Link Building

How to Grow Organic Traffic by 131% With Cold Email (Case Study)

Antonio Gabrić — Mon, 26 Dec 2022 07:30:26 +0000

Cold email outreach is still widely used for link building. However, the conversion rates have decreased drastically as many link builders utilized cold outreach the wrong way. Spending time on prospecting, finding email addresses, crafting email copy, and sending emails just to receive a couple of responses is very frustrating. So, what can you do to increase response rates, and get those high DR links? Below, you’ll find out the cold email outreach strategy that landed us more than 1,500 backlinks with an average domain rating (DR) of 68. Discover the tactics you can replicate and get featured in HubSpot, Ahrefs, G2, Zapier, and many other high-authority websites. The goal of this case study is to share tips that you can use in your cold email campaigns to get higher conversion rates. You’ll learn how to: Before you jump into the details, it’s important to understand a bit of context about the goals, approach, and tools used. Cold Email Is a Powerful Tool for Building Backlinks & Growing Organic Traffic (If Used Correctly) Creating good content that delivers value to the audience helps attracting backlinks, but it is not enough. Competing in a cold email software niche is extremely difficult, and most competitors publish a lot of fresh and quality content that is supported with backlinks from high-authority websites. The solution was to start actively building backlinks through cold outreach. The biggest issue with cold outreach is that everyone is doing it, and to build backlinks at scale, you need to be creative with your approach. Given the fact that Hunter is a tool that helps you with cold outreach, it was a no-brainer to use Hunter for all aspects of cold outreach — from finding valid email addresses to automating cold email campaigns. You can go crazy and spend quite a lot of budget on tools, but in nutshell, you only need Ahrefs and a system for tracking backlinks (Google Sheets does the work). This is how it looked before starting with active link building. The domain had quite a strong backlink profile, but the organic traffic and rankings plateaued, which wasn’t enough to keep up with the competition. We started actively building backlinks through cold outreach in January 2021. This is how it looks today. In just a year and a half, more than 6,000 relevant backlinks were built, and organic traffic increased by 2.3x. All that in an extremely competitive industry (it’s hard to find any keyword with a keyword difficulty lower than 25). Below, you’ll find out the key takeaways learned along the way and how you can apply them to your link building strategy. Takeaway 1: Guest Posting and Claiming Unlinked Mentions Have 13.7% Conversion Rates Key takeaway: When starting with guest blogging, getting featured in high-authority publications in your industry will be tough without a strong writing portfolio. Most editors ask that you share a couple of writing samples published under your name. The best approach here is to start writing for smaller but relevant blogs in your niche with positive traffic and authority growth trends. Slowly build up your writing portfolio and start pitching to higher authority websites. We’ll cover how to pitch to these higher authority sites shortly… Key takeaway: Before starting with tracking mentions, it is essential to mention that this tactic doesn’t work for everyone. Hunter is an established brand, and it was known before we started with this tactic, so for this tactic to yield results, you need to have an established brand to start with. Here is what you can do instead… Create image link bait content and reclaim unlinked attributions. The simplified process looks like this – create custom images and upload them to stock image sites such as Pixabay. Make sure to include all the details for attribution, so if people use your images, they can adequately attribute them to your website. The biggest challenge is that many people will use your stock images, but the link will often lead to the stock image website instead of yours. That’s where tracking the mentions come in handy. By setting up mention alerts, you can reach out to the sites that have used your image but linked to the stock image website. You can ask them to link to your website instead. Additionally, you can periodically use the reverse image tool to find where your images have been used without proper attribution. Tips on implementing this strategy: Key takeaway: Although the open rate was good and the highest response rate compared to other campaigns, the conversion rate is noticeably the lowest. The main reason is that many prospects respond with unrealistic paid options. Extra tip: How to achieve a 40% response rate for your guest blogging campaign Another good tactic that works well is collaborating with link-building partners and introducing each other to editors with whom you previously published guest posts. This is how you can get into a conversation with high-quality websites such as Zapier and G2 (and publish a guest post there). Here’s a template you can try. In the email opener, mention a shared connection and compliment their blog post. Also, if they have already published a guest post before, there is a high chance that they are interested in publishing another guest post. Key takeaway: The skyscraper tactic was popularized by Brian Dean from Backlinko almost 10 years ago. People tend to scrape lists and use the shotgun method — send as many generic emails as possible with minimal personalization. It worked before, but now it will likely hurt your email deliverability and sender reputation. What you can do, however, is try to send fewer emails and put your time into personalization. We do this, but over time noticed that open rates were slowly declining as well as conversions. This is, so far, the lowest-performing campaign we have run. Takeaway 2: Follow-Ups Can Increase Response Rates by 66% Crafting a winning subject line can be tricky. It really depends on the industry and context. At Hunter, we tried generic, one-word subject lines, as well as longer and personalized ones. Here’s what you can take away from the results: While reaching out to high authority websites and asking for a guest post opportunity, the more personalized your subject lines are, the better. Our best-performing subject line for guest post pitching is: {{company:”your company”}} x Hunter.io collab idea? Our worst-performing subject line for guest post outreach was: Content collaboration 🤝 For doing a skyscraper method (it still works, but the performance is decreasing), short, but personalized subject lines prove to work the best: {{first_name:”Hey”}}, collaboration? Longer, but personalized subject lines don’t work that well: {{first_name:”Hello”}}, I think you may find it useful. Key takeaways: Subject lines that worked best for us: Takeaway 3: Follow-Ups Can Increase Response Rates by 66% According to Backlinko, follow-ups are an essential part of cold outreach. Sending multiple follow-ups can increase replies by 66%. Here’s how it works for us: Roughly 65% of all replies come from follow-ups. Here’s another campaign where we sent emails to 600 recipients: Roughly 47% of all replies are coming from follow-ups. It’s safe to say that follow-ups are mandatory in any cold outreach campaign. Maybe the person you’re reaching out to is getting hundreds of emails per day and simply skipping your email. Or maybe they skimmed through their inbox quickly and forgot to open your emails. There can be many reasons why someone doesn’t get back to you. We tested multiple sequences, and what works for us is the following sequence: In case you didn’t get a reply at all, you can snooze the conversation and reach out again in a couple of months. Alternatively, you can find other potential decision-makers and try reaching them. Takeaway 4: Find the Right Decision-Maker & Don’t Quit After the First Sequence One of the most challenging parts of cold outreach (apart from crafting a personalized email) is reaching out to the right decision-maker. Cold outreach is not a one-size-fits-all approach, and it depends on the context. For instance, if your outreach goal is to score a backlink from a specific website, then the right decision-maker would be someone who manages content at the company. There are cases when you can’t find the contact information of a decision maker because the company is too small or their only available email address is a generic one such as info@company.com. In these instances, it’s fine to reach out to the CEO or the founder or simply to any available email address. The open and response rates will be lower, of course, but many times, they will refer you to the right person. Or, you can ask for the right person to contact. Here is an example of a follow-up email used: And here you can see the results this email achieved: As you can see, 20.5% of all replies come from the second follow-up, where you ask for an alternative contact. Most of these replies are helpful and point you Read More Read More

The post How to Grow Organic Traffic by 131% With Cold Email (Case Study) first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

SEO for Online Reputation Management: 2024’s Best Strategies

Matt Diggity — Mon, 09 May 2022 12:04:35 +0000

In this guide, I’ll show you exactly how to take control of the SERP for brand searches, with super easy (and cheap!) techniques that my grandma could do in a spare Sunday afternoon. We’re talking about online reputation management (ORM): the process of pushing negative search results down off page 1. Imagine this scenario: You’re a politician that recently got smeared for a big mess up. You want that negative online reputation to go away. This is where a company’s online reputation management SEO comes into play. Over the years, my agency The Search Initiative, has performed dozens of Online Reputation Management campaigns for our clients. I’m about to share the key essentials from these campaigns. You’re about to learn: Quick Summary Why Is Online Reputation Management So Important? Online Reputation Management is so important because it controls the reputation of your personal brand via the page (or pages) that rank on your brand’s search terms, aka keywords. The easiest way for a user to decide if they want to trust a brand is with a Google search. If someone Google’s “Diggity Marketing” or “Matt Diggity”, I want good things coming up on page 1. Whether your client is an online retailer with a bad news story ranking high or you have a new info product that’s losing branded search traffic (and control) to affiliates; being able to control what shows up on page 1 is massively beneficial. ORM can also be a very attractive skill set to future clients and employers, or even have a dedicated Online Reputation Management service. In this post, I’ll be taking you through my sure-fire system to gain (or regain) control of any brand’s online reputation, using a mixture of real brand marketing and parasite Search Engine Optimization. Parasite SEO was a term created in the early 2000s by Eli, the founder of the now defunct Blue Hat SEO blog. Eli’s definition of parasite SEO still stands true to this day: Using large, authoritative websites to build pages that allow you to “hijack” the root domains ranking signals. It’s truer than ever that Google favors large, authoritative websites. In fact, Google gives them certain leeway in terms of techniques they can get away with using. As you have seen throughout the last 12 months of updates, Google’s algorithms are moving more and more towards authority and thus, authoritative websites. This means our job of doing Online Reputation Management is easier. Techniques for Powerful Reputation Management with SEO These are the core techniques that I use to boost my site’s own ranking signals as well as give users a clear idea about what my brand’s about. While there are other ways to do ORM within the SEO spectrum, these are by far the simplest and most effective techniques available to us. And I’ve tested a lot of them. Boost Your Existing Rankings The easiest and totally free way to start cleaning up your brand’s reputation is by boosting your site and its appeal within the SERPs – Having a knowledge graph, sitelinks and multiple additional positive pages, reviews or posts ranking sends huge trust signals to users. Optimizing Your Site’s Entity Google will associate keywords with your branding if you build a compelling enough case for it to do so. For example, DiggityMarketing.com’s brand is “Diggity Marketing”, not “Matt Diggity”. But Google will still give me a sitelink pack when you search for “Matt Diggity”. When you’re optimizing your brand’s SERP, you want to first create as strong an entity stack around your brand’s keyword/s on your own website as possible. There are a few ways you can do this: Your pillow links such as social profiles and citations also play a big role in authenticating your website and its surrounding details – This is especially true for local sites and local SEOs looking to optimize a site’s GMB rankings using NAP. Optimizing Your GMB One of the easiest ways to get instantaneous trust signals to a user is by (first creating and then) optimizing your GMB to automatically insert a knowledge graph that authenticates the business as real in the user’s eyes. Protip: I’ve been building GMB’s and sending citations even for affiliate sites as a trust factor. Consistent citations can also have a major role in optimizing your GMB, but that’s another guide for another time. GMB Reviews Google will always display their review stars the highest on the page for a business branded search query than any other site or that site’s schema element. This means Google’s reviews (Which can arguably impact your GMB rankings[1]) are the most important trust signal to be sent to a user, and thus the ones you want to be optimizing for the most. It’s against the GMB guidelines to offer anything in return for a review but having an active email list or social media marketing accounts with engaged customers can provide a handful of positive reviews in a very short amount of time if you catch my drift. As a side note, just because it’s against the guidelines doesn’t mean that you can’t buy them. You didn’t hear that from me though. How To Remove Negative Reviews Just because you (or your client) has gotten a negative review on Yelp or TripAdvisor, it doesn’t mean it’s set in stone. Every website has its own unique process and system and appeal process. The support staff of these sorts of websites tends to be more sympathetic if you give evidence of the reviewer leaving multiple negative reviews within a short timeframe. Identifying the Review & Asking For its Removal As I said, every website has its own unique process, but most of them will be some form of ticket or contact support form with or without an upload feature to give additional evidence. Once you have the way of how to report the review, you need to give the company hosting said review a good enough reason to remove it. Most of these won’t require you to do any further digging yourself, but if you do almost all sites will only ask you to do it both on their website and physically within your own books/receipts. Unfortunately, if the review doesn’t break any of these additional rules then it’s very unlikely you’ll be able to remove it. Thankfully, there is always another tactic you can employ to knock it out the SERPs. Blanket Page 1 And Push Down Negative Pages Unless you’re some sort of super hacker, you’re unlikely to find a member of staff that’ll willingly remove a negative review on a site unless you’re paying to be listed on there in the first place – And even then you’ll still run into a bunch of restrictions and headaches. The easiest way to get negative pages knocked out the SERP for your brand is by putting stronger pages that you have control over and above them. Luckily, there are a bunch of authoritative websites out there that allow you to create totally free pages that can rank well for our brand’s name. Social Profiles are the Easiest SERP Control Associating social media accounts with a brand’s entity is one of the easiest jobs an SEO has. The root authority of huge social media marketing websites like Facebook, Twitter & YouTube makes for easy rankings without having to utilize links in most cases, or at least not a huge number of them anyway. If you look at my own SERP, you’ll note that the raw authority of my social media presence outweighs any interview, podcast, or guest posts on much lower authority domains than my own – Even though most of these profiles don’t have any readable content for Google to understand they’re linked to my brand, the brand association and root authority of the domains are high enough to rank them above pieces with 1,000+ words of content. Just make sure you’re consistent with your branding used on each profile, and the URL you’ve created around them and if you’re consistently posting on Twitter, Facebook & Instagram then you can even start getting additional feed elements in the SERPs from those sites which take recent posts and put them in a SERP block. Getting A Video Carousel Google’s use of video carousels within the SERPs worries some brands[4]. Its prominence can take up multiple organic positions on desktop but it can also be used to great effect when you’re trying to knock content down for your own brand terms, by re-optimizing existing videos or creating new video content with the brand’s keyword featuring within the first 50 characters of the video’s title. You’ll want a minimum of 3 videos optimized around your branding or you won’t even be able to get a carousel. Ideally, I’d go for 5, and they don’t need to be anything special nor have a huge view count for this to work. Google will normally feature the channel trailer video (If you have set one) first in the carousel if Read More Read More

