Marketing for Franchises: White Hat Link Building Strategies Reviewed

When marketing for franchises, white-hat link-building strategies pay dividends every time. Unlike exploitative, spammy “black-hat” strategies that are constantly being sought out and penalized, white-hat link building is evergreen, which keeps your franchise site and brand protected and progressing at all times.

Today’s post reviews 3 of the top white-hat link building tactics. Read on to upgrade your link-building strategy and start getting better results while marketing for franchises.

Use mega-content pieces as link-building lightning rods.

One of the simplest and most effective white-hat link building tactics is to publish high-quality content that engages readers and motivates them to share what they’ve read. To that end, long-form informational content is a great choice. When marketing for franchises, this might be an “ultimate guide” or “expert round-up” style post that answers questions relevant to your product or service. Since these mega-sized articles cover a wide range of topics, synthesize tons of expert information, and answer so many questions simultaneously, they engage a broader audience, which increases your chances of getting a link.

Though this strategy is highly effective, it’s intuitiveness has made it somewhat overused. You can still build plenty of links with quality mega-content (especially if it’s particularly authoritative!), but be warned that it’s not the goldmine it once was.

Keep up the guest posting.

Guest posting is still a tremendous white-hat link building tactic, and it’s a win-win proposition: the host site gets a great piece of content, and you get a link. Moreover, you also get an opportunity to increase your exposure, diversify your readership, and network with other bloggers in your industry.

Here are a few tips on guest blogging:

• Use better keywords to find more opportunities. The faster you can find guest blogging opportunities the better. We recommend using the following phrases in conjunction with your target keywords to pinpoint guest blogging opportunities: “write for us,” “guest post,” “guest blog,” “guest writer,” “guest author,” and “guest guidelines.”
• Understand your opportunities. Certain sites will be stricter in regards to anchor text than others. If a big site is limiting you to a link to the homepage in the bio section, accept that for what it is – the juice they’re passing on through that link is probably worth it. On other hand, if you’re working with a smaller site with fewer restrictions, make the most of if by injecting as many links as you can without getting spammy.
• Include your own media. Too many guest bloggers rely solely on text and expect the host to provide the images, videos, and sources.

Convert mentions into links.

Bloggers may begin mentioning your website or brand in reviews or write-ups.

Many of these mentions are not actually links, but rather straightforward mentions of your site or brand name.

One of the time-efficient white-hat link building tactics involves reaching out to these bloggers and asking that mentions be turned into links. You can use tools like Mention, Hootsuite, and Social Mention to track down these opportunities instantly.

Learn more about link-building and marketing for franchises

These are some of many white-hat link building strategies we employed in a recent campaign that earned 5300 quality backlinks for a franchise over the course of a year. See the full case study here or visit our website to learn more about link-building and marketing for franchises.