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The Best Way To Get High Quality Links Using
White Hat SEO For Pest Control
In the previous chapters, we have spent much time discussing what goes onto your website to climb up the ranking, but pest control SEO is a three-part strategy, and if you drop the ball in just one area, the entire plan will fail. We often hear from pest control owners, “SEO does not work,” but when you dig into why you’ll see it’s because either their page is not properly optimized, they do not have quality inbound links, or there are technical errors.
This chapter will discuss our off-page SEO strategy for pest control professionals. Inbound links are one of the most important steps in the entire strategy. They are at the very foundation of Google’s algorithm and navigation method from website to website all over the globe. In SEO, there are numerous different ways to acquire links. Some strategies do not involve much effort, whereas others require significant amounts of time, effort, and ingenuity (although they offer immense rewards).
This chapter is a compilation of our pest control SEO experts' tried and proven link-building strategies, best practices, and implementation tips for each. Still, before we dive into backlinks, let us explain what they are and why they are essential.
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A Quick Note for Readers
We have broken down our formula and process for search engine optimization (SEO) in this article in a very detailed manner. We could not put our 153-page book on our website so for more information get your free copy of our book mailed to you (just pay to ship)
As always, if you are looking to outsource your pest control SEO our company welcomes the opportunity to speak with you about the services we offer including our 200% ROI Guarantee!
What Are Backlinks?
At the most basic level, link-building is the practice of obtaining links from external websites that lead to a target website. A link (or hyperlink) is typically text wrapped in an HTML anchor tag with an “href” attribute. Links can also be images or entire block-level HTML elements. You can place them manually on other sites you own, social accounts, directories, forums, and other sites that allow direct access to place links.
More sophisticated link-building involves generating blog posts that compel other site owners to link to them. It may also involve clever strategies for creating scenarios where other site owners must place a link to your website.
It also helps to know which tools are helpful for running your off-page campaigns. Some of the tools we recommend are Ahrefs and SEMrush, and if you’d like a complete list, then we recommend this article by
Guest Posting
Guest posting is a strategy where your company can publish content on another person’s website and obtain a link in the process. It may involve reaching out to and/or collaborating with non-competing pest control companies, other business owners, and industry associations where you can land guest-posting opportunities.
Guest Posting Best Practices
Guest posting has been in the spotlight as being harmful to link-building. Business owners need to be careful to use the strategy sparingly. Follow these best practices for a good experience with guest posting:
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Only publish content on reputable websites.
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Look for opportunities with people you already know.
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Do not use the exact uncommon anchor text phrase too much (site owners do not naturally use target keyword phrases you are trying to rank for, and they definitely do not do it repeatedly).
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Try to get links placed in the body of a published post instead of the footer, blog roll, or byline.
Implementation
Contrary to what you might think, the first step in guest posting is finding an audience for your content and identifying a website accepting new content/guest submissions whose audience mirrors your own. Start with your sphere of influence – for example, associates, other businesses you might get customers from, and other pest control companies outside your local service area.
The best way to do outreach is to email your contacts and offer to collaborate on content. In any form of collaboration, there needs to be a mutual exchange of benefits. Obviously, no one knows your network of contacts like you, so this will require some judgment on your part. Just remember that cash is not the benefit I’m recommending, but it can be something like collaborative content.
Remember to choose the sites you guest blog on wisely. Check out their backlink profiles, DR (Domain Rating), DA (Domain Authority), indexed pages, organic traffic, etc. Publishing content with the same topical relevancy is ideal. However, if you can naturally link to an internal resource (such as research on bugs or pests), that approach will also prove beneficial.
Here’s a simple framework to follow when producing your content, whether you are doing it on your own or hiring a pest control SEO firm to produce it for you.
Consider your audience: Always remember that any content produced should answer customers’ questions and be an article they want to read. consumer intent. After all, most searchers will arrive at your content with some question in mind (even if it’s hypothetical), so the content needs to address that query in some way to be of use to them.
Content should be in-depth: Do more than submit guest posts that are low quality. Google now considers metrics (such as traffic from the originating source), so the link's authority may be minimal if the content could be of better quality. Look at similar pieces of content on the web and enhance yours with many more resources, angles, information, and other elements that make it truly useful to your readers.
Industry-Specific Directories
Directories are basically listings of websites, similar to the Yellow Pages of days past. There are numerous pest control directories on the web; they vary from subscription-based, free, or even one-time fee-based services.
