I had the absolute please of interviewing a legend in link building and SEO, Garrett
French of Citation Labs. Garrett co-wrote the Ultimate Guide to Link Building with Eric Ward, the godfather of link building (known as link Moses). Garret has developed software tools for the link-building community, enabling us to find link-building prospects.
I used Garrett’s agency at one of my enterprise-level SEO positions.
In today’s episode, Garrets pulls the curtain back on link building and link gap analysis. Let’s dive in.
Resources
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garrettfrench/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/GarrettFrench
Websites: https://citationlabs.com/, https://zipsprout.com/
Bio & About: https://citationlabs.com/about/
Software (Tools): https://citationlabs.com/tools/
Book – Ultimate Guide to Link Building: How to Build Website
Authority, Increase Traffic and Search Ranking with Backlinks (On Amazon)
Value Drops
4:26 - Garrett talks about the Ontolo link-building tool and his time on that team with Ben Wills.
5:10 - Garrett talks about developing a system for scraping Google.
7:49 - Garrett talks about the Zip Sprout tool set for local SEO.
8:40 - Garrett talks about link impact and what difference links make.
8:52 - Garret talks about his aha moment (building links to sales pages).
12:14 - Garret talks about measuring ROI against a control group of similar URLs.
13:40 - Garrett talks about the relevance of topically relevant domains and content vs domains with inflated domain authority (DA).
18:40 – Garrett talks about link gap analysis and how to calculate the number of links you need to rank for competitive keywords.
21:29 – Garrett goes into link-building ROI in combination with link gap analysis. (Garrett’s second aha moment).
24:28 –Garret talks about Citation Labs' different business lines and Branded Link
Building.
31:37 - Garrett talks about what Citation Labs' focus is in 2023 (AI)?
38:35 – Garret talks about how businesses can contact Garrett and Citation Labs.
39:26 - My recommendation is to use Citation Labs from my experience.
42:30 – What happens first as link building occurs? (Garretts 3rd aha moment).
44:03 – We talk about other metrics that can be used in conjunction with Link gap analysis: # of keyword baseline, Google search console: impressions, clicks, and
click-through rate (CTR), as well as a baseline of conversion goal (conversion rate) from analytics.
Check out the full episode at: https://emjpodcast.com/garret-french-discusses-link-building-link-gap-analysis.
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