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Crowdsourced link building is one of the underutilized SEO techniques in the marketing industry. Some professionals may see this as time consuming because it involves the ideation of a group of people taking up a project to generate backlinks. The effectiveness of crowdsourcing in link reclamation is thrilling because it improves a company’s visibility to rank high on any search engine.
Crowdsourced link building is the most fantastic way to solve a problem, having a community of knowledgeable like-minds at your beck and call to help through your ideation processes to your marketing buzz to drive organic traffic. According to Statista in April 2021 the percentage of crowdsourced restaurant reviews in the US and UK is 41 % and 22% respectively from the previous year.
Although you can’t rule out the fact that there are limitations surrounding this link building strategy, however, if implemented properly it can be a powerful tool for building external links and internal links. This post explains the benefit of crowdsourced link building, its impact on link building, and the various techniques involved in website marketing buzz through link building.
Table of Contents
What is Crowdsourcing?
I would say, crowdsourcing involves building relationships while seeking knowledgeable ideas and services from a community. This group of people comprises innovators and co-creators that help to influence the progress of your business from the starting point, up to the end result. Big brands like Samsung and Coca-Cola use crowdsourcing to ignite new product ideation. For example, Samsung can take to their social media and discuss a new Samsung model while they take advantage of ideas on the relayed model to boost their productivity for subsequent prototypes.
Crowdsource link building, therefore, involves the use of forums, social media channels, or other platforms in building backlinks to rank on search engines. This can be done through blog post content, sharing content on social platforms, etc. The fascinating part is that most content marketers are not aware of this innovative strategy, which is why you must take advantage of this to create high quality backlinks and increase your visibility.
Benefits of Crowdsourced Link Building
You can build high quality links just by connecting with a community of business partners, thinkers, and clients who are committed to creating new ideas for your business growth. This innovative link building strategy helps you cut down costs while testing the techniques.
Build Quality Links Easily
Crowdsourced link building is the fastest route to build backlinks for your website. Most website owners jump on this technique as a medium to build links that will increase their website rankings. Taking up a task by a community can improve your link building effort to create quality links easily. You can easily connect with bloggers, influencers, or people interested in joining your campaign.
Cost Effectiveness
Crowdsourced link building is the best approach for businesses starting out as they are able to manage costs while building backlink. By providing value and engaging content, you can easily build a good website. For instance, an e-commerce website can embark on a hashtag campaign to create awareness simply by asking forum participants to tag and share. There is no need to hire an expensive consultant or agency to build links when you have a group of experts intersecting with your niche.
It Solves Tough Problems
Imagine trying to combat a sales funnel strategy with a team of experts compared to doing that alone; amazing right? No wonder they say two heads are better than one. Leveraging crowdsource link building with the help you triumph over any problem encountered because your company can gain access to thousands of professionals in your niche, who are able to contribute to solving any problem by thinking out-of-the-box solutions.
Unexpected ideas can be mind-blowing coming from individuals with unique experience, and terrific diversity of thinking. Invite participants key into a problem-solving exercise, that way your link building campaign utilizes SEO efforts it wouldn’t have achieved.
It Generates Traffic and Increases Brand Awareness
Being part of this team of professionals will improve your domain authority, and organic engagement because a lot of prospects will have eyes on your website page. Site owners embark on this content marketing scheme to enable greater outreach and create the awareness needed for link reclamation. This will generate amazing leads for your website because of an increase in the inflow of traffic on your website.
Increases Digital Marketing Schemes
Rather than rely on the traditional method of link building strategies to solve pressing issues. Crowdsourcing can help you build a network that will help in the link reclamation process, and link pointing for search engine rankings. For example, a marketing buzz competition can be initiated by a restaurant for fans to suggest the best Burger recipe and give ideas on which taste suits their preference.
Builds Reputable Backlink Profile
Internal linking from relevant forum can boost your backlink profile performance by ranking on Google search engine result pages. This is an advantage as it enables you to outrank your competitors in the industry. A lot of attention is drawn to your page through external link to increase engagement.
