Building links – the act of getting other websites to link to yours in order to increase search engine visibility and get referral traffic – can generally fall into two methodologies:
- Outreach based link building. This involves contacting people to try and get a link from their website. It can be achieved through offering them an article, soundbyte, original data or (look away now Google employees) money.
- Organic link building. This is when an author from the site you are going to get a link from finds your content themselves. Then they cite it in their article, linking back to you in the process.
PPC – in particular Google Search Ads – can be a useful tool for organic link building. The high-level process for using Google Ads to build links runs as follows:
- Find keywords with “linking intent”.
- Create a landing page that heroes whatever you want to get linked.
- State in your ad copy that you have exactly what a potential linker is looking for.
- Optimise based on why your page is being linked.
I’ll now break down each of these steps in more detail.
1. Finding and Bidding On Keywords with “Link Intent”
As PPC marketers, we are used to bidding on keywords that have “buyer intent.” These are the kind of phrases people search for when they want to buy something.
If you’re using Google Ads for building links then you need to stop focussing on keywords that have buyer intent. Instead you should focus on keywords with “linking intent”.
A “link intent” keyword is one someone would search if, for example, they were researching an article and wanted to find a stat, chart or quote to add proof or legitimacy to whatever they were writing.
By far the highest volume link intent keyword in almost any industry is: “[most commonly used word to describe your industry] statistics”.
If we wanted to try building links using PPC for PPC Hero we would be targeting keywords like:
“advertising statistics”
“digital marketing statistics”
“marketing statistics”
“Google Ads statistics”
“pay per click statistics”
There are two things to note here:
- Since these keywords do not lead to traditional “conversions” (ie people buying stuff), their cost per click is relatively low. This means that you can have a low conversion rate and still build links more profitably than with outreach.
- The more specific keywords (in this case “pay per click statistics”) may not have enough search volume to run Google Ads against. You have the best chance of success going for the highest volume terms in your industry (or even your broader industry), even if this means your conversion rate is slightly lower.
There are a few variations on the “statistics” keyword pattern that have link intent. The most common of these are:
- [current year] [industry] statistics
- [industry] statistics [country]
- Latest statistics on [industry]
I’d therefore recommend using phrase match keywords to begin with, just to see what works for your specific industry. You can then optimise this once you see what keywords lead to links.
2. Create A Landing Page That Heroes What You Want to Get Linked
Now we know what ads we want to bid on, the next step is to create your landing page.
Unlike with sales focussed PPC advertising, we don’t want to create an individual landing page for each keyword.
Unlike with sales focussed PPC advertising, we don’t want to create an individual landing page for each keyword.
You then do the following:
- Google the keyword that you are targeting with your ad campaign (for this example I will use “PPC statistics”
2. Take the top three results and stick them into Ahrefs site explorer and then go onto the Anchor report.
This tells us the exact text authors use when linking to this page. It gives us the starting point of what specific information is “triggering” the link.
From this report alone, we can see that:
- People writing about PPC want to cite information about the ROI of PPC. We know this because the anchor text “$8 for every $1.60 spent” is used repeatedly
- People writing about PPC want to cite information about the number of companies that use PPC. We can see this in that “65% of SMBrun some kind of digital advertising campaign” has been cited several times.
- For the anchors that are just numbers, we can click through to them and see the context they have been used. You can see below what comes up if we click the “80%” anchor text:
This “80%” citation refers to the fact that 80% of companies who use PPC prefer to use Google Ads over other platforms.
Again, this tells us that people writing about PPC want data about what platforms are being used.
Once you have conducted this analysis with all the top three ranking pages for “PPC statistics” you should notice that:
- The Pareto Principle very much applies to what specific statistics get cited. In other words 80% of the links come from 20% of the specific statistics. For “PPC statistics” the ROI of PPC, the number of companies that use PPC and the amount that online advertising can increase brand awareness is responsible for around 80% of links.
- It should be fairly easy to categorise the different statistics. With “PPC statistics” we can categorise the different stats into:
- PPC market size (stats around the number of companies that use PPC)
- PPC benefits (stats around the ROI of using PPC)
- Platform specific stats (what’s the most popular platform for paid ads)
- Consumer opinion on online ads (how many people click on ads)
This is all the information we need to create our landing page.
