Link Building Systems For SEO agencies. Just Copy THIS For Your Clients 

 

Preface 3 National Clients 6 

Content Plan 6 A Long-Tail Strategy That Works 6 The Ultimate Infographic Strategy 9 Growing Oak Trees with Cornerstone Content 11 

Link Building Plan 12 Build High-Quality Local Citations 12 Skyscraper Campaigns 13 Press Releases 14 Infographic Links 14 Blogger Outreach 15 Links From Your Base of Connections 15 Anchor Text and What to Link to 15 

Local Clients 16 Content Plan 16 

Location-Targeted Landing Pages 16 Link Building Plan 17 

Citations, Citations, Citations 17 Email Your Client’s Current Relations 18 Getting Links From Bloggers 18 

Ecommerce 18 Content Plan 18 

Product Titles and Descriptions 18 Blog Posts 19 Skyscraper Content 21 Infographics 21 

Link Building Plan 21 Blogger Outreach 22 Email Suppliers and Clients 22 Types of links 22 

Super Competitive Industry Clients 23 Content Plan 23 

Where This Content Strategy Differs 23 Link Building Plan 23 

Blogger Outreach 23 Infographics 23 

Closing Notes 24    

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Brought to you by: 

 

Deliver Better SEO.

FATJOE.com

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Preface  

“If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what                             

you're doing.” 

– W. Edwards Deming 

Nothing is more important to a growing agency than systems. 

You’ll have systems for attracting leads, turning leads into clients, and... *drumroll* fulfilling your services. 

Putting a rock-solid link building process into gear is a delicate act. 

...Place too much effort into chasing golden unicorns of backlink opportunities and your costs will not be economical. 

...Loosen your grip on quality and you’ll do serious damage to your client’s SEO efforts. 

This book will take the fear and stress out of constructing an effective (and scalable!) system for link building. 

First and foremost, let me reveal the secret sauce behind how we structure our systems. 

We believe that all SEO clients can be divided into four different buckets. Therefore, we will be sharing four different systems designed to work beautifully with each type of business. 

Let’s get started with a nice little decision tree to help you determine what type of business your client runs. 

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Easy, right? Now that we have that squared away, let’s take some time to drill into these four different strategies. 

The National Strategy: This is the kind of client that serves an entire nation. These clients might be the modular homes company that builds housing across the US, the ice cream shop franchise that has multiple locations all around the UK, or the retreat chef who is always looking for new adventure. 

The Local Strategy: If your client has a small area of operation, then this is the plan for them. Local SEO has a lot of differences when compared to your typical search engine 

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efforts. For that reason, these kinds of businesses deserve their own, custom-tailored strategy. 

The Ecommerce Strategy: If the primary portion of your client’s business is selling products online, this is the strategy for them. 

The High-Competition Strategy: This kind of client is in an ultra-competitive industry. Perhaps they run a national insurance company. Maybe they’re a new fintech startup aiming to take on behemoths like Intuit. Such an ambitious task requires an entirely new strategy. 

Keep in mind that we will only be discussing systems for link building. Do make sure that all of your onsite and technical SEO tasks have been handled. 

There will be times where you’ll customize the services you provide to your clients, causing you to deviate from these systems. 

That’s perfectly ok. Good on you for putting extra care and effort into your services! 

The purpose of these strategies isn’t to take the creativity and thought out of your marketing. It’s to set a solid baseline of what you’ll provide for each client. It will allow you to scale more easily and avoid inefficiencies that would prevent you from taking on more business. 

With all that being said, it’s time to get down to the nitty-gritty and open our treasure chest full of scalable secrets! The next four chapters of this book will discuss each strategy in detail.   

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National Clients  

 

Our goal with national clients is to establish them as authorities in their industry through great content and strategic outreach. We’ll make use of the three content types mentioned in the graphic above. 

Content Plan ● 2-4 long-tail blog posts per month ● 1 Infographic per year ● 4 cornerstone pages or skyscraper content per year 

A Long-Tail Strategy That Works This strategy all begins with creating 24 to 48 blog posts a year targeting long-tail keywords. 

These are keywords revolving around question-based topics, industry-related news, and industry-related educational topics. 

There are all sorts of methods when it comes to finding these sorts of keywords. 

We can start out with one of my favorite methods. 

