seo

Posted by jkuria

Summary

We helped Repux generate 253% more leads, nearly 100% more token sales and millions of dollars in incremental revenue during their initial coin offering (ICO) by using our CRO expertise.

The optimized site also helped them get meetings with some of the biggest names in the venture capital community — a big feat for a Poland-based team without the pedigree typically required (no MIT, Stanford, Ivy League, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft background).

The details:

Repux is a marketplace that lets small and medium businesses sell anonymized data to developers. The developers use the data to build “artificially intelligent” apps, which they then sell back to businesses. Business owners and managers use the apps to make better business decisions.

Below is the original page, which linked to a dense whitepaper. We don’t know who decided that an ICO requires a long, dry whitepaper, but this seems to be the norm!

This page above suffers from several issues:

• The headline is pretty meaningless (“Decentralized Data & Applications Protocol for SMEs). Remember, as David Ogilvy noted, 90% of the success of an ad (in our case, a landing page) is determined by the headline. Visitors quickly scan the headline and if it doesn’t hold their interest, bounce immediately. With so much content on the web, attention is scarce — the average time spent on a page is a few seconds and the average bounce rate is about 85%.
• The call to action is “Get Whitelisted,” which is also meaningless. What’s in it for me? Why should I want to “Get Whitelisted”?
• A lack of urgency to act. There is a compelling reason to do so, but it was not being clearly articulated (“Get 50% OFF on the tokens if you buy before a certain date.”)
• Lack of “evidentials”: Evidentials are elements that lend credibility or reduce anxiety and include things like mentions in trusted publications, well-known investors or advisors, industry seals, association affiliations, specific numbers (e.g. 99% Net Promoter Score), and so on.
• Too much jargon and arcane technical language: Our research using Mouseflow’s on-page feedback feature showed that the non-accredited-investor ICO audience isn’t sophisticated. They typically reside outside of the US and have a limited command of English. Most are younger men (18–35) who made money from speculative activities on the Internet (affiliate marketing, Adsense arbitrage, and of course other crypto-currencies). When we surveyed them, many did not initially understand the concept. In our winning page (below), we dumbed down things a lot!

Below is the new page that produced a 253% gain in leads (email opt-ins). Coupled with the email follow-up sequence shown below, it produced a nearly 100% gain in token sales.

Winning page (above the fold):

Here are few of the elements that we believe made a difference:

• Much clearer headline (which we improved upon further in a subsequent treatment).
• Simple explanation of what the company is doing
• Urgency to buy now — get 50% off on tokens if you buy before the countdown timer expires
• Solicited and used press mentions
• Social proof from the Economist; tapping a meme can be powerful as it’s always easier to swim downstream than upstream. “Data is the new oil” is a current meme.

More persuasive elements (below the fold):

In the second span (the next screenful below the fold) we added a few more persuasive elements.

For one, we highlighted key Repux accomplishments and included bios of two advisors who are well known in the crypto-community.

Having a working platform was an important differentiator because only one in 10 ICOs had a working product. Most launched with just a whitepaper!

A survey of the token buyers showed that mentioning well-known advisors worked — several respondents said it was the decisive factor in persuading them to buy. Before, the advisors were buried in a little-visited page. We featured them more prominently.

Interestingly, this seemed to cut both ways. One of the non-contributors said he was initially interested because of a certain advisor’s involvement. He later chose not to contribute because he felt this advisor’s other flagship project had been mismanaged!

We also used 3 concrete examples to show how the marketplace functions and how the tokens would be used:

When your product is highly abstract and technical, using concrete examples aids understanding. We also found this to be true when pitching to professional investors. They often asked, “Can you give me an example of how this would work in the real world?”

We like long-form pages because unlike a live selling situation, there’s no opportunity for a back-and-forth conversation. The page must therefore overcorrect and address every objection a web visitor might have.

Lastly, we explained why Repux is likely to succeed. We quoted Victor Hugo for good measure, to create an air of inevitability:

How much impact did Victor Hugo have? I don’t know, but the page did much better overall. Our experience shows that radical redesigns (that change many page elements at the same time) produce higher conversion lifts.

Once you attain a large lift, if you like, you can then do isolation testing of specific variables to determine how much each change contributed.

