A collection of our findings from surveys, interviews with the experts, blog post roundups and more. We discuss industry insights through posts and webinars with Garrett French, and posts from our team and industry guests.
We recently partnered with BuzzStream to help produce the 2025 Link Building Trends Report — a comprehensive survey of 300+ SEOs and link building professionals. In the analysis below, we focus on the data points that matter most to in-house teams and brands trying to scale impact, prove ROI, and refine strategy. These takeaways reflect ... Read more
September 27, 2023
Topics: Citation Labs News, Enterprise Link Building Tips, Link Building Industry Insights, Technical Link Building Tips
The SEO community is reeling from an announcement by Googler Gary Illyes – @methode on X – during an AMA session last week during PubCon Pro 2023. Responding to a question, Gary indicated ‘backlinks are not a top 3 ranking factor, and have not been for some time’. Point of clarification: many posts/comments/Xs have injected ... Read more
February 6, 2023
Topics: Citation Labs News, Content Planning, Content Strategy, Link Building Industry Insights
Google’s scared of OpenAI’s significant release of ChatGPT (as are Facebook and Microsoft, but let’s stay focused on search for this article). From what I’ve gathered, Google’s fears AI primarily because its answer context doesn’t provide clickable advertising opportunities. This lack of advertising opportunity (and a troubling, persistent bias problem) is what led to Google ... Read more
Recently, @marie_haynes put out a Twitter poll. The poll asked respondents whether they ‘believe link building is less effective now compared to a few years ago’. According to this write-up on Search Engine Roundtable: Over 40% of respondents indicated they think link building has become less effective, vs. Almost 30% indicated no, it’s not less ... Read more
September 11, 2017
Topics: Enterprise Link Building Tips, Link Building Industry Insights, The Story Approach
Great stories engage your audience, attract links from authority sites and make your pitches for guest post placements or PR coverage so much more compelling. In this free webinar, Garrett French, Kristina Welch and Ken McGaffin will show you how anyone can find great stories and turn them into terrific content. Here’s the full recording of ... Read more
April 21, 2017
Topics: Campaign Creation, Enterprise Link Building Tips, Link Building Industry Insights, The Link Builder's Podcast
So where can you get new ideas to drive your link building campaigns? In this episode, Garrett tells us what is working for him at the moment, what he’s experimenting with and why there is still great value in tactics that have gone out of fashion.
It’s time for that mid-February Hallmark Holiday – a holiday when we celebrate, or re-consider, romantic relationships. But how many of us take the time and care to assess potential client-based relationships? We’ve all been there: you get an interesting inquiry, you schedule the first meeting, you quietly anticipate your future together, and, at long last, ... Read more
In our 2nd video in the Link Prospector series, Megan Hannay and Ken McGaffin explain the best strategies for links and resource pages finding with the Link Prospector. Check it out, or if you’re more of a reader, we’ve got a transcript below. Megan: I’m Megan Hannay, and we’re today going to be talking about ... Read more
December 31, 2015
Topics: Agency Hacks, Link Building Industry Insights, Understanding & Serving Audiences, Webinar
For our final webinar of 2015, we rounded up Shari Thurow and Eric Ward to discuss an often neglected topic among link-builders – where in the heck do you put link-worthy assets? A gap exists between the asset and site usability. Watch the entire webinar, or click on the links in the summary below to hear your ... Read more
December 16, 2015
Topics: Content Planning, Expert Interviews, Link Building Industry Insights, Webinar
We had way too much fun live brainstorming with Eric Ward last year, so this holiday season, we did it again. And this time we invited site usability expert (and Citation Labs friend), Shari Thurow. We gathered site suggestions from webinar participants before the session and chose four to analyze off-the-cuff during the webinar: At ... Read more
September 30, 2015
Topics: Campaign Creation, Content Planning, Link Building Industry Insights, Public Relations
Sign up for our 10/7 webinar more insights & tips on PR thinking for link building & content teams. Your promotion doesn’t happen in isolation. You have to compete for attention and links with competitor activity, industry events, new product launches, research reports and breaking news stories. If you launch a piece of content at ... Read more
At Citation Labs, we see PR as an essential component of any link building campaign, and we wanted to know if our clients and customers felt the same way. So earlier this year, we surveyed Citation Labs newsletter readers and customers with two questions in mind: How much is PR a factor in your link building efforts? How well qualified do you feel to develop your own PR campaigns? Here are our key findings.
Pollen Spring is in the air, link builders, meaning we have another season's worth of great SEO, link building and content marketing posts from some of our favorite influencers in the space.
We brainstormed link-building, content creation, PR opportunities and business growth ideas for ten businesses, randomly selected from 101 newsletter respondents.
See how even companies that describe their product as "very boring" have great content waiting to be found, and hopefully, you'll gain an idea or two for your business.
Every day businesses of every size get media coverage and valuable editorial links - but many SEOs and link builders don’t quite know how to approach the media to get this type of coverage. It takes much more than just sending out a press release - it takes effort and hard work. But the opportunity is very real and the good news is that link builders will already have many of the skills they need.
Ken McGaffin and Garrett French will use your business PR concerns to fuel the discussion on PR Strategy from a link-builder's perspective. From our first webinar, we learned that participants join with questions and ideas already brewing. This time, we're making viewer participation a key component of the Webinar. In other words, WE NEED YOUR INPUT to make this FREE WORKSHOP a success!
August 16, 2011
Topics: Enterprise Link Building Tips, Expert Interviews, Link Building Industry Insights
In preparation for my upcoming webinar - The Content Marketer's Guide to Broken Link Building (August 25th 8:30 AM - 9:30 AM PDT) I sent some "best-practices" questions over to Edmonton SEO Melanie Nathan, creator of a formalized broken link building process.
Read her broken link building tips here.
Through marketing with tips and tip inventory creation I came to think of tips as the smallest expressible unit of expertise. From a research query perspective, tips are quite easy to extract from a market's community of practice.
But what about larger and more complex units of expertise?
