Hi, Sad Dawson here. Now link building has always been and continues to be a crucial part of the SEO jigsaw that you need to build authority and drive rankings in Google. And with the emergence of AI-based search like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, the importance of links in getting your site cited in responses means that link building becomes of even greater importance. So I've grouped together all the best episodes of the podcast that touch on link building into a series dedicated to all the many strategies and tactics you can use to get more links to your content. So let's get on to the podcast. Hello and welcome to SEO Is Not That Hard. I'm your host, Ed Dawson, the founder of Keywordspeopleuse.com, the solution to finding the questions people ask online. I'm an affiliate marketer, SEO, and I've been building and monetizing websites for over 20 years. I've built sites from the ground up, bought sites, and I've sold sites in large exits. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Today I'm going to talk about content that people link to, tools. Okay, I'm going to start with quite a controversial statement for some people, and that is that people link to great content. Now you'll see lots of people in SEO disagreeing with this because they think people don't link to great content, and the only way to get links is to proactively go out and get and build them, whether that's buying them or trying to persuade people to link to you or doing any other um type of link building. But the actual truth of the matter is if you do actually produce great content, people will actually link to you because I've got experience from that, and I'm going to show examples today of some of the type of content that people will actually link to off their own back without being asked, without being approached, they'll just link to it. Now, people don't just link to any content, they only link to content that they can't replicate themselves. That's the kind of content that will naturally, organically get links because if someone can't produce it themselves, can't replicate it themselves, then they're much, much more likely to link to it. So this means you've got to produce something that's actually essentially hard to replicate. Now, what do I do I mean by tool? A tool is it's not just written content, it's not just graphical content. What it is is basically something that you interact with on a web page, on a website, um, get a job done or to find something out. So some very advanced types of tools are Google Docs, that's like a web-based tool, and it's incredibly advanced. Um, not the kind of content the kind of tool I'm necessarily talking about here, but that is like the pinnacle of a web-based tool. A very simple one might be a tool that just lets you say calculate Pythagoras' theorem for a given right angle triangle, the kind of thing that uh someone doing their math samework might use to um double check they've got things right, that kind of tool. But essentially, yeah, it's a piece of content that you will interact with to get answers, results, or produce something with. Now, tools, because they're quite complex to produce, that is what gives you the um that unique ability that people will link to it because they can't replicate it easily or quickly. So they will do the next best thing, which is they will share. Now, if you've got an audience and you're trying to bring them new content all the time, you're trying to keep them engaged. If you find a tool that your audience would be interested in, then you are very likely to want to share that tool with your audience because it raises your position with your audience because you're bringing new things to them. Now, if you listen to this thinking, I have no idea how to produce tools, I've got no programming experience, anything like that, don't worry, I will share later how you can get over that barrier quite easily. Now, so we know that people will link to tools and why people will link to tools, but let's give you some more examples of tools. So I can give you examples of ones that I've actually created myself, and these have generated thousands of links over time, all organic, all for free, and all from highly relevant other websites, because people are obviously going to be linking to tools from uh sites where they're adjacent to your topic, it might not be exact, so it might be someone who's linking to a broadband checker tool because they've got a say a community website and they want to give people a link to a place where that people in that community can find the best broadband deals available in that area, so they would link to a tool. So here are the examples I've got. So, first of all, is the broadband postcode checker that we built for broadband.co.uk, and it's still there, it's still live, but you can still go and see it now. If you go to broadband.co.uk, you'll see on the home page there is a big form saying find the cheapest, fastest, best broadband for your postcode, and it asks you to put in a postcode. If you put a postcode in there, it will then search a database of all the deals that are available in your area, only bring you the deals that are available in your area and provide you links to sign up for those broadband providers. Now, obviously, you can see that that tool it's quite a few moving parts to it. It's got to know what different broadband suppliers are available in what areas, it's got to have a know what the deals are for those suppliers, and it's got to be able to sort them and organise them based on a postcode that someone puts in. So that's not a trivial piece of work to do, it's not a trivial piece of work to keep up to date. So it's the kind of thing that people will link to because they can't replicate it, but their audience would find it useful. The second one to share is on it's on the same site, and that is the broadband speed test. So if you went to broadband.co.uk in the menu selected the speed test link at the very top there, it takes you to a widget on a page that will test your broadband speed. So it will do an upload and download test, it will give you um details of how fast your connection is, but it will also give you comparisons to how um fast you are for the supplier you've got and compare you to people other people on the supplier and other people in your area. Um so, again, this is something that is not easy to produce, and with it collecting all the data on the back end as well and being able to compare to other places, again, that it sort of builds up a sort of a core database that again is very hard for other people to replicate, and again, it's the kind of thing that people will share because if someone's having trouble with their broadband, they might they would say do a speed test. So, again, it's where something that's hard to replicate generates links. You can go and check on say a hrefs, backlink check or anything like that. You can go and see the kind of backlinks these pages are getting, and you'll see how there's a there's a huge organic um backlink profile that's been built up over time just by the fact that these tools exist. If these tools weren't on Broadband Code UK, then it never would have generated the same number of links as it does that these tools uh suck in. The third example I want to show is from keywordspeopleuse.com. Now, if you go to keywordspeopleuse.com and just go to the home page, the first thing it's going to show you is the form, which is a people also ask crawler. And this is a tool that will go to people also ask and it will crawl all the people also ask for a initial seed term, and then it will click through and click through all those different um people also ask results and find the results that then further go on. Because if you go there and do it manually, you'll see that as you