The Future of Link Building: Sustainable Strategies for 2025

[Music] the future of Link building sustainable strategies for 2025 by Peter me he's the head of SEO at bring performance Peter thanks for joining the conference today thank you all that said hey you know why going see it up T go ahead and take it away so my talk today is the future of Link building sustainable strategies for 2025 link building is back in style baby I guess the question is that did it ever really go out of style well yes it did According to some maybe some people never gave up on it but some people did get scared off uh I know a lot of clients did but we do know that there is uh with link building there are certain risks that get carried with it I mean pretty fair to say that if I'm RIS receiving link offers here in my inbox

for $5 for a DA 92 link I'm not so sure whether I'm going to take that offer but uh yes we do need links um but we want these links sustainably and so the sustainable strategy for 20125 is integrated digital PR so just diving a little bit more about me P made I've been a long time advocate and supporter of the SEO Community getting involved in lots of um Comm Community uh events meetups here in Melbourne the Melbourne SEO meetup groups in general I'm just an old school SEO guy I'm passionate about ideas and I just want to share my experience and so what would have process well I'm breaking this down into sort of four main areas the research and strategy and development content creation optimization Outreach and amplification analysis and integration so let's go to the first bit of this which is the uh research and strategy development so here's where

we're defining the goals aligning them with the audience's needs and behaviors so I think there's there's a fair bit here but I've been thinking about this stuff personas all the sort of content marketing side of things which is typically outside of the Realms of the SEO approach but it's definitely definitely worth it to go through that process of understanding who are the personas who are are the who are you who is your audience who are your potential customers pick pick existing customer and work through that and I mean there's some tools here there's a link here you can go through to the hopspot there's plenty of ways of doing this sort of thing but the more research the better results you're going to see the next stage here is the uh developing content that's optimized for search highly sharable and aligns with the pr goals so this is the content development side of things there's plenty of ways of doing this SE ranking has a a great content marketing section in their tools uh Surfer has a you know also has the NLP

stuff to the NLP options I mean you know these tools are always helpful they're great at the end of the day though you know some of our uh some of our people are just using word docs they're just writing articles because they're not don't want to get too hung up on the SEO side of the article Outreach is you know this can this can go wrong but we want to Leverage The Outreach to earn the bank links media coverage and social engagement it's not just about getting the links it's the media coverage the social engagement the amplification there's plenty of ways there's plenty of tools for doing this help a reporter out of course they're going away getting shut down I think cision owns them but cision's a bit more of an expensive Tool uh there's plenty of other tools you can use uh even things like LinkedIn self Navigator Twitter just get on to Twitter and search for people often their contact details are there it the and also old school go to Google get a Google sheet and just start collecting details start small rather than just s

of rather than plowing in so the fourth step here is to measure the performance and refine the strategies based on the data and the insights we want to improve we want things we want to look at how well did we do what worked and you know that this going back to this client again and uh looking into to the results over the last seven days for our client we can see we had 73 new referring domains in the last s days this is so uh there's a backlink checker in SE ranking which is really good but you need to decide what the metrics are that are important to you for your you know some people go by Dr some people think dr's a load of not important anch text follow no follow I think relevance to me relevance is the biggest most important metric uh also I want to some referral traffic from some of these links um I just think if you're going to get a link just for the sake of the Dr it's on its own it's not enough it doesn't make that much sense yeah there's all kinds of metrics that you need to figure out what

it is for you that you consider it to be quality and the other really important thing here is is the team this is so this kind of project I'm talking about obviously there's a fair few people in the team here but when we're talking about you know you might take this on as a smaller business perhaps um you might only have a few people in your team so you might split up some of these roles like some of the SEO tasks there might be one person doing them uh you might have you know content creator and a a writer might be the same person this kind of a thing whatever you decide to do the takeaways here is I think it's important to remember that Google is in the business of dishing out penalties you know if you've sort of seen anything that's been going on lately in the SEO world you can see that Google goes after the biggest you know biggest and the best it's not shy just think of is what

I think is important but spend time on the research and the strategy create the highest quality content you can because that will help you to attract links the links will come much easier avoid the Outreach spam you want to make sure that your domain doesn't end up on some kind of a MX Blacklist or you know your your emails are all going in the spam folder iterate and analyze and iterate on the kinds of things that work and uh build your team so it takes a lot of effort but above all enjoy the process it's a lot of fun I'm happy to keep the conversation going let there be content and links thank you thank you very much Peter we got a number of questions already up for you uh andreww said Peter as Google is increasingly emphasizing user content and entity-based search uh how do you see link building evolving to prioritize meaningful connections over traditional metrics like domain Authority which you were already talking about but that meaningful F focus is the

relevancy what what would you say to Andrew there yeah thanks Andrew for that question I think definitely uh Andrew would best approach would be double down on all of the of of the as said I had to sort of trif factor there where it's the it's the it's the the digital PR and promotion it's the content development but it's also the technical SEO and I think for me what I'm really saying to people is work on all aspects of that absolutely absolutely Ethan Wallace has a question uh Ethan actually said thanks hey a with AI generated content flooding the web how should seos adapt their Outreach tactics and ensure they're actually building quality links yeah great Ean yeah I mean it absolutely some of those numbers like 96.5% of content never gets any traffic and just yeah some crazy numbers um you're absolutely right AI generated

content is flooding the web now of course we know that we know that this can work and there's plenty of people who have made the you know just using all kinds of programmatic SEO approaches and and winning and doing well and that's off to them it's it's great but if your what I would say really would be the underlying approach here would be to work on the building PR we want to be promoting the brand so that at the end of the day we want you know Google loves Brands Google's kind of got a special place in their heart for Brands and so we want to win the heart of Google by by promoting the brand so I'd be thinking you know the long game would be to to sort of use that content marketing use that digital PR and work on getting that brand exposure in front of people alongside the link you know and getting branded links and that kind of thing excellent and uh you spoke about the knowledge graph last year there was kind of an explosion like a 33% growth of the

knowledge graph Data Vault where it also opened up Brands to a great deal as well as other types of contributors so that co- citation type of references the the different brand references are being valued even more in the the knowledge graph space would you agree oh yeah yeah absolutely um even to the point of um you know help it along a little bit with your entity and your e and do some schemer and help it along and you can get some good results absolutely another question from uh Natalie Ford to finish this off how do you envision local SEO link building changing in 2025 as search engine results become more personalized and location focused Maybe one one little takeaway would be you know uh if you're a local business in your local neighborhood uh maybe get involved in a local charity and you know sponsor them and and do something and get a link that way this stuff still works right but pick if you're going to go and I mean directory uh things like your your

citations are still still really good thing to do but get onto the quality directories vet them don't get onto any spammy looking D I mean the the the last thing you should do is be doing bulk directory submissions I'd be just picking out you know a good maybe dozen of good quality directories to be submitting your nap and your name address phone number and really but work on your obviously we're talking about Google business profile here of course there's the Bing uh places but what when we talk about the Google business profile work on optimizing that as the center of that you know the descriptions the services the photos update it with posts keep it current uh make sure you're interacting with people who are leaving reviews and uh so yeah there's a there's a whole strategy right there but certainly local link building is not going away um but just again don't be spammy well Peter has been a pleasure listening to you and thank you so much for sharing what you sh at 2: am in the

morning we certainly are you kicking off this presentation this conference today so thanks so much and everybody follow Peter on social and uh your deck is going to be shared after the uh program as well so thank you so much for your time today thanks Aaron