American internship experience (3) | SEO | Using scholarships to carry out Backlinks Acquisition

Backlink is simple, it is just to ask websites with high DA to link to your website, and the more the better, but in practice it is very time-consuming and labor-intensive. First, you need to have good content, whether it is products, videos, pictures, or articles. Next, you need to contact other influencers to see if they are willing to introduce your content.

If it is a big brand, there may be a lot of people rushing to report it even if there is no additional promotion (ex. iPhone will be washed out when Facebook releases a new one...); but for medium-sized companies, they will hope that more people will write about their own products (Google's own tablet pixel c, but only Google fans or technology geeks will notice); small companies will not even have anyone asking whether they have launched something new.

This article is about my first project for my new internship this semester, which is to establish a scholarship -> contact each school -> hope that the school will put a link to us on a page such as external scholarship.

  The picture above is my current company. Because I don’t want to be discovered as a rookie doing something that may leak internal company information, or be noticed that a strange Chinese website mentions the company name, I will use "COC" instead of my company XD.

This method should have existed in the American SEO industry for a while, but this is the first time COC has implemented it. The scholarship page has been completed by other web designers in the company. I am responsible for finding which schools offer scholarships and contacting them.

1. The company provides a fixed amount of money (COC provides $1,000). How many links you can get depends on your personality. The more links, the lower the ROI.2. The TLD of these backlinks is ".edu". The Domain Authority of these school institutions is usually very high, and the link juice that comes with it is relatively valuable.

There is an important concept here,The links between .edu and .gov are not inherently more important than .com!, but because these government/educational institutions themselves usually have higher DA, Matt Cutts has said this!

3. Shareablility: The news of getting a 1,000 yuan scholarship is worth sharing. Although it is difficult to track, it may attract some secondary links. Generally speaking, scholarships with no restrictions may not be successful, but if they are scholarships specifically for a specific ethnic group (girls/blacks/Latin Americans, etc.), it will easily attract some ethnic-related websites to repost the information.

4. Dwell Time: People who click on the scholarship page usually take the time to read the application conditions, qualifications, requirements, and even look at what the company that provides the scholarship does. The time they stay on the web page may also tell Google that this is an important website.

How to find schools with external scholarship pages

Not every school will have a dedicated page for External Scholarship. There are so many schools in the United States that it is impossible to find out if each other has such a page. You may find that the school only provides scholarships from the school itself or non-profit organizations, which will waste a lot of time.A smarter way is to first find a few schools that offer external scholarships, and then use the scholarships on this page to find those schools where they are still listed.。

Find out the seed schools

The first thing you can do is search on Google like this

you will seeA website with External Scholarships in the title + .edu in the URL,These schools can be used as your seed schools

Next, click on one of the websites to see which scholarships provided by other companies have been listed on it. I usephoenix’s scholarship pageas an example

There are a bunch of external scholarships here. My purpose is to know where else these scholarships are listed at the same time. You can choose a few, click on them, and then drop their scholarship program webpages into SEMrush orOpen Site Explorer。

I can see it here Scholarships provided by the companyApartmentlistalso appears in marquette.edu, spu.edu, uwb.edu....etc. and a bunch of schools.

Create Outreach List

Keep repeating the above two steps until you can't find a new school. My experience is that it will get stuck when there are about 350 schools. If you add a scholarship, 8 of the 10 linking pages that come out are duplicates of those on the list.

After finding the school, you need to find the contact information of the financial aid office. The Google Sheet must have at least the school name, external scholarship page, and contact information.

The letter sent to the school was given directly to me by my supervisor, so I didn’t need to think about how to pitch to the other party. The content of the letter was roughly as follows:I send the contact information to the schools one by one, and I will change it a little bit according to different schools. If I see the name of the person in charge of the other party, I will send it directly to the other party. If the other party has classified the scholarship, I will tell him which project he wants to be listed under.

tracking results

Tracking method one: Ctrl+F

Tracking method two: Ctrl+U ->Ctrl+F

Tracking method three: "Company name"+site:school url

The Engineering at Illinois party replied and said that they would put our information on the website, but after searching, we couldn't find it, so I used a third method and found out that the other party was actually putting it on the school calendar as a news item.But don’t use the third method directly from the beginning, because if the other party just put it up, you won’t see anything even if you search like this before Google crawls/indexes the page again.

Result:

Hindsight/review and improvement

1. When contacting the school, the title of my email was "COC Scholarship Program", so most schools also use this name when posting external scholarship webpages, but a better way would be to use "COC Digital Marketing Scholarship Program".

Firstly, because the company is related to digital marketing, adding these two words can have the effect of co-occurence. Secondly, it allows people who are really looking for scholarships to notice what kind of scholarship this is related to.

2. Design the scholarship to be awarded once a year. Most schools will remove the link because the scholarship has expired, so you should tell them that this is Annually when you first pitch to the school. This will not only prevent the other party from removing the link, but also prevent you from having to work hard again the next year.

3. The sooner you have this program, the better. I have looked at the external scholarships pages of hundreds of schools, and some have not been updated for months or even years. Assuming that a school has not updated its page since 2013, it will be difficult for companies that want to join the competition after 2013 to succeed.

Another benefit is that long-term cooperation will increase the credibility of the company’s own scholarship program. If there are testimonials from the winners from 2007 to 2015 on the scholarship event’s webpage, the school will also think that it is a company that has made some contributions in this field for a long time.

The fiercest opponent

Author’s bullshit: