There are countless articles highlighting the benefits of earning editorially secured, in-industry, non-reciprocal links for your website’s SEO. However, only a few provide a practical plan for actually obtaining these links. The strategy we are about to explain focuses on building high quality in-industry editorial links using an underutilised tool: build links with podcasting.
Our method aims at securing one-way, quality editorial links from websites within your niche that have high domain authority.
To clarify, this strategy isn’t a quick fix or low effort. If minimal effort is what you’re after, you might consider buying links (though this risks getting caught by Google) or engaging in low-end guest posting. Instead, Podcast Link Building requires some effort and setup to get started, but once established, it can produce four to eight quality editorial links per month that no one else in your industry is getting.
These links are far superior to those you could “buy” from spammers filling your inbox daily, which are usually irrelevant to your niche and can increase your spam score or even get your site banned by Google.
After your podcast setup is running, this strategy allows you to consistently acquire 4 to 8 links every month with less ongoing effort than PR, HARO, guest articles, or tool-building strategies, and typically results in better quality.
1. What are Good and Bad Backlinks
To ensure we’re on the same page, let’s briefly review what makes a backlink good versus bad. (For an in-depth look, read this Moz guide).
1.1. The Good Backlinks (the ones you want)
In link building, the goal is to obtain editorial links. Links you request are good, but unsolicited links are even better. Common sources of good backlinks today include PR, HARO, content-based strategies, tool building, news, data visualization, and similar methods.
Good backlinks are the ones you get when you build links with podcasting.
1.2. The Bad (or spam) Backlinks
Bad backlinks usually come from user-generated content (UGC), paid-for backlinks, reciprocal links, etc. Google considers a link “bad” if it appears to be manipulating the system rather than stemming from genuine intent to promote content.
Why it is hard to get good backlinks
Securing good backlinks is usually very resource-intensive. Even worse, most link-building techniques are one-time efforts that don’t create a consistent flow of new, quality links, which means they don’t provide long-term benefits.
Let’s examine some of these strategies:
- PR: While effective, PR often comes with high costs, is time-consuming, and offers no guarantees for backlinks. Maintaining media relationships requires ongoing effort, and measuring the direct ROI from PR activities can be challenging, complicating the assessment of their true value to SEO efforts.
- HARO (or equivalent): Reporters and editors are overwhelmed with requests in addition to their already demanding jobs. There is no guarantee that a journalist will choose your contribution or include a backlink, making the outcome uncertain. You will also need to continually find new reporters, as otherwise, you’ll be getting links from the same publications repeatedly.
- Tools Building: This involves creating valuable, often interactive resources that naturally attract backlinks due to their utility. While this method can generate high-quality, enduring links and establish your brand as an authority, it requires significant upfront investment in development and promotion. Moreover, these tools are often “one-offs,” so to create a new influx of inbound links, you’ll need to develop another tool.
The fact is, building one-way, unpaid links in your niche is extremely difficult. SEOs and webmasters often either avoid it, focusing on on-page solutions, or resort to short-term tactics. This is the wrong approach. You need something sustainable that is genuinely editorially earned and positively reflects your brand.
3. Backlinks earning with Podcasting
In a nutshell: you launch a podcast hosted on your website, interviewing guests within your niche who have a history of promoting their media appearances on their own sites. You publish the episode, and ideally, the guest (and potentially other listeners) will link to your website.
Here is a testimonial from Rich McIver, whom we’ve helped over the last 12 months with link building through podcasting for multiple of his websites:
Here is how it works:
3.1. Finding guests who will publish a link to your website
A podcast designed for link building has different criteria for selecting guests compared to a traditional podcast focused on audience size and ad revenue. You want guests who will link back to the podcast episode page. Otherwise, building links with podcasting won’t work.
Start by looking for guests who either work at companies within your niche with high DA websites or are bloggers, influencers, evangelists, etc., who cover your topic. In addition to searching competitor podcasts for potential guests, look for individuals who have linked to their speaking appearances at conferences or in print articles.
3.2. Why Backlinks from Podcast Guests Work
3.2.1. The Hook: Ego-Bait
Website owners receive numerous requests daily to link to other sites, which are usually a hassle and offer minimal benefit, leading to these emails being quickly deleted.
In contrast, effective link-building methods use psychological hooks to overcome the challenge of getting someone to link to your site. These hooks use well-established principles of human psychology to significantly improve your chances of obtaining a backlink.
How to build links with podcasting heavily relies on the ego-bait.
You invite someone to speak on your podcast, giving them access to your audience, showcasing them as a thought leader, and providing them with materials to promote on social media (we’ll cover this part later).
Ego-bait can be particularly powerful, especially as your podcast develops a genuine audience, attracting major trade publications, influencers, and websites to your podcast without payment.
