When you are beginning work on a link development project, it’s important to start with the right information before diving into the work head first. Here are questions you should ask before beginning:
1. How many links do I currently have?
2. Where are those links coming from? Directories? Random blog posts? Educational sites?
3. Who am I looking to target? Coming up with two or three personas can be very helpful.
4. What is my brand position? How do I want the public to see my site / company?
5. What are my business goals?
6. How will I define success?
7. How will I measure statistics to determine if I have achieved that level of success?
8. What resources do I currently have to work with.
Obviously, the answers to these questions will indicate a number of things in terms of your link building campaign. Your audience will determine where you are looking to get links from. Your brand indicates what caliber of sites you are looking at and what, specifically, you will be saying on those sites. The amount of resources will determine what you can do now and what you will have to build up to. Defining your analytics can help tie in a whole other group of individuals, or spur you into learning how to use the analytics you already have running on your site.
Of course, these are not all the questions you should ask when starting, but this is definitely a list of “must-asks” and it will open the door to all those other things that you need to learn about your company or site and how it will apply to your link building and overall SEO efforts.