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How To Do a Backlink Audit (And Link Building Plan) In 2024

Matt Diggity — Mon, 11 Oct 2021 12:51:08 +0000

If you want to know whether your website is in good SEO shape or not, you need to check your backlinks. I’ve been doing SEO since 2009. I have played around with both white hat and black hat SEO techniques, and I can tell you from my own experience that your backlink profile health can make or break your SEO efforts.. That’s why a backlink audit is crucial for your website’s search engine ranking. In this article, I’ll show you exactly how to do a backlink audit using Ahrefs backlink audit tool. I personally found this tool to be the most helpful. You’ll also learn how to analyze such links on your backlink profile so that you can identify any bad backlinks to your site that may prevent it from ranking to its potential. Once you’ve done a complete link audit, the next step is to continue to build websites link acquisition authority. Therefore, in the final chapter, you’ll find out how to create a Link Requirement Estimate Plan for your site – it’s a report that looks at how many backlinks/referring domains you’ll need to outrank your competitors. Quick Summary What is a Backlink Audit? A backlink audit is all about analyzing the quality of links towards your website from other domains with the aim to make sure that there aren’t any unnatural or spammy backlinks that could potentially hinder your site’s SEO performance or result in a Google Manual Penalty. Why is a Backlink Audit Important? A backlink audit is important because links are one of the most powerful and important ranking factors in Google’s Search algorithms. There’s no denying the importance of links and, by extension, the art of link building has on your website’s ability to rank. A Backlinko study of one million search results found that backlinks correlated with search engine rankings more than any other ranking factor. With this in mind, it’s no surprise that links can also be one of the most problematic components of your site’s SEO health. When you buy a car, you have to put the right fuel in it to make it run. In the same way, backlinks are like a website’s fuel where the right links provide the boost it needs to move forwards (rank). Apart from helping you find the potentially dangerous links, performing a link audit also helps provide an insight into your backlink profile and how you may want to strategize for a future link-building campaign. This is something that ties into the Link Requirement Plan section of this article. Backlink Audit Checklist Before we begin, here’s a breakdown of every backlink audit tool you’ll need to identify potentially dangerous backlinks to your site. Get An Overview of Your Link Profile (And Your Competitors) The first step in this link profile audit process is all about getting to know the state of your site’s link profile before digging deep into the links themselves. The simplest way to do this is via Ahrefs’ Site Explorer tool. Site Explorer > Enter your domain > Choose the “*.domain/*” mode Scroll a little further down, and you’ll see two graphs which show the number of referring domains (i.e. domains linking) and referring pages your website has seen over time. This graph is useful because it shows any sharp increases (which may be a result of a negative SEO attack), or decreases (which may represent a sudden loss of links) that may be of importance. You can compare both the referring domains and the link velocity graph with your competitors. To find out more about link velocity, check out the video below. Scroll further down, and you’ll find a table that shows the most common anchor texts used to link to your website. With this table, you can quickly identify whether the anchor text distribution of your link profile is natural or not. If you see mostly branded, URL based anchor texts, you have little to worry about. If you spot any anchors that are spammy (i.e. they have nothing to do with your website), or over-optimized (i.e. they are mostly keyword-rich), then this indicated that you will likely need to dig a little deeper by scrutinizing the full anchor text report that Ahrefs provides. You can do this by clicking on “view full report”. This information will come in handy later on! Follow the above steps to get an overview of your competitor’s backlink profile too – this will help you see where your website stands in comparison. Find & Pool Your Backlinks To perform your backlink audit, you need to gather data first! To get the most comprehensive data on your link profile, we recommend using as many sources as possible, but the main source we will use here is Ahrefs. To grab your backlink data head over to: Overview > Backlinks > One link per domain > Export > Quick/Full Export > Start Export From the export, delete all columns except: Now that you’ve collected all the information you need about your backlink profile, it’s time to analyze the actual backlinks! Analyze Your Backlinks Below we have listed a few metrics that you should look to speed up the process of analyzing all your backlinks. Each of these will help you answer the question, is this a spammy backlink? Domain Authority Your website’s Domain Authority is the perceived amount of authority your site has based on the quality and quantity of your backlinks. A link from a website with a high authority indicates that the link is of higher “quality”. Ahrefs has a logarithmic scale for Domain Authority called Domain Rating, in general: It’s worth noting that not all domains with a low DR score are spam sites. In these cases, other factors such as the language, number of keywords, link relevance should be considered. Page Authority Page Authority (or Ahrefs’ URL Rating) indicates the strength and authority of the linking page as opposed to the domain. A higher URL Rating suggests a higher quality page in terms of its ability to rank in the search results. Anchor Text We’ve already seen the importance of what types of anchors are used to link to your website. Referring Domains Websites that have a higher amount of referring domains indicate higher authority and ranking power. Use this metric in conjunction with Domain Authority. Organic Keywords The most valuable links are those whose domains rank for lots of keywords. Organic Traffic This metric tells you how much organic traffic the linked pages get. Getting links from websites (and pages) that are bringing in organic search traffic themselves offers more value to your website. Ahrefs’ metric isn’t quite as accurate as Google Analytics, but since you aren’t the site owner of the domains linking you, this is the best way to know how much traffic the backlinks pointing to you are getting. Total Backlinks More often than not, a website will only link to you once. A quick way to find potentially harmful or spammy referring domains is to identify any websites that have multiple links to your website. Two or three links is fine, but if these domains have 100s or maybe even 1000 backlinks linking to you, then it’s worth taking a closer look. Link Relevance Ideally, you want your inbound links to come from websites within your niche. If you have an eCommerce or niche website that sells vegan products, then a link from a health magazine is much more valuable to you than a link from a website about interior design. However, this doesn’t mean that you should disavow any domains that aren’t related to your website – because they may still be authoritative, bring in lots of search traffic, rank for lots of keywords etc. Language Use the “Language” filter on ahrefs to identify potentially harmful links from websites in different languages. If your website is in English and you see an unnatural amount of links coming from sites in various other languages, then it’s likely that these sites will offer little SEO value. Dofollow vs Nofollow There are two main types of backlinks: Dofollow links and Nofollow links. Dofollow links pass authority, Nofollow links don’t. Use the “Link type” filter on Ahrefs to identify any dofollow backlinks that are harmful to your site. Pattern Matching As you’ve probably noticed, it’s almost impossible to do a backlink audit manually, so it’s worth having a few tricks up your sleeve to quickly and efficiently spot those toxic links and reduce your toxicity score… … using pattern matching! Check For Manual Links Penalties An SEO’s worst nightmare (when it comes to link building) is finding out that Google has penalized their site. Link building has always been, is, and always will be one of the most lucrative of SEO components. It’s crucial that you follow Google’s guidelines and do not use any link schemes that manipulate Google’s PageRank algorithm. To check for manual penalties from Google: head over to Google Search Console > Security & Manual Actions Read More Read More

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E-Commerce SEO Case Study: How we 4x’d Traffic and Doubled Revenue

Matt Diggity — Mon, 02 Sep 2019 08:41:18 +0000

Whether you’re an e-commerce manager or an SEO specialist, you’ve invested a considerable amount of time and energy into working out the best practice approach for tackling organic search for online stores. An E-Commerce SEO Strategy Walk-Through In this case study, I’ll be showing you my agency The Search Initiative was able to double revenue by building a custom strategy for one of our e-commerce clients who operates within a small b2b furniture niche. My goal with this case study is to introduce you to a wide range of new ideas that will help you to expand and improve your e-commerce SEO game and better serve your customers. You’ll learn the strategies we used to improve UX, technical stability, onsite optimization, content, and of course backlinks. The approach that I will detail saw our e-commerce client grow their traffic by a massive 417% in 8 months. It also earned them $48k in consistent additional monthly revenue. This took them from generating $43k a month to $91k a month, or a 112% increase in overall revenue. The Challenge Our client is in the b2b furniture and equipment business and they offer their products only within specific locations in the UK. As well as offering their products for sale to clients, they also offer their products for hire. The client came to us with a solid foundation. They had an existing e-commerce business, a solid website, and a great brand. However, when setting up their company, SEO hadn’t been a top priority. Establishing E-commerce E-A-T (Expertise-Authority-Trust) & Earning Backlinks If you have a high-quality site and with a keen desire to establish your brand (like our client does), your approach needs to be particularly focused on sustainable, long-term growth. You need to create quality content that represents the brand well and earn backlinks naturally. In addition, focus on signalling trust in the online store and the brand by demonstrating transparency and authority. We’ll get to this later. Here’s how we did it… Step 1 – E-commerce User Experience To enjoy the benefits of some quick wins, first focus on the low-hanging fruit. User Experience The client came to us with robust branding already established and a professional-looking website, but we were able to identify a few small tweaks that created a significantly better experience for potential customers. Visual Changes Optimize visitor experience by adjusting color contrast (here’s a couple of great tools for choosing brand colors and color contrast), adjust placement and selection of images, and add zooming and scaling images to product pages to further improve user experience and increase the likelihood of generating a conversion. Mobile Optimization The majority of Internet traffic now originates from mobile devices, so local and mobile optimization are now crucial for small businesses. Make these small changes to your site that make a big difference to those viewing on mobile: Making phone numbers clickable Making emails addresses clickable. Increasing the font-size to a minimum of 16px for mobile users, as you can see in the screenshot below. These small tweaks contributed towards significantly increased conversions on mobile. Step 2 – Technical Auditing The foundation of any SEO strategy is technical optimization of the website, and since we were dealing with an e-commerce site with many functions and pages, there were plenty of opportunities to identify and resolve technical problems. They are as follows… Google Index Management This included removing all traces of their old website from the Google index, removing duplication in their category pages, managing index bloat, adding their XML sitemap to the robots.txt, and removing now-defunct meta keywords from their site. For example, the client’s login pages were indexed. In some cases, this type of unnecessary indexing can cause more valuable pages to be pushed out of the search results, or skipped over in a routine crawl, thus diluting your message. HTTP Pages and URL Parameters We also found HTTP pages and URL parameters in the index. URL parameters are parameters whose value is set dynamically in a page’s URL. For example, you may have a search bar on your website where customers can search your catalog. Whenever customers do an internal search, new URL parameters will be created, which ends up bloating the index with a bunch of URLs like: website.com/category/search?pink+scarf In order to make it clear to Google’s Search algorithm what the different URL parameters do, specify them in Google Search Console. Cleaning Up Legacy Strategies Next, we looked at any technical issues caused by legacy strategies and began to clean them up. One example of an issue was that the site included meta keywords on the pages, which have been considered defunct since Google confirmed that these self-defined keywords hold no weight in their algorithm. Worse, competitors could look at your meta keywords and find a perfect list of keywords and niches that you’re targeting. We then looked at how the client’s CMS might be causing issues without them even knowing it. Managing Magento 2 Our client’s site is built on the popular Magento 2 ecommerce website builder, which is notorious for not having a robots.txt and sitemap.xml configured out-of-the-box. We created the sitemap ourselves using Screaming Frog web crawler, added it to robots.txt, submitted to Google Search Console, thus helping Google’s search algorithm to better understand the layout of our client’s site. Finally, we dealt with a considerable site-wide issue. The site used canonical tags that were meant to be self-referencing, but were actually canonicalized different pages. This is suboptimal because it confuses Google’s web crawler bots, making it a mess when trying to rank. We cleaned it all up, so that Google knew exactly which pages should rank. Step 3 – Internal Link Building Once you have done a technical audit, earned some quick wins and solved some user experience issues, start to think about improving the internal link structure. Adding Internal Links To Existing Content Quickly, we noticed that while the client did have a blog on their domain, there was very little content on it and much of it was out of date. Also, there weren’t many links between their blog and their category and product pages… a huge opportunity for spreading link juice and establishing topical relevance. Our plan was to create more high-quality blog content and expand its scope, allowing us to build more internal links to relevant product and category pages. We drew up a content strategy that involved producing a consistent number of new content pieces each month and went back through each old blog post, updating them with relevant links to product and category pages. We’ll get to the content plan in more detail later, but for now, let’s really dig into internal linking. E-commerce Topical Clustering Create “topical clusters”, which can be thought of as groups of pages that talk about different elements of the same key topic. For example, “protein powder” might be the topical cluster. It would be made up of a cornerstone article that you hope to rank for the keyword “protein powder”, as well as several other articles talking about sub-topics of “protein powder”. Some examples could be “How to Make Pancakes from Protein Powder”, or “Can Protein Powder Help you Lose Weight?” or “10 Side Effects of Synthetic Protein”. You would then create a content piece for each of these sub-topics and have each linking to the cornerstone article using a close anchor text to “protein powder”. Using this technique, you’re able to pass value from the smaller articles to the main piece and have a better chance of ranking the main piece for “protein powder” in Google Search. From these cornerstone articles, we were then able to link back to category and product pages, increasing their perceived authority too. Step 4 – Content Strategy Before you can implement a solid external backlink building strategy, you need to create a bedrock of content to be used to support your outreach. I suggest giving your writers the following guidelines for creating content. Evergreen, Algorithmically Optimized Content Focus on evergreen content, preferably creating linkable assets such as infographics, slideshows or documents containing industry insights. An example of an evergreen topic would be “why ergonomic chairs are good for your back”. Conversely, “the best chairs in ” would not be evergreen, as it will obviously lose its relevance at the end of the year. In the same line of thought, avoid using dates in the page title, headings or URL. Look at the people ranking on page 1. Ask yourself: How many words did they write? Find the average and add 20% more. What sub-topics did they cover? When discussing “How to lose belly fat”, you’ll see that it’s necessary to talk about “avoiding trans fats”. Do the same. What kind of layout are they going for? Are they presenting in tables? Do the same. And don’t forget, write in an easy-to-read manner, and without any grammar mistakes. E-A-T and E-commerce Content Create content that referenced your products and services so that you can funnel users to your Read More Read More