13% lift: Simplified alternate page

The page below led to a further 13% lift.

The key elements we changed were:

• Simplified the headline even further: “Repux Monetizes Data from Millions of Small Enterprises.” What was previously the headline is now stated in the bullet points.
• Added a “5 Reasons Why Repux is Likely to Succeed” section: When you number things, visitors are more likely to engage with the content. They may not read all the text but will at least skim over the numbered sub-headlines to learn what all the points are — just like power abhors a vacuum, the mind can’t seem to stand incompleteness!

We’ve seen this in Mouseflow heatmaps. You can do this test yourself: List a bunch of bullet points versus a numbered list and with a compelling headline: The 7 Reasons Why 20,0000 Doctors Recommend Product X or The 3 Key Things You Need to Know to Make an Informed Decision.

Follow-up email sequence

We also created a follow-up email sequence for Repux that led to more token sales.

As you can see, the average open rate is north of 40%, and the goal attained (token sales) is above 8%. According to Mailchimp, the average email marketing campaign open rate is about 20%, while the average CTR is about 3%.

We got more sales than most people get clicks. Here’s a link to three sample emails we sent.

Our emails are effective because:

• They’re educational (versus pure sales pitch). This is also important to avoid “burning out” your list. If all you do is send pitch after pitch, soon you’ll be lucky to get a 1.3% open rate!
• They employ storytelling. We use a technique known as the “Soap Opera Sequence.” Each email creates anticipation for the next one and also refers to some interesting fact in previous ones. If a person would only have opened one email, they are now likely to want to open future ones as well as look up older ones to “solve the puzzle.” This leads to higher open rates for the entire sequence, and more sales.
• The calls to action are closer to the bottom, having first built up some value. Counterintuitively, this works better, but you should always test radically different approaches.

Email is a massively underutilized medium. Most businesses are sitting on goldmines (their email list) without realizing it! You can — and should — make at least 2x to 3x as many sales from your email list as you do from direct website sales.

It takes a lot of work to write an effective sequence, but once you do you can run it on autopilot for years, making money hand over fist. As customer acquisition gets ever more competitive and expensive, how well you monetize your list can make the difference between success and failure.

Conclusion

To increase the conversion rate on your website and get more sales, leads, or app downloads, follow these simple steps:

• Put in the work to understand why the non-converting visitors are leaving and then systematically address their specific objections. This is what “research-driven” optimization means, as opposed to redesign based purely aesthetic appeal or “best practices.”

• Find out why the converting visitors took the desired action — and then accentuate these things.

• Capture emails and use a follow-up sequence to educate and tell stories to those who were not convinced by the website. Done correctly, this can produce 2x to 3x as many sales as the website.

Simple, but not easy. It takes diligence and discipline to do these things well. But if you do, you will be richly rewarded!

And if you’d like to learn more about conversion rate optimization or review additional case studies, we encourage you to take our free course.

Thanks to Jon Powell, Hayk Saakian, Vlad Mkrtumyan, and Nick Jordan for reading drafts of this post.

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Posted by Tom.Capper

By now, you’ve probably heard as much as you can bear about mobile first indexing. For me, there’s been one topic that’s been conspicuously missing from all this discussion, though, and that’s the impact on internal linking and previous internal linking best practices.

In the past, there have been a few popular methods for providing crawl paths for search engines — bulky main navigations, HTML sitemap-style pages that exist purely for internal linking, or blocks of links at the bottom of indexed pages. Larger sites have typically used at least two or often three of these methods. I’ll explain in this post why all of these are now looking pretty shaky, and what I suggest you do about it.

Quick refresher: WTF are “internal linking” & “mobile-first,” Tom?

Internal linking is and always has been a vital component of SEO — it’s easy to forget in all the noise about external link building that some of our most powerful tools to affect the link graph are right under our noses. If you’re looking to brush up on internal linking in general, it’s a topic that gets pretty complex pretty quickly, but there are a couple of resources I can recommend to get started:

• This top-level Whiteboard Friday from Rand
• This 30-minute audit guide from me

I’ve also written in the past that links may be mattering less and less as a ranking factor for the most competitive terms, and though that may be true, they’re still the primary way you qualify for that competition.

