Written by Guillaume Jouvencel.
There are literally millions of articles discussing the benefits of having editorially earned, in-industry, non reciprocal links for your website’s SEO. Unfortunately, there are far fewer that lay out a practical plan for actually getting those links.
The link building strategy we are about to break down aims at building 8 quality in-industry editorial links per month with a tool that is very rarely used in link building… podcasts.
This method focuses exclusively on one-way, quality editorial links published on websites from within your topical niche and high domain authority.
Let us be clear: this strategy isn’t low effort or low touch, if you want that, go buy some links (but you better hope Google doesn’t catch you) or do some low end guest posting. Rather, Podcast Link Building, requires a bit of effort and setup to get going, but once setup will produce four to eight qualitative editorial links per month that nobody else gets within your industry.
These links are infinitely superior to what anybody can “buy” from the guys spamming your email three times a day, which are generally retreads, not in your niche, and eventually going to elevate your spam score and potentially get your site banned in Google.
And once you’ve got your podcasting rig set up and running, this strategy allows you to repeatedly get 4 to 8 links every month, and doesn’t require as much ongoing effort as PR, HARO, guest articles or tool-building strategies, and typically results in better quality.
Good vs Bad backlinks
Just to make sure we are all on the same page, let’s quickly remind ourselves of what a good backlink is versus a bad backlink. (If you want a deep dive on link quality, read this https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building)
The good backlinks
- In link building what you want are editorial links: the ones you ask for are fine, but the ones you don’t ask for are gold.
- Today, typical sources of good backlinks involve PR, HARO, content based strategies, tools building, news, data visualization… and so on.
The bad backlinks
- Bad backlinks are typically: UGC (User Generated Content), paid-for backlinks, reciprocal links, etc.
- In short, Google will consider a link as “bad” if it’s identifies it as a link trying to take advantage of the system rather than coming from genuine good intent of promoting a form of content
HUSSAM ALI, GHA MARKETING
“Technology evolves, trends change, keywords transform, but one thing remains certain: Google wants to provide the best results to its users. How many trustworthy websites link “naturally” to your website is one of the key criteria for your website to be appearing at the top of those results. Good backlinks are the way to go, but they are hard to get, unless you have a repeatable & scalable way to get high-quality, editorial, one-way, in-industry backlinks. This is what podcasts allow.
Learn more about putting this link building technique into practice ?
The Problem With Getting Good Backlinks
Obtaining good backlinks is usually extremely resource demanding. Worse yet, most link building techniques are one-off. They don’t result in a consistent flow of new, qualitative links which means they don’t pay off over the long term.
Let’s take a look at some of those strategies:
- PR: while effective, they often involve high costs, are time-consuming, and offer no guarantees for backlinks. They require sustained efforts to maintain media relationships, and measuring the direct ROI from PR activities can be challenging, complicating assessments of their true value to SEO efforts.
- HARO: Reporters and editors are drowning under such requests, on top of their already very time consuming and challenging day-to-day job. And again, there is no guarantee that a journalist will choose your contribution or include a backlink, making the outcome uncertain, and the benefits limited as you’re going to have to continually find new reporters because otherwise you’re just getting links from the same periodicals over and over again.
- Tools building: requires creating valuable, often interactive resources that naturally attract backlinks due to their utility. While this method can generate high-quality, enduring links and position your brand as an authority, it requires significant upfront investment in development and promotion. Last but not least, those are often “One-Offs”, so if you want to create a new rush of inbound links, you’ll need to develop another tool.
Fact: building one-way, unpaid links in your niche is really really hard. And so SEOs and webmasters tend to either shy away from it and emphasize on-page solutions, or look to short term tactics and “angles”. That’s the wrong way to look at it. You need something sustainable. Something that is legitimately editorially earned and which reflects well on your underlying brand
You need a machine. And we might have the one just for you.
The Big Picture: How to create backlinks with podcasting
Here is the big picture: you launch a podcast that you host on your website, and you interview guests within your niche that have a history of promoting their media appearances on their website. You publish the episode, and the guest (and hopefully other listeners) link to your website
So let’s look at some of the specifics of how this works…
Selecting The Right Podcast Guests
A podcast built for link building has different criteria for selecting guests than a traditional podcast focused exclusively with audience size and ad revenue. You want guests who will link back to the podcast episode page.
So the search starts with guests who either work at a company within your niche with a high DA website, or even bloggers, influencers, evangelists, and so on… who have a website that covers your topic. In addition to searching competitor podcasts for potential guests, you can also search for guests who have linked to their speaking appearances at conferences or even print articles.
Why backlinks from podcast guests work
The hook: ego-bait
Every website owner gets multiple requests a day of people asking him/her to link to their website. Doing so is a pain, typically provides minimal benefit to the webmaster, and therefore these emails are almost always instantly deleted.
By contrast, any good link building method uses one of a few psychological hooks to overcome the hurdle of getting someone to link to your site. These ‘hooks’ use well established principles of human psychology to significantly improve your chances of getting a backlink.
The one used in podcasting is the ego-bait. You invite a person to speak on your podcast, giving them access to your audience, showcasing them as a thought leader, and providing them with materials to promote on social media (we will get to that part later on in the article).
The ego-bait can sometimes be so strong, particularly once your podcast develops a real audience, that you attract the biggest trade publications, influencers and websites to your podcast, without having to pay for it.