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Case Study: A 4.5x Organic Traffic Increase Using (What?) Page Rank

Matt Diggity — Mon, 04 Mar 2019 09:55:34 +0000

Introduction I’ve been a director at The Search Initiative a while now. We’ve had some crazy results for a whole bunch of clients – all in very different niches. I’m going to share with you how my team and I took a low-authority website and put our foot on the gas to get it moving – fast! I truly believe there was a key ingredient that accelerated this website, but I’m going to share the whole process from the start. Why? Each website is going to be different, so you need to figure out what your site needs. You need to go through the process. Here’s a sneak peek of the growth. Now learn how we did it… Initial Analysis Since starting TSI’s organic seo services, I’ve realized that working with my own sites is hugely different from working with clients; especially if the website has weak foundations. I know how I want my money sites to look, so I build them using rigorous attention to detail. But if you take a website that’s been developed without a certain level of SEO knowledge – there’s normally quite a lot of on-site and off-site to fix. Here’s how my team broke down the initial analysis: Keyword Research On-Site Audit Backlink Audit Competitor Analysis Keyword Research My team tackled keyword research with two main workflows: one is used to monitor the health of a website, and the other is for content gap analysis. When we’re looking to track keywords for a website, we want to track some of the core terms, but also terms that are having problems. If a term is suffering from keyword cannibalization that we’re trying to fix – it’s worth tracking this daily until it’s resolved. Since this client needed a huge content strategy, we did both a health check and initial content gap analysis. This approach included breaking down all keywords for that industry into topics of relevant terms. In total, this process took over 20 hours and included thousands of keywords chunked into neat topics. This work later helped with choosing page titles, headings and content. Here’s an example of how we did it: Step 1. Search Broad Keywords Step 2. Review Parent Topics Step 3. Find Competitors for Parent Topics Step 4. Reverse Engineer Competitor’s Keywords Step 5. Exclude Outdated Keywords There is the option to also export all of these keywords into excel documents and then filter them that way. But most of the time, a lot of the top keywords are fairly similar. Here’s an example for the best dog food term: best dog food best dog foods healthiest dog food what is the best dog food top rated dog food best food for dogs While each keyword is unique, they all follow a singular intent. The users are interested in finding out what are the best dog foods in the market. On-Site Audit Finding all the technical and content issues with the website requires a full on-site audit. However, while big reports are easy on the eyes, it’s small changes that make the difference. We audited the website and found a whole bunch of technical issues, from lack of breadcrumbs, poor internal link structures, bad quality anchor text and unoptimized titles. A full on-site audit tutorial is too big for this post (perhaps coming soon), but here are some quick tips: Screaming Frog – A cheap way to regularly crawl your website. There are lots of ways to find errors, redirects, and missing metadata. You can also use a custom search to find all references of your keywords. Sitebulb – This tool is more expensive and is a monthly recurring fee. However, it gives you lots of extra data that would be impossible to spot manually and hard with Screaming Frog. An example would be empty hyperlink references. Site Search – By using Google’s site search (site:domain.com) and operators, you can find hundreds of issues with index management, outdated page titles, and multiple pages targeting the same keyword. There are a lot of quick wins here. Page Titles – If you wrote your page titles 1 – 2 years ago, you may find that they’re outdated now. A quick site search with “intitle:2018” will find all your content that is either not updated or not yet crawled by Google. Internal Links – A major way to pass relevance signals and authority to your core pages is through internal links. Make sure that your pages are well interlinked and you’re not using low-quality anchors from your power pages, such as “click here” or “more information”. We focused on fixing around 5 issues at a time varying from small changes like improving accessibility, to bigger changes like introducing breadcrumbs for a custom build website. Backlink Audit The website had a relatively small backlink profile, which meant it lacked authority, relevance signals and entry points for crawling. It also meant that a full in-depth link analysis was unnecessary for this campaign. In this instance, the initial check revealed there was nothing to be concerned about, so we moved on to technical implementation as soon as possible. Had the website experienced problems with the link profile, we would have done a full backlink audit to try and recover this. Here’s what to look out for: Link Distribution – Pointing too many links toward internal pages instead of your homepage can cause lots of issues. So make sure that you’re not overdoing it. Anchor Text Analysis – Using exact match, partial match and topical anchors are a great way to pass third-party relevance signals. Too many and you’ll be caught out over-optimizing, but too few and you won’t be competitive. Read more about anchor optimization. Referring IP Analysis – There are a finite number of IPv4 Addresses, so this isn’t often a big cause for concern. However, it’s worth making sure that you’ve not got too many links from the same IP address. Autonomous System Numbers – Since a server can be assigned any number of IP addresses, these systems often include an ASN. This is another way that Google could flag large numbers of websites from the same origin. My team did a case study on how to remove an algorithmic penalty, a lot of these audits come included in any penalty removal campaign. Competitor Analysis The difference between a search analyst and data scientist is how you approach the search engines. An analyst is focused on reviewing the SERPs and finding what is working best today, while a data scientist wants to understand how things work. We built our team to include both since competitor analysis requires a keen eye for reviewing the SERPs and algorithm analysis requires solid data scientists. If you want to do SEO at a high level, you’ve got to constantly be reviewing competitors using various analysis tools. You will notice that tons of best practices get ignored in the top positions and the devil is in the details. In this instance, we found that both more content and more links would be required for long-term success. Content Strategy Building any long-term authority website in competitive industries will include both an authoritative link profile and content plan. My team reviewed their existing content, looked at how other websites in their industry wanted to help users and then addressed these four cornerstones: User Intent – before we did anything, we wanted to nail the user intent on every page. This research meant that we identified three pillars of content for their site. We’ll get into this in further detail below. Service Pages – these pages were dedicated to explaining what service was offered, how to contact and what was included with that offering. Blog Content – these posts were dedicated to providing non-commercial, informative content that was interesting to the reader. Resource Center – this section was dedicated to giving basic information about topics in their industry. Instead of using Wikipedia for all our links to authority content, we wanted to use internal links instead. Here’s a little bit about each section and our strategy for them: User Intent The biggest mistake I see all the time is the simplest thing to check: What types of content is Google ranking in the top 10 positions? If you’re serving 10,000 words of content in a huge blog post, but Google is only interested in serving service pages with 50 words of content – you’ve missed the point. Another commonly found problem we find at The Search Initiative is including too much content in a single post, when your competitors have several shorter posts. One of the main attractions for Thailand are the yoga retreats. If you’re searching for this (yoga retreats) in America, you’re expecting to find destinations. Let’s take a look: The first position is called Yoga Journal and includes almost no content aside from images and headings. That’s exactly what the users were looking for. There are other websites doing a similar service and can help you make bookings. While others Read More Read More

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How to Build a Scalable White Hat Agency [Case Study from TSI]

Matt Diggity — Wed, 14 Nov 2018 08:28:58 +0000

Introduction A few years ago, my agency The Search Initiative (TSI) decided to remove PBNs as a part of our link building strategy and move over completely to a white hat link building model. While PBNs only made up a small portion of our strategy, we knew this would be a fairly big undertaking. This would involve the re-design of the overall process and our approach to campaigns. Every decision that we make at the agency is data-driven. We constantly test, experiment and analyze. Our aim is to always put our clients first and to give them the best ROI for their campaign. We needed a sustainable and powerful link building strategy that is not only extremely safe but also moves the needle. In this article, you’ll learn our entire outreach strategy. We’ll discuss the role content quality plays in an effective outreach campaign, how to research and create fine pieces, how to prospect link opportunities, and how to pitch with a high success rate. Bonus: I’ve brought in Rad Paluszak (TSI Director and Chiang Mai SEO Conference 2018 speaker) to chime in with some knowledge bombs. Overall Goals and Strategy During our early brainstorming sessions, we knew that to fully transition from grey to white we needed to base the entire system on high-quality content. Why is high-quality content so important for outreach? Bloggers, website owners and journalists wised up a long time ago to the importance of links in SEO. They fully understand how important they are to us and the value that these links hold. Many prospects are extremely proud of their websites and extremely picky about what content is placed on their own personal soapbox. Just look at how few guest posts I’ve allowed on my site. Outreach link building is an exchange. You provide something that the website’s readers will love and adds true value to the website and in exchange, you attain that all-important link. My advice: Create a systemized approach that focuses on quality. Focus on: Content that is easy to understand Content that teaches Content that is easy to share Content that impresses But how do you create a content marketing machine that can produce this kind of content? We assembled a team who had zero SEO knowledge but were bright and creative, which were the main skills we were looking for. You want your content and outreach team members to be right-brained, creative types. I’m a left-brained robot, so I’m much better at stuff like link prospecting, which you’ll learn more about later. If you chose to train the new outreach team from scratch, you avoid the shortcut mentality that many trained SEO’s have. Think about it. You have your biases about how things work, and you’re likely going to carry them around with you from project-to-project and job-to-job. Essentially, you want a team of content marketers, not SEO’s. This is easier to do when working with a blank slate. One of the key skills we were looking for was someone who had an eye for copy. Thus, we put out job adverts on copywriting groups looking for people who had a background in copywriting but who were interested in being trained up in online marketing. Cult of Copy is a great facebook group to find niche-specific copywriters. [quote] Tip for you The group has very strict rules from the very beginning. To join the group you have to confirm that you understand the following: Only posts requesting or offering a copywriting job are allowed. Only comments accepting a copy job or giving testimonial are allowed. No public complaints or moaning – these kinds of things should go through admin. Not adhering to the above and you’re banned! It’s good to keep everything in order! Do you think it impacts the group’s activity? Not at all! Have a look at the stats: Rad Paluszak – Director of SEO at the Search Initiative [/quote] Content Research There are endless tools and processes for content research available. To cut through the bullshit, keep things as simple as possible, stick to the 80/20, and focus your efforts on a few core resources: Reddit Quora Meta Filter Google Search The reason why these small set of tools are recommended is that communities like Reddit, Quora and Meta Filter have done a great job of keeping spam at a minimum and also encouraging active participation. You can, without too much effort, find the industry pain points, the subjects people care about, and the themes that are recurring time and time again. For a content marketer, this is phenomenal. Reddit If you are not using Reddit as part of your content research then you are seriously missing out on an awesome trick. The really great thing about Reddit is that spam and manipulation are very rarely tolerated. And the users are usually painfully honest, to say the least. Search for variations of topics to find out what questions people are asking and what specific questions receive lots of upvotes and replies. The key here is to create a documented record of the topics that had the most engagement, as this is a great indicator that the content is popular. At this early stage, you should aim to collect as much information as possible on anything and everything in our target niche that has a high level of upvotes and comments. To do this, simply head to Reddit, and search for your market defining keywords within the search bar. Next select ‘Communities and users’ to see which subreddits are in your niche. Look for the subreddits with the highest number of subscribers and ensure that they are active communities. Sort through the subreddits one by one by setting the results to, Sort > TOP, OF ALL TIME, to get the pieces of content and content themes that have had the biggest impact. Record all the data in a spreadsheet – you can create a copy of the spreadsheet or have it already integrated. [quote] Tip for you If you’re not familiar with Google Docs and would prefer to use Microsoft Excel or Libre Office Calc, you can download a copy of the shared spreadsheet as shown below: It’s also very easy to create your own copy of the spreadsheet on your Google Drive – as mentioned above, please use this method instead of requesting the access to our file: Rad Paluszak – Director of SEO at the Search Initiative [/quote] Quora and Meta Filter Quora and Meta Filter are both very highly used question and answer websites. These allow you to search for the themes and mini topics within your niche and look for the specific questions that people are struggling with. This is very important, as you’ll see later. It also allows you to look for further content ideas within the answers that are provided. Again, we are looking for questions that have received a large amount of engagement. In the example from Quora above we can see that both of these questions have a high answer rate (133 and 99 answers). We collect all the relevant questions in a spreadsheet which includes: The question The search used How many answers the question has Any relevant comments [quote] Tip for you If you’re only looking for a bunch of questions that people ask around your niche, my personal favorite is AnswerThePublic.com. Let’s type ‘link building’ and allow it do its magic: You can easily find a lot of common questions the users are searching for. It’s a great inspiration to write useful answers and a way to potentially attack these sweet “Position 0” answer boxes: Rad Paluszak – Director of SEO at the Search Initiative [/quote] Google Search Look at high authority sites to reverse engineer successful campaigns. This allows you to hedge your bets with outreach because you’re following in the footsteps of someone else. Let’s see what kind of SEO related infographics the Huffington Post is sharing. Using a simple search string returns 88 results. If we take one of those results we can see that this infographic campaign has returned links from 24 referring domains. These can simply be exported and saved ready for quality control checks and outreach. As these infographics have been featured on a site such as The Huffington Post, it is likely that it has also been featured on other authority sites. From this research, we can see what kind of themes and topics get featured on high authority sites. Record everything and add it to the research spreadsheet. Content Strategy Our content strategy was based on a few specific content types: High-quality guest posts Infographics Embeddable Interactive content Creative content pieces Guest Posts Guest posts are easy to scale and are a great way to ensure that you have a baseline of high-quality links. There’s ways to do them right and there’s way to do them wrong, so make sure you know the difference or get them from a place you can trust. Infographics Infographics have been done to Read More Read More

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7 “White Hat” Link Types that Can Get you Penalized in 2024

