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Frequently Unasked Questions (FUQs)
No buying decision happens in a vacuum. Satisfy all stakeholder questions by going beyond what’s frequently asked and targeting the unknown-unknowns.
WHAT IS A FUQ?
What are you not saying to customers during the buying process that you should be saying?
FUQs Explained
How We Create Them
Why They Matter
Frequently unasked questions (FUQs) are the questions your customers don’t know to ask until after the purchase.
FUQs fall into several categories:
- Frequently assumed data points
- Frequently assumed outcomes
- Frequently unconsulted stakeholders
- Frequently ignored feedback loops
- Unknowable answers
- Assumed answers
- Unasked dependencies
- Unspoken assumptions
Sometimes, these unasked questions lead to mild frustration with the buying experience or the product. Often, they lead to frustration, resentment, negative reviews, and churn.
We use a framework combined with customer research to identify overlooked areas in the purchasing journey.
Our goal is to figure out what the bigger-picture problems people were trying to solve when they made this purchase and got disappointed:
- What are the pain points?
- Who else is involved in the buying journey?
- What questions do they have?
- How do we alleviate missed expectations?
- What expectations should we set?
We get these questions from social listening, customer interviews, and using ChatGPT with the right prompt to evaluate your content and suggest unknown-unknowns to focus on.
Answering these questions benefits your business in numerous ways:
- Create unique, citation-worthy content
- Create assets that appear in LLMs and guide customers to your business
- Improve customer service and retention
- Potentially increase customer close and retention rates
- Close information gaps for your customers
- Stand out from competitors who aren’t addressing these concerns
- Enhance the customer experience and brand reputation
- Improve product development
The more information you have about your customers, why they buy, and how they buy, the better position your business will be to meet their needs.
Citation Labs FUQs
How will your link-building efforts align with our business goals?
Link building must support revenue-driving pages, sales initiatives, and brand credibility to justify your role as an SEO and investment by your team.
This is why we spend the first meetings exploring your business goals to build out a strategy that focuses on increasing the visibility of your core sales pages.
Once we start building links, we connect our efforts to ROI using established sales metrics from your organization.
How do we track and measure the impact of link-building?
There are two buckets for measuring the impact of link building:
- The metrics that align with SEOs: keyword rankings, traffic, share of voice, and number of links.
- The metrics that align with leadership teams: revenue, conversion rates, and AOV.
What happens if leadership doesn’t believe in link-building?
Some executives may not see link-building as a priority or may have had poor experiences in the past. After nearly 20 years in the space, we get it. SEO can feel like a black box and backlinking even more so.
This is why we have built custom tools and reports to connect our efforts to key sales metrics, using controls in our reporting to provide additional clarity.
We also work very closely with our internal champions, providing them with the data, case studies, and arguments needed to justify backlink campaigns to key decision makers.
How do we balance link-building with other SEO priorities?
While our priority is to build effective link building campaigns for your business, we’re no stranger to SEO and the complexities enterprise teams face trying to implement on-page changes.
The approval process can be long and challenging, requiring several meetings and rounds of revisions to get critical changes live on the site.
Our strategies fit the complexities of these firms. Specifically, we can use unbranded link building campaigns to side-step legal and compliance approval processes. This allows us to get critical links to key sales pages while you work to green light other SEO changes.
Additionally, our clients lean on us for SEO advice as we’re often at the forefront of the industry—presenting our insights on stage at numerous SEO conferences every year.
What does success look like beyond rankings and traffic?
We know what’s at stake for our champions.
They need to justify their role in the organization by showing their work impacted the bottomline. This is difficult when there are so many obstacles SEOs have to navigate internally to do their jobs—from weak buy-in to approval processes to explaining the complexities of SEO over and over again.
Over the years, we’ve managed to help our champions succeed and grow in their roles while facing often unpredictable search performance. They’ve over-delivered on KPIs, earned praise from their CEOs, been promoted, and even landed new roles.