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I like this method because it is free, easy to teach our team members, and very effective for finding long-tail terms. 

The general formula is: 

[main keyword] + [search intent helper] 

A “search intent helper” is a word or phrase you could use to help steer the direction of what type of content you are looking for.  

Some examples of a helper could be “how to”, “reviews”, “near me”, “news”, “guide”, or “why is” (good for question based terms). 

If our client is in the drywall industry, our first step is to create a seed list of search terms using the above formula. Here’s what my brain came up with: 

● drywall how to ● drywall news ● drywall reviews ● drywall near me ● drywall guide ● drywall help ● drywall why is it that ● drywall can you help me ● drywall how do i ● drywall what is the best way to ● drywall what is the best 

There we go! Next, we have to do a little bit of exploring. The general process looks like this: 

1. Search for one of these seed phrases in Google. 2. Jot down interesting search terms found in the autocompletion results, unique 

SERP features, and the “Searches related to” section.  a. Tip: Use the Keywords Everywhere browser extension to find even more 

ideas! 3. For each keyword idea you find, follow steps 2 and 3 until you stop finding new 

keyword ideas. 4. Plug every search term you have found into your favorite keyword research tool 

and continue your analysis. 

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To get a complete understanding of this process, let me run through the thinking behind the first seed term mentioned, “drywall how to”. 

With this particular phrase, it’s clear that we’re looking for industry-related how-to/tutorial topics. 

After Googling this phrase, I was presented with the following autocomplete suggestions: 

 

All of these are quite interesting! I’m going to jot these down to explore further. 

As for SERP features, this keyword provides the “People also ask” section. 

 

From these questions, we can jot down a few more seed keywords like: 

● “how to hang drywall ceiling by yourself” ● “is it ok to hang drywall vertically” ● “difference between sheetrock and drywall” ● “what do I need to install drywall” or something like “drywall equipment list” 

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Scroll to the very bottom of the page and you’ll come across the “Searches related to” section; always a great source of keyword inspiration. 

 

Looking at these search terms, we have gained some useful insights. 

● People are looking for videos and might even prefer it over written content for the drywall industry. We could include a YouTube video (whether it is ours or not) in our post and also include the keyword “video” in our posts. This will increase our visibility for any search terms where “video” is tacked on at the end. 

● We could explore topics where “by yourself” is added to the end of the term. This gives us an idea that a lot of DIYers are searching these terms. 

● We could explore the topic of “drywall finishing”. 

And that’s all you have to do! The next part of my job would involve reviewing the keywords I have jotted down and going through the steps all over again. 

At the end of the process I’d be left with a spreadsheet full of juicy, long-tail keywords and a big grin on my face. :-) 

The Ultimate Infographic Strategy One of the most widely circulated strategies for building links is creating infographics. 

However, to really succeed, you have to produce an exceptionally high-quality graphic. There are too many infographic campaigns that are way too generic to have the kind of impact we want.  

A lot of SEOs just bunch together a few statistics as the basis of their infographic. Doing this makes it more difficult to stand out from other marketers. 

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Make sure to take a look at our infographic creation service. We have prices to match any budget. Our least expensive pricing tier provides more value than some of our competitor’s highest tier! 

Here are a few tips to stand out, get noticed, and get links from your infographic efforts. 

Consider Using Original Research 

While you could totally source data from other organizations, it pays off to create your own research. 

This doesn’t mean you have to put together a complex, peer-reviewed study with a whole team of PHDs. 

Your own research could be as simple as asking a set of questions to people in your industry. 

For an architectural firm, you might poll a group of architects, receiving information such as their salary, work-life balance on a scale of 1 to 10, favorite gear and software, the university they attended, and more. 

 

Choose a Click-Worthy Topic 

I’ve noticed that the bulk of infographic promotions in my inbox cover very generic topics. 

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"7 Stats About The SEO Industry"... 

"Best Electric Guitars".... 

"Social Media Marketing Strategies"… 

You get the point. Topics that have been done to death and really aren’t that tempting to click. 

For a great example, check out the Psychology of Poverty and its Affect on Mental Health. They could’ve taken the generic route, creating a graphic with the topic of “Stats About Poverty in the US”. 