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Challenges of Crowdsourced Link Building
It would be unfair if we don’t discuss the challenges surrounding crowdsource link building tactics, as long as there is all good stuff there are also technical lapses in this strategy. However, you have to prepare your mind for the variable factors that might be tough when carrying out crowdsourced link building strategies.
Less Managerial control over the Strategy
We already talked about the fact that crowdsourced link building involves a forum effort in building internal links for organic traffic. While this is beneficial for creating high quality links, activities carried out by these participants can be challenging to control. Making sure that the links that are created are of high quality can be a tedious task because people in the community may create low quality links, broken links, lost links, or links that don’t meet SEO requirements.
To avoid this you must specify the type of links you’d prefer for your business. Although this can take a lot of time, you need to acquire managerial project skills to enable you to have a little control over your preference.
Inconsistency in Results
Indeed crowdsourced link building ideation results are a no-brainer technique in building valuable links, but sometimes there may be lows in results due to improper value proposition. Stating out how you intend to create backlinks and what crowdsourced tasks are obtainable in achieving these results. The idea may be powerful but the implementation process may affect the desired outcome of the exercise.
Risk of Confidentiality
While you crowdsource for backlinks, it can be difficult to share sensitive business data while solving a problem such as broken link building or link schemes. This can create loopholes in your business as people get to know your company’s deficiencies.
Techniques Used to Boost Crowdsourced Link Building
There are various practices used to boost your own website to enable search engine to rank your resource pages. It doesn’t end at building high quality sites, you need to drive traffic through engagement to increase your website authority and rating. Crowdsourced backlinks can range from creating content, infographic backlink, building broken backlinks, Google images, link juice, etc. You need to understand and carry out the best techniques that suit your brands for optimum results.
Leverage on social media
You can simply draft out a contest or competition on your website or social channels for participants to engage with others to build links. You can simply achieve this by asking fans, and clients to share blog comments, and blog posts back to your website for traffic. This helps you interact seamlessly with people, learning more and taking note of their suggestions. To achieve this you need to follow these steps:
- Build a social media channel linking back to your website.
- Create engaging content that will compel readers.
- Outreach for social shares and comments.
- Promote challenges with rewards for linking.
Find the Right Local Forum
It is easy to boost your own site visibility just by connecting with the right people. It is important to search for local website forums that are related to your industries and participate in any task given. This will help you build a relationship with experts to build a credible website, to find the right forum for the link reclamation process you must:
- Search for related forums in your niche, for example, a blockchain company will search for cryptocurrency-related resources that discuss the concept.
- Reach out to influencers/bloggers and website owners in your industry.
- Interact and post on forums and message boards to find the perfect directories.
Measure the Website Forum Metrics
This will impact your website rankings in a great way. A forum with a high domain rating will push your website to rank appropriately. For example, a high domain such as Education websites or Wikipedia can improve your website presence. There are tools used to analyze the amount of traffic a website generates, such as SimilarWeb. Before you join any forum for crowdsourcing make sure to check the following:
- The rate of traffic should be at least about 30,000 visitors per month.
- Measure SEO metrics such as DR(domain rating), TF(trustworthiness), CF, and PA(page website).
- Check if the forum has moderation in reviewing content to avoid plagiarism or low quality link spam.
Check forum Links types
Nofollow links and dofollow links are important when choosing a forum, A combination of these links can be a natural way for building links. Search engine see “nofollow” as a hint that has the potential to rank depending on infographic backlink, anchor text, and referring domain. This will help you follow Google’s SEO white hat strategy and broken internal links, and avoid dead or lost links. There are other types of links to check such as inbound links, internal links, etc.
Conclusion
Crowdsourced link building is among the few links strategy used to build a website. SEO marketers need to take part in this activity to build an incredible website that ranks effortlessly. Website owners need to research forums and find people who are interested in specific niches to expose their websites to a wider audience. To achieve this overall, you need to plan strategically on compelling tasks that would engage and drive traffic while building links.