Links that impact business metrics are great. But becoming an invaluable resource to our stakeholders is our real goal.
Link Building at Scale FUQs
Why are high-traffic and DR/DA not a guaranteed indicator of success?
Relevance, not DR/DA or Traffic, indicates success. You need content that’s relevant to your buyer, written for a publisher with a contextually relevant link. This sends numerous positive signals of a valuable link, helping increase sales page ranking.Most link building agencies use DR/DA and traffic to charge a premium for these types of links even though there is no data to back up the claim that these links are better.
Additionally, metrics can be gamed. There are plenty of irrelevant sites that are part of private blog networks and/or offer the path of least resistance for agencies and link sellers. But they are not the best option for businesses looking for relevant, sticky backlinks to their sales pages.
Our goal for clients is to find them the best websites to bring visibility to their key sales offerings. This usually means getting placement from other relevant business websites that align with their ideal buyer (not high DR/DA and traffic websites.)
How do you help us expand our SEO budget and improve company-wide buy-in?
Many SEO leaders struggle to get leadership support because SEO results take longer than paid media and are more difficult to explain. Executives want to see financial impact, not traditional SEO metrics.
Without the right story on how SEO impacts sales metrics, leadership teams see SEO as a cost rather than a growth driver.
Citation Labs fixes this by:
- Aligning link-building efforts with core business objectives
- Providing clear reporting that connects links to revenue impact
- Positioning SEO as a competitive advantage within the organization
How does your work help me ace my annual review?
SEO leaders are often measured on organic growth, revenue impact, and alignment with business goals.
Citation Labs structures its link-building strategy to ensure that:
- Organic search performance improves in measurable ways
- The impact of SEO efforts can be clearly communicated to leadership
- Reporting ties directly to revenue, making it easier to demonstrate value
How do I pitch link-building campaigns to my CMO?
SCMOs focus on revenue and growth rather than SEO-specific terminology. When pitching a link-building campaign, the conversation should center on:
- Competitive advantage: "Competitors outrank us because they have stronger backlinks."
- Revenue impact: "More links to high-intent pages lead to higher rankings and more sales."
- Risk mitigation: "Google prioritizes authoritative backlinks—if we don’t invest, we fall behind."
What are link-building KPIs my CFO will want to see?
CFOs are concerned with financial impact rather than SEO performance metrics. Instead of discussing domain authority, an SEO strategy should be evaluated based on:
- Cost efficiency: the return on investment for link-building efforts
- Revenue impact: how links drive qualified traffic and conversions
- Organic growth trends: improvements in rankings for high-value search terms
What if our leadership team doesn’t fully understand link building’s impact?
Most executives expect PPC-style reporting, where results are immediate and quantifiable. However, link-building contributes to SEO growth over months, not days. And it’s not always clear and easy to illustrate this.
We’ve built a custom reporting tool that provides clear, revenue-tied reports to help you communicate impact to leadership. These comprehensive reports can be easily shared or cut up into smaller overviews for your leadership team.
How do you ensure the links you build remain valuable over time?
Google exists to help get people the best information in the fastest possible way. The way it does this is by finding and sharing the most relevant, comprehensive answers to questions based on real experience and data.
Over the years, search has evolved. But this core tenant remains the same.
Knowing this, we create contextually relevant, expert content with publishers that showcase your brand and solution. By earning links this way, we future-proof our links against algorithm updates and evolving ranking factors.
Our retention rates for links are: 94% after 12 months and 85% after 24 months.
How do your links impact sales, not just rankings?
Our goal isn’t to increase the DR/DA of your website. We also don’t usually target content pages for backlinks.
Instead, we analyze your website against competitors to determine which pages need backlinks to increase their visibility and how many links they need. From there, we prioritize pages based on budget and business goals.
These are links to sales pages. They increase the visibility of your key offerings in search and in LLM tools, making it more likely that prospective customers will find your solutions on their buyer’s journey.
How do you handle industries with strict compliance or link restrictions?
