These slides were presented at the Semrush webinar "Building Links to Sales Pages". Video replay and transcript are available at https://www.semrush.com/webinars/building-links-to-sales-pages/

1. Special thanks to SEMrush for hosting us and to our fab moderator Kate for… er… moderating!

2. about Citation Labs
established in 2009
160 employees
Garrett literally (co)wrote the book on link-building
Garrett has been published in/on:
Moz, SEOBook, SELand, Mashable, WIEP.net, SEMrush!
past clients include:
Kraft, Rover, Care.com, SEPeople, VistaPrint, Plexus
2nd Edition!

3. link building objective informs tactic
• links and resources page
• digital PR
• authority trickle down
• imprecise
• less relevance from referrer
• less control over link target
Increase Domain Authority
Score generally
wherein we boil the ocean in order to try to
heat up an alpine lake to swimmable levels
increase Page Authority Score
for high priority pages
wherein we turn on the electric kettle to heat
up water for a nice cup of afternoon revenue
• op-ed
• thought leadership
• how to/guest placements
• targeted authority
• higher relevance
• control over ranking impact and
relevance

4. digital PR, data
stories, news
source for resource
links & local
sponsorships
our source for
sales page links
publisher type
“mainstream media”
gov, org, edu,
industry-facing
businesses selling
services or products
the publisher pyramid is evaluated when identifying target link types for an outreach campaign
the publisher pyramid
95%
4%
1%

5. page selection methodology
5
proposed pages are analyzed
against competitor link graph
primary metric: linking root
domain count
secondary metrics:
• keyword difficulty
• search volume
• Page Authority Score
• links/domain
LINK
GAP
ANALYSIS

6. LIVE LCD
WORKBENCH

7. Prospecting
TOPIC:
moving
topical
discovery
Keyword
Magic Tool
Suggest-
scrape
biz
publishers
movers in
[location]
+ blog
inurl:blog
publisher’s
revenue
model
Site
Audience
Alignment to brand
UVP (linkable assets)
Target Publisher

8. Qualifying
real
site
relevant
to topic
Qualifying
openly solicit
guest posts?
clear revenue
model?
publisher’s
revenue
model
Site
Audience
Alignment to brand
UVP (linkable assets)
Target Publisher
Other potential considerations: number of outside contributors, presence of comment spam,
whether they publish to PDF or page; follow/nofollow links in articles; review of backlink profile
(YAY NEW BACKLINK ANALYTICS!)

9. Engagement
Pitch into the
publisher
revenue model
leads: prospective customers/search rankings
public good: helpful fact sheets
95%
5%
1% ads: page views/shareable content
#ProTip: publisher benefits first and foremost!

10. measuring impact
10
monthly report delivered including key metrics for target
pages in the link-building campaign:
• Share of voice
• Page Authority Score
• backlink cumulative activity
• keyword rankings
• keyword distribution
• page-level reports for top and bottom 5 pages
• actionable insights at the page and campaign level
• link ramp up/down warranted?
• keyword growth/wins (rank, distribution)?
• visibility (SoV / est. traffic)
• SERP, competitive analysis
• campaign modifications needed

11. leading indicator: Page Authority Score
We can correlate
links built to Page
Authority Score,
which is often an
early indicator of
pending rank and
Share of Voice
improvements
Campaign
Page Authority Score

12. out-performing for share of voice, rank
Google Share of Voice
(weighted CTR model based on position, search volume)
Average Position
(rank in Google search results)
Using a control group of similar site pages not part of the campaign, we can showcase impact:
We can see in both of these metrics, the pages in the campaign far out-performed similar pages in the control group

13. how a drop in rank can be a good thing
even though the average
rank dropped initially, we
dramatically increased the
number of ranking
keywords on the page
this is a leading indicator for
future organic visibility
Number
of
Keywords

14. a jump in ranking keywords
A change to the number of
keywords ranking to a page is a
strong early indicator of impact
Pages in the campaign out-
performed the control pages for
this metric by over 800%

15. pages continue to out-perform after campaign
January 2021 February 2021 March 2021 M/M % diff. Camp/Cont
Campaign 0.11% 0.12% 0.21% 72.79% 168.20%
Control 0.23% 0.20% 0.26% 27.14%
0.00%
0.05%
0.10%
0.15%
0.20%
0.25%
0.30%
0.35%
0.40%
0.00%
0.05%
0.10%
0.15%
0.20%
0.25%
9/15/20 10/15/20 11/15/20 12/15/20 1/15/21 2/15/21 3/15/21
Share of Voice Over Time
Campaign Control
Even after an
engagement has
ended,
campaign pages
often continue to
out-perform the
control group as
we see here

16. SITE REVIEWS

17. attendee submissions
https://sath.com/
https://imaginationspectrum.com/
https://foxpest-batonrouge.com/