In terms of links, some directories are extremely authoritative. They often have areas for business owners to submit their company’s names, phone numbers, services, and links to social profiles and websites.
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Look for directories that have a high DR and/or DA (Domain Rating from Ahrefs and/or Domain Authority from Moz)
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Find directories that are actively being curated. Beware if they do not have photos or a few broken links.
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Decide if a directory is reputable before listing your website. If it looks low-quality or suspicious, it’s probably not a good idea to list your site there.
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The type of directory determines the process for submission; however, every directory is different.
Paid Directories: Typically, there is a review process for websites. You have to fill out a form, submit a payment, and then their site will be published after a brief review by the directory owners. Sometimes, however, all that is needed is for you to complete their form, submit your payment – and you’re finished.
Scholarship Programs
This link-building strategy will require a relatively minimal financial investment, as well as the investment of time for outreach to colleges and local communities. Start by creating a scholarship, then contact your local university’s financial aid department to have the scholarship listed on their site. In return, you receive a source of. Edu links (still authoritative, even if they are somewhat devalued) can create positive PR for your company.
Digital marketers have really abused this tactic, and these financial aid pages now contain thousands of scholarships, where they once held dozens (at most) only a few years ago. This, in turn, dilutes the value of the authority from the page. Be sure you actually will follow through by granting the scholarship.
Best Practices
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Create criteria for application to the scholarship.
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Build a page on your website to promote the scholarship.
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Generate an extensive list of schools you can contact for outreach.
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Customized outreach converts better than a generic broadcast.
Pest Control Associations
How can pest control associations help your SEO efforts?
Frequently, associations will include a profile page for their members. The criterion for inclusion varies: some are peer-nominated, others are based upon years of experience, and still, others require you to join and make a tax-deductible donation. These can provide your business with excellent links because of their topical nature, but they also improve website conversions due to perceived value derived from social proof. Once you join, you’ll receive a logo that you can place on your site to show your visitors that you’re a legitimate company, not a fly-by-night business.
How To Create A Scholarship
Step 1: Scholarship Setup
Come up with a scholarship name, an award amount, rules for applying, a submission and review process, and a page on your website explaining all of this. Creating a scholarship that speaks to a hot-button social issue is a great way to gain more traction.
One simple method of differentiating your scholarship is through the criteria (e.g., essay, video, infographic, etc.) you use to apply to your scholarship.
Step 2: Create a Page
This is the page you will ask schools to link to. It should contain all the information about your scholarship, including what it is, how students can apply, deadlines, application materials, etc. This page should live on your website to boost your pest control SEO. You want to link all other pages on the site.
Step 3: Curate a List of Schools
You can use search operators to find lists of schools in search engine results on pages. Simply type in site:.edu “Keyword” + “resources” or site:.edu “Keyword” + “scholarships”. This will produce a list filled with .edu domains that have scholarship pages or resources pages (which typically contain links to financial resources for students).Use a tool like SEO Quake or another tool to export search results from the SERPs. Once you have all those sites in a spreadsheet, it’s much easier to manage them and add contact information.
Step 4: Getting Contact Information
In the next step, you’ll be doing outreach, contacting these institutions to tell them about your scholarship. It will be at the discretion of these universities to decide if they will post your scholarship on their financial aid site.
The secret is not to ask for the link, but provide value to the university and its students. By offering tuition assistance to students, the link should follow organically. Again, this is an exchange of mutual benefits.
Step 5: Outreach
The final step is actually sending emails to schools to tell them about your scholarship, where to find it, and how students can apply. Portions of your email copy and paste, but you’ll have a much higher chance of success with a personal touch. Be sure to thoroughly explain the scholarship and provide a link to the scholarship landing page on your website.
One common misconception is that .edu links inherently carry more authority than .com, .net, etc. The reason .edu links are typically more powerful is that many universities, through marketing and prominence, have authority generated by the number of links pointing back to them. Smaller universities (i.e., those who do not market themselves heavily) are sometimes more authoritative.
Link Building On Reddit
Reddit is a very active social forum with various topics (including pest-related ones). Link-building on Reddit involves building a profile as a trusted account and consistently placing links to your website’s resources (where applicable). Business owners can either submit links or text posts (with hyperlinked text in them) on Reddit, but a specific strategy should be followed.
Best Practices: The one thing you should avoid is just showing up and posting links. Even if those posts are helpful, you must first become a helpful member of their community. To do that:
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Interact with other members without posting links first.
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Find and respond to questions about pests and bugs on Reddit a few times per week.