Matt Diggity — Mon, 03 Sep 2018 09:38:32 +0000

Foreword by Matt Diggity: Very shortly, I’m going to be turning things over to Rick Lomas. Rick is an expert in manual penalty removal. I’ve been working with him for quite some time, helping folks recover from manual actions, whether they be “unnatural links”, “thin content”, etc. Starting last year with a Christmas Day spree of manual actions going after scholarship link building, we’ve seen an uncanny amount of manual penalties being triggered by supposedly whitehat seo techniques. This is kicked up significantly in 2018 as we’ve had 3 waves of manual penalty sprees already, compared to typically one-per-year. Rick has kept track of all the “white hat” link types that Google themselves has pointed out problems with. You’re about to learn all of them. What do I know about links? I confess that before 2012 I was a black hat spammer and link builder. In those days I did not care where a link came from, as long as I had more than everybody else. I was in the motorhome/RV rental niche generating leads for a UK based company. The money was amazing, my client was happy and all was well. I had VAs in India building web 2.0s and I had three PCs running SENukeXcr 24/7 using spun content. What could possibly go wrong? On my birthday, April 7, 2012, I received a message in Google Search Console (or rather Google Webmaster Tools as it was called then). It was the dreaded message that all SEOs never want to see: Unnatural inbound links to http://domain.com violate Google Webmaster Guidelines I swear my heart stopped for a few seconds. I checked my traffic and it was still OK, should I be worried? I carried on as if nothing had happened. In the back of my mind, I knew there was a ticking bomb about to explode. On April 23, 2012, the ticking bomb finally exploded and caused mass devastation. I was left with my main money site limping along on Bing and Yahoo traffic. My income had been decimated overnight. The reality struck completely when the boss of the motorhome company called and said, “What’s happened? You’ve been wiped off the face of Google. I’ve got three staff here staring at empty screens, shall I fire them?”. The aim of this post is to educate you to avoid the mistakes that I made. I’m not doing this by spouting some random ideas, but showing you some sample problematic links that have been provided by Google reviewers. I only have this evidence because I have worked on hundreds of Manual Actions since 2013. When does Google provide examples of problematic links? Sadly, not as often as we would like and certainly not when you ask them! At the time of writing the most common time to see them is when you have been through this process: You have received a Partial Match Manual Action for Unnatural Inbound links You have submitted a Reconsideration Request Google has replied saying that your Reconsideration Request has been rejected At this point, more often than not, Google will supply 1, 2 or sometimes even 3 sample links that they do not like. Here are some examples that may surprise you… 7 “White Hat” Link Types that Will Nail You 1) Non-relevant Niche Edits The idea of putting a link into an article that is already established in Google is very sound. But in this case, it seriously backfired. Here the link was on worldofwonder.net which has rather good metrics and good traffic. The link was in a sentence talking about a ‘walker’ as an aid to help people walk. The article was about Alice Walker, an American writer, and activist. Clearly, the link was completely irrelevant. So it seems that Google doesn’t like irrelevant links. Most niche edits I see are pretty tenuous links, so be careful and definitely keep them on topic. 2) Sponsored Posts This one comes as no surprise. Google does not want you to guest post, pay for posts, pay for links, do link exchanges or anything that violates their Google Webmaster Guidelines. That said, this message was meaningless as this site did not have any live links that even vaguely resembled these samples. It’s a fail for Google, but at the same time, we get the message that sponsored posts are bad. 3) Zero Traffic Sites – Site Rebuilds? I don’t always agree that a site with no traffic doesn’t pass link juice. If this was true 99% of PBNs would not work. But we know that they do work. However, in this case, the Google reviewer did not like this link at all. Looking at the site itself http://teampr.info/ it seems to be a site rebuild using content probably from Archive.org. The content is now junk and irrelevant with tons of broken images. Google has the final word, “Your site still violates Google Webmaster Guidelines”. 4) Obvious Guest Posts At first glance, KevinMD.com looks like an authority site similar to WebMD.com. The ‘Contribute’ page says: KevinMD.com is the web’s leading social media health platform, with 3 million monthly page views, and over 250,000 subscribers on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and RSS. Could this be true? It’s probably somewhat exaggerated, but SEMRush does show some reasonable traffic: The link in question was not even a money keyword anchor text link. It simply stated something like, “A. Doctor is an anesthesiologist who blogs at AFitnessBlog.org.” at the end of the article. The article itself was well written and informative. The site states that it was founded in 2004 by Kevin Pho. Kevin Pho appears to be a real physician and even has his own Wikipedia page. So how could this be problematic? I think the answer can be found if we go back in time with Archive.org and see how the site looked in 2011: It seems like Kevin has been selling guest posts for many years and Google does not like it. Avoid reaching out to sites that clearly state that they’re selling links in their posts, avoid guest post author box links, etc. Or go with a vendor like Authority Builders that has already done this vetting for you. 5) Best Top Rated Links The one thing that stands out more than anything else in Google’s Manual Actions of 2018 is keywords like: best, top rated, top 10, review of the best etc. The link here is on http://uscombatsports.com and has the word ‘best’ 21 times on this particular page. Throughout this site, the word ‘best’ is completely overused. Take a look at the homepage: Although this site has some reasonable traffic, I get the impression that Google doesn’t like being told what is best! 6) Fake Social Profile Links There are two links given here. The first one Sociable.co might appear to be some sort of social network, but in fact, it is just another blog selling guest posts: The traffic on sociable.co is reasonable, but the fact that they openly advertise the sale of sponsored posts seems to be a definite No-No in Google’s eyes. The second example is on bizcommunity.co.ke. Although this Kenya-based website openly states ‘Advertise with us’ on its menu, the problem link is much more subtle than a blatant ad or guest post link: At first, it appears to be a perfectly innocent profile page with a NoFollow link to the members’ website. On closer inspection, it is evident that there is a second DoFollow link with an obvious money keyword in the anchor text. Google didn’t like them being greedy. It’s also odd how the profile name is Cathy, but then in the description, she appears to be called Rosie. I suspect this may be some software script that set up hundreds of profiles automatically, spinning the text each time. 7) Irrelevant Redirects This was the first time in five years of fixing penalties that I saw a redirect given as an example problematic link. The really worrying thing here is that there didn’t appear to be anything wrong with the domain other than it was slightly off topic. The original domain was about a specific food festival at a town in The Republic of Ireland. This domain was redirecting to a domain about kitchenware which is aimed at a US audience. There is a second link mentioned which Google refer to as a ‘spam link’. The site is now dead, but looking back to January 2018 on archive.org you can see that it was complete rubbish. The opening sentence of this post says it all: Microwave are now very popular among residence manufacturers, when time conserving tools have actually come to be necessary in the transformed lifestyles of the people. This could not have been written by a human and no human ever needs to read this sort of nonsense. So how do you avoid getting manual actions? The examples that I have mentioned above may have shattered all your illusions about link building. Links that you may have thought were white hat are being given as examples Read More Read More

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A Complete SEO Guide to Anchor Text Optimization for 2024

Matt Diggity — Tue, 01 May 2018 13:18:56 +0000

Undoubtedly, the most crucial expertise in offsite SEO lies in mastering the art of anchor text selection. Achieving the ideal anchor text distribution can propel you to the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) with fewer links compared to your competitors. Conversely, poor anchor text selection could result in a dreaded Penguin penalty. As an SEO expert, the most frequent question I receive from clients is: “Which anchor text should I use?” While I’d be thrilled to provide a straightforward answer, the truth is that it requires more than just a five-minute explanation. Choosing the perfect anchor text involves thorough analysis and practice. However, there is a systematic and consistent approach you can adopt to optimize your site effectively. It’s crucial to develop this skill independently, rather than relying on others, to truly excel in SEO. Once you’ve mastered this technique, it’s akin to advancing to the next echelon of SEO expertise. In this guide, you will discover the method to determine the optimal anchor text ratio tailored to your specific website, 13 innovative anchor text selection strategies to outperform your competitors, and techniques for maintaining a well-balanced internal anchor text ratio. For those that prefer video consumption, here you go: What is Anchor Text? Anchor text is the clickable text in a link. In HTML it looks like this: And on your webpage, it comes out like this: Awesome SEO Blog. In this example “Awesome SEO Blog” is considered to be the anchor text. Why Care About It? You should care about it because anchor text is one of the indicators that Google uses to determine relevance. For example, if a website is constantly getting quality links with the anchor text “dog collar”, Google is eventually going to determine that your site is about dog collars. Simple stuff. Back in the day, to get websites ranking, all you’d need to do to rank is send enough links with the anchor text exactly matching the keyword you want to rank for. Ah… the good old days. And then Penguin Came The Penguin algorithm (started April 24, 2012) targets backlink manipulation. It looks at the quality of the links your site is getting and, you guessed it, the anchor text pointing to your site. If the anchor text distribution doesn’t look realistic, then you get penalized. Sending anchor text with your keywords in it gets the ranking needle moving, but overdo it to the point that it doesn’t look realistic, and you’re going to be headed south very soon. Now the question is, what is realistic for Google? External Anchor Text Optimization Determining Your Niche-Specific Target Anchor Text The first step in anchor text selection is to figure out what is the ideal target anchor text distribution for your niche. Here’s how I do it, broken down to its basics: Analyze the Competition Many SEO’s often talk about needing a “natural” anchor text distribution. When they describe it, it typically looks something like this: 50% Brand/URL anchors For example, a branded anchor for golfgenius.com would be “Golf Genius”. Branded anchors only apply to non-EMD/PMD sites. URL anchors are variations of the naked URL: golfgenius.com, http://golfgenius.com, www.golfgenius.com, etc 25% topic anchors Example: “sports equipment” would be a topic anchor for the keyword “best titanium driver” 10% target keyword and longtail anchors Examples: best titanium driver, what is the top titanium driver, buy titanium driver online I define an anchor in this category if it has a single word of a keyword phrase you want to rank for (excluding stop words) 15% miscellaneous anchors click here, read more, go to website, etc. We could break this down even further into categories like “Brand + target” (e.g: Golf Genius’ review of titanium drivers), but for the purposes of this exercise, its overkill. We’re looking for guidance, not supreme accuracy. While many people stick to this idea that you need this perfect, “natural” ratio of various types of anchors, this simply isn’t the case. You’ll learn more about this soon… Do a search for your target keyword and toss the results into a backlink checker like Ahrefs. Here, and only here, is where you’ll find the anchor text distribution Google is looking for. Often this looks nothing like the cookie-cutter anchor text distribution that is supposedly “natural”. Case in point – Keyword: “sell my car online” Your anchor text plan often isn’t what you initially expect. I’ve been in niches where I had to consecutively hit the site with target anchors for a month straight until I was able to break into page 1. It’ sounds like anchor text SEO in 2005, but sometimes that’s what the niche is asking for. Here’s an anchor text distribution that is currently going to the URL of one of my sites ranking #1 for a high-stakes affiliate keyword (It’s been ranked #1 since mid-2018). Find the Average Anchor Text Distribution of the Top 5 Rankers To figure out the target distribution of anchors for my particular niche, I rely on Ahrefs and Excel (alternatively SEO Jet and Linkio supposedly do this). Step 1) Download the Ahrefs Anchor Text data for the site in position #1 Step 2) Categorize anchors by type I use the “Referring Domains” column so I don’t double-count anchors sent from the same domain, possibly from a site-wide link. Step 3) Find the anchor text distribution for this URL by creating a pie chart. Step 4) Repeat for Sites in Positions #2-5 Step 5) Your Niche-specific Target Anchor Text Distribution = The Average of the Top 5 Sites Step 6) Record and Implement Now that you know the anchor text ratio that Google is looking for, it’s time to begin your link building campaign whose anchors will mimic this distribution. I first start by recording the target distribution down in a Backlink Management Template. Once you know “where you want to be” you can start incrementally sending links until you get there. Frequently Asked Questions Q: This is great. Do I now send these links and anchors across my whole site, such that the overall domain itself gets this distribution? A: No. Anchor distribution ratios are determined on a per-page basis. Any anchors you send to an inner page, do not affect the ratios on the homepage for example. Q: My page ranks for many keywords. Which one should I use for my search to pull up the competition? A: Use the main keyword you’d like to rank for. For affiliates, this is probably “best _____”. For local seo solutions, its probably “<city> + <industry>”. Q: I believe my competitors are hiding their PBN backlinks. What should I do? A: First, check to see if they blocked some of the less popular crawlers like Open Link Profiler. If they didn’t block it, great. If you still can’t find their PBNs, skip over this competitor. Remember, we’re looking for guidance, not accuracy. Q: One of my competitors is an authority site that ranks with only 2 backlinks. Should I add it to the analysis? A: Skip over it as well. It’s an anomaly and will distort your result. Q: What if one of my competitors disavowed a bunch of their links? A: You’re getting the theme now. When in doubt, skip over the competitor. Mastering Anchor Text Selection At any given time, I’m conducting at least 6 single variable SEO tests. In the last few years, I’ve completed over 200. A huge chunk of them have been related to anchor text. Get a pen and paper handy because I’m about to reveal 13 anchor text selection tricks that will allow you to blow past your competition’s amateur SEO efforts. 13 Pro-level Anchor Text Selection Tricks 1. Never use the same target anchor text more than once Whenever I make any SEO decision, I ask myself the question: “Does what I’m about to do look natural?” Anchor text selection is no different. Back in the earlier days of SEO when you could pretty much get away with anything, people that wanted to rank for “dog training” would simply send all their anchors as “dog training”. Clearly, this doesn’t work anymore but I still see it quite often. Money sites will have a balanced anchor text distribution (50% brand and URL, 10% misc, etc), but all 20 of their target anchors will be the same (dog training, dog training, dog training, …) What are the odds of this happening naturally? The probability of 20 independent websites all linking to another website using the exact same target anchor text is pretty slim. If you have 500 backlinks it might move into the realm of “remotely possible”. Instead, never use the same target anchor more than once and mix up your keywords by throwing in filler words. Not only does it look more natural, but it actually gets a better result with fewer links. So in a nutshell, don’t repeat anchors, except in some cases like… 2. Utilize Your SEO Title Tag as an anchor Your SEO title Read More Read More

