Building Links That Impact the Bottom Line with Garrett French

There is typically a disparity between links and the bottom line. A lot of the time, a link-building agency may be contracted to just get links or drive organic traffic, but there’s no clear throughline to how it impacts the company’s bottom line.

And even if you are doing what you are hired for —building links for link’s sake—if you’re not impacting the bottom line, you’re not going to have a job for very long.

Our guest for this podcast, Garrett French, founder of Citation Labs, ZipSprout, and Xofu, is one of the best in the business at thinking through this problem. And he does this by placing a strong focus on answering audience questions and user problems.

In this podcast, we discussed his thoughts, theories, and strategies for building links that impact the bottom line.

Can you explain the concept of citable elements?

Garrett French 
To go way, way back — and I love doing that, probably a little too much, I hope we have plenty of time. So really, we wanted our client sales pages to be as linkable as a resource page. So when I say ‘resource page,’ I’m taking us all the way back to 2003 or 2004, when we would make these incredible, detailed guides that we would then try to get links to from other pages.

And so we realized that there were — what, at the time — now go with me back in time to, like, probably 2006, 2007 — linker-valued audiences. The linkers would be publishers with resource pages, and they were gonna link to content that served their valued audiences. A lot of times it would be seniors, for example.

So we really started to ask the question, not so much how do we make sure we talk to seniors as an audience on every page of the website — because obviously that’s gonna not really fit or work very well — but we said, what made this type of content valued by linkers? And then how do we bring components of this, or the values that this type of content enabled the linker to link to, and how do we put that onto a sales page? How do we make sales pages actually worth linking to? And this really cracked open the whole journey for us since then.

And some of this journey has been — gosh — we really keep our clients longer when we build links directly to the sales pages and we show how the rankings of the sales pages go up. It’s taken us out of conversations that are more like pure digital PR, or like, you know, big brand — how do we get lots of visibility for brands?

But we’ve stayed really focused on how do we make sure that this unit of offering from the client grows its visibility. And it’s very complicated in enterprise, where we have a brand, but then within the brand there are all these offerings, and each one operates as a business unit. Within the business unit, there are different offerings, and then within the offerings there are different pages that reflect different benefits or subsets of the — it gets so complicated so fast. When you really try to just increase brand visibility, you end up not really having anything to put into a report for the person you report to, to tell their boss where all the money went that they spent on visibility or link building, right? You have to stay focused in that place.

Right? Like, you have to stay focused in that place of, as an agency owner — you have to stay focused in that place of enabling the person you report to to explain why they should have, why they need to spend more money using Citation Labs or Zip Sprout or Xofu, whichever flavor they came in on, for visibility.

So that’s — I think I either over-explained or under-explained, I’m not sure which. Ask me more questions, though, so I make sure I’m being useful.

What kind of customer research do you do for clients?

Garrett French
Yeah, this is a very, very fun part. We were calling this “decisioning efficiency,” right? Like, you’re trying to enable a more efficient decision on behalf of your prospective clients, whether they go with you or not. And so I think that’s a really important starting point. It’s a scary starting point for marketers — we need to make it easier for people to say no.

That’s terrifying, but we need to start there.

Okay, you don’t have to tell your boss that’s what you’re doing, and we don’t usually talk about it like that, but you really do need to say: what information on this page would be most useful to someone that’s in the decisioning phase about whether to do or not do this — the transition or the activity that relates to this purchase, right?

So a lot of our initial work is like locating — in the context of the buyer — what are they doing? Why are they in the market? What problems are they trying to solve? Have they diagnosed their problems accurately? Do we have a way to help them diagnose that more efficiently or effectively that we can provide?

These are the types of questions that we’re really starting with.

This is much easier in a B2B space, okay? Because there’s a lot more specialization — role-specific specialization of the purchase decisioning committee. So if you’re in a smaller — so we’ve been looking a lot at nationwide service providers, local service providers, home service providers. This has been a special — we’ve been working with these folks for a decade-plus, but lately we’ve been getting more of these types of inquiries in.

