I revamped my agency's link building system

Yesterday was the longest, most boring day of work I’ve had in a minute.

I spent the entire day on one task.

A spreadsheet titled “Link Strategy - {brand name}.”

We’ve been building some great links the last few weeks, and nearly every single one of our brands continues to grow month over month.

But I kept running into three main issues.

The first, my team seemed to randomly build links to any page on our client’s site.

While this does look more natural, it’s not the most effective way to scale.

You want links to point directly to your most important pages — that’s how you climb the rankings more quickly.

Second, my team either built branded anchors (good) or anchors that had very little context (bad).

Sure, some of the anchors may look more natural because they don’t include keywords.

BUT I want to use a blend of keyword anchors because they’re balanced out by the branded anchors.

Three, my team seemed to choose guest post topics at random.

Now, I keep saying “my team” because that’s who builds the links. But I’m the Founder, so the buck stops with me.

The point is, I realized that our link building needed more standardization.

And more importantly, it needed to be better.

You already know my 5-step QA system for evaluating backlinks.

But I wasn’t pleased with the target URL or anchor text selection.

So I started scheming.

I mocked up a template in my head the other day on a walk, then translated it into a spreadsheet.

Then made copies of that spreadsheet for every single brand we work with, and populated it with the relevant details.

The template is fairly straightforward, it just took time to fill in the details and customize it for each brand.

I won’t share it directly, but here’s what it contains:

Priority pages: a list of 5-10 of the most important pages on their website, listed in order of importance. These are the specific URLs, and most of them are collection pages.

Acceptable anchors: for every single priority page, I listed 10-20 acceptable anchors that apply specifically to the corresponding page. I used a blend of GSC & Semrush data to collect these, and most of them are a combination of {brand name} + {near match keyword}.

Pre-approved guest post topics: also for every single priority page, I listed 8 acceptable guest post topics that ALSO apply specifically to the corresponding page. To identify these, I searched the target keyword for that page, copied the People Also Ask questions from the SERP, pasted them into ChatGPT, and asked it to give me 4 more similar FAQs. This left with me 8 highly relevant (to the target page) guest posts.

I prefer link insertions, but I have to game plan for guest posts too.

Speaking of game planning, our guest post topics have been subpar, so needed to fix that too.

So I added these instructions:

These guest post topics are pre-approved, BUT they will not always be relevant or applicable to the site we are trying to host the guest post on. IF that is the case, and these guest posts would not make any sense in the context of the guest post site, follow these instructions:

Open ChatGPT and enter this prompt: "Based on what you know about {insert guest post site URL here}, please suggest 5 guest post topics that would contextually align with the rest of their existing posts and also could make some connection to {your-website}."

Choose one, then enter that title into Cuppa.

Then, and most importantly, use one of the acceptable anchors + priority page combinations.

Alternative pages: If in the event that my team identifies a great link opportunity, BUT some combination of the priority pages and/or acceptable anchors won’t work for that particular link, my team can build a link to one of the alternative pages.

I did not list acceptable anchors for the alternative pages, though I instructed my team to build these as branded anchors because publishers are (in my experience) very likely to accept a branded anchor as long as you add value to the post.

BUT in the off chance that a publisher is not willing to do so, I also added these instructions:

Open ChatGPT, paste the entire article that you want to use for a link insertion into ChatGPT.

Hit 'Ctrl + Enter,' then paste this prompt: “Read through this article, then suggest anchor text that I could use to link to one of the following articles. Please take the liberty of editing 1-2 sentences in order to suggest helpful anchor text. Wherever you make edits, please denote them in the copy by adding the text: "EDIT STARTS HERE" before the edit and "EDIT ENDS HERE," and placing parentheses around the suggested anchor text.

Hit 'Ctrl+Enter'

{paste all alternative URLs here}

Hit enter, then use that information to inform the link insertion.

This should cover the rest of the gaps on anchor text.

There’s a ton of nuance in link building, but I believe that this improved system will eliminate most of it.

I’ve also added this to our onboarding process, so now I’ll have a document built for every new brand we bring on.

Always improving.

Have a good weekend.

Kai