Link-building is an integral part of any SEO strategy, but adult link-building presents its own set of unique obstacles. Finding webmasters who are willing to link to adult industry sites is a real challenge, which makes your relationships with industry contacts essential.
By the end of this article, you will have a deeper understanding of adult link-building, its niche challenges and how to overcome them. This article aims to help you create you own bespoke link building strategy, by looking into:
- What is link-building?
- What are the goals of link-building?
- Tools for link-building
- How is link-building different in the adult industry?
- How to create a link-building strategy
Once you have an understanding of what link-building is and tries to achieve, we can look at strategies and tools that industry professionals use in their own businesses.
1. What is Link-building?
Link-building is earning backlinks to your website either by paid or organic means. The website that links to you (referring domain) provides a hyperlink (backlink) from their site to yours.
Most tools such as Moz and Ahrefs will score your website’s domain strength based on the quality and quantity of your backlinks. Google does not take into consideration such metrics when ranking a website, but you should always be looking to earn high quality, industry-specific backlinks.
Some SEOs will also analyse negative factors when link building. Moz has its own spam score metric, which John Mueller said “Moz’s spam score doesn’t affect your backlinks or is even used by Google.”
So Google might not use Moz’s spam score, but they still will use their own metric to understand the value of a link. Therefore, it is a fine balance between the quality and quantity of your backlinks:
“Focusing on quality [backlinks] over quantity is what can help to protect your site as Google updates.” – Adam Reimer (SearchEngineJournal.com)
Depending on how deep into your link-building strategy you are, your focus will shift from your short-term goals towards sustainable long-term link-building.
Short-term link-building
To find success in the short-term, you will likely turn to paid link-building. For most keywords in the adult industry, promoting brands and/or services via Google Ads is not an option – which is why SEO experts focus on short-term benefits through paid advertising. This can include outreach platforms or press releases that businesses use throughout their entire strategy, not just exclusively at the beginning. It may consume some of your budget, but it can provide some early wins in your link-building strategy.
Long-term link-building
The ultimate goal of link-building is to earn ‘organic’ backlinks where websites will link to your site without you requesting it or paying. This tends to occur when your site has followed Google’s E-A-T quality guidelines:
- Expertise: You have a high level of knowledge in your specific field
- Authoritativeness: Your reputation among other experts
- Trustworthiness: The legitimacy and accuracy of the content on your website
The E-A-T guidelines make your website a desirable source to link to, which can allow your link-building strategy to function more passively. Other sites will then provide links without you having to reach out to pay or even request it.
2. What are the goals of link-building?
What are your goals? Why are you linking buildings to pages on your website? What KPIs are you using to measure success? It is important you can identify if you are link building to improve rankings, increase traffic, or to simply increase brand awareness.
As the graph above shows, the websites that rank at the top of Google receive the most clicks. Your primary goal with link-building might be to improve your search engine ranking – but beware this is a dangerous mindset. You do not want to only link-build with improving rankings as your sole focus. This could lead you to making a short-term decision – following Black Hat SEO strategies and not seeing the bigger picture which is growing your brand!
If you are looking for advice on how link building can improve your SEO campaign, earn high quality industry specific dofollow backlink, avoid banner, header and footer links and avoid PBNS.
Growing Domain Authority
Building quality backlinks to your high quality content that incentivises organic links will improve your domain authority. Metrics such as DA (MOZ) and DR (Ahrefs) are not used by Google, so having a higher domain authority won’t guarantee an improved search ranking, however, the metrics such as domain authority, trust flow and citation flow are strong indicators that you are building a strong and reputable website.
Increasing Traffic
Higher search engine ranking generally translates to more traffic. However, you may receive referral traffic from the backlinks you have built. If you have targeted relevant publications, users from your referring domain will be more engaged in your specialty and thereby more likely to click through. Referral traffic can be a great indication your link building strategy is working. Make sure you analyse your Google Analytics account to ensure your referral traffic is interacting with your website, otherwise you may be targeting the wrong audience.
3. Tools for link-building
Industry professionals streamline their link-building campaigns with software that provides insights your competitors may not have. Here are 3 useful industry tools for link-building:
Ahrefs
This is a paid professional software that allows you to:
- Search for potential relevant sites for backlinks
- Search for existing backlinks
- Conduct competitor analysis
- Measure the quality of backlinks
- Find trending topics and which webmasters are talking about the topics
Regardless of whether you are in the adult industry or not, you should have access to Ahrefs as part of your link-building strategy.
Semrush
Another paid professional software that offers:
- Email outreach
- Reviewing prospective backlinks
- Monitoring newly acquired backlinks
- Semrush provides you with a list of the links your competitors have that you don’t
Semrush is a similar software to Ahrefs, but it fills in several gaps that aren’t covered by Ahrefs. If you can allocate enough of your budget to incorporate both softwares into your link-building strategy, you will be covering all bases.
Buzzstream
Buzzstream is an outreach software that saves time on manually contacting prospective sites for backlinks. Some of its features are:
- Automating follow-up emails to prospects
- Analysing data from outreach campaigns
- Distributing tasks amongst your team
- Finds 1000s of websites that mention a topic you search
This is a paid software for industry professionals and anyone looking to pursue backlink acquisition on a large scale.
4. How is link-building different in the adult industry?
Adult websites present unique challenges when it comes to approaching prospects for backlinks. Some webmasters may link to certain adult sites but not others, whereas some webmasters may not link to adult websites at all. With the adult niche creating fewer opportunities, link-building is naturally more difficult.
Here are some prospects that you could receive mixed answers from:
The adult industry requires a more creative approach to link-building. If you can target high authority prospects that your competitors are missing or poach links by proposing your high quality content in their place, you will start to gain an advantage. It is more about being inventive and looking for gaps than following a set of rules.
5. How to create a link-building strategy
Find industry-specific publications
There are adult sites that will provide backlinks to you, it’s just a matter of finding them. As a general rule, sites that are relevant to your business will deliver more traffic as their users share an interest with you. This is especially true of adult sites where users are more primed for adult content and their webmasters are more open to backlinking to it.
Create relationships with webmasters
Once you have found a relevant publication that works, keep its webmaster close. You could agree a deal to get regular backlinks at a discount or agree exclusivity from any competing businesses. Keep in close contact with these webmasters as they can be hard to come by in the adult industry.
Competitor analysis
Find out what backlinks your competitors are getting to their sites that are boosting their SEO rankings. This can be useful for generating a list of potential backlink sites and for poaching broken links.
Create a bespoke campaign to get natural links
Skip the process of hunting down adult-friendly webmasters by generating enough interest to get people talking about your business naturally. Adult Creative made Bubbles Escorts one of the first escort agencies to accept Bitcoin as payment, which prompted news outlets to write stories about their brand. Being cited in news articles, even if they do not yield a backlink, is an effective way to raise brand awareness. Therefore, getting creative with campaigns can generate news-worthy opportunities for free backlinks and citations. To read one of the unprompted articles that Bubbles Escorts attracted, click here.
Linking it all together
It’s important to remember that link-building isn’t the only factor that increases your ranking on Google. Having high quality content that is kept refreshed is just as important. However, it can’t be ignored as part of a well-rounded SEO strategy. The only challenge is executing your plan and achieving high quality adult links.
Using the tools and strategies discussed in this article, you may attempt to manage your own SEO and link-building with success. Alternatively, if you would prefer a professional agency with years of industry experience to manage your link-building strategy, Adult Creative are here to assist with your adult SEO. We have a catalogue of webmasters and adult-friendly publications that will save on hours of outreach campaigns and subscriptions to industry standard link-building softwares.
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