The post A Complete SEO Guide to Anchor Text Optimization for 2024 first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce Websites

Matt Diggity — Tue, 03 Apr 2018 09:11:37 +0000

Foreword by Matt Diggity: Impressive. Knowledgeable. Underrated. These are a few words that I would use to describe Brendan Tully. B.T. is one of the first SEOs I ever met in Chiang Mai. He’s a veteran in the game and it shows. I mean… the man used to be commissioned by the Australian government to teach SEO. The guy is good. He’s a beast at E-commerce SEO, as you’re about to find out in this monster of a piece. Introduction It’s tough when Matt Diggity asks you to do a guest post. The guy sets a seriously high standard and regularly wows the SEO space putting out stuff that nobody is talking about or has talked about before publicly. When I first started in this game in the early 2000’s, I had zero idea what SEO was, but knew if I changed certain things on my site it would move up and down the SERPs in a particular way. We grew that biz to 7 figures in the mid 2000s and ultimately ended up in client work at some point in 2008. Now through our services, one-on-one consulting, and in-person training workshops, we’ve worked with over 3000 different businesses or sites in some capacity, which has given me an awesome opportunity to try and test different approaches to determine what works and what actually moves the needle. SEO has changed a lot since then – (strangely, stuffing a website footer with 200 suburbs and cities doesn’t seem to work anymore) with the SERP landscape changing week to week in some cases. While the tactics and SERP layout change massively over time, I think it’s safe to say search is here for the long term – which brings me to the next point. The more I speak with different SEOs and clients, the more ecommerce SEO in particular seems completely misunderstood. Because tactics change so rapidly, I’ve tried as much as possible in this article to stay away from short term tactics that have a use-by date. Instead, I focus on core fundamentals and strategies that are time-tested and supported by solid business, sales, and marketing principles – this article is not limited by just ecommerce SEO but instead is more broadly focused on ecommerce marketing and optimization – which is where you ultimately need to be playing if you want to stay competitive. I’ve included action items as we work through this article – some are going to be totally obvious but are things that are regularly missed and some you may not have heard of before but have the potential to make a huge impact with a small amount of work. I’ve also included an audio breakdown for most sections and a handful of videos too as some things are just easier explained that way. Please bear in mind that the bigger your site the chunkier the action items or todos, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to create 3 months of SEO work here for a 7 figure site. Ideally, if I can have you walk away after digging into this article with one easy actionable tactic or quick win, one new broad SEO strategy you can apply to your site, or one principle or SEO foundation you weren’t aware of before – then I’ll be happy to say this article was a success. If you have a question about a particular point here, post in the comments section and I’ll be happy to clarify for you. Ecommerce vs Local SEO vs Affiliate SEO Before we get into the meat and potatoes, let’s look at some of the key differences between ecommerce, local small business, and affiliate sites. There are some fundamental differences between them so let’s make sure we’re all on the same page. Ecommerce Sites Typically an ecommerce site has a lot more pages than other types of sites, even if there’s only a handful of products. Most of these pages are auto-generated from the CMS, for example category, tag, cart, and checkout pages. When you add tags, especially if you’re using a platform like Shopify, tons of pages are auto-generated off those tags and can create a canonical and keyword cannibalization mess. For bigger sites, cleaning this mess up can take some serious work but is a key component of getting the site to rank. It’s easier to fix these issues on smaller ecommerce sites, but for bigger sites, it’s tough to handle auto-tags without automation or SEO techniques that work at scale. Local & Affiliate Sites Local SEO sites may offer 5 to 10 services or products. What that translates to are 5 to 10 target keywords or groups of keywords. Affiliate sites are targeting more keywords but generally still not as many as a mid size ecommerce site – for example, an ecom site that offers 100 products will typically have 100 or more target keyword groups. It’s difficult to hand optimise a large number of keywords without using automation, templating, or SEO techniques that scale well when you’re dealing with a lot of pages and keywords. SEO is not just backlinks What I often see is when SEO’s do ecommerce SEO, they do it poorly. A lot of the time the default thinking is SEO=links but that’s not the case at all. Particularly with ecommerce sites, on-page SEO is vital and you need to get it nailed before chasing backlinks and internal links if you’re going to get serious SEO traction. This should be common sense, but you’d be surprised how often we see well established ecommerce sites with glaring on-site issues. On page SEO should be your initial focus, especially for established ecommerce sites. Generally as an ecommerce SEO strategy, I handle backlinks last. Backlinks are usually the most expensive part of SEO compared to internal links but actually give you the least control and there’s often no direct correlation between a link and a result. With on-page, there’s close to a 100% direct correlation between doing the work and getting results. ACTION STEPS: Run a Semrush Site Audit across the site. I’ve tried dozens of onpage audit tools and right now Semrush is my favorite. It picks up a ton of things other ecommerce seo tools won’t and presents them in a way that it makes them easy to get fixed. Semrush will pickup many of the easy technical problems that are roadblocking rankings. Run the site through siteliner.com – this is a fantastic tool for uncovering content duplication and cannibalisation issues. Get a Littlewarden.com account setup. It’ll monitor your site on an ongoing basis and detect basic but critical onpage SEO problems that you wouldn’t otherwise notice until your rankings start to tank (shout out to Kevin from Bulk Buy Hosting for this reco) A Note On Ecommerce Client SEO… It can be tough working with smaller ecommerce sites as clients, brand new sites, or sites where the average sale size is small. Generally I’ll stay well away from these types of clients. Generally when we do client SEO for ecommerce sites we never do SEO only. It’s just too hard to get them fast results and if the client is not commercially mature, often the expectation is that you’ll make them a millionaire overnight Whether I’m talking with a prospect about Adwords, SEO or something else one of the first questions I’ll ask if what is their budget. You can usually tell by the way they react what they’re comfortable spending and how commercially mature they are. A common problem with client SEO is that expectation that SEO is free so that’s where the focus should be versus ads. But that’s the wrong way to look at it. At least half of SERPs are paid ads now. If you don’t include paid traffic into your ecommerce SEO campaign strategy, you’ll have a hard time matching the competition. Ecommerce SEO – The Current State of Play, SEO is not enough any more Let’s talk about the current state of play with ecommerce SEO. As you’re well aware the SERP is constantly evolving which means your SEO approach MUST evolve otherwise it’s simply going to be less effective as time goes on. SEO is becoming increasingly fragmented. 10 years ago, the #1 result on Google was the SEO search results. There might have been one or two adwords results at the top of the page but now the landscape has totally changed. The #1 search result could mean many different things today: Regular paid adwords Google Shopping Google Maps Featured snippet (learn how to get it) Knowledge panel Paid Google Maps, which changes depending on location And more To top it off, the SERP also changes based on device AND the location of that device at the time of the search. The traditional #1 result has been drowned out by ads and other SERP elements now. A lot of SEOs haven’t realised it yet: Google is a paid search engine with some free results. Google wants to sell ads, they don’t care about searchers. Read More Read More

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The Story of 10Beasts.com – An Uncensored Interview with Luqman Khan

Matt Diggity — Mon, 08 Jan 2018 08:00:29 +0000

About a year ago, I was introduced to a site called 10beasts.com. At the time, it was an 8-page affiliate website in the technology niche that quickly busted out of the sandbox in six-figure profitability within 8 months. December 2016, it broke $80k. This site became incredibly popular when it was featured on Glen Alsop’s Gaps.com. I mean, how often does someone go public with an affiliate website of this level? Fast forward one year… 10Beasts grew in size and earnings and flipped for over half a million dollars. And then the unspeakable happened. It got penalized with an unnatural links manual action in Google Search Console. And guess what? The penalty had recovered in 5 days. Meet Luqman Khan. Luqman is the creator, builder, and recoverer of 10beasts. In this no-holds-barred interview, Luqman discusses the entire story of 10beasts, how he got it ranked, how he sold it, and how he recovered it. In this interview we get into: The story of Luqman Keyword research Content planning Onsite optimization Backlink strategy Social signals The huge flip for $500k+ …and the miraculous 5-day recovery Resources: Tools Keyword Finder – Keyword Research CrazyEgg – Heatmap Monitor Backlinks Services AddMeFast – Social Signals Upwork Fiverr: Character Images AllTop.com Empire Flippers Guides An SEO’s Guide to Flipping Blogs NichePie Backlinko Cloud Living Gaps.com NeilPatel.com Transcript Matt: Hey, Luqman. How’s it going, man? Thanks so much for coming on. Luqman: Hey, nice to meet you, Matt. You’re absolutely welcome and thanks for inviting me for this interview. Matt: Absolutely. For the people that are watching that don’t know who you are, can you give us a brief introduction like what’s your name, how old are you, where you came from? Luqman: Well, my full name is Mohammed Luqman Khan and I’m from Lahore, Pakistan. Lahore is actually the second biggest city of Pakistan. I’m like actually, I’m born here and I’m living since I’m born here, and I have been to England, Turkey, Egypt, and a few other countries. And for now, I am still living in England as a computer science student in University of Manchester. Matt: Oh, great, awesome, so you’re well-traveled. Tell me a little bit more about the home city you grew up in. Lahore, right? Luqman: Yeah. Matt: Is that a city where people are doing like what you’re doing, working online? What’s it like where you’re from? Luqman: Well, Pakistan is actually the second biggest country who are doing the freelance work like freelance jobs are more open here in Pakistan. And what I’m doing here a lot of people are doing here. Actually, I’m inspired from a Pakistani guy called … his name is Salman Baig. He’s from another city called Peshawar. It is the north side of Pakistan. So, yeah, that’s all. Matt: Yeah, cool. And what do your parents think about what you’re doing? Luqman: Well, my parents really don’t like what I’m doing. They want me to really work. They ask me there what you do and I really tried to explain them what. They don’t know what you can do on internet. They want me to get a physical job, they want me to show doing something because the people think that I’m just a lazy guy who’s sitting in home all the time and do nothing but yeah, that’s actually what’s going on here. Matt: It’s not one of their familiar lawyer, doctor, so it’s garbage. I get that too. So tell me a bit about your background. You said you were getting a degree in computer science, right? Luqman: Yeah. Matt: Okay. And are you working on your bachelors or masters? Luqman: I’m doing bachelors yet. Matt: Okay. How are you doing there? Luqman: It’s not that great. It has nothing to do with my career, so I’m actually just doing it to get a degree to satisfy my parents, that’s all. Matt: I hope your parents don’t watch this, and if they do, I apologize for instigating this guy. Okay, cool. Have you ever had a jobby job? Have you ever worked for someone else? Luqman: I had a job in call center. It was in the sales department in some kind of product, I think security installment product in Canada but the call center was here in Pakistan. Matt: That sounds fun. Luqman: Yeah. I had it back in 2011 maybe. I don’t remember. I don’t really … yeah. Matt: Okay, all right. Luqman: So, I only worked for like one month. My back was already completely trashed of sitting on a chair for eight hours continuously. Matt: Yeah, I can agree. Luqman: It’s like … Matt: Mm-hmm (affirmative). And so, when did you get into SEO and how did that happen? Luqman: When I was a freelancer, I started, you know, I figured out online earning from an ad. It was a PTC website, I don’t know. I was I think smartphone were newly introduced back then and I was looking for a smartphone on GSMArena.com, and there was an add earn by clicking in it was a PTC website. I hope you know about PTC websites. Matt: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Luqman: There you click on an add and you get a few cents and things like that. And that was a scam website but I ended up with an idea that earning, online earning is quite a possible thing. So I started research, I learned HTML, CSS, and WordPress. By the passage of time, I started to work on upwork.com, fiverr.com. And I had a project on Fiverr, they were the client who had a website. I think Amazon associate website. That’s how I figured out about Amazon associate and by the passage of time, I figured out about search engine marketing that how you can get visitor to your website and that’s how I ended up on backlinko.com, cloudliving.com. And I saw that guy, Suman Bake, whom I told you about earlier from Peshawar. I saw him. I know he was posting somethings on his Facebook walls so it was good. Matt: Okay, so you were doing some online freelance work. You started working for a website. And you’re like, “Okay, if he’s paying me this much, how much is he making?” Luqman: Yeah. Matt: Then you went down the rabbit hole, I’m guessing. Luqman: Exactly. Matt: And where have you learned from in the meantime? Do you read blogs? Luqman: Yeah, the main learning source is backlinko.com for branding. And a few other Facebook pages, Facebook groups, sorry, and Neil Patel. You know neilpatel.com and Quick Sprout also. These famous blogs, they are really helpful. Matt: Awesome. And this was how long ago when you first started getting into SEO? Luqman: I think in 2013 or ’14. Maybe … I’m not really remember. Matt: So like maximum like four, four-and-a-half years ago. Luqman: Yes. Matt: And I would definitely say you classify as what I would call a very successful SEO. I’d say you’re probably in the 1% considering what you’ve done with 10Beasts. How does that sound to you? Luqman: Oh, thank you. Matt: Like how does that make you feel? Luqman: That sounds great. That sounds really great, man. Matt: I’m not just saying that because its coming from me… but just like you were not an SEO four years ago and now you’re … I would say you’re in the 1%. That … you’re awesome. Luqman: I really do feel awesome actually. Matt: That’s good, that’s good. You deserve it. You did a lot of hard work and I’m excited to talk about that site but not quite yet. On the way to where you are now, did you ever face any setbacks or any big issues that kind of … roadblocks that got in your way. Luqman: The biggest issue I faced was drop out of college in November 2015. I had a fight issue with my ex’s boyfriend and the fight really turned rough fight, fight. Matt: Okay. Luqman: So you know, actually, that guy, he brought a few guys to beat me up from outside the college, those who weren’t students. So the students of the college, they find out that people came outside the college to beat me, the student of the college. So the fight really turned into a big scenario like there were more than 50 to 60 students fighting in the hockey ground. Matt: Oh, my goodness. Luqman: And it really turned bad. They suspended like more than 16 students and including me and that other guy. I was suspended for five years. I cannot [inaudible 00:07:47]. Matt: Wow. So, I mean, that probably not just affected you in your school life. It probably affected every aspect of your life including the relationship with your parents. Luqman: Yeah, exactly. The relationship with my parents, my family, my teachers, so it was really bad. Matt: How did you bounce back from that? Luqman: I flew to England. Read More Read More

