To follow is a great strategy that I've personally used to increase the topical trust flow of sites. It involves leveraging your skill set as an SEO or web designer to obtain links from sites in relevant industries that you'd otherwise have no hope of getting a link from.
A lot of SEO practitioners misunderstand topical trust flow. They think if they obtain a link from a site that has content on it similar to their website that this will help to increase their site's topical relevancy.
Topical trust flow is a measure of the topical relevancy of the inbound links that are pointing to the site where your link is coming from. It doesn't matter if the site is about the same subject, the topical relevancy of the inbound links pointing to that site is what really matters.
Getting topically relevant high Trust Flow links is hard. Consider trying this to get Topically relevant links!
Although a website may have content on it very similar to a site you're trying to promote, the actual inbound links pointing to that site may be coming from other sites that are completely unrelated and also have non-related inbound links.
This is why it's important to realise that just because you get link from a site that has similar content to your site, it doesn't mean that this will increase your topical trust flow in the correct category.
It's easier to understand the topical trust flow concept if you just think of it as a measure of your site's Tier 2 links. Your sites primary Tier 1 links may be on sites that cover the same topic as your site, but the inbound links pointing to that site, which are technically your Tier 2 links, may be coming from completely unrelated industries.
An inbound link from a site about web design could potentially increase your topical trust flow in the category of 'online games'. This is because all the inbound links pointing to that web design site are coming from online gaming sites. This is why the strategy I'm about to explain to you is so effective because you'll be able to get links from sites that have topically relevant trust flow.
This strategy requires work, and it's definitely not an easy solution, but you can get some fantastic results from it if you persist and work hard at it. The first step involves finding your target websites. The most effective strategy for doing this is simply to search for your primary keyword, but just add a different city to the end of the keyword.
Now you can extract the URLs for the top 10 results using a tool like Oscar Scraper and bulk check them for topically relevant trust flow using Majestic's bulk checker here, or you could just do a search for that keyword using the SerpWorx SEO Browser extension.
The Easiest Way to find Topically Relevant Sites
You can see below that I've found a site in the top 10 results for 'web design city' that has topically relevant trust flow behind it. This site gets added to your master list of sites. You now want to repeat the keyword search with a variety of different cities and areas on the end of the keyword, so you get as many sites added to your master list as possible.
The next step involves some clever over the phone negotiations to secure a link from the target website. What I do is briefly examine each site and find obvious optimisation faults before I contact the business owner. This way I actually know what I'm talking about when I contact the site owner. Errors can range from no schema markup, missing site map, multiple H1's, and scores of other possibilities.
The idea is to offer to repair these SEO deficiencies for the business owner in exchange for a link that points back to the site you're trying to promote. Here's how a typical phone call goes when you use this strategy.
"Hello (business owner name), I won't take a minute of your time and the reason for the call is that I have a client in (City) that is in exactly the same business that you're in. (This starts to build rapport as people don't often meet people that work in the same industry)
I'm hoping this could be a win-win situation for the both of us as I think we could scratch each other's back and the benefits are definitely tilted in your favour. The best way for me to promote my client is to obtain mentions (don't call it a link) from sites in the same industry such as yours.
What I'm proposing is that I could fix quite a few SEO errors that I've found on your website such having no site map, four H1 tags and having no schema mark-up. Now I can clearly see that these errors would be holding back your site's rankings, and I'd be happy to fix all of these free of charge for you in exchange for a small mention about my client on your website.
I'd usually charge at least a few hundred dollars for this as I'm sure you can understand, but if I could get a small mention somewhere on your site that's about four words long, I'd be happy to fix up those errors on your site free of charge for you."
Improve their site, so they're happy to provide a topically relevant link
Now there's a myriad of counter questions they may ask you in return which you'll have to answer on the fly, but it's important to reiterate and affirm to them that you're an expert in this industry, and you can clearly see that those errors on their site are holding back their rankings to a degree.
It helps to mention your clients name as you'll have to divulge that information anyway, but the idea is to mention some good keywords you already have them ranked for. Because this prospect is in the same industry they'll be able to appreciate the benefit that those keywords could provide.
For example that part of the conversation may go something like this;
"I already have them ranked on the first page for ‘e-commerce websites city' and ‘business websites city', but I'm just reaching out to progressive business owners such as yourself in an attempt to improve my client's visibility for a couple of other keywords as well. This is why I know that if you let me fix the errors I mentioned for your site, you should also see a nice little improvement."
Different Outreach Strategies can Work Wonders
Sometimes you may even get another SEO client from these phone calls as they can often be impressed with the other keywords you have already ranked your client or similar clients for.
As you can imagine there's just too many variables that could potentially occur during this phone call for me to document the perfect call script, but all you really need is the theory behind the call and the drive to follow through.
On one hand you may make 10 phone calls without a single bite. But, you may also achieve some fantastic results with this strategy as it can be one of the fastest and easiest ways to secure high-quality topically relevant inbound links to your sites. It all comes down to how well you can sell the idea to the site owner.
