International SEO: Part II – BackLink Profile
Well, in this part we will consider the importance of creating the right backlink profile for your site, as well as the features of its building in different countries.
If you target each country separately, it is reasonable to follow the same sequence as when promoting your site in the local segment. Often, people tend to consider entering the international market as another check mark in the list of marketing development. This is fundamentally not true. If you want to achieve a result, put up with the idea that it will be as difficult as developing your product or service in your own market.
Persecution of international SEO rankings can be even more difficult, but at the same time much more useful. Some types of keywords that are oversaturated or too expensive for promotion in one country can be easily accessed in another.
The important part is your translated content (or written in the original language). If, for example, you want to promote your website in China, you should get back links from trusted Chinese sites, it will be much more effective than links from English sites, even though they would be of very high quality. If you want to promote your site in India, then you need to look for sites for linking there. There is a tricky thing here. If you correctly link with local resources, your page is likely to succeed in whatever country you are currently promoting your site whether it is India or China, but may be downgraded in the US ranking. That is why the diversification of sites and domains, which we talked about in the last article, plays such a big role. As an alternative, look for good bloggers with relevant content for your business, contact them and suggest distributing their articles in a different language. You will publish the translation on your website, include a link to the original and gain additional weight in the country you are targeting, and the blogger will receive additional traffic.
Recalling how much effort and time it took to build a solid backlink profile and come up with the idea that you have to do this all again is terrifying. This, perhaps, has become one of the most painstaking (laborious) and useful SEO tasks in recent years.
There are many ways to fulfill it and we will consider them step by step:
Definition of the target audience
If you did the proper marketing research, which we talked about in the first part of our series of publications “International SEO: Part I – Domains“, then you can put a temporary check mark here (you should never stop studying your target audience – this is the basic principle of research marketing). Having more or less clear picture of the first groups of your prospective customers you need to understand what website they usually visit and what they are interested in.
Creating a keywords semantic core
To do this you need to think about all those words which related to your business and describe it the best. Once you’ve determine them you can start searching for Internet resources, which appear in the search result if the user typed those words. These resources do not just have to be the place where your target audience is, but really meet the basic requirements of your subject. These days it is completely ineffective selling medical equipment and get 100 backlinks from sites on cosmetics and hope for serious success.
To help you, such programs as Google Keyword Planner, KWfinder, Keyword Tool, etc.
Building a list of websites for getting backlinks from
Then you need to start searching for sites where you are going to advertise and systematize this search. You will quickly understand that there is too much information that needs to be operated simultaneously. Searching for relevant resources is greatly simplified by using the following programs: Scrapebox, Mozenda, Import.
Determine the relevance of chosen websites
To determine the trustworthiness of a particular site (in other words, the weight that is designated by the search engine) and the benefits of obtaining a backlink on this site, you must also use special tools. Many of them are not cheap, but they show the only reliable information and help to solve the most important problem. The success of your promotion will directly depend on what site you post the backlink. In SEO, testing plays such a big role, as in no other type of activity. Benefits from the links you posted today, are only effective up to 4 months in most cases. With productive work, such a sequence is not very easy to track. That’s why you need to test very carefully and wisely. Here it is worth considering such specialized programs and services such as Semrush, Ahrefs, Majestic.
Communicate with the owners and administrators of websites
Once your original list is compiled, you can begin sending emails to the sites and blogs that you selected. Do not count on getting the response from everyone you’ve contacted and furthermore that it will happen right away. If there is no answer at all, do a small follow up, just do not bombard them with new letters every day. On many sites, the announced response time to emails for sponsor posts is not less than two weeks. So be sure to read all available information on the site before starting to act. There will be a lot of sites that the information you need on will be in different places and in order to find it you need to spend time, after which you need to read it and find the answers to the questions that interest you. Of course, it’s easier to open each new site, look for any place with a feedback form or email contacts and simply insert the prepared message template. So, you can go over all the sites that you found in one day, but the result will be much less accurate than to approach this task thoroughly.
By the way some websites warn users that all request about advertising submitted in the general inquiry or contact form will be rejected because they have a special form for this exact purpose in some other place on the website. And this warning can be placed not with capital letters so anyone couldn’t miss it, it can be somewhere in the middle of the general information text.
Therefore before sending your message explore each website and find out the following:
- Does the site publish any sponsorship content?
- Does your product / service correspond to the site’s content?
- Is there a comprehensive information on advertising issues?
- Are there any answers to your questions in the FAQ or elsewhere?
- Is there a special contact form for these kinds of questions?
- Are there any restrictions on the publication?
- Having studied the site, consider what pitch in your message can end up with a greater positive result (common goals, some achievements of this website that you admire, mutual benefits, a partnership or something else)
- Do not write this all in one message, just draw a plan in your head: first of all your main task is to establish the contact
- Make sure that in your final message there are NO questions that have already been answered on the site
Finally, you should not stop working on any of the above items. At each of them, especially at the stage of negotiating with the owners or administrators of the websites there may be significant delays. Here, as anywhere, it is important to make a clear plan and follow it. Some sites will play for time, not deliberately, just because it is the specifics of this work, others may disappear for several weeks after everything is agreed and even ready for publication. Therefore, everything needs to be done step by step and making preparations for the future in order to create a good chain of publications over a long period of time, say 2-3 publications a month for six months. To improve the ranking of your site, it’s better to publish four links in two months than all of them at once or even in two weeks. If you approach this task thoroughly and follow all the recommendations, then the site will go up more rapidly.
