"Google only loves you when everyone else loves you" — is THE golden rule when it comes to SEO.
No matter how well you SEO optimize your pages, at the end of the day, your website's authority will either push you to success or hold you back.
Now, the only way to increase your website's authority is through link building. And, Typeform, is literally, the KING of link building!
Typeform is a relatively small company, but its massive backlinks profile would hint otherwise. Its current valuation is $70M, while it has accumulated a crazy 106M backlinks!
So, how was Typeform able to do this? Read on to find out!
Why link buildd-ing is important?
Before, we get into the specifics of Typeform's strategy, let's first understand why link building is important.
In SEO, link building includes all the actions you take to get quality backlinks.
A backlink refers to links to your page from any other page on the web.
For Google, every link to your website is basically a popularity vote. The more votes you have, the more likely you are to rank at top positions.
While Google doesn’t reveal the exact metric it uses, tools like Ahrefs, Moz etc. have analyzed billions of websites to come up with their own metric. On Ahrefs, it’s called domain rating (DR) and it’s basically a number between 0-100 that's assigned to your website.
Of course, a vote from a high DR website adds much more value than a vote from a lower DR website. By acquiring good quality backlinks, you can increase your website authority.
There are a number of ways to get backlinks. The most effective is to write guest posts and create focused outreach campaigns to high DR websites. But, it's usually a tedious process.
So how exactly did Typeform do this at scale?
How does Typeform buildd links at scale?
Typeform is a simple form builder. It helps you create visually appealing forms & surveys that your customers would enjoy filling.
Once you have created a Typeform, you are likely to share it on social media, add it to your blogs, or embed the form on your website.
When you embed the form on your website, this is how it looks:
Now, what's interesting about this snippet is the bottom part of the form where it says "powered by Typeform". When you look at the code you can clearly see that there is a link added to the text "Typeform".
So, if you decide to embed this code on your website, your website will essentially link back to Typeform, helping increase its authority.
Now, imagine this at scale. Typeform has thousands of users and they probably have created multiple forms and surveys. That's thousands of backlinks to Typeform without lifting a finger!
Brilliant, right?!
Our link buildd-ing strategy at Remote Tools!
We have also implemented a similar tactic to get backlinks on our website Remote Tools. To give you some context, Remote Tools is a repository of tools used for remote collaboration.
Every week we'd select the Top 5 products of the week to share it with our Twitter & newsletter audience. A top product badge would then appear on these product pages.
We would also share the code snippet for these badges with the product maker, so they can add it to their website.
When the badge is added to the product's website, it basically works as a backlink to Remote Tools. Here's how the code snippet looks. You can clearly see that the code includes a link directly to remote tools.
So, from the maker's perspective, these badges work as social proof showcasing the popularity of their product. But for us, it means an extra backlink!
So, what are the results?
Like I mentioned earlier, Typeform has 106M backlinks according to Ahrefs! If you look at the backlinks, you can easily identify the form URL pattern for Typeform.
URL Pattern ➝ [form-name].typeform.com
For example, we have links from sites like:
- Dictionary.com → form.typeform.com/to/
- Healthifyme.com → myhealthifyme.typeform.com/to/
- Sportskeeda → sportskeeda.typeform.com/to/
Owing to these 106M backlinks, Typeform today has a DR of 93 which is in the range of sites like Washington Post, Twitch, Hubspot, Bloomberg, HuffPost & Snapchat!
So clearly, this initiative has helped Typeform increase its domain rating to make it 182nd most popular or linked website on the internet!
What are the key takeaways?
Link building is one of the most important initiatives you’ll work on. If you invest in building links today, it’ll reap you benefits for years to come.
Good domain authority gives you a significant advantage over your competitors & will help you rank for difficult, high-volume keywords.
Overall, the most reliable way to get high-quality links is by writing guest posts. But, it definitely helps to have scalable & creative ways to quickly acquire a massive number of backlinks.
There are many such examples you can come across, where products have successfully scaled their link-building process. All you have to do is figure out a creative way to do this for your own startup :)
