Link Building by Starting a Market Research Firm

One successful link building strategy is to start a market research firm for your specific industry. This strategy is so great because it forms a reusable, multi-usable, and specifiable asset that can become its own link building machine. Here’s how it can be done.

Market Research Firms

Have you ever noticed that sites are being cited and linked to whenever they even think of doing market research? Research is cited for many reasons, such as:

• Whenever research backs up someone’s marketing claim, they’re more than willing to mention such a source. This works great for getting links from big corporate businesses.
• The most newsworthy facts in any industry come from research, so people in that business will pick it up. This works nicely for sites featuring industry news.
• Because every site needs content, providing them with additional insights and scoops gives them unique content that their readers will love (and in turn might even link to). This works for publishers and sites that are somewhat actively taking an SEO effort.
• When your research is specific to someone’s audience, they might even be willing to address those for your questionnaire. This works great for getting dofollow links from social networks and sites with a large following.

Why an Entire Firm?

Market research requires resources that can be quite expensive and extensive when only used once. But after you’ve done it a first time, you can always re-use part of your respondents, your media connections, research partners, the look and feel of your reports and graphs, and the name the firm has built for itself.

A separate firm can also draw attention from your commercial activities. An impartial site can easily get links from your biggest competitors. There are many ways of getting the acquired link value from the research site to yours.

From Research to Links

Partner as much as possible with all research you do. Partner for additional people to question, additional trustworthiness, for media attention, for specific links, and much more. Depending on those particular partners and the search term that needs to be addressed this time, you define a topic and make sure the search term is the one thing that won’t be changed when editors devise their own titles.

Create an extensive report of the research, including potential conclusive takes on titles and subtitles. The more extensive it is, the more likely it is to be linked instead of copied entirely. 

Visuals also increase the chance of being linked. Copyrights should only be applied mildly to avoid discouraging people from picking it up. 

Give scoops to specific partners and send through industry specific or generic newswires too. If the linked report is a PDF, you can always redirect it after a couple of weeks to an HTML version that is better able to distribute link value. Old locations of the questionnaire can be redirected to this outcome as well.

Some Success Stories So Far

One famous dating site does a lot of research on dating behavior and often receives national news coverage with the outcomes. Before this tactic, this website was nowhere to be found on Google and no one even knew their name. They do the research out of their own brand, which makes sure their own domain receives all link value.

One construction company offering services nationwide does research on do-it-yourself constructions. Although this audience has no apparent relation to their services, this website started ranking on every competitive term in their industry. They discovered that corporate construction information isn’t linkable, but DIY has an active online community that uses the same terminology. Google even found the links relevant enough for words like “contractor” and “architect”.

There are many more, but naming them would jeopardize their ranking effect for those clients. Needless to say, you need to experiment with it yourself. 

Start out small and don’t give up to early. It will take some practice, but it could become one of your most successful strategies to date.