For businesses with heavy compliance and legal guidelines, we focus on our unbranded outreach. This approach allows us to conduct outreach, negotiate link placement, and create content without having to run every asset through complex approval processes.
How do we defend this investment when other teams prioritize PPC or social?
Leadership teams want to allocate appropriate resources to the right channels to drive new business. Without showing the potential impact of any initiative, it’s very difficult to justify the budget for those activities. This is challenging with SEO as results are often delayed.
To defend your SEO budget from the start, we map out the potential link impact on your sales pages using our Link Impact Report. Each month, we update your team on the results of our campaign and show the impact of those links on the sales pages. We also use a control group to ensure the data we report is accurate.
As leadership teams see the value of link building, they are more willing to defend that budget. In several cases, CMOs have even increased this budget (as much as 5x by one client).
How do you ensure our internal teams (content, PR, devs) align with link-building?
Enterprise organizations have very complex team dynamics and difficult internal politics to navigate. Without care, SEOs and their vendors can derail the momentum of campaigns. This hurts the internal stakeholders and negatively impacts the team’s perception of that vendor.
This is why we’re very careful with where our efforts end and your other teams' efforts begin. We are highly collaborative because we understand that momentum matters, so we work to build it with your team.
Having successfully navigated several complex internal relationships for large clients, we’ve gone on to support other teams within the organization—becoming the preferred vendor across the business.
Why do some agencies sell links at a fraction of your cost?
Many vendors that sell these links have an existing network of publishers who will automatically add links to irrelevant content, creating the path of least resistance and the highest margin for them. They do this at scale and with no regard to strategy or business outcomes.
These cheap links are often low-quality with minimal (if any) relevance to the business, product, or customer. It’s simply a backlink. And you get the link you pay for.
Our strategy starts before the first call. Using in-house tools, we run reports on your website to determine the best sales pages to target and the number of links needed to increase visibility.
After our engagement starts, we meet regularly with our champions to provide current insights, new ideas, and support. From helping SEOs get critical sales data to better calculate ROI to support budget requests to experimenting with new approaches to link building, we help our champions exceed the expectations for their role.
The kind of links and results we get for our champions get them notoriety within their organization, promotions, and more budget for new campaigns.
LLM Mentions FUQs
How do LLMs impact our current search traffic and conversions?
Traditional SEO has focused on ranking in Google, but LLMs are reshaping search behavior by providing direct answers instead of driving clicks. This means that the buyer’s journey is very different.
Buyers no longer rely solely on specific keywords to drive searches to specific pages that answer those queries. Instead, they can engage with an LLM through a series of prompts to quickly find the answer to their problem along with a relevant product or service.
Companies relying on search traffic must assess how much of their audience is using AI tools and whether they are visible in those responses.
What factors determine whether our brand appears in LLM responses?
Unlike traditional search rankings, LLMs generate responses based on training data, citations, and linked content. SEOs must understand what sources AI models prioritize and how to strategically place brand mentions where LLMs pull their answers.
Once you identify these sources, you can create content to address these queries. Content and citations still matter to your prospective market. You just need to rethink how you approach both.
Are LLM mentions the same as organic rankings?
No. While Google rankings are based on indexing, backlinks, and authority signals, LLM responses come from data sets, citations, and query patterns. Optimizing for LLMs requires a different strategy than traditional SEO, but there is some overlap between the two.
Who in our company needs to be involved in an LLM visibility strategy?
Unlike traditional SEO, optimizing for LLMs may involve SEO, content marketing, PR, customer service, and sales. Teams must align on how to position brand mentions, distribute authoritative content, and integrate AI-driven search insights into business decisions.
How do we track and report our brand’s presence in LLMs?
Most SEO tools do not track AI-generated results, making it difficult to measure visibility.
Every search with an LLM is different because it relies on natural language instead of keywords to find answers. This adds complexity to the buyer’s journey, as each journey can be drastically different from the next.
Citation Labs provides LLM Rank Reporting, helping SEOs share AI search performance with leadership in a way that aligns with broader marketing goals.
