Hi, I’m “Penguin” Pete Trbovich, and YOU overthink SEO!
This time, I want you to take protective measures. Wear a hockey mask and catcher’s mitt, or at least have a pillow handy. This is because I’m about to tell you an SEO trick that is so BLINDING obvious and yet nobody ever, ever thinks of it.
Backlinks, backlinks, backlinks, everybody wants backlinks! To quote Moz.com: “Backlinks are especially valuable for SEO because they represent a ‘vote of confidence’ from one site to another.” But they just talk about how important quality backlinks are, not how to get them. Many sites out there pay lip service to this concept, but are vague on how to get backlinks.
I will not be vague. I will be very specific. This blog post is over 2K words long, relax.
There’s Bad Advice About Backlinks Out There
“Paid link-building,” as they call it, is still a thing in 2021. Search Engine Journal says so. Google classifies this as “link schemes” and will tax your rank for it at the least, if not outright blacklist your site at the worst.
Other SEO bloggers list work-around fudges, like “find somebody who would link to you and persuade them to update a link to you.” This is called “link reclaiming.” Three problems with this: (1) Having a lot of backlinks in the past which went 404 is your own damn fault, (2) reclaiming links requires you to have had links in the first place, and (3) speaking as a webmaster, nothing gets deleted from my inbox faster than somebody whining at me groveling for links. At best, if you actually have something useful in my niche, you are allowed to email me ONCE! (and I MEAN it.) Then leave the rest up to fate. Maybe I will get around to it and maybe I won’t. Second email, into the trash it goes.
OK, but finally some SEO experts realize that any other ploy is futile except – you guessed it – quality content. “Quality content,” they chant over and over. And then they go right past the actual goal to list “find what people are searching for” as a way to put down link bait. No. That is not how you get backlinks. That is standard SEO 101.
I’m not out to jive you; “quality content” is definitely in the right ballpark, but my breakthrough news here is going to be far, far more specific.
The Secret to Organic Backlinks: Be Useful To BLOGGERS!
“Quality content” is a tremendously subjective phrase. What is it? People will say things like “interesting, informative, relevant, funny.” No. You’re trying to define this vague ideal and then seeing it from the user’s perspective. The end readers on social media can’t be counted on to link anything. What you need to do is get other website owners, or their maintainers, to value your content.
In short, you need bloggers. Freelance web content writers are the backbone of eCommerce right now, and you need the links from them! Appealing to any other demographic is, well, mostly a waste of time. Maybe some Wikipedia editor will make your day, or your witty tweet will go viral. And if you wish hard enough, maybe a rainbow and a leprechaun will give you a pot of gold.
Don’t go to the boss. The boss is busy tending to other business. The bloggers, WordPress maintainers, copywriters, site editors: These are the people holding the keys to your site’s rank.
So you need to find a blogger to ask, “how do I get you to link to me?” Luckily, we have – oh my gosh – a stroke of luck. I am a freelance blogger, with over two decades’ experience. So here’s the juice:
I Am Big Blog Kahuna, Source of All Good Backlinks! Here is How to Curry my Favor:
Be useful to me. In my course of work, I blog on all kinds of topics and industries. You can see a few of my main public gigs from my homepage, but there’s tons of ghostwriting / branded content which I am not at liberty to disclose besides.
What kind of content is “useful to bloggers”?
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- Hard data – Statistics, surveys, charts, polls, graphs, concrete data
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- Scientific studies – Complete, comprehensive gatherings of the research on a topic and a factual summary of the findings
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- Insight – Break down hard technical topics in plain everyday English for the layman
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- Interviews – An interview with an industry insider or authority source
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- Quotes and soundbites – Something I can reference and point to later on
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- Large image galleries – Have it be on one particular topic or news story
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- Wikis – Wikis for everything and anything, encyclopedic content I can link as a reference
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- News – Factual, detailed coverage of any news story
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- HOWTOs and tutorials – Teach people how to do things
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- Fact-checking and debunking – Join my crusade to mythbust fake news
Sometimes you have to give a lot to get a lot.
So what isn’t useful?
Just for a counter-example, here’s some content ideas I see getting promoted as “quality content which will earn organic backlinks,” which I almost never link to:
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- Infographics – 2003 called, it wants its big image page back. These are too big and cumbersome to link to in the mobile era. When I want a chart or a graph, I want ONE statistic or maybe a few grouped around a narrow point. I don’t need some long rambling 2-page scroll interrupting the flow of my blog post.
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- Reviews – Reviews are just opinion. I’m a blogger, I have my own opinion.
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- Funny stuff – “Funny” gets you links from grandma on Facebook. I’m plenty funny on my own.
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- Multimedia content – Unless it’s on YouTube, which is the big embeddable exception.
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- Short news briefs – I don’t care about your 2-sentence summary and a link to CNN; I will just link to CNN.
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- Top / bottom ten lists – Unless it’s something really weighty by an official source, these just aren’t useful to anybody. They’re clickbait to end users, worthless to bloggers.
Let’s show some hard, real-life examples that have come up in my experience:
Backlink Opportunities You’re All Missing Right Now…
When I have a deadline, and I’m grinding out content on assignment, nothing is as frustrating as searching for something I need, but can’t find. As we go along, try Googling these suggestions to walk a mile in my shoes and then you will understand what I need.
