By definition, any piece of content, article or otherwise – which is edited by inserting a content snippet relevant to the rest of the content in a naturally flowing manner into it, is a niche edit. This means, beyond the scope of SEO, in a broader sense – a script writer for a movie, or an editor of a local newspaper – are placing niche edits when editing their scripts or articles.
How are niche edits different from other types of SEO, such as guest posts or PBN builds?
The key to a successful campaign is to use a mix of every kind of SEO in an unforced looking manner (to Google’s robots and manual reviewers). Understanding the difference between the different kinds of backlinks and types of SEO will allow you to create such campaigns, not only because you’ll be able to differentiate a niche edit from a guest post, but because you’ll understand the logic behind the products.
Guest posting entails placement of an entire article onto a webmasters website or blog, which gives you more control over the overall content in the article (whereas niche edits sometimes get placed in articles that have other competitor backlinks in them, etc). The guest posting process overall takes a little longer due to having to write content for every backlink, the webmaster approving it and taking the time to place it/edit it how you want and so on.
On the other hand – PBN builds are the creation of entire website networks completely under your own supervision. In essence, BEING the webmaster of these 30, 50, 100 PBN websites. The best part about PBN builds are that you have total control over the content, websites and backlinks on your PBN websites. There’s no risk of paying for backlinks that end up disappearing due to webmasters that retire, stop hosting websites, sell their websites, etc. PBNs aren’t initially powerful right after being built – and take time to expand and power up, meaning this kind of SEO is generally for long-term campaigns and planning, since a PBN build will generally not have the same initial authority as a decades odl website with thousands of pages of content, and therefore not be as powerful in the SEO-sense as a niche edit.
What are the benefits of niche edits?
There are three main benefits to niche edits over other types of link building. First up – it’s much easier to convince webmasters to give you a link. They don’t have to worry about your pitch for an entire guest post, or approving the content and editing it into a visually appealing article the way you want in a series of back and forth email updates. Much of the time, if you’re specific enough to show them the article, the paragraph you want changed, and the new paragraph to simply paste in – webmasters are happy to take the 50-100 bucks for 5 minutes of work.
Second – the process is cheaper, because of perceived value in webmaster’s minds. After the amount of outreach we’ve done – we’ve very familiar with the “inflated sense of value” syndrome that comes when we contact a blogger for an outreach opportunity and come off as any sort of corporate agency with any sort of budget. They’ll quote us ridiculous amounts for guest posts – assuming they’re “gouging the big evil corporate company” or being so flattered at the contact they base their pricing emotionally versus a cost/benefit formula we’ve got to assess their website or blog. While this is a common problem in outreach – we’ve noticed that all webmasters consider editing some of their old content in a 5 minute task MUCH LESS WORK and therefore, are happy to take much less money than they would for guest posts/etc.
Last but not least – the process is fast. Maybe the fastest. With a proper process – one can essentially get yeses + confirmed edit changes from webmasters within a few emails per contact – waiting to recieve pay for the edits they made on their websites. No 4-6 weeks waiting periods to negotiate with webmasters and their busy lives to place a volume of guest posts, or anything like that.
What are the cons of using niche edits?
There’s also a few cons to using niche edits to be careful in regards to. First of all, you have no control over the website you’ve paid for niche edits on. This means – if a webmaster stops hosting the website, loses the domain, sells it off to a company that wipes all the outbound links in the content, etc – there’s not much you can do. Secondly, the same point is to be made if a webmaster decides to accept edits on their website in niches that are considered blacklisted by Google – such as forex, pharma, adult, etc. If a webmaster starts agreeing to place niche edits in such niches on their website after you (and whatever other webmasters like you who bought niche edits on this website) already have your links there – it could put your website in jeopardy with Google by reference, since you’re being linked back to by a website that is all of the sudden in Google’s “bad neighborhood”, harming the websites it links out to. Third – the entire outreach process can become very labor intensive and hard to scale without a team. While the work on the webmaster’s side isn’t as intensive when placing an edit as the process of a guest post – the research to find initial niche-relevant targets, contact them and negotiate with them, is still a lot of work.
Overall – niche edits are a great tool in your SEO toolkit if you’re careful with how you use them. Don’t order huge orders to your money sites from untested providers – and much like your food, inquire the provider you choose to use where your niche edits are coming from!