A great example I’ve seen recently of what happens if you don’t have comprehensive internal linking is eflorist.co.uk. (Disclaimer: eFlorist is not a client or prospective client of Distilled, nor are any other sites mentioned in this post)

eFlorist has local landing pages for all sorts of locations, targeting queries like “Flower delivery in [town].” However, even though these pages are indexed, they’re not linked to internally. As a result, if you search for something like “flower delivery in London,” despite eFlorist having a page targeted at this specific query (which can be found pretty much only through use of advanced search operators), they end up ranking on page 2 with their “flowers under £30” category page:

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If you’re looking for a reminder of what mobile-first indexing is and why it matters, these are a couple of good posts to bring you up to speed:

• General guide to mobile-first indexing, by my former colleague Bridget Randolph
• How mobile-first indexing disrupts the link graph, by Russ Jones

In short, though, Google is increasingly looking at pages as they appear on mobile for all the things it was previously using desktop pages for — namely, establishing ranking factors, the link graph, and SEO directives. You may well have already seen an alert from Google Search Console telling you your site has been moved over to primarily mobile indexing, but if not, it’s likely not far off.

Get to the point: What am I doing wrong?

If you have more than a handful of landing pages on your site, you’ve probably given some thought in the past to how Google can find them and how to make sure they get a good chunk of your site’s link equity. A rule of thumb often used by SEOs is how many clicks a landing page is from the homepage, also known as “crawl depth.”

Mobile-first indexing impacts this on two fronts:

1. Some of your links aren’t present on mobile (as is common), so your internal linking simply won’t work in a world where Google is going primarily with the mobile-version of your page
2. If your links are visible on mobile, they may be hideous or overwhelming to users, given the reduced on-screen real estate vs. desktop

If you don’t believe me on the first point, check out this Twitter conversation between Will Critchlow and John Mueller:

In particular, that section I’ve underlined in red should be of concern — it’s unclear how much time we have, but sooner or later, if your internal linking on the mobile version of your site doesn’t cut it from an SEO perspective, neither does your site.

And for the links that do remain visible, an internal linking structure that can be rationalized on desktop can quickly look overbearing on mobile. Check out this example from Expedia.co.uk’s “flights to London” landing page:

Many of these links are part of the site-wide footer, but they vary according to what page you’re on. For example, on the “flights to Australia” page, you get different links, allowing a tree-like structure of internal linking. This is a common tactic for larger sites.

In this example, there’s more unstructured linking both above and below the section screenshotted. For what it’s worth, although it isn’t pretty, I don’t think this is terrible, but it’s also not the sort of thing I can be particularly proud of when I go to explain to a client’s UX team why I’ve asked them to ruin their beautiful page design for SEO reasons.

I mentioned earlier that there are three main methods of establishing crawl paths on large sites: bulky main navigations, HTML-sitemap-style pages that exist purely for internal linking, or blocks of links at the bottom of indexed pages. I’ll now go through these in turn, and take a look at where they stand in 2018.

1. Bulky main navigations: Fail to scale

The most extreme example I was able to find of this is from Monoprice.com, with a huge 711 links in the sitewide top-nav:

Here’s how it looks on mobile:

This is actually fairly usable, but you have to consider the implications of having this many links on every page of your site — this isn’t going to concentrate equity where you need it most. In addition, you’re potentially asking customers to do a lot of work in terms of finding their way around such a comprehensive navigation.

I don’t think mobile-first indexing changes the picture here much; it’s more that this was never the answer in the first place for sites above a certain size. Many sites have tens of thousands (or more), not hundreds of landing pages to worry about. So simply using the main navigation is not a realistic option, let alone an optimal option, for creating crawl paths and distributing equity in a proportionate or targeted way.

2. HTML sitemaps: Ruined by the counterintuitive equivalence of noindex,follow & noindex,nofollow

This is a slightly less common technique these days, but still used reasonably widely. Take this example from Auto Trader UK:

This page isn’t mobile-friendly, although that doesn’t necessarily matter, as it isn’t supposed to be a landing page. The idea is that this page is linked to from Auto Trader’s footer, and allows link equity to flow through into deeper parts of the site.