For instance, you can invite a guest from one of the top 10 news-publications within your niche, and then leverage that podcast episode to go to a top 3 publication and say “Hey, we interviewed that person from that magazine on our podcast, we talked about this and the episode did great! We would love to have you on our Show to give a different perspective!”
We of course say it slightly differently, but you get the idea 😉
Ego-boost & Seed content
For a few years, podcasts have been all the hype, and it keeps on growing.
In our case, what we also like is its seed content nature. People like to share about the fact that they have been on a podcast, it showcases them as a thought-leader, an authority in their industry.
Companies also like to promote their employees appearing as speakers at events and on podcasts.
If you play your cards well, you can even have a say in what is published by those third parties, i.e. by proposing them some clips, (short form content) for LinkedIn and other social media channels, already edited, with a proposed caption (say… with a link towards your website for instance ;))
The call-to-action: guilt-bait
Now comes the time to actually get your backlink.
The call to action we use here is based on guilt bait: “Since we have interviewed you on our show, given you access to our audience and even provided you with free materials to post on your socials, would you mind promoting the episode on your website once it’s live, with a link towards our website?”
To be most effective, you can lay the foundation for this task even before the interview takes place, as you are thus able to rule out any guest who doesn’t commit to post a backlink on their website, making this strategy repeatable, and certain.
The Full Step By Step Playbook
If you want to move forward with podcast linkbuilding, then you’ll want to check out our detailed step by step playbook, you can find it here.
The Results You can Expect
Guest Links
We mentioned it before, but it bears repeating, not 100% of the show guests will link to your podcast. So 52 episodes a year doesn’t necessarily mean exactly 52 links.
But with a good guest funnel and follow up processes in place, you can easily go up to 85%. Our best stats are around 95% of guests linking to our site.
Networking Benefits
Another nice after-effect of the podcast is the networking opportunities you get from it. Eventually, you end up interviewing influential people in your industry, and for a smaller company in the space, the opportunity to chat with executives at much larger organizations can pave the way to business deals, partnerships, etc. .
Plus imagine a world where you get somebody from your sales or marketing team, or a contractor, meet one-to-one with the most influential people in your industry, once a week, 4 times a month, 52 times a year, to have a genuine conversation of 30 minutes and build a relationship.
Audience Building
Podcasts are a long tail asset of evergreen content. We have 2 podcasts of our own , and for both of them, our most listened to episode every single month is the first episode we ever recorded.
People regularly discover your podcast episodes months, if not years after their publication, and listen to it, and create an intimate relationship with your brand and guests.
The audience that you develop around a whole new piece of content, your podcast, will bring your organization business opportunities due to the reputational benefits that a podcast brings to your company..
Natural links
In the long run, you will end up receiving (editorial) links that you didn’t ask for from websites in your niche that you’ve never spoken to, simply because you are creating great content, whilst showcasing influential people, and benefitting from its compounding effect on podcast platforms, but also social media channels.
Trade publications, magazines, news websites might end up talking about a guest appearance on your podcast, or even about your podcast itself.
For one of our in-house podcasts (because of course we apply this strategy to ourselves), we interviewed the editor of the leading newsletter and news-website in one of our industry (the podcast world ;)). This ended up in one backlink from a 74 DA website, but also a backlink from a 50 DA website (secondary website of the editor), and a publication about the episode in the most read newsletter in that space… For free. Well, if we don’t take into account the cost of the podcast of course, but I can assure you that the cost of a paid ad in that newsletter is much more.
That’s the power of link building through podcasting.
Free customers
That’s right, while you are going nicely about your business getting backlinks, growing your brand and growing an audience, it’s not only the SEO department that get happy. But the whole Marketing one and eventually Sales one because people reach out after listening to some episodes and finding out more on social media.
Free leads anyone? Here we go.
Meet PR Agencies
Lots of brands, thought leaders and influencers have understood the power of appearing on podcasts as guests: tapping into a loyal and well established audience, having an opportunity to showcase your expertise for 30 mins straight in the ears of your ideal clients.
In the podcast world, there is a whole business model that has been built around this: PR agencies who “place guests”. They basically contract with individuals (the individuals are the ones paying), to reach out to podcasts within their niche and get them booked as guests. This means two things:
- You can start build relationships with PR firms and get your podcast featured on their website (boom, free high DA link)
- You don’t even have to look for guests anymore, they come to you.
- Of course, you can still (and must) impose the commitment about getting a backlink. And as a matter of fact, you can touch upon this with the PR agency person reaching out to you regularly (because it often ends up like this)
- Those same PR contacts are valuable for your other more traditional linkbuilding efforts, and now instead of you begging them, they’re the ones needing favors from you.
Phew! There you go, a compounding, repeatable, high DA, high quality, one-way, editorial link building machine.
And here is my closing pitch…
You can do all this yourself, it works and none of this is rocket science. As a reminder, you can find our whole playbook on how to launch and run a podcast that builds links here.
Or you can get the benefits from it without any of the hustle, and reach out to us and see if we can help by managing the whole process for you. 🙂
About the Author: Guillaume Jouvencel
Guillaume is the co-founder of GHA Marketing, a Podcast Marketing Agency based in the UK. GHA Marketing provides services to podcasters and link building services with branded podcasts to businesses across US, UK, Europe and Asia.