So we’re really starting, even there, though the decisioning committee isn’t quite as complex for a B2C purchase. We’re still seeing a lot of very particular intent around things like people with very particular allergies or health-related concerns, for example, when it comes to cleaning.

Or people that — maybe there’s another kind of layer of people that is a B2B layer for cleaning services — that would be the person whose job it is to turn the apartment over for rental for someone else, right?

And so the questions that each one of these roles or types of folks would have are just very different one from another, right? And you do the same service, you use the same chemicals, but how you’re positioning on your page is gonna be very different. And the decisioning efficiencies — the information that’s needed by the people that are making the decision — can be very, very different.

Now, what do we do with all this?

And that was a long way of describing the simpler decisioning arena of a cleaning service versus, you know, enterprise computers — actual hardware — where the complexities are quite varied.

Vince Nero

So the idea is, like, you’re identifying the types of customers within each segment of your business, for each product, and also the decision-makers and the types of problems or questions they might ask that will lead them to your service. Right?

—

Garrett French
The questions that — let me reframe that a little bit.

Number one, we’re rarely asked to come in and do everything for the entire company.

It’s usually a division, a business division person, and we’re gonna do one — yeah, yeah, exactly. “Garrett, we’re not ready for all this yet, okay?” Like, I come in pretty — I don’t know if you know — I bring a lot of intensity with me wherever I go. But…

So one of the ways we’re looking at constructing how we think of information needs — right, like what’s the ideal amount of information that someone would have — is we think about what a seasoned veteran who has solved this problem a number of times before would ask. What questions would they have? What would they be asking?

And so this isn’t — you know — it’s a thousand times easier with LLMs, okay?

But it’s not a crazy thing to ask. It’s not a wild thing to kind of use as a starting point. And so we’ve done a lot of thinking. We’ve coined the notion of “friction-inducing, latent, unasked questions.” But we realized that another way to spin that or flip that around was: all right, well, what would the seasoned expert ask that basically no one else would know to ask? And that’s going to give you a better sense of what types of information to put on the page.

Let me give an example from your life, Vince, if you don’t mind. You just shared how you hosted Thanksgiving, but this was after you hosted your mother’s birthday. So this was the second big family hosting event you had, and it went much smoother — because you knew what questions to ask. You knew how to do things differently, right?

And so, Vince, going into his third big family event — well, you would have — if you went to go prompt an LLM about how to best take care of your family, you’d have a much different array of types of questions you would ask.

And so what we’re really trying to land on is: what is the array of inquiries that a very seasoned professional would have if they were the one buying the service?

Like, the person that’s been running a cleaning business for 20 years and wants to hire somebody to clean their house — what would they ask?

What would a used car salesperson who’s been doing it for 20-plus years ask when they went to go buy a used car?

And so that’s the level of informational inquiry that I think starts to define what — can you put all that on one page of your website? No, of course not. But you’re trying to come up with tables and representations of this kind of information.

Does it all live on — this is where we have a lot of nuance and we have to figure things out — because usually you can’t really mess with an enterprise’s sales page.

You’re not invited into that particular…Thanksgiving table. You’re not asked to eat at those tables.

But there are ways to address that if you can’t just actively make additions to a page or add FAQs.

And we really are — part of our starting point for what content should we add to a page, which then is building into where do we go to build links or drive visibility — comes from this place of what does an ideal amount of information look like for making the best possible decision.

There’s gotta be a faster way to say that, Vince. But that’s what we’re trying to accomplish.

Does traditional keyword-based SEO research have a place in this?

Garrett French

For sure, for sure.

Yeah, we still use as a starting point what we call link gap analysis. So we built out a tool called Link Launch. And so we’re looking at potential target pages to build links to, looking at what keywords these are ranking for, who’s ranking against these.