For example, you could invite a guest from one of the top 10 news publications in your niche, then leverage that podcast episode to approach a top 3 publication, saying, “Hey, we interviewed that person from that magazine on our podcast, discussed this topic, and the episode did great! We’d love to have you on our show for a different perspective!”
3.2.2. Ego-Stroke and Seed Content
Podcasts have been popular for several years and continue to grow. What we also appreciate is their seed content nature. People enjoy sharing their podcast appearances, showcasing them as thought leaders and authorities in their industry.
Companies also like to promote their employees’ appearances as speakers at events and on podcasts. If you play your cards right, you can even influence what is published by those third parties, such as by proposing clips (short form content) for LinkedIn and other social media channels, already edited with a suggested caption (e.g., including a link to your website).
3.2.3. Using Guilt-bait to get your link
In order to build links with podcasting, you need to call the guest to action once the episode is live.
The call to action here is based on guilt-bait: “Since we’ve interviewed you on our show, given you access to our audience, and even provided you with free materials to post on your socials, would you mind promoting the episode on your website once it’s live, with a link to our website?”
Now for the sake of clarity, we see this as a genuine exchange of value that both the podcast (and webmaster) and the guest will benefit from. We wanted to categorise why it works hence the choice of wording “guilt-bait”. But we can also consider a simple rule of reciprocity being at play here 🙂
To be most effective, lay the foundation for this request before the interview. This way, you can rule out any guest who doesn’t commit to posting a backlink on their website, making this strategy repeatable and reliable.
4. What Type of Results You Can Expect
4.1. Links from the Guests
When you build links with podcasting and as mentioned earlier, not all show guests will link to your podcast. Therefore, 52 episodes a year won’t necessarily equate to 52 links.
However, with an effective guest funnel and follow-up processes in place, you can achieve a link rate of up to 85%. Our top statistics show about 95% of guests linking to our site.
4.2. Networking & PR included!
Another great benefit of podcasting is the networking opportunities it provides. Over time, you’ll interview influential people in your industry. For smaller companies, this can lead to conversations with executives at much larger organizations, paving the way for business deals, partnerships, and more.
Imagine a scenario where someone from your sales or marketing team, or a contractor, meets one-on-one with the most influential people in your industry every week, 4 times a month, 52 times a year, to have a genuine 30-minute conversation and build a relationship.
4.3. Podcast as a Content & Audience Building Machine
Podcasts are a long-term asset of evergreen content. We have two podcasts, and for both, our most listened-to episode each month is the first one we ever recorded.
People often discover your podcast episodes months or even years after they are published, listen to them, and form an intimate relationship with your brand and guests.
The audience you develop around your podcast will bring business opportunities to your organization due to the reputational benefits that a podcast offers.
4.4. Getting Links that you Didn’t Ask For
In the long run, you will receive (editorial) links you didn’t solicit from websites in your niche that you’ve never interacted with, simply because you’re creating great content featuring influential people and benefiting from its compounding effect on podcast platforms and social media channels.
This where the magic happens when you build links with podcasting.
Trade publications, magazines, and news websites might talk about a guest appearance on your podcast, or even the podcast itself.
For one of our in-house podcasts, we interviewed the editor of the leading newsletter and news website in our industry. This resulted in a backlink from a 74 DR website and another from a 50 DR website (the editor’s secondary website), and a feature in the most-read newsletter in that space—for free. The cost of a paid ad in that newsletter would have been much higher.
4.5. Some “Free” Customers
As you build backlinks, grow your brand, and expand your audience, it’s not just the SEO department that benefits. The entire marketing team and eventually the sales team will be pleased, as people reach out after listening to episodes and finding out more on social media.
4.6. PR Agencies will Reach Out to You
Many brands, thought leaders, and influencers have recognized the value of appearing on podcasts as guests: they tap into a loyal, well-established audience and get to showcase their expertise for 30 minutes straight in the ears of their ideal clients.
In the podcast world, a whole business model has developed around this: PR agencies that “place guests.” They contract with individuals (who pay the agency) to reach out to podcasts in their niche and get them booked as guests. This offers two main advantages:
- You can build relationships with PR firms and get your podcast featured on their website (resulting in a free high DA link).
- You no longer need to search for guests—they come to you.
Of course, you can and should still require a commitment to getting a backlink. You can even discuss this with the PR agency representative who reaches out to you regularly.
These PR contacts are also valuable for your other traditional link-building efforts. Now, instead of you seeking favors from them, they need favors from you.
Phew! There you have it: a compounding, repeatable, high DA, high-quality, one-way, editorial link-building machine.
Conclusion
You can do all this yourself; it works and none of it is rocket science.
If you would like to do everything yourself, we would be happy to send you the complete playbook for free. Just reach out to guillaume@ghamarketing.com and he will send you a 15 page procedure on how to do this yourself.
Or you can enjoy the benefits without the hassle and contact us simply to see if we can manage the entire process for you. 🙂