6 best practices for bonding at the enterprise level

The size of your business has a profound influence on your marketing strategy.

Many big brands or websites inherently have an unfair advantage over small businesses and brands: name recognition, reach, a much larger budget to work with, and additional resources in other departments.

Take all of these benefits into consideration when planning your next business link building strategy.

To successfully implement a large-scale link building campaign, scalability is key.

Start with a brand or product / service and then as you learn what works and what doesn’t you can expand both your campaigns to cover more products and your reach to get links from more sources.

Building Connections at the Company Level: Where to Focus

The most successful large-scale link building campaigns start with a specific niche.

Even if you were a home improvement store like Lowe’s or The Home Depot, you couldn’t easily run a campaign trying to cover all the home improvement products that you offer.

Build your initial campaign around a specific product line, category, or other niche offerings, then expand it to others, using what works.

A good rule of thumb is to start with a one page outline.

If you can’t fit the elements of a link campaign into a one-page plan to begin with, then you’re not focused enough.

1. Promote specific content

In this Home Depot sponsored article on Simply Designing with Ashley Phipps, the author introduces his audience to some of the light fixtures and other items you can make with pipes:

She also directs readers to The Home Depot’s Apron Blog for a full DIY tutorial on the fixture.

This is a great example of working with influencers for content and as part of a traffic-driven link building campaign.

Not only did Phipps have their audience exposed and a link to these products available at Home Depot, but Home Depot gave Phipps exposure on their blog for the DIY tutorial.

Home Depot has certainly paid for this content, however, a niche-focused topic with a strong brand or product connection will also make it easier to secure unpaid mentions.

Home Depot is a great example of a collaborative campaign.

Plus, because the blog topic is so specialized (pipe light kits), the post performed well on social media as well, with over 1,800 Pins at the time of posting.

This example does not suggest that paid links in sponsored content will increase rankings, but is a great example of a link that can generate traffic.

2. Increase the authority of the site or section of the site

Besides growing your portfolio of inbound links to specific pages, link building is also a great way to increase the authority of your site, subdomain, or page, usually if you are a small brand within the portfolio. brands.

If you are working on link building for a small brand owned by a larger company, be sure to leverage the brand awareness and reputation of the products and their manufacturer.

For example, this article on Ma Nouvelle Mode concerns a line of products at a jeweler.

This review gave more visibility to this specific product line, while also mentioning the jeweler, whose name is perhaps more well known.

Targeting a specific topic, as well as a specific brand or line, is what makes influencer and link building campaigns more effective.

If you try to be too broad (for example, if Staples tries to promote all of its available school supplies during Back to School), you might lose the reader’s interest or not know what to focus on.

It’s more than likely that an article on “getting all the back-to-school supplies we need at Staples” won’t be as successful as “where to find the cheapest notebooks” or “how do I get the sticky notes?” have made it more productive. “

How to Approach Linking at the Company Level

Once you’ve focused on a specific product or brand, you need to work on your approach.

Below are some of the areas you can focus on to get links to great companies or brands.

3. Unlinked brand mentions

A brand has a tremendous advantage in generating links with unrelated brand mentions.

These are mentions or references to your brand terms, usually in articles, that do not relate to your field.

Usually these links are natural and as the author clearly knows the brand but for some reason they did not link.

These types of links are also much easier to get than others which means they are easier to find and the conversion rate when securing a link can be as high as 15-20%.

I recently used Ahrefs’ content explorer because you can find the mentions over time and hopefully their dataset is large.

4. Leverage influencer marketing

Start building your link building campaign by researching the specific posts, influencers, or bloggers you want to reach out to.

Use a tool like BuzzSumo to find popular posts on related topics, then go back to find the post the post is on.

For example, if we wanted to do more posts about DIY projects for The Home Depot, there are several blogs we could contact.

How has the competitive landscape changed?

Find out if your competitors have secured their positions in the market over the past few months.

Try experimenting with the date range filter to get the best results for what you need and to see recent trends.

5. Leverage customers and customers

Besides reaching out to influencers for content campaigns, why not use your existing connections?

Many companies have a “my favorite” page.

If you are one of their customers, asking for a link on this page is not unreasonable.

Here’s a screenshot of some of the unaffiliated products and tools that author and entrepreneur Chris Ducker shares on his resources page:

Any nonprofit work done by your business could also be a potential connection.

Ask to be mentioned on the event information page if you are sponsoring an event or on the donor appreciation page if you have donated to an annual fundraiser and the nonprofit mentions and links to fundraisers. donors on its website.

Asking for links from current clients and clients should be done with tact and common sense.

You don’t want to sound opportunistic.

Be specific without appearing demanding. Often something like:

“I noticed that you have listed the event donors on the event page [link to URL], Can CompanyXYZ also be included? We love the work we do with you and look forward to [something specific and genuine]”

Be frank and straightforward so that the request appears painless.

6. Link between corporate / brand sites

Often, companies have multiple brands with their own online identity and website.

Make these websites link to each other where it makes sense (and is useful for the user).

This could be offering related products, comparing a small or large-scale solution, or sharing promotions that work between different brands.

Gap does a good job from an ecommerce perspective:

When you’re on the websites for one of their brands (in this case, OldNavy.com), there’s a tabbed format at the top that takes you to their other brands.

The shopping cart and several promo codes work on all their brands, making the shopping experience smoother.

This saves time for the consumer: they can do all their purchases online in four different stores at the same time.

Conclusion

Remember to always be determined with your link building.

Don’t go after a link that looks doable.

Build a thorough strategy.

Link building is best with a multi-faceted approach.

Target a specific audience using a niche topic for influencer marketing projects, then work with your clients and your own sites to get more links where it makes sense.

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Image credits

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita
All screenshots taken by the author