I was at a recent client meeting for a new project and we were brainstorming ideas. After considering all kinds of wacky schemes, plots, techniques and tactics we came up with what is, in essence, a very simple linkbuilding technique. In the interests of openess I wanted to share it with you, I'm just nice like that. :-)

This idea works best when you are working in an industry where the value of the items that you are selling is high, and the object is somewhat unusual, distinctive or customised. Examples of businesses which might fit this category:

• Antiques dealers
• Bespoke interior decorators
• Painters
• Bespoke aquarium builders
• Photographers
• Landscape gardners

If your site is within one of these niches then the basic premise is as follows:

"When your clients have purchased something from you which is unusual or distinctive they are often happy to link back to you. This is especially true for high-value items."

A Real Life Example

Disclaimer: Distilled built and designed the Aquarium Architecture website but we are not involved in their SEO. The below is an illustrative example. Also, I love aquariums so it's a win-win :-)

Those of you who are paying attention will notice that I carefully slipped "bespoke aquarium builders" into the list above. The reason being that Aquarium Architecture are just such a company - they design and build bespoke high-value, custom-install aquariums. To give you a flavour of what I'm talking about:

Pretty aren't they?

Anyway - while you're all drooling over the nice pretty fish I'm going to talk about how they can get links out of the work they do. The website doesn't have prices on but you can imagine the kind of money you need to get one of these aquariums. So the buying process is often a long and involved affair where clients will want to ensure every little detail is correct. Because of the intimate relationship which Aquarium Architecture have with their clients it should simple to build into their process at some point, asking for a link to their site. Obviously, this isn't going to be applicable for all clients (the above image was taken from an installation in a professional footballer's house, and he doesn't even have his own website) but they do a reasonable amount of business with Pubs, Hotels and the like. These businesses DO have websites and would provide valuable links.

Remember To Add Value

When building a link building campaign however you should always remember that you'll get more links if you can add value to the linker. Therefore I don't suggest that Aquarium Architecture simply ask for a link. Instead, I'd recommend that as part of the process a case study is built on the site for each new client which shows off photos of the aquarium along with making-of shots and/or design sketches. They've already done this to a limited extent as you can see here:

So now, not only do Aquarium Architecture have a direct and intimate relationship with their clients but they also have now built some content on their site which the client has a motivation to link back to. If you were building this process for an antiques website instead of an aquariums website you might want to include the history of the particular antique item on the case study page. These kinds of case study pages can be really high value and are a natural place for the client to link to. Not to mention the fact that you're building out website content all the time to help long-tail rankings and you're constantly adding testimonials which will help conversion rates. Win-win-win!

Or, Alternatively, Why Not Make Some News?

Of course, manually building links is hard work, even when you have a process like above. Therefore you might also want to consider taking some of the more unusual/remarkable/impressive contracts and craft a news story out of it. Again, the Aquarium Architecture guys did this well (again, nothing that Distilled was involved with):

The above story appeared in the Daily Express in the UK and is a fine example of the kind of linkbait that you can create when you have products of such a unique and high-value nature. Unfortunately in the above example Aquarium Architecture didn't get a link out of the story but there are plenty of ways you can go about getting links from this kind of thing.

Key Takeaways

So I completely understand that not all clients or websites will be able to do this kind of thing but hopefully even if you can't follow this exact process you can gain some insights into how you might build a process into your existing business practices to help your company build links.