Instead, they went ahead and gave it a completely unique angle. It’s not only about the psychology of poverty but also its effect on mental health, a widely discussed topic at this time. 

You Get What You Pay for with Graphic Design 

Some marketers rely too heavily on the copywriting-juju of their outreach emails to secure their infographic placements. 

Gorgeous graphic design wins the attention of the viewer before any of your data findings are read. 

If you’re going for a quality over quantity strategy, posting one infographic a year, you’re going to want to invest in a good graphic designer. 

Think Outside of the Box 

There’s always a different path you could take in order to set yourself apart. One of those ways are animated infographics. 

A fantastic example of one is Animagraphs’ "How a Car Engine Works". 

Perhaps you’re in the audio equipment industry. It may seem hard to create an infographic when your whole industry is based off of sound. 

An idea for you to try is to make your graphic an entire webpage. You then have the opportunity to embed multimedia. 

You’d still be able to make your “graphic” embeddable by using HTML IFrames. 

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Growing Oak Trees with Cornerstone Content As mentioned earlier in the book, your cornerstone articles are your oak trees. They are resources not expected to instantly rank, but when they do, it will be a huge win for your client. 

It takes time and link building. 

Your main cornerstone keywords are likely to be at least moderately competitive. 

When it comes to creating these resources, keep it simple.  

The secret to cornerstone content is to create a resource so good, it renders your competition’s content inferior. 

Don’t make the mistake of one-upping your competition based solely on the word-count, or how many keywords you could pack into your metas. 

Get inside the mind of the person searching for your target keyword. What do they want?  

Will a video solve their woes? Would detailed photos/illustrations help? Are they a beginner or an expert? 

Ask yourself these questions before doing anything else. 

Link Building Plan ● Continuous building of local citations ● 1 skyscraper campaign for every piece of content you publish ● 2 press releases per month ● 10-50 infographic links per month ● 10-30 blogger outreach links per month ● Follow up with charities your client donates to, suppliers, and/or accrediting 

bodies for links or references on their sites ● Types of links: 

○ 50-60% home page ○ 30% content pages ○ 10-20% money page 

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Build High-Quality Local Citations A common misconception is that local citations are only of use to businesses that only serve a small surrounding area. 

Well, even for businesses that operate nationally, citations are an incredible resource to set the groundwork of your link profile. 

But here’s the thing… quality matters. 

We do not recommend shooting for every directory under the sun. Not only will that have little to no effect on your rankings, but it would cause a BP-oil-spill-level of a cleanup effort every time your NAP info changes. 

So what’s your plan of attack here? Prioritize industry and area-based local citation opportunities. Look for those hard-to-find but ultra valuable citations that are not listed in the typical “Top 1,000 SEO Citations” listicles. 

Over at FatJoe, we are very transparent with our local citation services. We submit only to directories that are relevant to your country and provide a detailed report of the entire process. 

Skyscraper Campaigns 

 

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In simple terms, a skyscraper campaign is when you find a piece of content, write a better version, and then email everyone who has linked to that piece of content (and ones that are similar), seeing if they’d be interested in linking to your new article. 

You’ll find good topics for skyscraper research by taking a look at a site’s top-linked or highest performing pages. 

Below is an example of how you could find a bunch of great keywords by looking at the Top Pages section inside of Ahrefs. 

 

To recap, the strategy here is to: 

1. Find a successful competitor of yours 2. Plug their site into a tool like Ahrefs 3. Take a look at their top pages and what keywords they are ranking for 

Press Releases Press releases have had an interesting history in SEO. They’ve had various benefits and there were always little hacks and tweaks to make the most out of them. 

However, what has stayed true about them over the years is their effectiveness in attracting journalists. Publish press releases, but keep them clear, concise, and interesting. 

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Infographic Links The range of infographic links you should earn your client can be from 10 to 50. This will all depend on the size of your client’s niche and how interesting the topic is. 

Also think about other industries that might find interest in the topic of your graphic. 

If our graphic is an animated illustration of how an automotive clutch works, we don’t have to limit ourselves to other car sites. For example, we could also reach out to mechanical engineering blogs. 

Blogger Outreach Bloggers are the backbones of links. So many great backlinks are out there waiting to be had by building great relationships with bloggers. 

The easiest way to start a positive relationship is by contributing a great guest post. Not an average one, but a great one! 

