To effectively promote a newly created site, you need to ensure a systematic increase in link mass and growth of trust – the level of confidence of the search engine. Gradual growth is more reliable than ways to drive traffic in a week, and it doesn’t matter if you need to promote a live casino website or an accessory store.
Identify Your Competitors
To understand which links will help promotion, analyze the experience of competitors – sites from the top search results. Identify your direct competitors first. Do not take into account market leaders: a small project does not have enough resources to repeat their success. Focus on companies that:
- Operate in the same market segment as yours.
- Comparable in the number of proposals, such as the range of products in the catalog.
- Have the same financial capabilities.
- Operate in the same region.
There are two ways to search for competitors:
- For free. You can do it through a search engine. Type the main key works for your product or service into your search, such as “buy marketing books.” Exclude aggregators and marketplaces. These companies are not direct competitors for a start-up store. Look at the other sites and identify competitors based on the criteria described above.
- Paid. It’s possible to do this through SEO services. Use Serpstat or another similar tool that automatically shows competitors with a similar semantic core. The method is suitable for a working site with texts, keywords, and meta tags.
Make an Anchor List
Once you have identified your key competitors, make an anchor list and update it regularly. Today, it’s not enough just to buy links, as companies did 5-7 years ago. Filters of some search engines are struggling with artificial link mass and lowering the sites in search results. To avoid being filtered, it is important to adopt the experience of competitors and properly compile your anchor list.
Analyze your competitors’ links. Once you identify your competitors, make a table and enter the following information into it:
- Number of links.
- The sites on which they are placed.
- Lists of anchors.
- Pages most often linked to.
- Page distribution of links on the site.
The total number of links can be viewed in a tool called Ahrefs. For other information, you will need to use paid services, such as Serpstat or Majestic.
Make your own anchor list. Use anchorless and anchor links. Unanchored links do not contain keys, they are just page URLs. Anchor links can be commercial with the words “buy”, “order” and others and natural, such as “go to the site.” When selecting words for anchors, you need to consider the experience of competitors.
Increase the Link Mass
Registration in trusted directories and directories. Use trustworthy directories. First, check the sites on the thematic relevance and spam level. You can do this in the service known as Checktrust. If you register the site in all directories, you will get under the filter.
Crowd-marketing. Recruit natural links from forums, social networks, urban portals. This is important to avoid skewing in the direction of commercial links and sagging sites in issuance. Find thematic sites, register on them, leave comments with links to the site. It is important that posts do not look advertising or unnatural, otherwise the moderators will remove them.
Register on review sites. Before buying an item, users often look for reviews about it, how to buy it, or how to use it. Prepare positive reviews or answers to questions and post them on profile sites.
Review sites are an effective way to get leads and improve brand reputation. Positive reviews help promote the brand and provide links to the selling site at the same time. To post content effectively, post reviews or responses regularly, such as 2 or 5 on each site every month.
Content marketing and outreach. Put links in articles and publish them on donor sites. You can search for them manually or on special exchanges, such as Collaborator or Miralinks. For a strategy that brings results, adhere to the following rules:
- Check the sites for publication because of the links from the spammed non-spammy sites-donors can get under the filter.
- Write texts that are interesting and useful to readers.
- Look for relevant news and issues.
- Insert links naturally so they do not look like intrusive advertising.
- Post articles regularly, the results of link promotion will appear in 3-6 months.
Native placement of links in articles is content marketing, outreach is the cost of preparing material with free publication.
Summary
The promotion strategy works best in combination. Link mass should be built up by all types of links, regularly and gradually.
During the first month, you should post 10 links. Register the site to directories and geographic services. Create an account on the forums and start crowdfunding. Place several articles on websites or blogs.
In the second month, you must increase this number to 10-50 links. Increase activity on the forums, prepare articles and press releases, write guest posts for partner sites.
In the third month, there must be more than 50 links. Do not reduce activity in the forums, focus on link promotion.