Now, obviously that surface — the SEO surface, the organic 10 links, the 10 blue links type of results — those are gonna be the phone book. They’re going away. It’s sad; I love them. That’s where I feel the most at home, right? But they’re going away for sure.

We still use that as a component of understanding relative competition in a given space — what does the link graph look like for this body of keywords or body of information need?

But really, then there’s this hard kind of gap — like, hey, as SEOs, we’ve really limited ourselves based on where we see keyword demand right now, which isn’t always the information that’s needed to make a great decision.

Because a lot of the keyword demand is driven by a problem I would like to solve and a belief I have that maybe this thing is the way to solve that.

And so we’re really trying to crack that place open. And there’s not a lot of good language to describe that — we haven’t found it. I don’t know what the KPIs are for it. And then frankly, we’ve gotten pushback — recently it was a pitch we were doing with a CMO, and they’re just like, “Hey, GTFO the bottom of the funnel. You don’t know our space. We just want top-of-funnel visibility.”

And so that’s the other piece — we really do start at the bottom of the funnel and kind of work up. But we do find that when we do that, it can be a lot. I already bring a lot to the table, as I mentioned, but then especially if you have a CMO at a big company that doesn’t actually understand — no offense, I’m not calling anybody out — doesn’t understand the bottom of the funnel for all the various service lines.

All of a sudden you’re talking about things that you need an SME to give you feedback on, and the CMO is like, “No, no — get back up to leads. We gotta come back up to leads.”

And we are trying to live and die by leads —visibility and impact—but it can be tough to close those gaps.

I personally find it very difficult to close those gaps. I know other people are very good at those things, but explaining myself has never been my strong suit — oddly enough, as a marketer. But anyway, keep going.

How does your customer decision-making research get used in link building or PR efforts?

Garrett French

One of my favorite examples here is an industrial computer manufacturer — or actually I think they’re an OEM, it doesn’t matter.

We worked with their customer service logs.

They put them into a Notebook LM so we could query against those, and we were able to isolate — this is where, we’re just the link builders, we really like to have an SME internally who can say “yes, this is actually a thing or it isn’t” — but we’re still able to get much closer to this place of useful things to say.

Like, genuinely useful.

But we found that there was a big disconnect between engineers and the in-house procurement team. The engineers weren’t doing all their homework.

They would just say, “Hey, we need five or ten of these,” or whatever — and they’d send that to procurement. And they left procurement with a lot of questions still. So there were a lot of inquiries from procurement to the client, and the client didn’t know this information — they kind of needed more from their engineers.

So we didn’t do any studies here, but it begs a study, right — around when there are slowdowns.

We don’t want to point fingers, but gosh, it sure seems like the engineers aren’t quite doing as much as they could. You wouldn’t say it like that — please, nobody take marketing advice from me. Don’t say it like that.

But we found the problem, and it was in this place where the engineers weren’t explaining themselves.

So what do you do as a business?

Well, you ask how do we help solve this problem, because it’s clearly a problem.

And so you’re going to work a little harder with the engineers and give the procurement team a better sense of what we know as the OEM provider of these products, and then what they’re going to have to ask the engineers.

But here’s how you talk to the engineers. Here’s how you ask them. Because if you don’t ask an engineer, right — what happens? Nothing. That’s the answer you’re not going to get. You’re not going to get anything valuable out of that.

So where we landed was: gosh, we need to have more — almost an API, or like a language translator — on our pages.

So if you’re on our website and you’re curious about these things, well, it’s probably because you need to ask your engineers these things.

So we’re better able to isolate the types of information in our decision makers — and these are past the decision point, the decision has been made, right?

We’re just trying to get money at this point, but it’s still in-funnel. Technically we haven’t made money yet.

But when we have this participant in the purchase, how do we reduce friction?

How do we make their job easier?

And it isn’t about explaining topically what an XYZ is.

And this is the thing that kills me about SEO — I love SEO, don’t get me wrong.

But when we focus on topical relevance, we lose the plot.

Nothing against that, right?

