Today, I’ll cover link building ideas for a transportation niche – car rentals.
There are a lot of link opportunities you can dive in this vertical besides those common directory and citation links. Let’s start with a strategy with the most plenty of link targets.
AIRPORT TRANSPORT OPTIONS
Airport websites normally have pages dedicated to passengers looking for transport options such as taxis, bus, car rental and even bicycle rentals.
This is a great link acquisition methodology if you are pursuing high-quality backlinks to your category page (www.domain.com/car-rental) or a sales page dedicated for bookings or reservations.
You start this approach by sourcing out available link targets. With a few simple Google search queries listed below, you can find transport options pages.
- inurl:”transport options” [CITY or LOCATION] ~”car rental”
- intitle:”transport options” [CITY or LOCATION] ~”car rental”
- “to and from” [CITY or LOCATION] ~”car rental”
- intitle:”public transport” [CITY or LOCATION] ~”car rental”
- “public transport” [CITY or LOCATION] ~”car rental”
You have to qualify these pages by understanding the purpose and context of the resource page. For example, there are pages that will give you a hint that they only link out to major car rental brands (i.e. “here are major car rentals”). So if your car rental company is new, you are less likely to get a link from the links page.
Next thing, be cautious when doing outreach and make sure you use a corporate email from your car rental company (e.g. [email protected])
When reaching out, craft a short email of who you are, what you represent and why do you deserve the link. If you can include customized discount codes in your email, (which you also normally give to your active customers), you would have a high likelihood of acquiring the backlink from transport options page.
PLACES TO HIRE A CAR AND TRANSPORT IN [LOCATION]
Besides airport websites, there are tourism blogs and even non-travel sites that publish hire a car or transport in [LOCATION]. If you can refine your Google search queries and find them, they can be added opportunities in your outreach list.
For email outreach, you can apply the similar discount code strategy to get a better conversion rate.
GETTING HERE AND THERE PHRASES
We all use the same old opportunity phrases for search queries, i.e. inurl:links OR inurl:resources “niche”). So if you’re in the transportation industry, you replace niche with the word “transportation”.
But there are common niche-relevant phrases that are used as titles and on-page texts on linking pages that aren’t universal.
In transportation niche, for example, “getting there” is a common on-page title for related resource page opportunities.
If you can use the exact phrase or any of its variations to find some relevant transportation resource pages, you’ll have better more suitable link targets for your campaign.
Below is a list of transportation search queries you can utilize for Google prospecting:
- “getting around” [CITY or LOCATION] ~”car rental”
- “getting here” [CITY or LOCATION] ~”car rental”
- “getting there” [CITY or LOCATION] ~”car rental”
- “getting to” [CITY or LOCATION] ~”car rental”
- inurl:”getting around” [CITY or LOCATION] ~”car rental”
- inurl:”getting here” [CITY or LOCATION] ~”car rental”
- inurl:”getting there” [CITY or LOCATION] ~”car rental”
- inurl:”getting to” [CITY or LOCATION] ~”car rental”
CORPORATE AND STUDENT DISCOUNTS
I’ve covered this strategy in my previous link building guide for hotels, but I’m constantly fascinated with this link building strategy because it also works well for other niches such as transportation.
Educational institutions publish pages for alumni benefits and discounts which you can take advantage by reaching out to them and offering of your own kind of student discount.
Please note that some pages are only dedicated to alumna while others are for current students of the university or college. Ensure you have some remarks in your spreadsheet to only offer a particular type of discount.
BLOG SECTION
In the context of building more backlinks to your blog content, you first have to identify what topics are mostly being linked to in your space.
There is another option to massively create new content assets that aren’t limited to the specific car rental niche. You can produce tangential content that has a believable tie-in your brand.
Here’s a recent slide deck of Danielle Boone at Confluence 2018 that covers about leveraging tangential content.
Here are some topics you can craftily publish on your blog or as a guest content on other related publications.
1. Saving Money on Travel
2. Travel Guide
3. What to do or things to do in [LOCATION]
It is best to use Ahrefs’ Best Pages By Links to spot on topics of pages with the highest number of referring domains and use Best Pages By Links Growth to see content assets that get links consistently over time.
Need help with your outreach campaigns? Check out our link building services here.