Here at SEO Guelph.com we are always looking for new, innovative ways to get those hard to reach backlinks. However, once in a bluemoon something is presented to us which has been right under our eyes the whole time. Just the other day a friend of mine was holidaying in Sydney, Australia when they decided to do one of those learn to surf schools. I was eager to see any photos I could of my friend surfing (as she has no previous experience of doing anything like this before). Now lets be real here, how are the people that do this are going to get someone to take photos of them standing up on the surfboard for the first time? What friend is going to be standing out in the water neck deep, with an expensive SLR camera (that’s probably not waterproof)?
Here comes the SEO bit (which I don’t think they realise) the surf school pays someone to take the photos for them. They then put the photos online once a day so that the customers can go online in the evening and download the pics of them surfing! Seems brilliant however the surf school was doing this for all the wrong reasons, and weren’t doing it as well as they could of been.
Think about it from an SEO point of view. You have hundreds of pictures on your website. The customers check them out, see the photos of themselves up on the website. What do you think the first things is that they are going to do? You guessed it, log into their Facebook, Twitter, Google+ accounts and link to it. Think of all those amazing backlinks that surf school gets from all this free publicity. However, they sort of dropped the ball a little bit, they only have the photos online for a day (then remove them), and they have no social media plugin buttons to make it just that little bit easier for the customer to integrate into their Facebook or Twitter feeds.
Think about your online business. Do you have a plumbing website? Maybe you could take some nice before and after pictures, put them on the website and tell your customer about it. Chances are they MIGHT just feel a little bit proud, a little bit famous and link it to their friends and family. These links to your website don’t cost you anything.
Own a car garage? What about taking some nice photos of your customers cars and putting them online. Have a short bio on each one of the cars, something like “Loved working on this red Mazda”, chances are if your customer is a car lover that they will link to it so all their friends can check it out, especially if it’s a really nice car.
Think about it, you don’t have to give something away for free just to get backlinks. You don’t have to work in an “exciting” industry to get backlinks either. I get comments all the time in my inbox from Mechanics saying “People don’t link to me, who is going to link to a mechanic?”. Or “I can’t afford to give something away for free.” Taking photos and putting them online for your customers to check out and post to their friends doesn’t cost a cent. If you are complaining about getting people to link to your “boring” industry then think about how much more valuable each social media backlink will be.
For the record, the surf school which gave me this idea are ranking first in Google! What are you waiting for? Get that gallery online today and start telling your customers about it. It will be great for human and robot traffic. People see the links, click it and end up on your website. Robots see the links and follow it to your site giving you social street cred.
I w ould love to hear your stories and find out if this tip worked for you.