Like, we want to rank for these big topics and these big keywords and we want the traffic, rah rah rah — but also if we’re not reducing frictions for the people that are actually trying to solve the problems with our services or our products, on the pages where they buy them, I think we’re not doing our jobs.

And we can build links to that stuff too, Vince.

Like, that stuff becomes a very citable element around — okay, this is a very specific table that helps the procurement team talk to engineering.

Maybe that’s part of a bigger study we’ve done, and then we’re going to have a little chunk that goes on each individual product page. B

ut you can still build links to that much more readily than just the product itself, right?

Because this is the stuff that you see in Reddit — these are the complaints you see in Reddit, this friction between procurement and engineering, right? So you want to live in that place where you’re helping reduce these frictions, helping both sides understand each other.

I’ll let you talk now. I’m so sorry.

Vince Nero

No, no. I think the kind of creative spark then becomes how — presenting those problems in a way that, yeah, you can get links. Like, to your point, is it a big study or is it just a table, and you’re reaching out to — and I would assume when you get this niche, for lack of a better word, or this descriptive with the problems you’re solving, you probably limit the amount of outreach you can do, right?

The amount of websites you’re getting links from.

But the ones you’re getting links from are the super relevant links that are probably really going to move the needle.

And at the end of the day, you could probably point to those to your CMO and say, “Look, our audience is probably spending a lot of time on these two sites that we got links from.” So to me, I mean — good.

Garrett French

And like, if there are engineering coaching firms, right — if that happens to be a thing, or procurement coaching — maybe there isn’t, I don’t know.

But you would look for those types of publishers, potentially.

You would look immediately to your existing people that send you business, and who are your allies in the verticals that you work in.

And is there a way to kind of cross-promote with those folks? You would be sponsoring the procurement webinars, the niche-specific procurement and engineering conventions and webinars and publications and trade magazines for visibility there as well.

But yeah, absolutely — the opportunity pool is quite small.

But when you are — yeah, it’s preferred. It’s much easier. Sometimes constraints are nice to have.

How do you report on link impact?

Garrett French

That is 100% why we said — yeah, we could talk literally all day long about metrics of the linking page, the linking website, and there are good ones and there are bad ones. But what happens after you build the link?

And so it’s that specific place where we really try to move the conversation and move the focus, because that’s what we found helps us keep our jobs and helps the people that we report to keep their jobs, right?

Because we’re focused on impact, as opposed to getting granular about the DA or whatever of a given website.

Does that close the deal?

No — a lot of our more traditional, steeped-in-SEO folks have a tough time making that leap into impact.

And we don’t talk about impact very much, very particularly, or with a lot of specificity.

But when we can say, “Hey, here’s the page we built links to, and here’s the control group of pages on your website that are similar but didn’t get any links — and you can see them trending flat while our visibility is going up for the page we built links to” — when you can isolate impact that way, and say it was these links that we built, these 17 —

From, you didn’t like the DA of this one — remember, you got really upset with that one?

You asked us to do another link because this DA was so low? Well, guess what — it didn’t matter. A

nd that’s not what we should be looking at.

I’m not saying give us carte blanche — we’re not trying to get shitty links out here, we’re not trying to get PBNs.

But let’s really look at what happens after we build the links, what happens on the pages we built links to.

And when we track a control group on a site, and a control group of competitors as well — “hey, here’s how we’re trending against our control group, on-site control group plus competitive control group” — the whole conversation shifts. You all of a sudden have a narrative, a compelling story to tell the CMO.

This is the game. I mean, this is where you have to live. You’re not like, “Hey, we got a link from a DA 99.”

What does the CMO care about that?

What are you giving the CMO there to help them keep their job? Because they’re under attack too.

Don’t quote me on this — don’t call me out based on my made-up statistics here — but CMOs are the C-suite individual that loses their job the most frequently.

And if you’re not contributing to the stability of their job continuity, then you’re not contributing to your own job continuity either.

