Far too few agencies talk about link building and, in my humble (or not so humble) opinion, most that do, do an absolute garbage job.  Blake Denman posted this shot on Twitter the other day, of the backlink profile for “link building” work done by an agency. This stuff is pure garbage (yet most firms don’t know it).

Blake then postulated (IMO, correctly) how these garbage links (paid for by a client to an agency) actually had the end result of decreasing, not increase organic traffic:

This type of activity is NOT only paid for by the client, but then requires a client to a) notice the negative impact and b) hire someone else to clean up the mess. We call this Janitorial SEO. This is Blake’s joy to deal with for the next few months, and the client’s headache to pay him for it.

So…

What should a firm be doing about link building?

I want to showcase one example of a significant, permanent increase in organic traffic due to just a single link on a site we’ve been working on for years. Now the graph below doesn’t scream amazing, but the difference in average weekly organic traffic between the weeks January 22nd and 29th is a persistent increase of 11%.

The link in question was from a very high ranking site – ahrefs puts it at DR, 82; Moz’s OpenSiteEplorer at 83 and Majestic Citation Flow at 61. The content in question took weeks to develop and the outreach, was frankly hit or miss. In fact, it wasn’t our outreach that drove the link, but instead, the tweet from a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend (this is the way social really works). And just one link. And yet…boom. A 12% increase that will benefit the site for years to come.

So…how do you know if your agency is engaged in useful (I’ll call it advanced) link building, or link building so bad that it’s not just a waste of money, but it’s going to cause you to spend more money to clean their work up in the future? The first answer is easy: a good link building campaign is both long term and effective. This means, that over time, your inbound search traffic shows an up and to the right improvement. In the case of this site, that’s exactly what we’ve seen…below is the long term graph of their search traffic, in which we’ve done nothing more than generate strong content married to a proactive link building effort.

However, the quality of your agency’s link building efforts can be more immediately assessed based on the tenor of your relationship. Are you deeply engaged with your agency? Do they know what you are working on (amazing – specific matters can be link building gold). Have they pushed you on outreach and relationship building?

One final note: this level of engagement, expertise, relationships, content development, care and effort isn’t cheap. And it’s not always successful (which also makes it not cheap). But it’s the primary thing that drives success in organic and local search. If your agency is doing link building and you have NO idea what they are doing, most likely it’s not high level and you are simply torching your kids’ college fund. (Although, watch your traffic, if its growing, I’m more than happy to be wrong here).

If you’d like to read more about link building try:

• or my old standard from 2011 on Search Engine Land, most of which remains very relevant today:  How to Terrify Executives Into Linkbuilding.

Last week was particularly painful – I reviewed a $1,700 a month FindLaw site with pages carelessly duplicated. I looked at a firm paying $800 a month for SEO for a website without H1s. I analyzed a site with a $50,000 price tag (yes – four zeros) that didn’t have a robots.txt file. So, don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of self-proclaimed SEO “experts” who wouldn’t know the difference between a canonical tag and a fluffernutter. But The premise of this article assumes you can do a decent job weeding out the flagrant SEO charlatans and social media marketing consultants guaranteeing Pinterest followers will catapult you to the top of the search results and instead addresses the more important question:

How do you identify an advanced agency from those that are merely competent?

I’ve written a few times about how to vet an SEO provider…

• Should You Get in Bed with an SEO Agency?  (SearchEngine Land)
• 9 Questions Your Legal Website Provider Doesn’t Want You to Ask
• Are You Qualified to Hire an SEO?  A Simple Test

…but I think those articles may be overthinking the key point.

To answer this question, I’m looking to the tactical focus of our engagements for large firms in heavily competitive markets. Once we’ve completed the Janitorial SEO phase – cleaning up all of the pre-existing technical, content, penalty and platform disasters – we move into a maintenance phase. And during this phase roughly 70% of a client’s investment goes towards linkbuilding. So its obvious to me…the only important question you need to ask when looking for a genuinely advanced agency:

Describe your most effective linkbuilding campaign over the past three months.

Know that there is no singular right answer to this question – but thematically you are listening for a few things.

1. Creativity – effective linkbuilding entails a creative approach to stories, facts and opportunities to generate stories for a highly interested (and online) audience. You are looking for someone who can either generate a unique perspective commenting on existing stories, or, better yet, be active in actually generating the news. Fundamentally – listen for someone taking a creative angle on a story or even a unique approach to the content medium – infographics, video or unusual content.
2. Collaboration – without a doubt, our most successful linkbuilding campaigns involve deep cooperation with our clients. They know their issues, stories and perspectives better than we do – and we facilitate creativity through brainstorming sessions that include the client directly.
3. Outreach – great content alone is impotent if no one reads it. “Content is King” is one of the lies lazy SEOs tell their clients – shifting the responsibility of the failure of an SEO campaign to their clients for not blogging enough. (See SEO Regicide, Content the King is Dead for more.) Find an agency who is able to identify raving fans and has an outreach plan for reaching those raving fans through social, email, phone or even traditional PR. Our most recent linkbuilding coup included a $17,000 spend with a PR agency that generated stories and links from places like the New York Times, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal’s Law Bog, as well as 40 other sites.
4. Timeliness – in many cases, great stories are fleeting – so being able to jump on issues, turn around content and execute on outreach quickly is extremely important.
5. Failure – note that high-end linkbuilding isn’t guaranteed. At least half of the time efforts are going to fall flat. (And just 10%-20% of the time, agencies deliver a home run.) Experienced agencies know this and should prepare clients for this possibility.
6. Variety – a strong, organic backlink profile is built through a variety of tactics; agencies who rely on a singular approach to linkbuilding are often walking you towards a penalty.

Of course, you want to avoid like the plague, agencies who promise links, guarantee links, offer to buy links, or suggest in any way that they have a simple, scaleable solution to a complex, unscalable challenge.

Don’t expect to be able to hire someone who can engage in advanced linkbuilding at $500 a month or even $2,000 a month. This is hard, creative, uncertain work – it requires experience, brainstorming, contacts, writing panache, timing and a heavy heavy dose of luck to be successful. It’s an ongoing process

Also note that some Big Box website and SEO vendors are able to easily slot your site into a network of domains they control to generate links back to you. This is flagrantly against Google’s best practices and I’ve dealt with more sites than I care to count where the Janitorial SEO phase has lasted for months as we’ve dug a site out from a penalty. BUT…currently these networks can be effective when implemented by the more crafty Big Box providers. Law firms pay for the value of these links through exorbitant “hosting” costs that run into the hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars a month, when the actual cost should be between $5 and $29. Note that this is a risky approach – my take is that it’s a matter of when, not if, the sites get burned. Additionally, leave the vendor, and those links will slowly disappear from your backlink profile – leaving your site impotent.