Overview
The city of Hannibal, Missouri, is well-known for being the childhood home of famous American author, Mark Twain, and inspiring the setting of many of his classic books (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, etc.). The city has multiple Twain-related sites and museums, plus gift stores that sell Twain-related merchandise. One Mark Twain-related store, Twainabilia, has operated for years without a website, until this year, when they hired a company to create an ecommerce store that allows them to sell and ship the same unique Twain merchandise they sell in their Hannibal store (books, shirts, art, bags, decorations, etc.).
Twainabilia understands that their new website needs to build authority in order for their products to show up in search results for their target keywords (“mark twain memorabilia” “mark twain shirts” “mark twain art,” etc.) and has asked for your help. You are going to create an initial link building strategy to assist the company. Your client recommendations should be relevant and realistic to achieve, based on your research, using tools like SEMrush, Moz Link Explorer, BuzzSumo, or Google Trends.
Deliverables:
- One content marketing link building idea (See SEO Ch.11.2 for ideas); assume it will be published on a page of the client’s website. It does not have to be about Mark Twain, but could be indirectly related (e.g., books/literature/writing/American history). Include:
- Type of media you plan to use (text/image/video)
- Detailed description of the content idea (must be a unique idea and valuable, interesting, informative, or entertaining enough that websites would link to it)
- Research-based justification for your content idea
- Examples of 2-3 websites that would potentially link to this content (that aren’t part of your manual outreach link building list) and justification
2. A link building spreadsheet with 10 manual link building opportunities. Each row should include:
- Target link URL (or domain if applicable)
- Research-based justification for your link building idea
- Contact info for outreach, if available (name/title/email)
Examples of broad manual link building categories you might research (See SEO Ch. 11.3 for more ideas):
- Competitor links
- Websites that link to Hannibal businesses
- Mark Twain- or literary-related pages/websites that link to businesses like ours