However, there’s a complication: this page in an ideal world be “noindex,follow.” However, it turns out that over time, Google ends up treating “noindex,follow” like “noindex,nofollow.” It’s not 100% clear what John Mueller meant by this, but it does make sense that given the low crawl priority of “noindex” pages, Google could eventually stop crawling them altogether, causing them to behave in effect like “noindex,nofollow.” Anecdotally, this is also how third-party crawlers like Moz and Majestic behave, and it’s how I’ve seen Google behave with test pages on my personal site.

That means that at best, Google won’t discover new links you add to your HTML sitemaps, and at worst, it won’t pass equity through them either. The jury is still out on this worst case scenario, but it’s not an ideal situation in either case.

So, you have to index your HTML sitemaps. For a large site, this means you’re indexing potentially dozens or hundreds of pages that are just lists of links. It is a viable option, but if you care about the quality and quantity of pages you’re allowing into Google’s index, it might not be an option you’re so keen on.

3. Link blocks on landing pages: Good, bad, and ugly, all at the same time

I already mentioned that example from Expedia above, but here’s another extreme example from the Kayak.co.uk homepage:

Example 1

Example 2

It’s no coincidence that both these sites come from the travel search vertical, where having to sustain a massive number of indexed pages is a major challenge. Just like their competitor, Kayak have perhaps gone overboard in the sheer quantity here, but they’ve taken it an interesting step further — notice that the links are hidden behind dropdowns.

This is something that was mentioned in the post from Bridget Randolph I mentioned above, and I agree so much I’m just going to quote her verbatim:

Note that with mobile-first indexing, content which is collapsed or hidden in tabs, etc. due to space limitations will not be treated differently than visible content (as it may have been previously), since this type of screen real estate management is actually a mobile best practice.

Combined with a more sensible quantity of internal linking, and taking advantage of the significant height of many mobile landing pages (i.e., this needn’t be visible above the fold), this is probably the most broadly applicable method for deep internal linking at your disposal going forward. As always, though, we need to be careful as SEOs not to see a working tactic and rush to push it to its limits — usability and moderation are still important, just as with overburdened main navigations.

Summary: Bite the on-page linking bullet, but present it well

Overall, the most scalable method for getting large numbers of pages crawled, indexed, and ranking on your site is going to be on-page linking — simply because you already have a large number of pages to place the links on, and in all likelihood a natural “tree” structure, by very nature of the problem.

Top navigations and HTML sitemaps have their place, but lack the scalability or finesse to deal with this situation, especially given what we now know about Google’s treatment of “noindex,follow” tags.

However, the more we emphasize mobile experience, while simultaneously relying on this method, the more we need to be careful about how we present it. In the past, as SEOs, we might have been fairly nervous about placing on-page links behind tabs or dropdowns, just because it felt like deceiving Google. And on desktop, that might be true, but on mobile, this is increasingly going to become best practice, and we have to trust Google to understand that.

All that said, I’d love to hear your strategies for grappling with this — let me know in the comments below!

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Posted by DiTomasoAre you mindful of your customer’s experience after they become a lead? It’s easy to fall in the same old rut of newsletters, invoices, and sales emails, but for a truly exceptional customer experience that improves their retention an… Continue reading →

Posted by KristinTynski

Recently, new internal analysis of our work here at Fractl has yielded a fascinating finding:

Content marketing that generates mainstream press is likely 2X as effective as originally thought. Additionally, the long-term ROI is potentially many times higher than previously reported.

I’ll caveat that by saying this applies only to content that can generate mainstream press attention. At Fractl, this is our primary focus as a content marketing agency. Our team, our process, and our research are all structured around figuring out ways to maximize the newsworthiness and promotional success of the content we create on behalf of our clients.

Though data-driven content marketing paired with digital PR is on the rise, there is still a general lack of understanding around the long-term value of any individual content execution. In this exploration, we sought to answer the question: What link value does a successful campaign drive over the long term? What we found was surprising and strongly reiterated our conviction that this style of data-driven content and digital PR yields some of the highest possible ROI for link building and SEO.

To better understand this full value, we wanted to look at the long-term accumulation of the two types of links on which we report:

1. Direct links from publishers to our client’s content on their domain
2. Secondary links that link to the story the publisher wrote about our client’s content

While direct links are most important, secondary links often provide significant additional pass-through authority and can often be reclaimed through additional outreach and converted into direct do-follow links (something we have a team dedicated to doing at Fractl).

Below is a visualization of the way our content promotion process works:

So how exactly do direct links and secondary links accumulate over time?

To understand this, we did a full audit of four successful campaigns from 2015 and 2016 through today. Having a few years of aggregation gave us an initial benchmark for how links accumulate over time for general interest content that is relatively evergreen.

We profiled four campaigns:

• Perceptions of Perfection Across Borders
• America’s Most P.C. and Prejudiced Places
• Reverse-Photoshopping Video Game Characters
• Water Bottle Germs Revealed

The first view we looked at was direct links, or links pointing directly to the client blog posts hosting the content we’ve created on their behalf.

There is a good deal of variability between campaigns, but we see a few interesting general trends that show up in all of the examples in the rest of this article:

1. Both direct and secondary links will accumulate in a few predictable ways:
   1. A large initial spike with a smooth decline
   2. A buildup to a large spike with a smooth decline
   3. Multiple spikes of varying size
2. Roughly 50% of the total volume of links that will be built will accumulate in the first 30 days. The other 50% will accumulate over the following two years and beyond.
3. A small subset of direct links will generate their own large spikes of secondary links.

We’ll now take a look at some specific results. Let’s start by looking at direct links (pickups that link directly back to our client’s site or landing page).

The typical result: A large initial spike with consistent accumulation over time

This campaign, featuring artistic imaginings of what bodies in video games might look like with normal BMI/body sizes, shows the most typical pattern we witnessed, with a very large initial spike and a relatively smooth decline in link acquisition over the first month.

After the first month, long-term new direct link acquisition continued for more than two years (and is still going today!).

The less common result: Slow draw up to a major spike

In this example, you can see that sometimes it takes a few days or even weeks to see the initial pickup spike and subsequent primary syndication. In the case of this campaign, we saw a slow buildup to the pinnacle at about a week from the first pickup (exclusive), with a gradual decline over the following two weeks.

“These initial stories were then used as fodder or inspiration for stories written months later by other publications.”

Zooming out to a month-over-month view, we can see resurgences in pickups happening at unpredictable intervals every few months or so. These spikes continued up until today with relative consistency. This happened as some of the stories written during the initial spike began to rank well in Google. These initial stories were then used as fodder or inspiration for stories written months later by other publications. For evergreen topics such as body image (as was the case in this campaign), you will also see writers and editors cycle in and out of writing about these topics as they trend in the public zeitgeist, leading to these unpredictable yet very welcomed resurgences in new links.

Least common result: Multiple spikes in the first few weeks

The third pattern we observed was seen on a campaign we executed examining hate speech on Twitter. In this case, we saw multiple spikes during this early period, corresponding to syndications on other mainstream publications that then sparked their own downstream syndications and individual virality.

Zooming out, we saw a similar result as the other examples, with multiple smaller spikes more within the first year and less frequently in the following two years. Each of these bumps is associated with the story resurfacing organically on new publications (usually a writer stumbling on coverage of the content during the initial phase of popularity).

Long-term resurgences

Finally, in our fourth example that looked at germs on water bottles, we saw a fascinating phenomenon happen beyond the first month where there was a very significant secondary spike.

This spike represents syndication across (all or most) of the iHeartRadio network. As this example demonstrates, it isn’t wholly unusual to see large-scale networks pick up content even a year or later that rival or even exceed the initial month’s result.

Aggregate trends

“50% of the total links acquired happened in the first month, and the other 50% were acquired in the following two to three years.”

When we looked at direct links back to all four campaigns together, we saw the common progression of link acquisition over time. The chart below shows the distribution of new links acquired over two years. We saw a pretty classic long tail distribution here, where 50% of the total links acquired happened in the first month, and the other 50% were acquired in the following two to three years.

“If direct links are the cake, secondary links are the icing, and both accumulate substantially over time.”

Links generated directly to the blog posts/landing pages of the content we’ve created on our clients’ behalf are only really a part of the story. When a campaign garners mainstream press attention, the press stories can often go mildly viral, generating large numbers of syndications and links to these stories themselves. We track these secondary links and reach out to the writers of these stories to try and get link attributions to the primary source (our clients’ blog posts or landing pages where the story/study/content lives).