What competitive insights can we gain from LLM optimization?
Understanding how competitors are mentioned in AI-generated responses provides valuable insights. SEOs should ask:
- Are competitors appearing in AI-driven answers when our brand is not?
- What content and citations lead to their mentions?
- How can we adjust our strategy to increase visibility in LLMs?
- What types of assets and citations would we need to increase visibility in LLMs?
How do we justify investment in LLM visibility to leadership?
Many executives are still unfamiliar with the impact of AI on search. SEOs should frame the investment as future-proofing search visibility, ensuring that the company remains discoverable as search behavior shifts from traditional engines to AI assistants.
What happens if we ignore LLM search?
Businesses that fail to optimize for LLMs risk losing visibility to competitors who actively shape AI-generated responses.
We’re currently seeing LLMs take search volume from Google and major websites. This means lower organic traffic, fewer conversions, and decreased brand authority from businesses that do not appear in AI-driven search environments.
How long does it take to see results from LLM optimization?
Unlike traditional SEO, which relies on crawling and indexing, LLM optimization depends on when AI models update their data sets. Some updates happen monthly, while others are longer-term. Companies should approach this as a continuous process rather than an instant-ranking solution.
Can we repurpose our existing SEO strategy for LLM visibility?
Traditional SEO strategies can provide a strong foundation, but LLM optimization requires different tactics.
Companies must focus on:
- AI-readable content formatting
- Placing citations in high-authority sources
- Optimizing for AI-driven user journeys
- Creating a complete knowledge graph
- Addressing unique customer concerns
What type of reporting will leadership expect from LLM optimization?
Leadership may not be familiar with LLM-specific metrics, so reporting should translate AI visibility into business impact, such as:
- Brand mentions in AI-generated responses
- Customer engagement from AI search paths
- Competitive benchmarking in AI-driven search environments
- Confirmation from new customers who converted using LLMs
- Clear connections between sales impact and LLM optimizations
Citation-Worthy Content FUQs
What makes content "citation-worthy"?
Citation-worthy content is not just another blog post—it’s content that is highly valuable, unique, and structured in a way that naturally earns links.
This can include:
- Data-backed insights and research reports
- First-party surveys and expert interviews
- Frequently Unasked Questions (FUQs) that address knowledge gaps
- Interactive tools or calculators that provide immediate value
How does citation-worthy content impact SEO and sales?
Unlike traditional link-building, which often focuses on guest posts and outreach, citation-worthy content attracts organic, editorial links from high-authority sources. These links improve your rankings, organic traffic, and share of voice.
They can also make your key sales pages more authoritative and engaging. This makes it easier for publishers to link to these pages, increasing their visibility in search engines and LLMs, and driving more conversions.
Why is this different from traditional content marketing?
Most content marketing focuses on publishing for traffic and engagement. Citation-worthy content is designed to help the buyer. This connection provides uniquely valuable assets to your customers, strengthening their relationship with your business.
How do you build your content strategy?
Citation Labs evaluates your business, competitors, and customers to identify key concepts worth exploring. Content topics often center around:
- What topics are underrepresented online but highly relevant to your industry
- Which competitors are earning citations and why
- How existing content can be restructured to become more link-worthy
- Where unique tools can be created to aid your buyers
- What experts do your buyers want to hear from
- Which data is dated or confusing that can be updated and more easily explained
How does this content integrate with our existing website and sales strategy?
Citation-worthy content can be published as standalone assets (e.g., research reports, guides, studies) or integrated into sales pages to improve credibility, rankings, and conversions. A strong internal linking strategy ensures that the authority gained from citations benefits key commercial pages.
Can citation-worthy content be added to sales pages without disrupting conversions?
Yes. In many cases, elements like cost breakdowns, original data, or expert insights can be subtly integrated into sales pages to increase trust without disrupting the buyer journey.
For enterprises with strict approval processes, the initial focus can be on creating content assets first before transitioning into optimizing sales pages.