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Participate in other discussions that may not relate to your industry.
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You can then post a link to your website for every handful of posts you respond to.
Be careful, as the community is very sensitive to spammers, and you can find yourself banned quickly for posting too many self-promotional links.
I’ve mentioned this previously, but again, consider the mutual exchange of value. By helping consumers (in this case, Reddit users) solve problems, you can strategically incorporate links back to your website’s resources naturally. This lends itself to a more evergreen (permanent) link vs. jamming in links that will eventually be filtered and removed through moderation.
Implementation
The first step is to create an account on Reddit. Once you do that, fill out your profile on the site by creating a user name and setting your preferences.
For the most part, you can begin reading and posting immediately. As time passes, you may develop preferences for how you want your content to appear or how you want to configure notifications, for example. Other than that, the main thing to remember is to be something other than a salesman on their platform.
Further Reading: The Fundamentals of Ethical Reddit
Infographic Link Building
An infographic is a graphical representation – such as a chart or a diagram – of data. They are essentially big images that combine otherwise data points (that may be dry to read in text form) into a visually appealing and exciting piece of art. Infographics inform people about a topic but do it in a way that makes it entertaining and easy to digest.
Some infographics are interactive, while others are just static images. They can be posted to pages, blog posts, or social media sites.
Here are some tips:
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Find data that is appealing to your audience.
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The data used in the infographic should be exciting or helpful.
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Use a designer to help you or one of the many tools available to generate infographics, such as Canva.
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Keep your topic simple and focused.
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Use as many visual representations of data as you can.
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Promote your infographic aggressively on social media and other’s websites.
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Make it a reasonable length (do not make a considerable image 10,000 pixels long).
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Add adequate spacing so that the information is easy to read.
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Craft a catchy headline for the top of the infographic to grab the reader’s attention.
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Ensure your data is accurate and up to date.
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Cite your sources at the bottom of the infographic.
Design: We mentioned some infographic creation tools earlier, which are great for creating an infographic yourself. If you plan on doing this yourself, we recommend using one of those services unless you have design knowledge. The best route is to have a pest control SEO firm do the work for you. It will save time and come out looking much more professional. Once you have your infographic, it’s time to promote it. The first place you should place it is on their website or blog. After that, it’s just a matter of sharing the link for the infographic.
SEO Benefits Pest Control Companies Get
From Haro
HARO is an acronym for Help A Reporter Out and is a free service for business owners. It helps reporters get content and leads for stories and also helps users get publicity. Cession owns HARO, and content sourced by the service is used by the AP, American Express, Gannet, Fox News, and other major news outlets. This can help you build trust and backlinks. News stories submitted through HARO get distributed across the web, helping you get your business exposure. They can also include links in content that takes readers to your site.
The key to HARO is submitting references from a unique perspective. At the end of the day, HARO is trying to create content that engages the audience, so offering dry quotes gives you a minimal chance of getting quotes. If you want to stand out, be interesting and offer a unique perspective. Remember that you are an original, and you can't be duplicated when you use your uniqueness.
Testimonial/Review Link Building
Remember that exchange of value that we’ve mentioned several times? Businesses need social proof to aid in their conversion efforts, and one strategy for acquiring links is to write reviews or testimonials for products and services that you actually use. Oftentimes, the company will link back to the attributing source. Not all websites allow this, but many have a field where a reviewer can leave a URL as a reference for their testimonial. An ancillary benefit of this tactic is that even if they don’t allow a link, the goodwill engendered may make them receptive to future collaboration.
Best Practices
Virtually any service or product you use has the potential to become a natural link. For example, office supplies, chemicals you use, staffing, and cleaning companies (or any other services a firm uses) usually love getting reviews. Reach out to any service company or affiliate you have and see if a review can be left on their site.
Use a link to your company home page. Links to service or city pages may appear as a red flag to the site owners, so they may be hesitant to post your review.
Local & Citation Directories
What are they?
Local/citation directories are websites designed to provide website and other related contact information for local businesses to a local customer base. These directories are not specific to pest control. Even though a directory may have a national presence (such as Yelp or Yellowpages.com), they deliver localized results for users.
Local directories serve as an essential function in your pest control SEO strategy. They are often some of the first pages people see when searching for local services like exterminators. They often have elements like reviews, navigation, descriptions, and contact information that make locating local businesses easier. In fact, Google specifically calls out directories that aren’t up to speed to improve your local rankings.
Best Practices
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Join as many high-quality location-based directories as you can find.
