Enterprise Link Building
Besides the notable difference in size, structure, scope, and focus area, enterprise-level websites have to take a different approach to link building.
Large brands often have several advantages over small businesses, like name recognition, outreach, a substantially larger budget, and other resources at their disposal.
If you’re looking for link building at the enterprise-level scale, why not use the size of your enterprise to your advantage?
In this guide, we’ll go over enterprise link building, what works, and what doesn’t, as well as what crucial factors you need to implement in your link building campaign to get more links.
What is enterprise link building?
While smaller websites often struggle to generate links to their home pages, enterprise websites like McDonald’s and Caterpillar have no shortage of links. However, they require deep links to key product verticals and solutions that would help drive the prospects through the sales cycles.
As such, enterprise-level companies face unique challenges in terms of link acquisition due to their size, complexity, brand equity, and bureaucracy. Enterprise link building is a set of strategies specifically designed for promoting large and complex websites.
Enterprise websites, in addition to being massive, multi-section entities, usually come with several built-in features, such as:
- Brand equity
- Content
- Positive reputation
- An international presence
- Strong relationships with partners
4 proven enterprise link building strategies
The largest difference between smaller entities and enterprises lies in how link-building campaigns are conducted and structured for each entity. While each individual campaign requires a customized strategy, there are specific link-building tactics that are particularly beneficial for large brands.
Unlinked brand mentions
Established brands are mentioned online more frequently because they’ve built brand awareness, which naturally leads to more link opportunities. However, finding these brand mentions is only half of the link acquisition. You need quality outreach to successfully acquire and build links towards your enterprise. Everyone requires a different and personalized outreach, so it pays to be polite and build positive relationships.
Broken link building
Large, enterprise-level websites are usually older, well-established sites that have changed to keep up with the current web trends. As a result, there’s a significant chance that these websites contain links pointing to pages and products that no longer exist, creating a 404 error.
Broken links leading to dead competitor pages represent a fantastic opportunity for your enterprise link-building campaign. If your brand’s offering a similar product or service, you can reach out to webmasters of those linking sites and suggest replacing broken links with ones that lead to your enterprise’s page.
Content promotion
Any link-building campaign should include content promotion, which is especially beneficial for larger enterprises. These entities often have the monetary means to invest in content creation and often have a content marketing plan.
Creating content naturally generates link opportunities, but content marketing shouldn’t replace link building, which involves manual promotion and effort. Instead, one should complement the other within an effective online marketing strategy.
Link builders should be involved in content strategy, not just content marketing. While it’s feasible to promote material for links after it has been created or developed, it’s much easier to earn a great number of links if an SEO guides the creation process.
Community engagement
Community engagements are a fantastic way to secure links through various social events big brands might be associated with. The perfect examples of community engagement include:
- Partnerships
- Sponsorships and scholarships
- Interviews
- Industry round-ups and other social events
- Contests and giveaways
These community engagement activities offer many linking opportunities; approaching them with a linking mindset could propel an SEO campaign. Mentions are a viable strategy, as they already have links you can use, but community engagement allows link builders to create more link-building opportunities. Furthermore, these types of links offer more than just SEO value, given that they actually support the brand and reputation building.
Enterprise link building best practices
Here are some of the best enterprise link building practices you should consider implementing into your link building strategy:
Focus on relevance
While people usually focus on domain authority (DA) of high-authority links, relevance is key. In fact, relevancy is crucial to search engines, much more than DA metrics of specific websites.
High DA metrics are fantastic, but they’re pointless if they’re irrelevant to your brand. Instead, focus more on relevant links, even if their DA metrics are mediocre. The answer is simple: Volume. There are so many of them, and they’re easier to secure link placements. Relevant, high-quality links times volume, over time, is the best possible formula that will get your pages ranked on Google Search, thus increasing your organic traffic.
Avoid fluffy content
Most enterprise blogs include an unsorted mixture of generic articles centered on a specific topic. To avoid creating fluffy content, you should focus on creating smaller articles for your digital marketing platform, be it a blog or social media. Since customers usually don’t like sifting through walls of text while searching for specifics, these articles should range anywhere from 500 to 1000 words, targeting a specific keyword.
However, every 10 smaller articles should tie and interlink to a thematically related cornerstone article. Cornerstone articles should be approximately five to 10 times the size of the smaller articles and target a major keyword in your niche through quality content.
For example, smaller 1,000-word articles targeting daytime skincare products and nighttime skincare products, respectively, should tie into a 4,000-word article focused on best skincare products.
List to category pages
Besides considering how many deep-page links your page or blog might have, search engines also consider thematic relevance and trustworthiness of your brand. In addition to acquiring links suitable for deep linking towards your specific products or services, it’s crucial to generate DA with strong category pages.
Let’s take cosmetics as an example again. If you want to rank for “anti-aging night facial cream”, you might be tempted to build links to your Anti-aging Night Facial Cream page. However, the search engine results page (SERP) analysis of such links usually shows that those URLs have fewer backlinks.
In contrast, link-building to a higher search category, like “anti-aging cream,” usually gives higher SERP metrics for backlinking, which increases your DA with strong category pages. This will help you establish more relevance and trustworthiness, helping the Google algorithm to rank your home and deep-linked pages higher in search results.
Why it’s important for enterprise companies to build links
Strong link-building practices are important due to Google strengthening its algorithmic filters to count only valuable links. This is especially important since they are incorporated Penguin 4.0, which filters out spam and irrelevant or fluffy content from search results.Here’s why building links is important to your or your client’s business:
Building a brand
Building links helps you build a brand by associating your enterprise with other authoritative brands and entities in your niche. For example, getting featured by an A-list news site is a fantastic way to make the most of the links you’re building while also establishing authority in your field.
Gain traffic
Building links helps you gain traffic. For example, ranked webpages get constant traffic. As a result, they continuously send traffic to the pages they link to. The same can be said for authentic reviews from customers and bloggers, which improve your website’s overall rankings in organic search. Additionally, positive feedback from social media platforms and influencers will also help generate more traffic.
Increase trust and authority
Acquiring links from highly credible and authoritative sites that both Google and users see as trustworthy will help you increase the brand’s trust and authority. To do that, your enterprise SEO strategy needs topically relevant assets, at least to a degree that other high-authority websites would want to use your content as a reference or resource.
Increase rankings
Building a brand, gaining more traffic, and increasing trust and authority through building links will inevitably boost your enterprise’s rankings on Google or other search engines.
Summary
Going after every possible link that seems accessible isn’t a viable method to acquire links for your enterprise. Instead, it would help if you prioritized developing a good link-building strategy by focusing on a multi-faceted approach. This includes creating content for the niche-specific target audience, collaborating with bloggers and influencers, and conducting great SEO optimization of your enterprise’s website.
If you want to learn more, check out Stellar SEO’s comprehensive guide on link building, or schedule a free consultation.
Stellar SEO is a well-established agency specializing in content marketing, link building, and SEO for law firms.
