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 how to find links and resources pages using the Link Prospector. Links and resources pages are often so different from blog pages.
Ken: Let’s have a look at a couple of examples.
Megan: Sure. So, yeah we’ve found a couple of great links and resources pages. The first one is Financial Advisor, and as you can see, she actually has a resources and links page and she has a bunch of resources to help people that visit her website with different financial concerns they may have. I mean, this looks like a pretty well done site but it’s not a solid resource on how someone could help themselves financially. She might be someone you could reach out to and say “Hey, will you include my link in your page for your audience?”
Ken: Yes, because you can see from this page, she includes links to lots and lots of resources, so that’s good news for us.
Megan: Links and resource pages can actually come from businesses, especially businesses with the intent of helping people, or in this case helping animals. So if you had…a great resource for helping cats, this would be an example of a site you could reach out to. And as you can see, both of these sites are very different from traditional bloggers. Both of these people aren’t just simply writing weekly or bi-weekly posts on different topics. They’re websites that have to do with something bigger, either a cause or a business or a larger entity. One other good way to think about the difference between writing content for bloggers and writing content for links and resource pages is what we call the difference between in-funnel and out-of-funnel content that when you’re doing blog outreach programs, you’re still often, “in-funnel.” You’re looking for people, for bloggers, whose readers are very much highly in your target market. You’re going to be writing content that leads more directly into your product, what you’re selling, what you want people to be interested in…
Ken: And so by saying “in-funnel,” you mean actually inside the sales funnel type of environment. Okay, so it’s about products, it’s about sales that we’re interested in. So that’s in-funnel, yep?
Megan: Right, an out-of-funnel content is still high-quality content but it might be less directly in the sales funnel. So this is content that is…someone reading it might not actually be someone who is very close to making a purchase for your type of product. You might be thinking, “Well then, why am I going through all the effort to make this content?” And I would say the answer is that with links and resource pages, if you can write the right content that’s high quality, it can help build you a lot of links which can really help raise the profile of some of your more in-funnel content. And it can also be a branding awareness play too, that even if they’re not ready to purchase yet or they’re not in-funnel for you yet. They might be in a few months down the road.
We’re going to come up with a fictitious example. We’re doing links and resource page link building for a moving company. If you’re going to go directly in-funnel, it might be like “How to Pack your Kitchen The Best Way.” In order to find the right topics, the right pages that you can create content for, you want to actually play around with Google. So I started off with “moving with kids.” And I did a .gov search. I ended up with pages that were on “exercise with kids,” and I was like “Oh, no.” So for the rest of it, I tried “relocating with kids.” And that’s when I found more pages that actually had to do with the topic we’re looking for, which is “moving to a new home.”
Ken: One of the things I love about this, Megan, is that you’re an expert in this area yet you still have to try these things out to find them and there are surprises there. If we’d been talking separately without having done that search, I would have think, “Hey, moving with kids, yeah of course.” And that’s easily understandable. But when you show that example of how it’s reflected in Google searches, you realize, “Wsell, that’s not the right word to be chasing.”
Megan: Exactly, and as with most areas of research, it’s not so much knowing your stuff but knowing how to find your stuff. When you’re looking for links and research pages in order to come up with good topics, you want to move away from the sales space and the best way to get yourself out of the sale space with your key terms is to search in the .edu and .gov space because most .edu and .gov sites are not selling as much as .coms are. They have the financial freedom in a way to provide more informational content, and when you’re creating content for links and resource pages, that’s exactly the kind of content that you want to create, highly informational, less sales-y.
I went through a few of these, “moving with pets,” “moving with parents,” and the cool things I found. This is just a great way to think about content ideas. One of them, .edu had “my partner’s moving in but they’re allergic to my pets.” I was like “Oh, that’s so interesting. Pet allergies, I hadn’t even thought about that with moving.” Or obviously when you’re talking about moving with parents, you might have talked about parents and senior citizens moving in or you might be talking about moving them to an assisted living care center, so you have different…it just opens up the brainstorming for links and resource pages about what people care about in this area.
Ken: Yeah, so just by taking that little step, you expand the whole universe of content that you can tap into and test yourself in.
Megan: So one I did find, California Department of Public Health, and it’s talking about when you’re moving your pet into or out of California. If California has laws for it, probably a lot of states too. So a guide to moving your pet into different states. You’re moving to Maryland, what do you need to know about having your pet taken care of?
Ken: That’s going to be interesting to people who are doing local link building campaigns.
Megan: Exactly, yeah, that’s a great way to get into local.
Ken: You extrapolate your thinking. Well, if one state has got regulations here and guidance, then lots of states are likely to have the same sort of thing.
Megan: One more step that you want to take when you have some ideas of what you want to search for is you want to test your phrases, and this is just a good way to not use up credits wastefully. You can type in your search terms, type in with inurl:links.html, and type them into Google and see how many results you’re getting. If there’s only three of four results, then chances are there’s not going to be a lot of websites around that when you put in the Link Prospector. If you get a few dozen or a few hundred, then that’s probably a good research phrase to use. Once you have your search terms, you’re not going to do so many advanced options. It’s not like we’re looking for a page that was created within the last year necessarily.
Ken: You doing this preparation before you even come to the Link Prospector too, then you’re going to get better results and you’re going to get them quicker. Shall we have a look at how all of this then looks in when we move on to Link Prospector?
Megan: I did one more focused around international relocation because I think that’s another area where people who need a lot of information are going to be looking up a lot of information. So, as you can see, we ended up with a lot of expat based pages that have links and resources pages. These are sites that have to do for the most part with moving abroad and that includes links pages. Now, I did another one and what I did with this second search is I just included in-URL, colon, links and html alongside my research phrases. So, even though the Link Prospector already uses a lot of footprints to help identify the kinds of pages you’re looking for, using in-URL, colon, links and html right next to all five research phrases that you’re using, it specifies better and you can see. With the first one I got, 1,719 total domains. The second one I got only 348. So this was a way to narrow it down to make sure I’m only getting links and resource pages. These are just a bit more specifically, definitely, links pages or websites with links pages.
Ken: Again, I love the way that you’ve narrowed it down in here, and you’ve got fewer results but you’ve got more specific results. One of the questions I have is, you got really excited in the guest posting that you…by contacting people and finding about their personal rapport. Is that the same with links pages?
Megan: It is less personal. I think it’s less relationship based and it’s more, “I’ve got a high-quality resource for you.” It’s a little bit more, I would say, business oriented in outreach.
Ken: Okay, I think that’s an excellent point to finish on. You really helped clarify that. The links and resources pages are different and the way you approach them for links is different.