Bloggers are always receiving guest post requests. Knocking one out of the park is a great way to stand out and will increase your ability to get more links from said blogger in the future. 

Links From Your Base of Connections It’s easy to forget about the people you know and only seek new opportunities. 

Don’t! 

Your clients may donate to charities, sponsor events, or even have good relationships with product suppliers. 

Reach out to these organizations and pitch them on a link. Often enough, these organizations/companies would love the opportunity to show off a brand that supports them. 

Anchor Text and What to Link to Include your brand name in most of your links’ anchor text. 

As mentioned, a rough estimate to go by is 50-60% links to your home page, 30% content page links, and 10-20% money page links. 

The amount of money page links you get will vary. 

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Is your client an electric car company taking on Tesla? You’re going to have no problem getting plenty of money page links. 

Is your client a national waste removal service? Yeah, you’re not going to have as easy of a time. 

 

 

 

 

Local Clients  

 

Local clients! The backbone of the small business economy.  

Our strategies here are much less content-focused. Our goal is to position our client as the go-to resource for their services in the local area. 

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Content Plan ● Create a landing page for each location this business owns 

Location-Targeted Landing Pages Simply enough, our content strategy here will be to create landing pages for each location the business owns. 

A great example of this is pictured to the right. A popular driving school, Nextstreet, creates these kinds of pages for all of their locations. 

1. They rank like hotcakes. 2. They are mind-blowing tools 

for lead-generation. 3. Depending on the competition, 

they could bring results to your client’s business reasonably fast. 

Include the most important information on these pages, such as when you’re open, the address, phone number, detailed descriptions of your services, and more. 

Link Building Plan ● Continuously build local 

citations ● Email clients’ donors, suppliers, and other relations ● 1-5 blogger outreach links per month 

Citations, Citations, Citations As we’re not creating content and resources like other kinds of businesses, citations are a big part of our link building efforts. 

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Just like I mentioned in our section about national client citations, you’re really trying to go for those industry-specific, location-specific citations. 

In addition to those, there are a good amount of generic, but ever-so-important citation opportunities. 

You have to decide if this is something you’re going to do in-house or outsource to a reputable company. 

You have to account for the time, effort, and training you would need to invest in order to do in-house local citations. After that, compare the costs with reputable companies that specialize in citations. 

For most SEOs, it’s just not worth it. Companies that specialize in citations have gotten their services so fast, reliable, and cost-efficient. 

When you’re evaluating different solutions, remember to take a look at what we offer over at Fat Joe. What we offer is done 100% manually (meaning it’s performed by a human!) and we’re very transparent about the whole process. 

Email Your Client’s Current Relations This is the same kind of strategy we talked about in our chapter about national clients. 

A local business might have product suppliers, they may participate in community events, and they may donate to charity. 

Politely email these different organizations and see if they would be interested in showing off your brand as somebody who endorses them. 

Getting Links From Bloggers The most effective way to get links from bloggers is to either email bloggers that write about your local area or to participate in guest posting. 

You could leverage the name and experience of your client’s brand. A plumbing blog would value an article contributed from a company that’s actually in the trenches every day. 

Ecommerce  

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SEO is a big breadwinner for the ecommerce industry! A great job could make a huge difference to the client’s business. 

Content Plan ● Product titles and descriptions ● 2-4 blog posts ● 6 skyscraper articles per year ● 1 infographic per year 

Product Titles and Descriptions The first step is to really clean up the product titles and descriptions in the store. 

This is something that will typically need a lot of elbow grease when you begin your contract with the client. 

It helps to create an easy-to-follow checklist for your team members. Below is an example: 

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A basic checklist like this is fine for training your team members, however there’s an important quote I refer to any time I am systemizing anything: 

“What gets measured, gets managed” - Peter Drucker 

Sure, our team now knows exactly what to do for each product, but how do we know they didn’t skip a step? The answer is in the spreadsheet, my friend. 

Check out this incredibly powerful template I created in just about five minutes inside of Google Sheets: 

 

How cool is that? All we have to do is send over a shareable link to our spreadsheet and our team member can progress through all of the product pages and make the appropriate optimizations. 

Feel free to copy this template and make your own changes. Need to add your own action steps? Add a column for your target keyword? The sky’s the limit! 