How do we convince internal stakeholders to invest in citation-worthy content?
Many executives view content as a cost center rather than an SEO and sales driver. SEOs and senior marketers should emphasize that citation-worthy content:
- Attracts organic, high-authority links without constant outreach
- Improves trust and credibility, increasing sales conversion rates
- Supports long-term search visibility and LLM (Large Language Model) recognition
What if we don’t have access to customer data or subject matter experts?
While customer data enhances content quality, Citation Labs can work around internal limitations by:
- Mining industry discussions on Reddit, forums, and review platforms
- Running first-party surveys to collect fresh insights
- Interviewing external subject matter experts to add credibility
How do we measure the success of citation-worthy content?
We measure success in two buckets: SEO metrics (new links generated, engagement, share of voice, visibility, keyword rankings) and business metrics (conversion rates, ROI, and AOV).
Will citation-worthy content still matter as AI-driven search (LLMs) evolve?
Yes. LLMs prioritize high-quality, authoritative content when generating responses. Businesses that invest in original research, first-party data, and expert-backed insights are more likely to be cited in AI-generated search results, ensuring long-term visibility beyond traditional Google rankings.
What happens if a content asset doesn’t gain traction?
Every piece of citation-worthy content is designed for long-term value, not just short-term engagement. If a piece underperforms, Citation Labs:
- Identifies distribution gaps and adjusts outreach strategies
- Refines the content based on link-building and engagement data
- Leverages internal linking to ensure SEO benefits are still captured
How do we align PR, content, and SEO teams to maximize impact?
Citation-worthy content bridges the gap between PR and SEO. PR teams can use it to secure media placements, while SEO teams benefit from high-quality links and authority growth.
However, citation-worthy content is not a replacement for PR. Instead, it’s better to think of it as buyer community building—not getting link placement in mainstream publications.
Businesses should ensure cross-team collaboration to maximize impact.
Our Link Building Process FUQs
How does Citation Labs define a successful link placement?
Success is not just about getting links—it’s about placing the right links in the right context.
Citation Labs prioritizes hyper-relevant, unique placements that support a company’s sales and marketing objectives, not the metrics of the linking page.
We look for publishers (often small businesses) that are in relevant industries (often adjacent) and identify content gaps on their websites. Then, we create contextually relevant, unique content to address those gaps with a link that supports the content.
A successful link meets those requirements, ensuring that the link will support the sales page and will likely stick around for the long term.
Why do you prioritize relevant pages over DR/DA and traffic?
Domain Authority (DA) and Domain Rating (DR) are often used as shorthand for quality, but they don’t guarantee real business impact. Citation Labs focuses on placing links where they will drive meaningful visibility and conversions, not just where they look good in a report.
What KPIs should we use to define a successful backlink campaign?
We measure success by changes in rankings, visibility, share of voice, and revenue impact. Our reporting connects backlinks to organic traffic, conversions, and business growth. This shows your leadership team the impact our work has on business metrics.
Note: We do not use the DR/DA or website traffic of linking pages as success metrics. Instead, we’re looking for websites that are relevant to your audience.
How does your approach make it easier for me to do my job?
Most link-building agencies require SEOs to manage outreach, strategy, and reporting internally. Citation Labs provides a full-service approach, from strategy development and outreach to impact reporting, ensuring that SEOs can focus on broader initiatives.
How do you help us communicate wins to leadership?
Executives often struggle to see the impact of SEO efforts. Citation Labs’ Impact Reports are designed for easy sharing with marketing and leadership teams, helping SEOs justify spend and build internal credibility.
How do you make sure publishers keep new placements?
Many agencies build links that disappear within months. Citation Labs has an 85% retention rate after 24 months. This is because we seek out relevant publishers, giving them content designed to serve the needs of their buyers with contextually relevant links.
In short, it’s not spam. It’s content that serves their business goals, meaning our links stay much longer than other vendors’.
How does your approach help me stand out as an in-house SEO?