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The Black Sheep: Why You’re Stuck on Page 2 (Revised)

Matt Diggity — Mon, 05 Jun 2017 11:35:42 +0000

I get this question quite often. Today in fact. I’ve been stuck for 3 months on page 2. It doesn’t matter how many links I throw at it. It simply won’t move. I can’t figure it out! Has this ever happened to you? All of your tactics are clean but you simply can’t break into page 1. You have the perfect on-page SEO and your anchor text is properly diversified. Most of the time I see this, it’s because the site has an off-site SEO record that is completely different than the other sites ranking on first page. It’s what I like to call the “Black Sheep Effect”. The Black Sheep Effect Look at the top 10 for your keyword and look at the number of links that the ranking pages have (use mozbar to make this a lot easier). If everyone in the top 10 is ranking with less than 20 links, and you’re the guy trying to break into page 1 with your 75+ links, Google is going to recognize you as being different from everyone else and you’re going to have a hell of a time trying to rank. This often comes up when you’re in a niche dominated by authority sites. For example, if you’re in the health niche trying to sell an affiliate’s new supplement, your page 1 is likely going to be filled up with a WebMD, WikiPedia and the Center for Disease Control. These sites typically have a huge domain authority (DA) of 90+ so it naturally takes them only a few links to rank. Sometimes none at all. Another example of the Black Sheep Effect is when one of your non-intended pages ranks higher than the one you actually meant to rank. Let’s say you have a homepage about Product ABC. You’ve thrown a ton of links at it to get it to rank, but for some reason you have a non-important inner page about the product which is ranking higher than the homepage. What’s going on is you’ve either over-optimized the anchors for the homepage, or you have too many links pointed to it compared to everyone else. How to Beat it You might be saying, “Well, I don’t have a DA 90 site so I’m going to need a ton of links to rank for my challenging keyword.” Easy solution: Reverse siloing. What you want to do is create inner pages that are supporting articles for your critical page’s target keyword. Then place a contextual link to the homepage with some variation of the target keyword, or something generic like “Return to Homepage.” When you send links to the inner page, the link juice comes in and immediately transfers to the critical page using a targeted anchor to establish the relevance. Works like a charm. So instead of going brute force after a keyword, first take a look at the competition. See what they’re doing to rank, and mimic the same. As usual, send your most powerful links to your critical page and use inner-pages to supply the extra link juice to get to the top. Are there any Other Black Sheep Scenarios? Quite simply… absolutely. There are numerous situations where sticking out from the crowd and being different from your peers in the SERPs is going to make life harder for you… As a general rule, your main goal for ranking in Google is to “blend in” but “do it better”. Here are some examples… Word Count It’s a common fallacy when people blindlly believe that larger articles always outperform shorter articles. Take local SEO for example. If you’re trying to rank your plumber client, does it really make sense to have a 4000 word homepage? How much content does it take to sell plumbing in Chicago? Google knows this. They know that many sales based pages (and ecommerce as well) do not require a huge amount of content to rank. When your SERP is populated with short content sales pages, you’ll need to mimic the same. Domain Age Every time you’re evaluating whether or not to go into a new niche, take a look at the domain age of the sites on page 1. If your competition is all 4+ years old, you’re going to have a hard time penetrating that niche. So what’s the solution? Is it as easy as being patient and waiting for your new site to age? Hardly. Remember, as your site is getting older, so is your competition. One year later, you have a year-old site but your competition is now 5 years old. One option is to simply build new sites on aged domains. I would stick to non-dropped domains such as you can get from vendors like TB Solutions. Another option is the 301 redirect. When you redirect, the receiving site essentially inherits the age of the redirected domain, amongst other things such as anchor text and link juice (minus some fudge factor). I’ve used 301’s to skate the sandbox as well as imitate artificial age, but I tend to avoid them as much as possible. 301’s add a measure of non-control to the ranking process, which I prefer to always keep. Locally Relevant Link Diversity SEO agencies are very familiar with this. When ranking in locally-based niches, Google is expecting locally-based links. If you’re the fella attempting to rank for “plastic surgeon beverly hills” with 100% PBNs, you’re going to be fighting an uphill battle. Looking at your competition will soon reveal a large list of locally relevant link sources, whether they be from business citations in the same city or guest posts from local bloggers. I ran into the same situation on a national level when I was attempting to rank an affiliate website in Brazil. Reverse-engineering the competition revealed that the competition had, on average, 40% of its links coming from .com.br domains. This is what gave me the idea to use citations for affiliate websites, and as a result, I found myself on page 1 in short time. Leverage local links like citations for a quick and cheap way to get that local relevance. For this I recommend Web 20 Ranker’s citation package (coupon code “Diggity15” for 15% off). Being Bottom-Heavy This situation comes into play when you have the following site architecture… You have a homepage that virtually serves as a portal to various silo pages. Your homepage doesn’t exactly try to rank for anything, but your silo pages definitely do. An example of this would be if you have a national dentist directory. Obviously no one is searching for “dentist in USA”, so you wouldn’t care about ranking that page. But you definitely care about ranking your inner pages for “dentist in Palm Springs” and the like. The problem comes into play when you’re distributing the links to the pages on the site. If there is an unnaturally high ratio of inner-page links vs homepage links (as compared to the competition), this results in another black sheep scenario. To prevent this from happening, you need to link to the homepage. You can accomplish this on the cheap with citations or, one of my favorites, press releases. I get this question quite often. Today in fact. I’ve been stuck for 3 months on page 2. It doesn’t matter how many links I throw at it. It simply won’t move. I can’t figure it out! Has this ever happened to you? All of your tactics are clean but you simply can’t break into page 1. You have the perfect on-page SEO and your anchor text is properly diversified. Most of the time I see this, it’s because the site has an off-site SEO record that is completely different than the other sites ranking on first page. It’s what I like to call the “Black Sheep Effect”. The Black Sheep Effect Look at the top 10 for your keyword and look at the number of links that the ranking pages have (use mozbar to make this a lot easier). If everyone in the top 10 is ranking with less than 20 links, and you’re the guy trying to break into page 1 with your 75+ links, Google is going to recognize you as being different from everyone else and you’re going to have a hell of a time trying to rank. This often comes up when you’re in a niche dominated by authority sites. For example, if you’re in the health niche trying to sell an affiliate’s new supplement, your page 1 is likely going to be filled up with a WebMD, WikiPedia and the Center for Disease Control. These sites typically have a huge domain authority (DA) of 90+ so it naturally takes them only a few links to rank. Sometimes none at all. Another example of the Black Sheep Effect is when one of your non-intended pages ranks higher than the one you actually meant to rank. Let’s say you have a homepage about Product ABC. You’ve thrown a ton of links at it to Read More Read More

The post The Black Sheep: Why You’re Stuck on Page 2 (Revised) first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

How to Rank In Google Images in 5 Steps

Matt Diggity — Thu, 27 Apr 2017 09:25:59 +0000

Foreword by Matt Diggity: If you’ve look in the SERPs recently, you might have noticed that featured snippets have slightly changed. Whereas before, if you rank for the snippet the image is pulled from your site – Now, the image will most likely be pulled from the #1 ranking image in Google Image search. Sounds annoying, right? Not if you know how to rank in Google Images. In the video below, we’ll cover how to rank #1. For this sneaky post, I’ve brought on Dino Gomez to show you exactly how to do just that. Benefits of Ranking Images 1) Branding Include a logo watermark on your image and that can be seen front and center on Google for a competitive target keyword. 2) Traffic Depending on your niche, image optimization can drive a fair bit of extra traffic. In particular, ecommerce websites have much to gain. I ranked a client in the fashion apparel industry and their designs showed up first for competitive terms in addition to their website. Since people look closely at the design of clothing as part of the buying consideration; it helped drive click through rate from Google image results. “How to articles” also have much to gain from image optimization. When people are looking to learn something they often want to see a “visual” of how it is done. 3) Rich Snippets There’s been a lot of recent discussion around how to rank for rich snippets and rich snippet images. Results are showing that rich snippets sometimes pull images from websites not even on page 1 of Google for that query. The truth is that most of the time, like Matt said, the images is getting pulled from Google image rankings. Imagine your competitor does all the work to gain a rich snippet but your image is sitting with the snippet at position zero. There’s a good chance you’re going to steal some of that traffic and brand awareness again. 4) Amusement I ranked myself for “best looking guy in San Diego”. My competition (see the images next to me) was obviously fierce as I’m barely beating out the fellas that went shirtless. Needless to say, I showed my girlfriend. And my mom. And my buddy who spams me with fake political stories. Their reaction? And the result… Girlfriend thinks I’m amazing. (win) Mom has most proud moment of her life. (win) Friend stops spamming me with fake news. (win) Who would’ve thought image optimization could be so damn amusing and powerful. How to Rank Images in Google (Step by Step) Ranking images in Google is very similar to ranking a Youtube video. In fact ranking images is actually easier because the competition is lower (not many people are intentionally aiming to rank photos). Here are the steps to rank an image… 1) Alt text The alt text of the image needs to match or be a partial match keyword to what you’re aiming to rank for. 2) Content The content surrounding where your image is hosted needs to be closely related to your target keyword. 3) Authority This is relevant to the competitiveness of the keyword you’re trying to rank. If you’re aiming to steal a rich snippet image spot then the hosting website of your image should have some comparable authority to your competition holding the actual text snippet. Here’s an example of stealing the image snippet. If you check the alt text of the image you’ll verify it’s a partial match of the keyword. You’ll also see the website stealing the image snippet has very similar authority to the website with the actual text snippet. (below) 4) Syndication Take your image and syndicate it out to all the image sharing websites. This includes Google plus, Flickr, Google Picassa, & others. Link back to the original image. Here’s a link to the gig that I use: click here. 5) Juice The Image Take your image and embed it on a few PBN sites just as you would if you were aiming to rank a Youtube video. Make sure the embed references the hosting website image source code as the point of origin. That’s it. Depending on the competition level and authority of your image-hosting website you’ll hit the top of google images quickly. Finally, what image search do you plan to rank for? Foreword by Matt Diggity: If you’ve look in the SERPs recently, you might have noticed that featured snippets have slightly changed. Whereas before, if you rank for the snippet the image is pulled from your site – Now, the image will most likely be pulled from the #1 ranking image in Google Image search. Sounds annoying, right? Not if you know how to rank in Google Images. In the video below, we’ll cover how to rank #1. For this sneaky post, I’ve brought on Dino Gomez to show you exactly how to do just that. Benefits of Ranking Images 1) Branding Include a logo watermark on your image and that can be seen front and center on Google for a competitive target keyword. 2) Traffic Depending on your niche, image optimization can drive a fair bit of extra traffic. In particular, ecommerce websites have much to gain. I ranked a client in the fashion apparel industry and their designs showed up first for competitive terms in addition to their website. Since people look closely at the design of clothing as part of the buying consideration; it helped drive click through rate from Google image results. “How to articles” also have much to gain from image optimization. When people are looking to learn something they often want to see a “visual” of how it is done. 3) Rich Snippets There’s been a lot of recent discussion around how to rank for rich snippets and rich snippet images. Results are showing that rich snippets sometimes pull images from websites not even on page 1 of Google for that query. The truth is that most of the time, like Matt said, the images is getting pulled from Google image rankings. Imagine your competitor does all the work to gain a rich snippet but your image is sitting with the snippet at position zero. There’s a good chance you’re going to steal some of that traffic and brand awareness again. 4) Amusement I ranked myself for “best looking guy in San Diego”. My competition (see the images next to me) was obviously fierce as I’m barely beating out the fellas that went shirtless. Needless to say, I showed my girlfriend. And my mom. And my buddy who spams me with fake political stories. Their reaction? And the result… Girlfriend thinks I’m amazing. (win) Mom has most proud moment of her life. (win) Friend stops spamming me with fake news. (win) Who would’ve thought image optimization could be so damn amusing and powerful. How to Rank Images in Google (Step by Step) Ranking images in Google is very similar to ranking a Youtube video. In fact ranking images is actually easier because the competition is lower (not many people are intentionally aiming to rank photos). Here are the steps to rank an image… 1) Alt text The alt text of the image needs to match or be a partial match keyword to what you’re aiming to rank for. 2) Content The content surrounding where your image is hosted needs to be closely related to your target keyword. 3) Authority This is relevant to the competitiveness of the keyword you’re trying to rank. If you’re aiming to steal a rich snippet image spot then the hosting website of your image should have some comparable authority to your competition holding the actual text snippet. Here’s an example of stealing the image snippet. If you check the alt text of the image you’ll verify it’s a partial match of the keyword. You’ll also see the website stealing the image snippet has very similar authority to the website with the actual text snippet. (below) 4) Syndication Take your image and syndicate it out to all the image sharing websites. This includes Google plus, Flickr, Google Picassa, & others. Link back to the original image. Here’s a link to the gig that I use: click here. 5) Juice The Image Take your image and embed it on a few PBN sites just as you would if you were aiming to rank a Youtube video. Make sure the embed references the hosting website image source code as the point of origin. That’s it. Depending on the competition level and authority of your image-hosting website you’ll hit the top of google images quickly. Finally, what image search do you plan to rank for? Read More

