Link Acquisition Program Management for Ecommerce Teams

Most link programs underperform on where the links point, not on how many arrive. A typical direct-to-consumer program sends around seventy percent of its earned links at the homepage and a press page, which is where they do the least for revenue. We choose the destination before the tactic, then run the program that fits it. What we run and what we hold: This is the engagement where we own the whole link surface: press outreach, a study or two a year, expert sourcing, reclamation, and the internal link graph that redistributes what press insists on pointing at the homepage. It also means holding the parts nobody wants to own, such as deciding that a quarter goes to the buying guides rather than the new collection the merchandising team wants covered, and then saying that to the merchandising team. Pages before tactics: Destinations come out of your own search data: pages sitting between positions five and fifteen on terms that convert, category and buying-guide pages ahead of product detail pages, and the pages where a link changes the outcome rather than confirming it. The tactic then follows the page. A study earns links to a research page and the internal graph carries the value onward. Reclamation puts links exactly where the old URL pointed. Press mostly lands on the homepage, and we plan around that instead of pretending otherwise. Anchors and pace: We never ask a journalist for anchor text. Where we do have influence, which is reclamation and resource placements, the distribution stays weighted to brand and naked URL, and we will not manufacture a profile no organically covered brand in your category has. Pace follows what the category actually produces in coverage, not an invoice cycle, and some months are quiet. We would rather tell you a quiet month was quiet than fill it with placements neither of us would defend in front of your CFO. Your other vendors: We review the rest of your link spend and tell you plainly which of it is bought. If a vendor is buying placements, we will not sit above them and report their output as earned. You keep them or you keep us. That is not a negotiating position, it is that our reporting would be worthless with their output inside it. Working with your team: We take commercial priority from you and hold editorial judgement. Your content team keeps its calendar; we name the two pieces a quarter worth building for outside attention and leave the rest alone. Your PR agency keeps corporate and crisis; we take category and product stories, and we share the media list so nobody pitches the same desk twice in a week. Reporting: One page a month. Placements with live URLs and destination pages, the referring domain's actual organic traffic rather than a third-party authority score, ranking movement on the destinations we chose, and a section on what we tried that failed and what we are stopping as a result. Quarterly, a call where the recommendation may be to reduce the retainer, and occasionally has been. What we will not run: Guaranteed monthly link counts. Payment per link. Programs whose deliverable is a spreadsheet of placements on sites that exist to sell placements. And we do not take a client whose site cannot hold a ranking once it has links, because that is a technical and merchandising problem that link building does not solve. Who this is not for: Brands wanting a vendor to execute a plan already written in-house. Hire freelancers, it is cheaper and it will work. Teams unwilling to share analytics access. And organizations where the person paying is measured on link volume, because our reporting will make their quarter look worse than a cheaper vendor's would.