Many in-house SEOs struggle to get visibility for their work. Leadership teams tend to see SEO as a black box, not fully understanding how it helps the business generate more revenue.
Citation Labs helps SEOs drive measurable results, communicate impact effectively, and build internal support for SEO initiatives. Our goal is to help you stand out in your organization. This is why our champions get praise from their leadership teams, promotions, and exciting projects to manage.
Why can’t we do this internally?
It has taken us nearly 20 years to build a system for finding prospective publishers, conducting outreach, following up, and getting placements.
To streamline this process, we built custom tooling and a tech stack to automate aspects of our process and support more personalized pitches. We’ve also learned how to turn “No” into “Yes” with publishers and what types of content they value.
Building a similar team and tooling in-house would take considerable time and resources. Rather than getting new links to key pages, you’ll need to invest in training and development.
As such, our clients often find it more cost-effective to work with us. However, we have helped train in-house teams to run outreach internally.
How can you help us sell your service internally?
Many companies hesitate to invest in link-building because they don’t fully understand its impact. Citation Labs provides business-aligned reporting, competitive benchmarking, and real-world case studies to help teams justify the investment to leadership.
We’ll sit through numerous meetings with stakeholders, attend conferences with them, and answer their most difficult questions. We also provide guidance for our champions on how to sell link building internally. And we even go to bat for them when discussing budget.
How do you continuously refine strategy as the campaign progresses?
Citation Labs works with several enterprise clients, meaning we’re regularly refining our process and building new tech to support it. At the same time, we’re also heavily involved in the link-building space. We host events, meet with experts, and run experiments in The Lab.
We take all of this expertise and funnel it into our ongoing engagements with clients. This helps us identify new opportunities and adjust outreach tactics to maximize long-term success. It’s an iterative approach that ensures campaigns remain effective as search landscapes evolve.
How do we align link building with PR, content, and other teams?
Enterprise organizations have very complex team dynamics and difficult internal politics to navigate. Without care, SEOs and their vendors can derail the momentum of campaigns. This hurts the internal stakeholders and negatively impacts the team’s perception of that vendor.
This is why we’re very careful with where our efforts end and your other teams' efforts begin. We are highly collaborative because we understand that momentum matters, so we work to build it with your team.
Having successfully navigated several complex internal relationships for large clients, we’ve gone on to support other teams within the organization—becoming the preferred vendor across the business.
What type of reporting will leadership expect from this engagement?
Over the years, we’ve learned to create reporting your CMO will love.
Our monthly link impact report is not a simple spreadsheet of new backlinks with DR/DA and site traffic. Instead, we use control groups to show the impact of new links on key sales pages every month. The reporting breaks down the share of voice, keyword ranking, and visibility changes on each page.
All of these insights are connected to ROI using existing sales metrics from the organization and industry conversion benchmarks. The output is a clear overview of how our link-building campaigns increase sales and conversions on the core pages we target.
What does success look like beyond rankings and traffic?
We know what’s at stake for our champions.
They need to justify their role in the organization by showing their work impacted the bottomline. This is difficult when there are so many obstacles SEOs have to navigate internally to do their jobs—from weak buy-in to approval processes to explaining the complexities of SEO over and over again.
Over the years, we’ve managed to help our champions succeed and grow in their roles while facing often unpredictable search performance. They’ve over-delivered on KPIs, earned praise from their CEOs, been promoted, and even landed new roles.
Links that impact business metrics are great. But becoming an invaluable resource to our stakeholders is our real goal.
Our Sales Process FUQs
What internal stakeholders need to be on the call?
For the sales call, we need the in-house SEO leader. These senior-level decision-makers usually have the role of:
- Head of SEO
- Director of SEO
- SEO Manager
- Outreach Manager
- Director of Search
- Senior Director of Search
- Head of Growth
- Comms
- Rev Ops
- Performance Marketing
Are we looking for a short-term boost or a long-term competitive advantage?
