How to Use Backlinks for Better Ranking (Guide)

What's that? Oh, you want to know how to get your website ranking for over 2 million keywords? I got you. Glassdoor did it and we're going to show you how. What's up? It's Jamal from HubSpot. Glassdoor's masterful SEO strategy has made it the number one search result for over 130,000 keywords. That is more words than I know. In this video, we're going to take a look at some of the SEO techniques Glassdoor used to grow into a job search behemoth. Just hulking around. Hup, hup, hup, hup. I love keywords, you know, they're crazy. If you find this video video useful, give it a like and subscribe to the HubSpot YouTube channel. And check out our Academy course on building backlinks so that you can rival Glassdoor. Despite a Slowdown due to COVID 19, the global online recruiting market was worth $25.1 billion last year. Glassdoor is the number two job site on the Internet with over 70 million monthly visitors who come to search almost 6 million job postings. The only bigger site is Indeed.com and the two became sister companies when Glassdoor was acquired by the same parent company in 2018 for $1.2 billion. What a family. That payday came after a decade of excellent SEO strategy that included cultivating backlinks and optimizing for organic search. It also included one controversial technique that we're gonna reveal in just a few minutes. Let's take a look at Glassdoor's backlinks. 255 million of them coming from almost 100,000 domains. Marketer Ross Simmons from Foundation calls this an SEO moat, meaning that it's almost impossible for anyone else to come along and take the site's SERP placement. That's such a funny idea for a moat though. Can you just imagine? Instead of water, it's just. Just spacious. You know, Simmons, you have a vivid mind. Of course, Glassdoor is more than just a job site. When it launched in 2008, the company described itself as a career and workplace community where anyone can go to find and anonymously share real time reviews, ratings and salary details about specific jobs and specific companies. That very first press release included some fascinating statistics, including some like only 24% of employees feel comfortable talking about compensation with their boss, and 59% wish they had a better understanding of fair market compensation. Those numbers are interesting. Interesting on their own, but it also reveals that Glassdoor understood the power of data from the beginning. In the 13 years since its launch, the company has amassed a huge amount of data generated by its users, and it leverages that data to create content that builds backlinks. This works because releasing new statistics in the form of reports, blog posts, or infographics encourages other blogs, news sources, and social media to share this information and link back to the source. Hey, cite your sources. I'll be reading your bibliography. The only person ever to do that Glassdoor has done this especially well, dating all the way back to 2009 when it released its very first 50 best places to Work awards. The scores were based on user ratings of companies on Glassdoor, turning data at hand into lots of earned attention. How much attention? Well, the 2021 Best Places to Work survey has earned a whopping 37,000 backlinks. That includes over 20,000 links from Kaiser Permanente who proudly boast about their inclusion on every single page of their career site. You know who else takes pride in their ranking on Glassdoor HubSpot? Who made the list five of the past six years, including number one in 2020. Woo. Let's go baby. That's why I'm working here. Lists of any kind are a great way to encourage backlinks from those featured on the list. In addition to its annual Best Places to Work content, Glassdoor consistently posts items like highest paying jobs, highest rated CEOs, and even the best paying internships. All of these are backlinked catnip, generating tens of thousands of links, often from high authority sites like the New York Times, Yahoo News and Bloomberg. SEO experts believe that Google uses relevant links from high quality sites to gauge the relevance and quality of importance of your own website. In general, the more high authority backlinks your site has, the more competitive your pages will be in search results. Authority doesn't just come from the biggest websites, though. The world's most popular cycling website, Cycling News, has an authority score of 70, which is the highest in its category. So if your business sells bike seats, a backlink from Cycling News is incredibly valuable to your SEO. Remember, you don't have to be the best on the Internet. You only have to compete in your category. And what if you don't have any big data to turn into backlink catching statistics? Consider commissioning studies that can help your overall business strategy and turn those findings into stats worth sharing. Back to Glassdoor. Stats Driven Media isn't the only way the site built SEO supremacy. They also use their extensive trove of salary data to create thousands of automated landing pages with the salary info for various job descriptions. Some of these pages generate a lot of backlinks. The one that gets the most data scientist salaries with 1,500 backlinks from 500 domains. Guess those data scientists like to check the data. More importantly, these salary pages show up at the very top of Google's search results in a special salary widget. So whether you search data scientist salary or social media manager salary or truck driver salary, Glassdoor is right at the top of the results. Huge. But remember, not everyone uses those exact search terms. Users might also ask, how much does a truck driver make? In that case, Glassdoor isn't even on the first results page. That's okay because the search volume for truck driver's salary is much higher for now. But as voice search continues to grow with tools like Siri and Alexa Jamba, even who knows, conversational keywords like how much does a truck driver make? Will become much more common. If you want to learn more about voice search, check out HubSpot Skillet podcast. There's a link down in the description below. If anyone from Glassdoor is watching, you guys should give it a listen too. Even the biggest companies can use some SEO TLC sometimes, but Glassdoor is one trick up its sleeve. In addition to data driven content and landing pages, Glassdoor does plenty of conventional service oriented blogging articles like 11 recession proof jobs and nine attention grabbing cover letters. Get plenty of organic search results and backlinks from reputable sites like nih.gov and GitHub. But here's where it gets a little controversial. Two dozen of those blog posts average more than 4 million backlinks each. That accounts for roughly 40% of Glassdoor's 255 million total backlinks. When checking the source of those links, we discovered that they almost all come from pages on five of Glassdoor's international sites. Glassdoor SG Singapore, Glassdoor HK Hong Kong, glassdoor.co. in India, Glassdoor AU Australia and Glassdoor NZ New Zealand. Glassdoor actually runs 23 sites with international CCTLD or country code top level domains, with each site localized for content and language. This is a clear advantage for any company seeking international reach. But starting a new website on a separate country code often means restarting or going backwards in the authority building journey. So you have to balance the pros and cons. We can see that one blog post, 50 Most Common Interview Questions, has more than 850,000 backlinks coming from Glassdoor SG to the post on the dot com site. Separate analysis found 1.8 million backlinks to the same blog post from Glassdoor's India site. We initially assumed that some widget on the international pages, maybe top 25 blog posts, might be sending all this traffic between domains. But we searched a couple dozen of the referring pages and couldn't find the actual links to the blog posts on the page or in the source code sourcing. So where are all these backlinks coming from? And are they actually helping Glassdoor's overall search ranking? Glassdoor? If you want to tell us, I'll keep it a secret. You know what I mean. It'll just be between you and me and your backlinks. You know, I won't tell anybody. But before you get any big ideas about gaming the algorithm, and we're not saying Glassdoor is gaming anything, just remember that backlinks are only valuable if they come from a reputable website. Anyone who tries to sell you backlinks is definitely not from a reputable anything. Like the rest of SEO, there are no shortcuts to building backlinks, but there are best practices. HubSpot Academy offers an entire training course on how to build backlinks. You can find the link in the description below. And when it comes to Glassdoor, best believe they're doing everything right to build their SEO moat and fill it with backlinks. And as I said, I mean, the moat's probably pretty spacious. You know what I mean? Like, I feel like we could host a party out there. Bring a raft, bring a bathing suit. Maybe a drink or two. Water. Of course. What's that? You're gonna go hang out in the moat? Okay, we'll see you in there. Yes. Yes. The power. The. And I need help.