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How to Properly Track and Manage Your Backlinks

Matt Diggity — Mon, 01 Aug 2016 13:00:29 +0000

I am absolutely O.C.D. when it comes to tracking, measuring, and recording data. One of the best skills you can have in SEO is to be able to stay efficiently organized. Only by keeping track of what actions you’ve taken, will you be effectively able to make correct decisions about what to do next. Famous management consultant Peter Drucker once said: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” I couldn’t agree more. Unfortunately, not everyone has the same nerdy obsession I have over collecting data. Every week, I perform SEO consultations for various clients. When someone doesn’t show up with a list of the links pointing to their site, I simply can’t help diagnose their offsite SEO problems. There’s simply nothing to talk about. I decided to make this post to help make your (and my) life easier by explaining how to properly track and manage your backlinks. The importance of staying organized in SEO It is said that there are over 200 ranking signals that Google uses to determine SERP placement. This means, that in your ranking equation, there are over 200 variables that are constantly changing from day-to-day. Your only chance at wrapping your head around this equation is if you successfully reduce as many variables as possible. If you can confidently answer questions like “do I have enough nofollow links pointing to my site?” then you’re one step closer to understanding your rankings. This is not possible unless you keep track of your backlinks. Why you can’t rely on Majestic to track your backlinks Do not count on the 3rd party backlink crawlers to track your links for you. Why is that? 3rd party crawlers are extremely flawed and will not pick up all your links. If you’ve ever tried comparing Majestic vs Ahrefs vs Moz results, you know what I’m talking about. Their results are highly varied and grossly incomplete. You’re likely blocking your PBNs from being picked up by them anyways. Imagine you start a new project money site. A few months go by and you’re not ranking where you’d like to be. You decide that it’s possible that you were too aggressive with your anchor text and you’d like to compare your sites anchor text profile to the niche-specific average ratio. Well, my friend, if you didn’t keep track of your website link building efforts yourself, you’re completely screwed. Majestic, Moz and Ahrefs are going to all give you conflicting and incomplete data. Even Webmaster Tools won’t display all of the links to your site. If you want to be able to debug your sites, it’s time to start tracking your backlinks in detail. What you need to track I recommend keeping one large master spreadsheet for each of your projects. Each spreadsheet should contain the following data: Backlinks First and foremost, you’ll want to track your backlinks: all links coming from PBNs, Web 2.0s, Press Releases, blog comments, etc. Namely, track every link that is pointing to your site that is indexed. This does not include social signals which play a different role in ranking altogether. In the video below, you’ll learn why backlinks are still considered as a top ranking factor and what other things you can do to win on Google SEO. Here’s exactly what you should record: When was the link placed? What is the referring domain? What is the target URL? What is the anchor text used? Dofollow or nofollow? Is the link indexed? Anchor Text Distribution This is definitely the most important thing to track. Keep an ongoing record of the overall anchor text distribution pointing to your site and how it measures up to the niche-specific target anchor text. This is best accomplished with an automatically-updating pie chart. Rankings Whenever you place or purchase links, keep track of what the rankings were before you placed the link. This will allow you to see what links/anchors were most likely to have caused positive or negative movement. This is most easily accomplished with a rank tracker, but I also recommend adding weekly ranking notes to your spreadsheet every time you place a backlink. It’s simply going to make your life easier. You’ll see what I mean. A List of Keywords and Which Pages Target Them Keep track of each of the keywords your site is gunning for and which pages on your site are gunning for them. In most situations, I recommend you don’t send the same exact anchor text more than 1-2 times. Each time you send a keyword’s exact anchor, mark this down in your spreadsheet. Social Fortress Tracking List all of your social fortress profiles, including your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc. and denote whether or not they are indexed. Also if you’re trust pulling and linking to your social fortress, keep track of the links and anchors that you’re sending to each social profile. Weekly Log Keep a weekly update on what actions you took for the week as well as what actions you recommend yourself to take next week. This will help you make quicker decisions from week-to-week as you won’t need to re-familiarize yourself with what your goals were. But probably the most valuable outcome of keeping a proper weekly log is when you start to deploy multiple websites and dominate a niche. Once you’ve figured out how to rank one site in a particular niche, you have a blueprint on how to rank other sites moving forward. You simply need to follow the same weekly actions until your 2nd, 3rd, etc. pages are ranked on page 1 as well. This can be huge when you really want to scale. High-level responsibilities such as anchor text selection can be outsourced to a VA with very little SEO training. As long as they can follow the instructions outlined in your weekly log, they can rank a website. My Free Website Tracking Template Keeping track of everything I’ve listed above is quite an organizational feat, so I’ve helped you out by providing you with the exact template that I use to keep track of my projects (must be opened on desktop). And here’s a demo on how to use this spreadsheet to its fullest potential. I am absolutely O.C.D. when it comes to tracking, measuring, and recording data. One of the best skills you can have in SEO is to be able to stay efficiently organized. Only by keeping track of what actions you’ve taken, will you be effectively able to make correct decisions about what to do next. Famous management consultant Peter Drucker once said: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” I couldn’t agree more. Unfortunately, not everyone has the same nerdy obsession I have over collecting data. Every week, I perform SEO consultations for various clients. When someone doesn’t show up with a list of the links pointing to their site, I simply can’t help diagnose their offsite SEO problems. There’s simply nothing to talk about. I decided to make this post to help make your (and my) life easier by explaining how to properly track and manage your backlinks. The importance of staying organized in SEO It is said that there are over 200 ranking signals that Google uses to determine SERP placement. This means, that in your ranking equation, there are over 200 variables that are constantly changing from day-to-day. Your only chance at wrapping your head around this equation is if you successfully reduce as many variables as possible. If you can confidently answer questions like “do I have enough nofollow links pointing to my site?” then you’re one step closer to understanding your rankings. This is not possible unless you keep track of your backlinks. Why you can’t rely on Majestic to track your backlinks Do not count on the 3rd party backlink crawlers to track your links for you. Why is that? 3rd party crawlers are extremely flawed and will not pick up all your links. If you’ve ever tried comparing Majestic vs Ahrefs vs Moz results, you know what I’m talking about. Their results are highly varied and grossly incomplete. You’re likely blocking your PBNs from being picked up by them anyways. Imagine you start a new project money site. A few months go by and you’re not ranking where you’d like to be. You decide that it’s possible that you were too aggressive with your anchor text and you’d like to compare your sites anchor text profile to the niche-specific average ratio. Well, my friend, if you didn’t keep track of your website link building efforts yourself, you’re completely screwed. Majestic, Moz and Ahrefs are going to all give you conflicting and incomplete data. Even Webmaster Tools won’t display all of the links to your site. If you want to be able to debug your sites, it’s time to start tracking your backlinks in detail. What you need to track I recommend keeping one large master spreadsheet for each of your projects. Each spreadsheet should contain the following data: Backlinks First and foremost, you’ll want to track your backlinks: all links coming Read More Read More

The post How to Properly Track and Manage Your Backlinks first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

SEO Spotlight: Daryl Rosser, Lior Ohayon, Joseph Elshazly

Matt Diggity — Tue, 09 Feb 2016 13:00:49 +0000

Welcome back to Episode 2 of the SEO Spotlight series. In the last episode, we visited three SEO’s that think outside-the-box in order to tackle their problems. Being a person who appreciates creativity, I’ll be keeping up with the same theme here by interviewing three more SEOs who have made great progress in the areas of affiliate SEO, PBN, and client scaling. You’ll learn their thought processes and find out how you can apply these same ideas to your own SEO projects. Daryl Rosser – Breaking Down Problems into Bite Size Pieces Daryl has got to be one of the most likeable guys in SEO. He’s got an incredible head for business, especially for such a young fella, and has a sound technical understanding as well. Plus, he’s fun to party with. His technique for deconstructing high-competition affiliate SEO is bound to get some ideas popping off in your head. Name: Daryl Rosser Age: 22 Location: Northamptonshire, England Matt: When did you get into SEO and how? Daryl: 2.5 years ago when I was seriously struggling to make money. A local business had contacted me, they said they wanted SEO and heard I could help. I had no idea about SEO, but I needed money, so I met them, read up on some SEO buzzwords before meeting them, and later on ended up closing them as a client. After their first payment came through, I setup some backlinks, and got them ranked #1 in 3 weeks, and had an “oh shit” moment. Matt: Let’s talk more about how you make affiliate SEO ridiculously easy. Daryl: Why is it that most people prefer local SEO to affiliate SEO? It’s easier. When people think of affiliate SEO, they think of competing with all the other affiliates. This requires a higher budget, better knowledge of ranking, and most likely more time. This technique is how I approach affiliate SEO, where there is barely any competition, you don’t need a lot of PBN links, and the conversion rate is ridiculous. Matt: How exactly do you do it? Spill the beans. Daryl: I don’t sell products as an affiliate. That’s a great model, and it works, but it takes a lot more traffic. I specifically seek out national firms that have pay-per-lead and/or pay-per-call affiliate offers. Firstly, this makes it a lot easier to generate a commission, and some of these can pay upwards of $100, depending on the niche. (Lingo clarification: Pay-per-lead means they will pay for an enquiry. Pay-per-call means they will pay for a call.) But the smart part of this strategy is that I treat them as local clients. Rather than try to compete on the national keywords, I can pick out a few towns or cities, rank my site top in them, and reap the rewards. This leaves you competing with local businesses, not other affiliates. The search volume is low, but you can rank multiple sites easier, and the search traffic is highly qualified. Say you work with a national plumbing company. If someone searches “plumbers in [your city]”, how qualified do you think they are to wanting a plumbing company? Then all you need to do is drive an enquiry or call through their website, and you get paid. It’s like local lead gen, but it’s through affiliate networks, so no client management. The next question people ask me when I share this is, “where do I get the offers?” All I can say is that you should be on every reputable network, and you should be looking out for them. Here is a list of 20 reputable CPA networks: https://mthink.com/top-cpa-networks-2015/. You can specific ask your affiliate managers for these types of offers and they’ll be able to help. Matt: Very clever. What’s your biggest win from using this technique? Daryl: Last month one of my websites had 1,342 unique visitors. The revenue (entirely from SEO) was $2,600. That is around $1.94 per visitor to my website. Compare that to some affiliates that have over 1,000 visitors daily with lower revenues. This is a solid model. Matt: Any advice to others in this SEO game? Daryl: My advice isn’t related to SEO so much as it’s related to business. One of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in the past, and I see others make, is to focus on things in the wrong order. They do the right work, but in the wrong order. Take client SEO as an example. People invest thousands of dollars and several hours into building up a PBN before they even have a client. How does that help you? It doesn’t. Evaluate your goals and ask yourself what is the one thing you should be focusing on right now to get you closer to that. If you’re just starting out with client SEO, it’s probably prospecting or outreach. Once you’ve done that, then you can build a PBN or rent links. As you expand your business you get better at this, but then it becomes – are you spending all your time managing and maintaining what you have, or are you focusing on growth? It’s easy to get complacent at a certain stage and just manage things, don’t, keep focusing on growth and working your ass off towards it. Be sure to check out Daryl’s Lionzeal.com, a blog and community (of over 2,000 members) committed to scaling SEO businesses. Lior Ohayon – No Software Tool Exists? Create it Yourself. We all have some tasks that repeatedly consume a large amount of time. Tasks that would be better resolved by software, if it existed. Lior took matters into his own hands and developed a tool for speeding up the PBN auditing process. Name: Lior Ohayon Age: 23 Location: Toronto, Canada Matt: When did you get into SEO and how? Lior: I got into the SEO world by accident in 2013. I was a typical college dropout looking for ways to make money online. Everything I would read about starting a business boiled down to getting traffic to websites and SEO was one of the main ways. I consumed a lot of content about affiliate websites and link building, mainly through Pat Flynn, and played around with my own sites a little. Then I realized instead of starting a bunch of websites, I could just offer these new skills I learnt to existing business owners and help them grow their traffic. I stumbled into client SEO by accident! Matt: Let’s talk more about the software you created. What problem does it solve? Lior: When you are buying an expired domain for your PBN at auction or from a broker, you need to do a lot of research using third party tools to see if it is a powerful, clean domain. There could be dozens of metrics to research, and it can get very time consuming and a headache to manage all of the tools in your browser (multiple tabs, logins, etc). I got frustrated with this whole process so I created ScopeReveal. It’s a free tool that aims to eliminate that problem by streamlining all the tools into one convenient dashboard, as well as providing our own metrics from our algorithm that combines many of the imported metrics. Matt: Many SEOs including myself have considered having software created. What was the development process like? Lior: First I decided which metrics are the most important, and figured out how to use their APIs to capture that data into my own software. Next, I found my developer by using Elance (now UpWork). He was one of the first to respond and he even built a prototype of the software which he included in his initial SEO proposal. That blew me away and his English was perfect so it was the right fit all around. Some tips I have for hiring on these sites is to include a secret code they should put in their proposal so you know they read it, as well as requiring a small test to be done (can be a paid test – well worth it). Then you will know their communication skills, skill level and ability to deliver on schedule. It also helps to promise future work on other projects if the first one goes well. This will lower rates if you always choose fixed price like me. On a side note, do research before making any SEO software that makes your life easier. It could already exist, or it could be cheaper to have a virtual assistant do the same tasks. You really have to calculate how much time or money it will save you in the long run, including upkeep and all. Matt: How much time savings can one expect using ScopeReveal? Lior: I typically buy PBNs from brokers. So once I get the URL from them, I would have to open MOZ, Majestic, Google, Ahrefs, Archive Wayback Machine, Who Is. That’s maybe 5 minutes in total. Then adding the domain to each one, analyzing the data, another 15 minutes or so. Read More Read More