Your landing page should be structured as follows:
Headline: [Number] [X statistics] [Year]. Having the exact keyword in your headline should increase your ad’s quality score and having the year tells the potential linker that your stats are up to date
Three most cited statistics in a bulleted list – In all honesty, you can get away with just copying this from what’s already ranking on Google. Bury your sources at the bottom of the page so it’s easier to link to you than to the original source. If you can create original data around this,that can improve your conversion rate. It should mean you need fewer links to rank the page organically (which is our end goal here)
An embeddable graphic that presents some of the most linkable data in a visual way. Most outlets require images in their articles. Creating an embeddable image gives an author an easy excuse to cite your article. You can also use Google’s reverse image search to find people who have used your image and ask to credit your image with a link.
A table of contents with your different categories as jumplinks: Again, we want to make the specific data points that authors want as easy to find as possible
Put your different categories as an H2 and then list the specific stats as bullet points: Each statistic needs to be so specific that a writer can just copy and paste it into their article. “For example 82% of SMB’s use Google Adwords” is far more soundbytable than “most companies use some form of paid advertising”. Specificity is king.
Put all your sources at the bottom of the page: Cite your sources, but make it easier for a writer to just link to your page rather than trawl through your page to find original sources. You’re not breaking any intellectual property laws here – everybody does this.
3. State in Your Ad Copy You Have Exactly What A Potential Linker is Looking For
Your ad copy should have the following format:
Headline: [Exact keyword] | Original Data on [topic] [Year]
Description: Includes the latest figures on [most linked to topic], [2nd most linked to topic] & [3rd most linked to topic] as well as data visualisations of these statistics.
Sitelinks: Add sitelinks to the H2s in your articles. You can do this by putting url.com/#H2’s title as your site link.
So for “PPC statistics” your ad copy should read something like:
Headline: PPC Statistics | Original data on PPC Advertising 2024
Description: Includes the latest statistics on PPC’s market size, the ROI of PPC, as well as what the most popular and powerful platforms are for PPC
Sitelinks:
PPC Market size: Learn about how many companies use PPC
PPC ROI: The latest figures on ROAS for different industries
PPC Platforms: Figures on different advertising platforms
PPC Outlook: Consumer opinion on digital advertising
A big rule here is to not put your brand name in your ad. You are marketing your data, not your company.
4. Optimising Based on the Reason To Link to You
Now we have our initial ad(s) set up, we want to optimise them so we can build links as cheaply as possible.
We do this by looking at why we are being linked to, and then adjusting our keyword selection, ad copy and landing page to hero these specific pieces of data.
Again, you will need a backlink checking tool to do this (and again, I recommend Ahrefs).
Once your ad has had around 500 clicks (this is what I tend to find is the minimum to get enough links that you can get significant data on what specific pieces of information are being linked to), you then go back to the anchor report for your piece and look at what pieces of information are getting linked to.
There are then three ways that you can optimise your ad:
- Change the keywords you are targeting: Let’s say that 90% of your links are coming from data around the number of companies that use PPC. You can then try targeting the keyword “how many companies use PPC”. Admittedly, there’s a good chance that these specific questions won’t have enough search volume for Google to show an Ad for it, but if you can find one with enough search volume then your conversion rate will go up dramatically.
- Change your ad copy: State in your ad copy that you have specific statistics on whatever piece of data is triggering the most links. You can even put the exact statistic in the ad description itself, making the ad almost look more like a featured snippet than an advert.
- Change your landing page: Simply push whatever stats are triggering the link to the top of the page. Your most linked to stats should always be above the fold. The idea here is that the writer clicks the ad, sees exactly what they need, links and then gets on with finishing their piece.
Summing Up
One of the lowest effort ways of building links to your website is to rank for “[industry] statistics” keywords with a page that contains specific pieces of data in your industry.
You build links this way by writers searching for “x statistics” when researching their article, finding a specific piece of data on your ranking page, and then citing that data with a link.
If your website does not have the authority to rank organically for these keywords, then you can use Google Ads to buy your way to the top of Google for them.
Since these keywords do not have commercial intent, they often have relatively low CPCs, allowing you to build links to your website more cheaply than through outreach.
Once your page has enough links, it could then rank organically, allowing you to build links even more cheaply in the future.