And so you need to be very clear about the ROI of link building. And this is something we learned over 15 years of being an agency — we’re into our 15th year now.

And this is why we started focusing on impact reporting, link impact reporting: here are the pages in our campaign, here’s how they’re doing versus your control group. I mean, it seems like it should have been a thing all along — it just hasn’t really been. We’ve seen some examples in the wild of folks doing this, and it’s not outlandish, it’s not crazy.

But when you focus this way rather than —And I’m not saying you don’t do digital PR — you’ve got to keep taking those big swings, you’ve got to keep taking those medium swings.

Don’t worry, you can’t always build links directly to sales pages — you shouldn’t.

But if you’re doing all of these things together, you are cooking with gas.

That’s when the magic really happens — when you put all these pieces together, for sure.

Vince Nero

And just to clarify — the upward trajectory you’re talking about, when you’re talking link impact score — that’s traffic?

Garrett French

Correct, it’s rankings that align with keyword demand for keywords that we know the traffic for.

So yeah, it is visits to the page, relevant to a specific keyword.

Now, let’s talk about the elephant though — AI overviews and LLMs — because has everything shifted?

Yes, it has. Is it just link building?

Kind of not, but kind of, right?

So we could push there, but you’re running things, Vince.

What else should we talk about?

What are some of the characteristics of good content?

Garrett French

Utility — or helpfulness.

We’re taught by Google to make helpful content, and yet we’re given no formulas or rubrics or guidance around what helpful actually means. And so we’ve really pushed heavily into that space, trying to formulate what does helpful look like, what does it mean.

And for us it’s a lot of decisioning efficiencies — reducing a sense of risk, increasing or decreasing the time it takes to arrive at a decision. And honestly, this is what a lot of LLMs are already doing, right?

Like, they don’t need us. They can speculate a lot into these places.

But when you get granular about a very particular offering that a client has, there are still going to be a lot of areas that LLMs end up hallucinating into, or best-guessing over, or not really having detailed knowledge about.

And so that’s kind of where we feel like the most bang for the buck comes from — what can we add to the page to make it appear higher in, or get cited more frequently in, LLMs? Hopefully get the brand mentioned more. And then also what can we build links to directly, and what’s gonna be genuinely useful.

I do think there’s some opportunity, depending on the size of the client, to be looking across a division that, let’s say, has three business units.

They all kind of work with the same client or type of ICP.

Doing a study that really does look across all of these, but then trying to come up with formulas that could be extensible — decisioning formulas, like how do you make decisions about what to do when this happens — and then getting those formulas and working them all the way down to the page level, where you’re not necessarily starting from the bottom up.

That’s my favorite way to do it, because bottom-up you really start in the soil — the context of this thing that’s for sale, right?

We’re SEOs, and we think top-down: topic, and then everything else is kind of like noise.

But it’s that place of noise — the edge case — that’s where the real value a lot of times comes from, when we are looking for specific types of content that are gonna be citable by humans and not just LLMs, but citable and put on a particular sales page. It has to be useful, though. It has to be helpful. And that could mean you’re telling people not to buy this thing.

That’s what helpful means.

That’s what actually helpful means.

It’s scary — it’s scary for us as marketers.

And don’t tell your CMO that I said that. Please. I’ll never have a chance to speak with them.

But that’s where the genuinely useful kinds of information comes from — if you’re enabling someone to not choose this thing.

Now, you could suggest other things on your website, right?

But you’re saying, “Hey, don’t click here now, because you need to do these things before you click here. You’re gonna waste your time.”

Acknowledging that, I think, is where trust really comes from — really trying to take that role in the life of your market, in the context of your market, for people that are visiting your website. That’s where I want my marketing to live.

I mean, nobody’s asking me for that, Vince, right?

Like, “Hey, put more friction on my sales pages, please.”

Nobody says that.

Nobody really wants that.

But it is the place where probably the most useful things to say — the most citation-worthy content — is going to likely be.