click, um, people also ask more and more questions appear, and they kind of cluster together. So we built a tool that goes and does that for you automatically, does it in a process that takes sort of 10 to 20 seconds and collates all the data for you and puts it in a nice graph, and that's something that if you were to do manually would take you a good chunk of time, and this allows you to do it and visualize it very quickly. Um, and this tool is really obviously useful for search engine optimizer optimization and for anyone in online marketing and brands and all sorts of people trying to find the questions people are asking for certain terms. Um, and this again has generated when we launched it in October 2022. If you go and look at the background profile, you'll see how it picks it's picked up thousands of links, people linking to that piece of content, and all organic, no outreach, it just you know happened. It's like a snowball. People as people discover and start linking to it, more people discover it and link and link and link in it, and it builds up. And again, that's a really great example of a tool that we've produced that actually has built organic links just by being useful and hard to replicate. And I'll give you a fourth, which is a teaser, which is one that isn't actually live yet, but that we're working on at the moment, and that's where building a tool that allows you to cluster keywords, and this way you can provide any set of um keywords, and the tool will then go to Google, crawl the SERPs, the live SERPs for all of those keyword terms, and find the link intersects, and that's where um same similar keywords share similar um Google search results. By doing that, and then mapping out those intersects actually clusters keywords really, really well. Much, much better than any other method that we've tried, and any other method that we've experimented with. And the prototypes we've built have produced results that are sort of standing. We're like, we're gonna have to build a tool for this. And I know that when that goes out live, that again is another piece of content that will produce loads of organic links because people will start linking to it because it'll be a useful tool and free for people to try. Now, at this point, some of you will probably be thinking this sounds really hard and really expensive. Let's compare it to the alternative, which is not producing this kind of content and producing sort of more easily replicable content, and then trying to build links in any other way, sort of doing outreach or buying links, or any of the other ways of doing links, those in themselves are also expensive and complicated because you've still got to produce some content, and then you've got to go out and do the outreach and try and persuade people to link to it. And it isn't an ongoing process, you tend to do those promotions once, and then yeah, the links will die off to that content. So, this method, these tools will keep building links over and over the years as more and more and people discover them newly. There's always new people discovering them, and they're always going to be linking to them, and it does it on autopilot once it's set up. Yes, producing the tools itself, there is a cost, you're no denying that. Um, but it isn't necessarily going to be as expensive as you think. Okay, so if you want to get a tool set up and published onto your site, but you have don't have the technical skills to do it, then don't worry, there are loads of people out there that can help you. I think the one place I would say go and look at is Upwork.com. Now that is a marketplace of developers and all sorts of people who can provide services online, but there's a lot of developers on there, and as long as you have the idea and you can articulate that idea, then you will be able to find someone on Upwork.com to produce it for you. Um, there's loads of people out there that know how to how to produce these kind of tools, how to integrate them with things like WordPress or any other kind of website. Um, so the having it produced is not a difficult thing, yeah. You might see need some budget to get it produced, depending on the tool is going to depend on how big a budget you need. So a tool, for example, like I mentioned very earlier, like just to calculate you know uh Pythagus' theorem for right angle triangles, that's not going to be a huge tool to produce. I'm not saying it's a great example to do right now because I'm sure there's plenty plenty of places that have already done that, but that's a very simple tool now. To do something like the um keyword clustering tool that we're working on, now that is a lot more sophisticated, and that needs a lot more specialist development, so yeah, you will be talking a lot bigger budget for that. But the key thing is you need to have that first idea of what your tool is going to be, so you really need to think about what in your niche is uh something that you could build that would answer people's questions or help them research something, or can bring together data and make it searchable for them in a way that would help them out. So think about the um broadband postcode checker. That's not overly complicated as a comp as an idea. People can get it. I put my postcode in and then I find what's available in my area and then show them those deals. So it's not necessarily complex. There's a lot of data you've got to build up in the background with that one, but the actual process itself isn't complex. So what you need to do is just sort of brainstorm ideas of what tools could work in your niche, and then just write it down, write a video, create a video of you talking about what you want. Go to somewhere like gotbook.com and see if you can find someone who can understand what you're asking for and find out how much it would cost to build. Now I know we've only talked about the c of doing this so far, but the second part of this is a really good tool will actually pay for itself over time because you will monetize it. So the examples I've used so far, um, the postcode checker for broadband that monetizes with affiliate links to the providers that it searches for. The broadband speed test that also monetizes because it will also show you after it's shown you a um the speed test and the results you get in your area, it will then show you lists of suppliers that can provide you faster deals that are monetized with affiliate links. The People also Ask Scrawler, it's a free tool, but if you want to have unlimited search on it, then you have to subscribe to even the very simple example of um say a you know maths calculator for triangles. You know, that sounds unmonetizable, but actually you can easily monetize a tool like that using display ads. So rather than just being an expense to generate links, it actually is an investment because a good tool will pay for itself over and over again. So this is why tools are really the ultimate kind of content because they will generate you links, they will engage your audience, and they will monetize and they're an investment that will, as I said, keep paying for themselves over and over again. So if you can find any way to fit a tool into your site, into your niche, then I would highly recommend you go for it. Thanks for listening, I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share, it really helps. SEO is not that hard, is brought to you by keywordspeople to use.com, the solution to finding the questions people ask online. See where thousands of people use this every day. Try it today for free at keywordspeople to use.com. If you want to get in touch or have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I'm at channel 5 on Twitter, or you can email me at podcast at keywordspeopleuse.com. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO Is Not Black Hard.