Marketing stats…
A common topic is marketing. I would like to be able to link to a source to tell me things like “how many Facebook users opt out of targeted ads?” I’d like a hard statistic. A survey, poll, or even user data gathered from a reliable source. I have dozens of questions in the marketing topic. How accurate are Facebook user groups? What’s the click-through rate on Twitter ads? How many people use AdBlock on YouTube? What percentage of online shopping purchases are a 2-person team?
If you’re saying “Pete, the web is full of this stuff,” you’re not thinking this through. If I, blogger, am writing on a paid assignment about marketing, then whom is my client? Obviously, it’s a digital marketer. But I don’t want to link to my client’s competitor. So I’m stuck. The only people talking about marketing online are companies in the marketing business.
You see where this is going? Right now, finding facts about marketing without linking to marketing sites is restricted to third-party apps and SaaS like Hootsuite. The other problem is that most marketing data is just buried on the web in the first place. If you’re doing your homework, a search like “how many Facebook users opt out of targeted ads” will yield pages and pages of tutorials about how to opt out of targeted ads on Facebook.
Niche drug facts…
Continuing with the above theme, there’s hundreds of niches which are left uncovered online when it comes to, again, hard data. There’s plenty of opinions, lots of anecdotes, wishy-washy forum discussions, no data.
On my gig over at DabConnection, I’m constantly starving for new data about the emerging cannabis market. Just the other day I was looking for facts about terpenes, which are organic compounds in cannabis. One question I was trying to answer is, basically, can an airport drug-sniffing dog be fooled by a spice rack (spices have terpenes in common with cannabis, see)? That’s #6 on the list, but you can see that I could not pinpoint that exact question. Instead it turns out that drug-sniffing dogs get a false positive about 75% of the time due to plain old residue and lingering smell on clothes and money. And look, I had to link to an Australian site just for that! Are American canine cops trained differently? Anybody know?
I’m constantly on the prowl for this kind of niche information. Oregon just decriminalized all drugs, how is that working out for them? Is there more crime, less crime, more addicts, fewer rehabs, what? For that matter, with all the lawyers with blogs out there, can one of you do a blog post on decriminalization, legalization, and the difference between them? That link was me trying to pull those answers out of my ass. Search for it, and you get NORML (most helpful), Mirriam Webster, Wikipedia, and WeedMaps (very weak source). It would be nice to have a practicing, licensed lawyer explain it in plain English.
Medical research is another area screaming for good link sources. For medical studies, everybody is forced to link to US National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. That is great for authority; it is LOUSY for readability. Readers are caught between my casual summary or digging through a long scientific paper, with no in-between. I would still like a round-up of all the scientific research on the effectiveness of chamomile, summarized for casual readers who are without a degree, from a website that is not trying to sell chamomile pills.
Media archives…
Mass media, especially the history of same, is a hit-and-miss topic on the web. There is IMDB, that’s big. But even its information is sketchy sometimes.
For instance, it doesn’t cover TV commercials. There are some TV ad databases out there, but they’re basically worthless (half those links are dead already). How do I find that animated Levi’s Jeans commercial from the ’80s that seemed to be inspired by Star Wars? You can see here, I got lucky on YouTube, but God knows how long that stays up. How about old ads for Yahoo? Years ago I couldn’t find them, but this site is a lucky current hit (with one YouTube embed already succumbed to link-rot). How about the time Vincent Price hawked for Time-Life Books’ The Enchanted World series? Go fish on YouTube, or this guy found a couple. I remember the one closing with the sassy line “how do you know witches don’t exist if you don’t know what one looks like?” Can YOU find it? How fast?
There’s a huge black hole for media prior to the World Wide Web’s founding. There’s some government resources, some non-profits and collectives out there, and random YouTube archivists, but finding this crap is time-consuming and frustrating.
Here’s an example of a niche well-served: the IMCDB. It’s the Internet car movies database. What car was Michel Lemoine driving in 1976’s Seven Women for Satan? A 1964 Peugeot 404 Coupé. See how easy that is? That database is so complete it’s freaky. Thank God we have cars in movies covered.
Now what about filming locations? There’s a movie locations database, but that particular movie isn’t listed. IMDB says the country is “France,” but that’s not much help. There’s a few filming locations that are very famous like “Kirk’s rock,” but after that the resources get thin.
How about a listing of every Saturday morning cartoon that had a band? As in “the Archies.” There were scads of them, I have assembled some here to show you for an example.
But you see where there’s just endless trivia that’s still missing from the Internet? When there is a site that’s a good source, half the time it’s behind a paywall. Even if I have a subscription, that’s still a crappy source link because I don’t want to frustrate my clients’ readers if they don’t subscribe to that particular walled garden.
In Conclusion: You Need To Kiss More Blogger Ass
I realize that the above examples are either extreme niches that are difficult to fill, or examples that one can find on the web after clicking through ten Google SERPS or so. But they still come up all the time! The entire eCommerce industry is running off millions of bloggers just like me, only not as great as I am. Sorry for my sickening humility.
How do you get backlinks? Be the answer! If you can’t find the answer from another source, then do your own data gathering. I don’t care if it’s a petty poll you did on Survey Monkey, it’s something. Chartify existing data and slap your URL on it. Or take technical topics and break them down so I can link readers to something that doesn’t require a master’s degree to understand.
Never mind worrying about “what people are searching for.” To be a good backlink magnet, put up crazy tiny long-tail niche stuff that you can hardly imagine anyone searching for, because that’s what’s missing.
Be the answer! The web will come backlinking to your door if you have the answers.