Blog Posts Blogging for ecommerce really isn’t much different than for any other kind of business. 

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The main deviation is to ensure the topic you choose has some connection to the product you sell. 

Over the years, I have noticed Todoist, one of the most popular todo list applications has put a high priority on their content marketing efforts.  

These are the kinds of topics they discuss: 

 

They cover topics related to productivity, digital productivity (meaning, getting the most out of your software and apps), team management, and work-life balance. 

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All of these topics closely appeal to their target customer, which is somebody who wants to reduce stress and get more things done. 

Skyscraper Content We’ve covered the skyscraper strategy in detail earlier in this book. However, with ecommerce, we will make one alteration.  

With ecommerce, we will seek out proven topic ideas and will publish a new one every other month. 

This is done with the following steps: 

● Go to Ahrefs (or a similar tool) and plug in a large competitor’s website. ● Look at their top pages, sorted by backlinks. ● Once you have found a page that has a high number of dofollow backlinks, export 

all of the pages that are linking to it to a spreadsheet. ● Google the target keyword of your competitor’s page to find other pieces of 

content that rank. ● Export all of the dofollow backlinks and move them to that first spreadsheet you 

started. ● Filter out all of the low-quality links. ● If you are left with a high amount of good potential links, create the piece of 

content and promote it like usual. 

Infographics I recommend referring to the Infographics Section under the National Clients chapter for a clear explanation of our infographic strategy. 

Link Building Plan ● 10-30 blogger outreach links per month ● 2 press releases per year ● Email suppliers and clients ● Types of links 

○ Build links to your product category pages ○ Build links to your most popular products ○ Home page links should include branded anchor text 

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Blogger Outreach An opportunity that comes up with ecommerce businesses are sponsored posts where you have the ability to promote your product in some way, shape or form. 

● You could pay for an in-depth product review. ● You could pay for a promotional guest-posting opportunity, where you could 

teach their audience how to solve a problem using your product. ● You could open up an affiliate program and encourage bloggers to join and 

promote your products. 

Email Suppliers and Clients As covered earlier, there’s a great amount of opportunity in emailing the organizations your client works with for links. 

With ecommerce businesses, this typically means their product suppliers. 

Types of links Start out by linking to your product categories. It’s important that you have an SEO-friendly permalink structure for this to work. 

Here is a bad permalink structure: 

1. myshop.com/category/hats ← Category page 2. myshop.com/red-baseball-cap ← Product page 

In contrast, here’s a much better structure: 

3. myshop.com/category/hats ← Category page 4. myshop.com/category/hats/red-baseball-cap ← Product page 

While you’re at it, set up breadcrumbs for that extra bit of structure. 

When you’re getting links to your category pages, you’re going to want them to pass down link juice to your product pages. This is done through proper structure. 

That is impossible with a permalink structure where your category and product pages are completely unrelated. 

You’re also going to want to build links to your most popular products as well as your home page. 

Home page links should always include the name of your brand. 

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Super Competitive Industry Clients  

 

Last but not least, it’s time to cover a plan for clients in ultra-competitive industries. 

Content Plan ● 4-8 blog posts per month ● 1 skyscraper post per month ● 2 infographics per year ● 2 press releases per month 

Where This Content Strategy Differs Compared to the other methods, we are upping our amount of content creation. 

In addition, our promotional efforts will be increased at an even higher rate. 

With less competitive industries, there are times you could get away with not have a stellar backlink profile. In the ultra-competitive world, the story is completely different. 

   

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Link Building Plan ● 20-40 blogger outreach links per month ● 2 press releases per month ● Email suppliers, charities, and other relations of the client ● Infographic outreach 

Blogger Outreach The main component of our strategy will be to build relationships with bloggers and aim to score 20-40 links per month. 

Infographics The two infographic campaigns you send every year should be quite large. You’re aiming to get a lot of attention and links through these campaigns. 

Refer to our Infograhphic Links Plan for more information. 

Closing Notes We have covered a lot of ground in this eBook! 

If you are interested in working with us to create your very own, seamless link building systems, we offer the following: 

● Blogger Outreach ● Local Business Citations ● Press Release Distribution ● Infographic Outreach ● Infographic Design ● Content Writing ● ...and just now we’re offering a beta service for Media Placements 

Happy link building! 

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