Link building with Google Ads

1. Find link-worthy topics

First things first, don’t start running Google Ads to random pages on your site and expect them to get backlinks. Not every article is link worthy.

Start by doing some research and finding articles within your niche that naturally attract backlinks each and every month. 

I typically start with statistic-based content.

Type in [niche] statistics into your search bar and look at pages that have a ton of referring domains.

Note: We don’t care about traffic, keywords, or anything else. All we care about is the number of referring domains these pages have. 

The goal of these pages is to get links. Nothing else.

Now, we want to dig deeper into these pages and look at how many links they get each month. We’ll take Forbes as an example here. 

We want to input Forbes’ cybersecurity article into Ahrefs and look at how many referring domains it’s gained over the past 12 months.

One year ago this article wasn’t even published and had zero referring domains. But since going live, it’s gained 501.

What you’re looking for here is a nice slow and continual growth chart over time. If you see a spike in referring domains, they’re link building and you should ignore the page.

Do some maths and you’ll find out this page has gotten ~41.75 links each month.

What's more, many of these links are coming from high DR sites. 

If we dig even deeper into the backlink profile and look at backlinks from DR 40+ websites with domain traffic 10,000+, we see this page has gotten 86 over the past 12 months.

That’s an average of 7 PHAT links each and every month. And that’s just one page! 

Imagine creating 5–10 of these.

2. Find data to include

Once you have a list of pages within your niche that naturally attract backlinks, we want to figure out what data journalists are actually interested in.

Not all data is created equal, and when looking at a statistics page with over 100 different data points, it’s hard to narrow down what actually matters.

To do this we want to review the anchor text pointing to each page.

Continuing with the Forbes cybersecurity article, we see most journalists link to this page and cite the same data:

• $10.5 trillion by 2025

• 2,365 cyberattacks

• information breaches rose by 72%

If we open up the pages that are linking to Forbes, we start to uncover how journalists are using the data within their content.

Now, based on the most popular anchor text and data points being used, we structure our page so this information is at the very top. 

These two steps are the 80/20 when it comes to creating content that naturally attracts backlinks. 

Journalists will land on your page, find the info they are looking for (quickly), and then quote you as the source.

The question always is, how can I rank this page? No chance I overtake Forbes.

And that’s where step three comes into play.

3. Set up the Google Ads

If you run Google Ads for keywords, then you’re theoretically number one.

You rank above all the organic listings.

And no, journalists don’t care.

When setting up Google Ads, you should only target the keywords the Forbes article is ranking for. Specifically, only keywords in the top five positions. 

These are the keywords journalists are searching for and what is driving these natural backlinks.

Once you have this list of keywords, go and set up Google Ads with a couple of caveats.

• Make these “search” only campaigns.

• Use exact match, not broad match, for keyword targeting.

• Only target desktop devices: No journalist writes an article on their phone.

  
  

• Only target people in the countries you want backlinks from.

And that’s it my friends.

You’ll want to set up a task to monitor the links coming in each week. 

And remember, look for backlinks with “gclid” in them because this shows journalists came in through your Google Ads, linked to your site, and didn’t strip out any URL parameters.

Your Next Steps

Reading articles and theory are cool but you know what will actually move the needle for you?

Action. Don’t just read this. 

Implement it or send it to a team member.

Here’s what to do next:

1. Find a list of 5–10 articles within your niche that naturally attract backlinks.

2. Review their anchor text to find important data points.

3. Input important data points at the top of your articles.

4. Set up Google Ads.

5. Monitor.

6. Get links.