We were hired by Educator.com, one of the World’s leading online education portals, to execute a high quality link building services at scale. That particular word (scale) is important, given the number of links some of their competitors have.
The Challenge
Educator has a paywall on the vast majority of content, owing to the very high standards of content on the website – They hire professional teachers and PHD level experts to film and publish outstanding learning knowledge on the website.
From a link building perspective, this posed an issue – It’s far easier to build links to content that’s 100% publicly accessible than to content which requires payment (which is the case for Educator), and that’s especially true when trying to build links from .Edu websites!
The Solution
We simply had to take our outreach efforts to a large enough scale whilst maintaining a high quality of communication in our outreach emails, to convince recipients that Educator truly is an outstanding and helpful learning experience for anyone who wants to take their education to the next level outside of the classroom.
Here’s just some of the strategies we enacted to win a high volume of high quality, relevant links from schools, teacher websites and other relevant destinations.
Competitor Links
We scoped out a large number of competitor websites such as Brightstorm and Math TV to create a large prospect list of link targets. We already knew that people felt compelled to link to these websites which had elements of paid membership, so it made sense they’d also be interested in linking to Educator.
From there, it was about curating an authentic approach to make people believe in Educator.com and to generate a high response rate and link acquisition rate.
Below – competitor link outreach campaign with a 34% response rate
Scholarship
This is a link building method which can seem unnatural in certain niches, and is clearly setup for the intention of link building. However, since Educator is specifically in the education niche – It makes perfect sense. We’re providing genuine value to scholars across the World and it fits in very naturally with the users on our website, often high-school students interested in learning who wouldn’t mind earning a little extra money by applying to our scholarship!
So actually, the scholarship fits in perfectly with the values of the website.
From there on out, we again crafted outreach campaigns which allowed us to gain scholarship links from some renowned American colleges and Universities.
The Results
- Over 200 links to date from high authority, relevant educational websites
- Multiple links from websites with DA greater than 70
- Targeted inbound traffic from interested users