These types of links also follow a similar pattern over time to direct links. Below are the publishing dates of these secondary links as they were found over time. Their over-time distribution follows the same pattern, with 50% of results being realized within the first month and the following 50% of the value coming over the next two to three years.

The value in the long tail

By looking at multi-year direct and secondary links built to successful content marketing campaigns, it becomes apparent that the total number of links acquired during the first month is really only about half the story.

For campaigns that garner initial mainstream pickups, there is often a multi-year long tail of links that are built organically without any additional or future promotions work beyond the first month. While this long-term value is not something we report on or charge our clients for explicitly, it is extremely important to understand as a part of a larger calculus when trying to decide if doing content marketing with the goal of press acquisition is right for your needs.

Cost-per-link (a typical way to measure ROI of such campaigns) will halve if links built are measured over these longer periods — moving a project you perhaps considered a marginal success at one month to a major success at one year.

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Posted by rjonesx.

Let me tell you a story.

It begins with me in a hotel room halfway across the country, trying to figure out how I’m going to land a contract from a fantastic new lead, worth annually $250,000. We weren’t in over our heads by any measure, but the potential client was definitely looking at what most would call “enterprise” solutions and we weren’t exactly “enterprise.”

Could we meet their needs? Hell yes we could — better than our enterprise competitors — but there’s a saying that “no one ever got fired for hiring IBM”; in other words, it’s always safe to go with the big guys. We weren’t an IBM, so I knew that by reputation alone we were in trouble. The RFP was dense, but like most SEO gigs, there wasn’t much in the way of opportunity to really differentiate ourselves from our competitors. It would be another “anything they can do, we can do better” meeting where we grasp for reasons why we were better. In an industry where so many of our best clients require NDAs that prevent us from producing really good case studies, how could I prove we were up to the task?

In less than 12 hours we would be meeting with the potential client and I needed to prove to them that we could do something that our competitors couldn’t. In the world of SEO, link building is street cred. Nothing gets the attention of a client faster than a great link. I knew what I needed to do. I needed to land a killer backlink, completely white-hat, with no new content strategy, no budget, and no time. I needed to walk in the door with more than just a proposal — I needed to walk in the door with proof.

I’ve been around the block a few times when it comes to link building, so I wasn’t at a loss when it came to ideas or strategies we could pitch, but what strategy might actually land a link in the next few hours? I started running prospecting software left and right — all the tools of the trade I had at my disposal — but imagine my surprise when the perfect opportunity popped up right in little old Moz’s Open Site Explorer Link Intersect tool. To be honest, I hadn’t used the tool in ages. We had built our own prospecting software on APIs, but the perfect link just popped up after adding in a few of their competitors on the off chance that there might be an opportunity or two.

There it was:

1. 3,800 root linking domains to the page itself
2. The page was soliciting submissions
3. Took pull requests for submissions on GitHub!

I immediately submitted a request and began the refresh game, hoping the repo was being actively monitored. By the next morning, we had ourselves a link! Not just any link, but despite the client having over 50,000 root linking domains, this was now the 15th best link to their site. You can imagine me anxiously awaiting the part of the meeting where we discussed the various reasons why our services were superior to that of our competitors, and then proceeded to demonstrate that superiority with an amazing white-hat backlink acquired just hours before.

The quarter-million-dollar contract was ours.

Link Intersect: An undervalued link building technique

Backlink intersect is one of the oldest link building techniques in our industry. The methodology is simple. Take a list of your competitors and identify the backlinks pointing to their sites. Compare those lists to find pages that overlap. Pages which link to two or more of your competitors are potentially resource pages that would be interested in linking to your site as well. You then examine these sites and do outreach to determine which ones are worth contacting to try and get a backlink.

Let’s walk through a simple example using Moz’s Link Intersect tool.

Getting started

We start on the Link Intersect page of Moz’s new Link Explorer. While we had Link Intersect in the old Open Site Explorer, you’re going to to want to use our new Link Intersect, which is built from our giant index of 30 trillion links and is far more powerful.

For our example here, I’ve chosen a random gardening company in Durham, North Carolina called Garden Environments. The website has a Domain Authority of 17 with 38 root linking domains.

