The Exciting But Highly Demanding Roles Of The Link Strategist

Creating online content is basic need for every business. People must know of the existence of your business or website in order for it to be of any benefit. It is really to get this attention if you do not have high quality online content. This is why your online content team is constantly on the go creating the interesting articles and social media posts that capture attention of the highly volatile worldwide web. People online do not have a very good attention span because they are constantly navigating from one tab to the other one. If you have that good content that is bringing in traffic and engaging your audiences well, that is just amazing.

What is the matter?

There can be so many things wrong even if you have the best content. One of the major problems nowadays is that links are not being acquired. Acquisition of links at an enterprise scale needs a lot of attention. Therefore you have to divide labor and create a strategy that will facilitate this work being completed. In this team there are several role players who include:

1. The strategist

This is the controller of the team. He/she calls the shots by driving the campaign, designing the strategy, develop a mission unique to your site and also serving as a liaison between the SEO team, PR and content teams for the link building efforts.

2. Prospector

Work is to find the blogs, websites or journalist opportunities that are based on the campaign parameters developed by the strategist.

3. Qualifier

He/she simply qualifies whether the findings of the prospectors are fit for the campaign’s plan.

4. Relationship builders

They take the content from the strategists and present it to the linkers found by the prospector. They are the template and outreach personnel.

5. Content designer

This role is often played by the link strategist as well. It requires a lot of negotiation with the teams of the brand- PR and writers, as well as the link prospects as well.

Evidently, the link strategist is responsible for the lion-share of the task. If they do not do their work properly then the whole link building process is going to be a serious flop.

What do link strategists do?

The job description of a link strategist mainly involves a lot of research and processing. This is the person who finds no issues exploring the worldwide web for hours on end. They however do this in a very fun but structured way. The end result is that they come up with a defined campaign mission plus a process that is distinctly designed for achievement. It sounds like such a fun job, right? Link strategists do prefer measurement of their successes and failures, often preferring quantitative metrics. They are not scared to test new techniques but at the same time they will not just drop an idea that does not work.

If you are a beginner link strategist you are definitely going to have some challenge beginning the task. However, here are some practices that will help you in your first campaign as you aim for organic rankings:

• Understand the types of link publishers

There are two types of publishers who include: the news, community and blog publishers, and the link and resource page publishers. The first one deals with developments of possible interest to your prospective customers. The link and resource page publishers are people who are very passionate about a particular topic. They are the curators of websites (or pages) that are devoted to sharing very helpful information. Unlike the news, blog and community publishers, these ones may not really be speaking directly to your audience.

• Linker-valued audiences

Many SEO and link builder forget this very frequently. Content that is linkable does have some attributes unique to it such as an ideal word count and format type. Nonetheless, it must be content that serves an audience the publisher cares about. You should always strive to get content that is useful to the audience. At the same time the audience should be valuable to the linkers such as senior citizens, people with disabilities and so forth.

• Quality tramps sales

SEO experts most of the time focus on making of sales by doing tons of keyword research. Digital marketing strategies however dictate that quality is always the best. People have to find value in the content being linked to. Therefore, the link strategist has a major role directing the team’s attention towards the linker-value audience and this will shift attention from sale-focused to linker-valued content.

• Which audiences should you address?

The linker-valued audiences can include thousands of different audiences; not exactly the people you want to address. The most challenging task is usually finding a need in an audience. It is possible to address different audiences- old and young, men and women. However, linkers often serve very specific audiences. Basically what you would want to do is get content that fills in the gaps. Basically you want to answer a question that has not been answered yet.

Bottom line

The work of link strategist is quite a complex, tedious but very interesting one. As one grasps the roles involved, they are able to deliver better quality work each and every time.

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