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Fill out profiles completely with contact info, biography, images, keywords, video, etc.
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Join as many high-quality location-based directories as you can find.
Implementation: Go after the well-known local directories first. They include:
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Yelp
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Apple Maps
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Local.com
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Google My Business
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Bing Places
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Facebook Business
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Merchant Circle
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Better Business Bureau
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Super Pages
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Manta
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WhitePages.com
Blogging
A blog is an online publication (typically conversational or informal) focused on a specific set of topics. Blog topics may range from general (sports) to very specific (just curling). You are reading a blog right now. Blogs are positioned to attract inbound links, build a brand, and support social engagement/community-building. Your blog content is frequently supportive of the top of the funnel (e.g., “Steps to Take If You Notice Rats In The Winter,” “Safety Tips for using Insecticides,” etc.).
Best Practices
Blogging for your business should be customized to your readers and your business goals or objectives. Here are some of the best practices that our pest control SEO agency follows when creating a blog post for our clients:
Content should be posted consistently in terms of both scheduling and quantity.
Write about information that is helpful to your target audience.
Blog posts should be long enough to support your topic and cover it with sufficient depth.
Posts should link out to external resources when necessary to validate the information.
Posts should link internally to other posts or pages on the site where necessary for maintaining reader engagement or helpful for answering user intent.
Blog posts should be easy to read and scan. Formatting (headings, short paragraphs, and images) should be used to break up the content and make it more digestible.
Implementation: Regarding implementation, Harsh Agrawal has a great comprehensive resource on starting a blog that you can read here.
Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing involves using the internet to generate buzz and solicit support from many people. Fundraising platforms (like GoFundMe) are an excellent example of crowdsourcing, but they can also include sites that have nothing to do with raising money.
Companies can leverage crowdsourcing websites to get links in a couple of innovative ways: they can insert links on crowdsourcing sites that call on a community to answer questions or use crowdsourced content to get links.
Publishing Books
Writing a book opens up many opportunities, including link building on sites where you can submit your book and third-party news recognition.
Obviously, there are better uses of your time than writing a book to acquire inbound links, but we create books for pest control companies that take the place of your business card. I want you to consider the last time you got a card and put it into your wallet, never to see the light of day again. Exactly! They have lost their value, so why not have a new calling card you can leverage for links?
Submitting to Amazon
Amazon.com is a great place to get links after submitting your book. As a part of this process, you can create an author profile. Authors can submit updates on the platform; these are links to their website, including blogs, service pages, and other content. These are high-quality, do-follow links from a highly authoritative domain.
As a side effect, you can also get natural links from media sites based on their value to consumers. A book establishes you as an authority figure when they are looking for a story or want to discuss your niche. Guess whom they are most likely to contact?
More than any other tip, I can’t stress enough how valuable a PR specialist will be in garnering media attention when you begin outreach for your book.
You also should have a landing page that discusses your book. This will allow media sources (such as those who interview you or promote your book as part of your PR outreach) a place to link rather than simply sending consumers directly to Amazon’s listing. The key here is that you want the media to link to you, not Amazon.
Podcasts
Producing a podcast is a great marketing strategy for pest control companies. In addition to that exposure, you can earn a link for your site. There are two primary methods of acquiring links from podcasts: 1) from podcast hosting companies/profile pages and 2) from podcast blog transcriptions.
Podcast Hosting Companies/Profile Pages
There are many podcast-hosting companies on the internet. When you create an account, you’re typically allowed to make an author profile page, which you can link to your website. Getting links on notable sites like Apple or Stitcher is not as easy anymore, but the opportunities are still available.
Many podcast owners actively promote their blogs by transcribing interviews into site content. Frequently, they’ll include reference links back to the interviewee.
Creating A Guide
As you might expect, an ultimate guide is a piece of content that is all-encompassing on a subject. They’re typically over 10000 words and cover the subject matter in a very thorough manner.
Ultimate guides are fantastic for link-building because of their versatility in marketing. In other words, they can be used in various scenarios and re-purposed over and over to promote a business.
They are also excellent for ranking web pages for highly competitive keyword phrases: these phrases often need something that sets them apart from the other pages ranking for those terms. One of the main benefits of an ultimate guide is that it naturally includes related phrases and synonyms (for which you can rank). This creates a natural incentive for sites to link to you (because of the added organic reach). Simply put, more people will see the post and have the opportunity to link to it.
Many times, these are repurposed into eBooks and downloadable guides. In those situations, you can submit eBooks and PDFs to their respective directory type.