We can go ahead and copy-paste the domain into “Discover Link Opportunities for this URL” at the top of the Link Intersect page. If you notice, we have the choice of “Root Domain, Subdomain, or Exact Page”:

I almost always choose “root domain” because I tend to be promoting a site as a whole and am not interested in acquiring links to pages on the site from other sites that already link somewhere else on the site. That is to say, by choosing “root domain,” any site that links to any page on your site will be excluded from the prospecting list. Of course, this might not be right for your situation. If you have a hosted blog on a subdomain or a hosted page on a site, you will want to choose subdomain or exact page to make sure you rule out the right backlinks.

You also have the ability to choose whether we report back to you root linking domains or Backlinks. This is really important and I’ll explain why.

Depending on your link building campaign, you’ll want to vary your choice here. Let’s say you’re looking for resource pages that you can list your website on. If that’s the case, you will want to choose “pages.” The Link Intersect tool will then prioritize pages that have links to multiple competitors on them, which are likely to be resource pages you can target for your campaign. Now, let’s say you would rather find publishers that talk about your competitors and are less concerned about them linking from the same page. You want to find sites that have linked to multiple competitors, not pages. In that case, you would choose “domains.” The system will then return the domains that have links to multiple competitors and give you example pages, but you wont be limited only to pages with multiple competitors on them.

In this example, I’m looking for resource pages, so I chose “pages” rather than domains.

Choosing your competitor sites

A common mistake made at this point is to choose exact competitors. Link builders will often copy and paste a list of their biggest competitors and cross their fingers for decent results. What you really want are the best link pages and domains in your industry — not necessarily your competitors.

In this example I chose the gardening page on a local university, a few North Carolina gardening and wildflower associations, and a popular page that lists nurseries. Notice that you can choose subdomain, domain, or exact page as well for each of these competitor URLs. I recommend choosing the broadest category (domain being broadest, exact page being narrowest) that is relevant to your industry. If the whole site is relevant, go ahead and choose “domain.”

Analyzing your results

The results returned will prioritize pages that link to multiple competitors and have a high Domain Authority. Unlike some of our competitors’ tools, if you put in a competitor that doesn’t have many backlinks, it won’t cause the whole report to fail. We list all the intersections of links, starting with the most and narrowing down to the fewest. Even though the nurseries website doesn’t provide any intersections, we still get back great results!

Now we have some really great opportunities, but at this point you have two choices. If you really prefer, you can just export the opportunities to CSV like any other tool on the market, but I prefer to go ahead and move everything over into a Link Tracking List.

By moving everything into a link list, we’re going to be able to track link acquisition over time (once we begin reaching out to these sites for backlinks) and we can also sort by other metrics, leave notes, and easily remove opportunities that don’t look fruitful.

What did we find?

Remember, we started off with a site that has barely any links, but we turned up dozens of easy opportunities for link acquisition. We turned up a simple resources page on forest resources, a potential backlink which could easily be earned via a piece of content on forest stewardship.

We turned up a great resource page on how to maintain healthy soil and yards on a town government website. A simple guide covering the same topics here could easily earn a link from this resource page on an important website.

These were just two examples of easy link targets. From community gardening pages, websites dedicated to local creek, pond, and stream restoration, and general enthusiast sites, the Link Intersect tool turned up simple backlink gold. What is most interesting to me, though, was that these resource pages never included the words “resources” or “links” in the URLs. Common prospecting techniques would have just missed these opportunities altogether.

While it wasn’t the focus of this particular campaign, I did choose the alternate of “show domains” rather than “pages” that link to the competitors. We found similarly useful results using this methodology.

For example, we found CarolinaCountry.com had linked to multiple of the competitor sites and, as it turns out, would be a perfect publication to pitch for a story as part of of a PR campaign for promoting the gardening site.

Takeaways

The new Link Intersect tool in Moz’s Link Explorer combines the power of our new incredible link index with the complete features of a link prospecting tool. Competitor link intersect remains one of the most straightforward methods for finding link opportunities and landing great backlinks, and Moz’s new tool coupled with Link Lists makes it easier than ever. Go ahead and give it a run yourself — you might just find the exact link you need right when you need it.

Find link opportunities now!

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