And you can spin it so that it’s like, “Hey, we’re best for” or “best win.” So it’s not just like, “Don’t do it if—” I just say things the wrong way because I’m — I’m just a terrible marketer. That’s not my strong suit. Figuring out where the frictions are — that’s what I love.

And I think that’s one of the things that LLMs have enabled us to do at scale more easily.

Certainly, the more we can ground what we would say on a particular page from the complaints and issues that our customers have with this specific offering, the better we’re doing at creating citation-worthy content and serving our market. And I think that’s what Will Reynolds landed on in the example you gave, right? “This page on the IRS website is very difficult. We don’t understand what it means. So let’s make it easier to understand. Let’s build a tool to make that easier to work with.”

But now LLMs can do that much more quickly too.

So we’re still in this era where — are we really solving a problem that needs to be solved anymore?

And so it’s still a fun — it’s still just a delightful place to work. I love my job.

The last two years of LLMs and AI’s ascent has been absolutely breathtaking and wonderful. I feel more excited than ever about coming into work.

But it’s definitely a challenge around what do we say, what do we put on client pages that is gonna be useful and seen as relevant? Like, have entities in it that an LLM would expect, but then also be uniquely useful, uniquely valuable.

You kind of have to solve it fresh each time — but LLMs make it much easier to solve that type of thing now.

It’s just getting SMEs on board to get granular down to the specific page, and that can be tricky. We’re still solving for that, frankly, Vince. But go ahead.

Are you looking at AI-generated answers to make sure you’re filling in those gaps?

Garrett French

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

So when we’re building out — we call them “tracking-worthy prompts.”

When we’re building a tracking-worthy prompt, it’s from the perspective of an expert user who’s really trying to — and we use AI to make these too.

So this is why the more insight we can get from an SME, the better. Anyway, so when we have this kind of expert-level prompting, you can take the output and then put it in front of an actual, real SME and say, “What is wrong here? What is inaccurate?”

And calling it a hallucination — it’s more like: what is it glossing over?

What is it still not really understanding, that it’s not speaking to?

And I think that’s a key distinction to make — it could be, but it’s really more like where is it inadequate?

And sometimes it’s a pure hallucination — not super often, especially not with Gemini, which is just coming out kicking a lot of ass. I do see it making mistakes — I’m not trying to say it’s the best in the whole world.

I do think it is, but I’m not trying to say that. I’m just kidding.

I’m being silly.

But I do like it, I do really like it.

But those outputs from Gemini, from the AI overviews — those are what you really want to be examining.

But almost more specifically, what are the citations when it’s saying these things? Because that’s the second layer of work here. We’re calling it “citation optimization,” but we’re really trying to say: what are the documents that are being called up? And then how do we interact with the publishers of such documents — whether it’s us or a publisher that we could engage with potentially — so that what they’re saying is more favorable, or more full in its expression of information needed?

So there’s some missing information on these pages, and we know that from having validated the absence with an SME. So now we can go to this organization, this publisher, and say, “Hey, you missed something. You didn’t realize this, and so you’re leaving this out, and your page is deficient in some way.”

Now, you’re usually gonna have to knock — people aren’t updating their websites that much anymore — so you’re often getting people who are — so you’re moving into the gray area of link building, or you’re buying at this point.

Yeah, we haven’t really traditionally done that, so we’re kind of starting to have to lean into that space.

We’ve really tried to be link earners. But when you can see exactly who’s being cited, and you know the types of pages, you know what they’re saying, and you need to be visible on those pages — you gotta do what you gotta do, Vince.

Vince Nero

Vince is the Director of Content Marketing at Buzzstream. He thinks content marketers should solve for users, not just Google. He also loves finding creative content online. His previous work includes content marketing agency Siege Media for six years, Homebuyer.com, and The Grit Group. Outside of work, you can catch Vince running, playing with his 2 kids, enjoying some video games, or watching Phillies baseball.

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Website: https://www.buzzstream.com