on diseases and disorders that benefit from CBD. Our plan was to take the pages and recreate them into the most indepth guides on the disease/disorder and how to remedy them. Then pitch these guides to websites with resource pages in the disabled, child, parent, elderly, health, and niche specific disease/disorder websites. Links Audit: We ran a thorough link audit of cbdMDs existing links this includes: Checking the quality of the links and eliminating spammy unnatural ones if a manual action penalty has been taken by Google. Anchor text ratio is at a good ratio and not stuffed with spammy unnatural keywords. Check the site traffic of the links, backlinks to the links and relevancy of the links. 5 Link Building Strategies: Every link building campaign begins with 5 link building strategies that we feel are applicable to the website and niche. For cbdMD we chose Guest Posts, Resource Pages, Roundups, and Broken Links. Once, we have the essentials out of the way we move into prospecting for relevant link targets and outreach. Prospecting and Outreach Now its time to build those white hat powerful links that drives targeted purchasing referral traffic, organic rankings, and drasticly increases brand awareness. Gaining links is very difficult for most and for myself it is a bit of an art form. Google Search Operators: Firstly, we chose specific keywords from specific landing pages on cbdmd then we plugged these into our Google Search Operators and began the prospecting. Once we had 200 relevant targets based on our criteria and recorded all relevant contact information we stopped. Outreach To Opportunities Using Personalized Emails: Secondly, we created personalized initial outreach email templates that can be personalized at scale during the campaign. Follow Up: Followup is one of the most important pieces of the process that is often overlooked by many. We use Buzzstream to schedule out followup emails both personalized and non-personalized to with the goal of earning link via a value exchange. All sent emails, opened emails, and replied emails were tracked using Buzzstream. For some guest posting we had a 50% reply rate on the first email and a 92% open rate.
Results
A 65% increase in organic traffic speaks for itself. If we can bring exponential results to an extremely competitive niche such as CBD than nothing is stopping us from helping you.
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