Some companies seek quick SEO wins, while others invest in sustainable link-building strategies that provide long-term value. Understanding whether the goal is scaling rankings over time or fixing an immediate gap helps Citation Labs craft the right approach.
How do we justify this investment to leadership?
During the first call, we will run a few audits and put together a report for you to share with your internal team that connects projected efforts to ROI.
This starts the conversation with leadership teams around ROI for link building. It also shows how our reporting works and how we connect efforts to business metrics. Both make it easier to communicate the value of link building internally from the get-go.
However, our long-term goal isn’t to justify the link-building budget—it’s to grow that budget.
What specific business problem are we trying to solve with link-building?
Many companies approach link-building as a general SEO tactic, but success depends on solving specific business challenges.
You may be trying to correct a traffic drop. But what are the consequences of that decrease in visibility? Are competitors gaining visibility in LLMs while your brand is absent?
Before reaching out, define the primary outcome you need to achieve. If needed, we’ll work with you on call to help you further define your goals.
How does link-building fit into our overall marketing and sales strategy?
You should have a clear view of how SEO will fit into your company’s growth engine. Link-building should align with sales, demand generation, and content marketing efforts.
Before engaging, businesses should ensure they have clear goals that tie SEO to revenue, pipeline growth, or brand positioning.
Who in our company needs to be involved in the decision to work with Citation Labs?
While we mostly meet with Lead SEOs on sales calls, our champions work directly with key stakeholders to get buy-in on backlink campaigns.
These stakeholders are:
- PR Teams
- Content Teams
- The CMO
- PPC teams
- Legal
- Compliance
Are we ready to track and measure the impact of link-building?
Many businesses struggle to connect SEO efforts to business impact. Citation Labs provides reporting tied to key metrics like traffic, conversions, and revenue, but companies should assess whether they have the right tracking and analytics setup to fully measure success.
Why do we need external help instead of handling link-building internally?
It has taken us nearly 20 years to build a system for finding prospective publishers, conducting outreach, following up, and getting placements.
To streamline this process, we built custom tooling and a tech stack to automate aspects of our process and support more personalized pitches. We’ve also learned how to turn “No” into “Yes” with publishers and what types of content they value.
Building a similar team and tooling in-house would take considerable time and resources. Rather than getting new links to key pages, you’ll need to invest in training and development.
As such, our clients often find it more cost-effective to work with us. However, we have helped train in-house teams to run outreach internally.
How do we ensure we don’t repeat past mistakes with link-building?
We’ve worked with many clients who have had poor experiences with low-cost link vendors and link-building agencies. From these engagements, we’ve learned what didn’t work, why, and where the service can be improved. And we used those insights to further develop our service.
We’ve also refined our process, approach to strategy, and tactics over the years as link building (and SEO) is a continuously evolving industry. In every engagement, we bring our experiences, experiments, and education.
This mindset of continuous evolution through reflection has helped us continue to help our clients outperform their competitors.
What type of reporting will leadership expect from this engagement?
Over the years, we’ve learned to create reporting your CMO will love.
Our monthly link impact report is not a simple spreadsheet of new backlinks with DR/DA and site traffic. Instead, we use control groups to show the impact of new links on key sales pages every month. The reporting breaks down the share of voice, keyword ranking, and visibility changes on each page.
All of these insights are connected to ROI using existing sales metrics from the organization and industry conversion benchmarks. The output is a clear overview of how our link-building campaigns increase sales and conversions on the core pages we target.
How do we measure success beyond just rankings and traffic?
We know what’s at stake for our champions.
They need to justify their role in the organization by showing their work impacted the bottomline. This is difficult when there are so many obstacles SEOs have to navigate internally to do their jobs—from weak buy-in to approval processes to explaining the complexities of SEO over and over again.
Over the years, we’ve managed to help our champions succeed and grow in their roles while facing often unpredictable search performance. They’ve over-delivered on KPIs, earned praise from their CEOs, been promoted, and even landed new roles.
Links that impact business metrics are great. But becoming an invaluable resource to our stakeholders is our real goal.