Give Dead Links New Life as part of Your MSP Marketing Strategy
Your managed services business wants to have as many opportunities to draw in business as possible. Often, some of the most effective marketing strategies come from the least expected places.
One way to get more traffic is to take advantage of opportunities left by businesses that have let their web domains go dark, either due to neglect or going out of business. Here's how to gain more links to your business quickly.
"We all know building backlinks is one of the most important aspects of any successful SEO and digital marketing campaign," notes a recent Moz article. "There is an untapped resource out there for link building: finding your competitors' broken pages that have been linked to by external sources."
How Do I Drive More Viewers to My Website?
That's a question we get asked often. We recommend working to find dead links on key pages that are likely to attract customers that you want. Fortunately, there are several great, free tools out there to help.
At Ulistic, we use brokenlinkcheck.com to find those expired links. Simply enter a URL into the site and you'll get a comprehensive report of dead links.
The report includes a listing of all the websites that are now dormant on the target domain. It also lists the cause of the dead link, whether it's a request timeout, a 404 error or a bad host. That's where the opportunity exists.
The bad host category is where you want to focus your work.
How Do I Leverage Dead Links for My Website?
The sites with bad links mean that the registration for that domain has expired. This may be due to unpaid bills, negligence or business that no longer exists.
The opportunity is that the link to that domain still exists on the page you checked. The next step is to determine how valuable that domain is for your purposes.
We use thehoth.com, which offers a free domain authority checker using metrics from Moz. You get several stats to gauge the name value of the site:
- Domain Authority: A score that predicts the likelihood that a site will rank in search engines on a 0-100 scale. Low scores mean there's a slim chance of it appearing high in results.
- Page Authority: Similar to Domain Authority, this metric assesses the likelihood that individual pages will register rather than the website as a whole.
- A Moz ranking
- Number of external links
With a clearer sense of the relative value of dead links, you'll be ready for the next step.
How Do I Redirect Dead Links?
Once you know of an expired domain, it's a rather simple process to redirect. First, you'll need to purchase the domain, which is usually an inexpensive purchase.
Once you have ownership of the domain, you can use your site management tool to redirect any traffic from that website to your website.
Visitors to the site containing the formerly dead link will now be sent to your site when they click.
Who Can Help Us With MSP Marketing?
At Ulistic, we help MSPs with online marketing, from website design to content. Let us help optimize your website to draw in more business. Grade your MSP website now at https://www.ulistic.com.
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