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SEO Spotlight: Jacob Kettner, Daniel Moscovitch, Michael Landau-Spiers

Matt Diggity — Wed, 20 Jan 2016 15:00:47 +0000

I was a strange child. I always seemed to do things a bit differently than the other kids. The habit stuck. I use four fingers to hold a pen. I’m right-handed but left-legged. I never wear underwear. You should see the process I use to tie my shoes. Needless to say, I’ve always been fascinated with the various ways we can solve the same problems. In my own SEO business, I spend a majority of my time testing. What I’ve found is there is no cookie-cutter blueprint for success in SEO. It’s always going to depend on your particular situation, skill set, and resources. I appreciate SEOs who can think outside-the-box; clever folk that use their intuition and do things a bit differently, allowing them to get some amazing results. I’d like to introduce you to three of them. Jacob Kettner – Using Sub-domains for Risk-Free Authority Building I met Jacob a few months ago. He’s a really bright SEO and is a perfectionist in his work. I helped him audit one of his sites and found nothing wrong with his SEO plan. That happens pretty much never. The subdomain technique he uses is a clever way to build up authority, yet at the same time, reducing penalty risk. Name: Jacob Kettner Age: 26 Location: Winnipeg, Canada Matt: When did you get into SEO and how? Jacob: I got into internet marketing at the age of around 16. I tried a lot of “loophole” tactics off Digital Point and Warrior Forum and made enough cash to keep me in the game. I ran a business dropshipping customized products on eBay for years. Despite my many years of internet marketing experience, I had virtually no knowledge of SEO and hired 3 different SEO firms before deciding to learn how to do it myself. Eventually I sold off my site and used the capital to start a client SEO business in the fall of 2014. In the following year I learned a lot and scaled from nothing to a low 6 figure per year business. Matt: Tell us about the sub-domain authority boosting technique Jacob: Juicing up subdomains helps increase DA quickly without risking your money site. The theory comes from looking at Web 2.0 sites like WordPress, Tumblr etc. It’s a well-known SEO concept that subdomains on these strong properties will rank more quickly and have a higher tolerance for abuse than a fresh domain. Hold on a second though… How did these sites get so powerful? Was it from high quality content and powerful links linking to the main domain? Let’s look at majestic stats. The URL metrics for https://www.tumblr.com/ are TF88 CF83 RD 27,112 and Backlinks 4,337,075. So yes, I’m not denying that this is a very strong site. But let’s look at the majestic metrics for the root domain tubmlr.com… TF92 CF93 RD 2,061,256 Backlinks 30,957,773,997. To be clear this site has over 30 BILLION backlinks going to it. Although Tumblr in of itself has a lot of power on its main URL, a LARGE amount of power that the domain holds only 1.4% of the referring domains going to the site go to the main page. The bulk of the referring links go to its sub-domains. My conclusion is that this is a two-way street. Tumblr’s power helps parasite subdomains rank, but also the subdomains give back DA to the main domain. Matt: Practically, how do you juice up your sub-domains? Jacob: Here are a couple of models that I’ve used: Create subdomain EMD then build an auto video blog and leave it alone (maybe send some social signals). Create a subdomain EMD and send high authority links at it (this is a good place to test Fiverr gigs). Shitty PBN links will work fine here, as well. No need to waste the good stuff on this. I’m not advocating for sending thousands of GSA links at a money site subdomain, but you can definitely afford to be a little bit more aggressive than you would to the main domain. Keep in mind the purpose of the subdomain isn’t necessarily to rank. It’s just to add authority to the overall domain. I’ve also done this with auto video blogs and no links just to increase page count and fresh content on the domain. (Note: I don’t link from these subdomains to my main site.) Matt: What are the biggest accomplishments you’ve been able to attain from using this technique? Jacob: I’ve ranked for a competitive local term with this method and just three PBN links. Matt: Nicely done. Got any advice for other SEOsS, newcomers and experts alike? Jacob: Take action and test stuff. Foundations and principles last forever. Tactics and loopholes die as soon as they go public. If you like tactics and loopholes, test stuff yourself and use it before it gets ruined. I’m sharing this one because it’s particularly hard for Google to address it, given the parallel between this and major Web 2.0 sites. To learn more about Jacob and his case studies, be sure to check out his agency at First Rank. Daniel Moscovitch – Slick Client Getting Tactics If you’re doing client SEO, you’ve likely run into the same problem everyone else does. Most businesses don’t trust SEOs. Daniel solves this problem by simply rewording his sales copy and avoiding the conversations that would be in the typical SEO sales pitch. Name: Daniel Moscovitch Age: 30 Location: Tel Aviv, Israel Matt: When did you get into SEO and how? Daniel: 2.5 years ago (just after the first Penguin update). I started off as a whitehat link builder at a really awesome online marketing agency here in Tel Aviv and just exploded from there. Matt: Tell us about your client getting technique. Daniel: Let’s face it. SEO has a bad name. This is totally understandable due to the sheer number of businesses out there who have just gotten screwed by the so called SEO “experts” out there. These ‘experts’ often use outdated tactics, undercharge and under-deliver on their promises, and businesses are fed up (and I DON’T BLAME THEM!). That is why I have had success as of late by taking the focus away from SEO, a ‘dirty’ word, and talking instead about online visibility, creating an online brand, and making websites more powerful and more Google friendly. The word “SEO” has somewhat been tainted and is often really hard to understand what it actually is. That is why I always like to start describing my services with words like “improving your site’s power and authority”, “increasing website visibility” and “connecting you with more customers online”; “increased rankings”. Of course, there is no hiding that what we do is SEO, but this way I don’t scare prospects off right away and can slowly develop a relationship that shows the value that I provide as opposed to selling them on SEO right off the bat. I also like to make sure that the focus is NOT on what WE will do, but rather what THEY will gain from working with us. Most business owners want to stop worrying about having to actively search for clients, and prefer to stick to what they know and love. On every proposal we send out, we make sure that it includes that sentiment. On top of that, we have experimented recently on not locking clients into any long term obligation, but rather starting off with a small proof of concept. So far, 100% of our clients who have started with this, have gone on to continue with us long term and for more money. SEO can be difficult enough as is. When you add selling it to potential clients, you have to make it as easy and beneficial to them as possible. That is why it is important to focus on what THEY have to gain, start small, gain their trust and go from there. Matt: In ROI, what has this change in marketing achieved for your agency? Daniel: In the past 2 months alone, we have increased our monthly earnings by $5K by just switching the focus of our pitch and changing our proposals around. Matt: Any newbie advice for upcoming SEOs? Daniel: Never get discouraged, never stop learning, and embrace the confusion! To learn more about Daniel and his agency, check them out at MoreHotLeads.com. Michael Landau-Spiers – Smart Keyword Research to Break into a Huge Affiliate Niche Michael is my favorite SEO success story of last year. With only a year’s experience in SEO, he found a way to break into one of the most competitive affiliate niches (I’m in it myself). Instead of going for the super high volume keywords like most SEO’s would (including myself), he broke down the niche and found keywords that we’re easily attainable, yet still very profitable. When the timing was right, he cashed out on a huge flip. Name: Michael Landau-Spiers Age: 21 Location: United Kingdom Matt: When did you get into SEO and how? Michael: Read More Read More

The post SEO Spotlight: Jacob Kettner, Daniel Moscovitch, Michael Landau-Spiers first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

The REAL Reason Why Your Backlinks Don’t Work

Matt Diggity — Tue, 01 Dec 2015 17:03:37 +0000

Has this ever happened to you? You send some links to your money site and wait for the result. One week goes by… nothing. Two weeks… still flatline. An entire month goes by and nothing has changed. Or even worse: after you send the links, you see the rankings actually drop. If you’ve ever been in this situation, you’re reading the right article. I’m here to shed light on a commonly misinterpreted concept that can potentially help you understand why you’re not getting positive results from your backlinking efforts. This article is not about buying and setting up the right PBNs. I’m assuming that you’ve already doing that right and that you’re testing your PBNs before you’re adding them to your network. This article is about revealing a blind spot on the topic of optimization. I’ll be discussing various different scenarios, what the problem is in each, and how to deal with it. Scenario 1 – Onsite Optimization Issue Symptom – Flatline rankings after links are sent I use this analogy quite frequently in my consulting sessions. Winning in SEO is like winning a car race. Your onsite SEO quality determines the quality of your car. The backlinks are the gas you put in it. If you build a shit car, its simply not going to go anywhere, no matter how much premium gas you put in. For sites with low-quality or over-optimized onsite SEO, the impact you see from backlinks is going to minimal, if any. This is a very typical result that you can expect after you send links to an over-optimized money site: How to Fix it Fixing onsite issues is easy. Unlike offsite SEO, the rules of onsite optimization are straightforward. You just need to know where to find the correct rules. And it just so happens you can find them right here… The great part about onsite optimization is that the effect shows quickly, typically in a few weeks or less. I know it sounds like hocus pocus. Why would onsite optimization prevent offsite efforts from taking effect? Because Google says so. I see it all the time… Scenario 2 –Anchor Text Optimization Issue Symptom – Rankings drop after links are placed. In this situation, the anchor text distribution for the page you’re trying to rank is over or under-optimized. You’ve likely sent an anchor that pushes your anchor text distribution even further in the wrong direction. So even though the link has sent more link juice, the page is less optimized. How to fix it You need to find your niche-specific target anchor text ratio. This has nothing to do with using your intuition on what you think might look natural. Whenever you perform a search, Google basically “shows you their hand” and reveals exactly what anchor text distribution they want to see for that search. You’ll just want to take the average of the top-rankers in the niche and start working towards the same. How to determine the niche-specific target anchor text distribution: click here Just like with the other scenario, I see this one a lot too… Scenario 3 – The Random Documents Algorithm (You’re being punked) Symptom – Rankings drop after links are placed In 2014, big G released the Random Documents Algorithm as a way to figure out who is doing SERP manipulation. Basically to figure out who you are. Yes, YOU. In simple terms, this is how the algorithm functions. You do something that should cause an improvement in ranking. Instead of giving you a positive change, you’re given a negative movement in the SERPs. For the next 20 days, they’re monitoring to see if you do anything fishy to “recover”. Namely, things that only SEOs would do, such as: change anchors, delete links, etc. If you do get caught, this short term negative effect becomes more of a long term one. How to fix it Be patient and don’t do anything for 20 days. If you suspect that some action you took caused your rankings to decrease, don’t make a decision for 20 days. Set a calendar appointment and forget about it. Keep doing everything as you usually do. Maintain the same link velocity, continue to send social signals, etc. Just don’t make any moves around that particular action that you think caused the drop. If it truly was the Random Documents Algorithm, and you’ve been a good boy, you’ll see something like this: Has this ever happened to you? You send some links to your money site and wait for the result. One week goes by… nothing. Two weeks… still flatline. An entire month goes by and nothing has changed. Or even worse: after you send the links, you see the rankings actually drop. If you’ve ever been in this situation, you’re reading the right article. I’m here to shed light on a commonly misinterpreted concept that can potentially help you understand why you’re not getting positive results from your backlinking efforts. This article is not about buying and setting up the right PBNs. I’m assuming that you’ve already doing that right and that you’re testing your PBNs before you’re adding them to your network. This article is about revealing a blind spot on the topic of optimization. I’ll be discussing various different scenarios, what the problem is in each, and how to deal with it. Scenario 1 – Onsite Optimization Issue Symptom – Flatline rankings after links are sent I use this analogy quite frequently in my consulting sessions. Winning in SEO is like winning a car race. Your onsite SEO quality determines the quality of your car. The backlinks are the gas you put in it. If you build a shit car, its simply not going to go anywhere, no matter how much premium gas you put in. For sites with low-quality or over-optimized onsite SEO, the impact you see from backlinks is going to minimal, if any. This is a very typical result that you can expect after you send links to an over-optimized money site: How to Fix it Fixing onsite issues is easy. Unlike offsite SEO, the rules of onsite optimization are straightforward. You just need to know where to find the correct rules. And it just so happens you can find them right here… The great part about onsite optimization is that the effect shows quickly, typically in a few weeks or less. I know it sounds like hocus pocus. Why would onsite optimization prevent offsite efforts from taking effect? Because Google says so. I see it all the time… Scenario 2 –Anchor Text Optimization Issue Symptom – Rankings drop after links are placed. In this situation, the anchor text distribution for the page you’re trying to rank is over or under-optimized. You’ve likely sent an anchor that pushes your anchor text distribution even further in the wrong direction. So even though the link has sent more link juice, the page is less optimized. How to fix it You need to find your niche-specific target anchor text ratio. This has nothing to do with using your intuition on what you think might look natural. Whenever you perform a search, Google basically “shows you their hand” and reveals exactly what anchor text distribution they want to see for that search. You’ll just want to take the average of the top-rankers in the niche and start working towards the same. How to determine the niche-specific target anchor text distribution: click here Just like with the other scenario, I see this one a lot too… Scenario 3 – The Random Documents Algorithm (You’re being punked) Symptom – Rankings drop after links are placed In 2014, big G released the Random Documents Algorithm as a way to figure out who is doing SERP manipulation. Basically to figure out who you are. Yes, YOU. In simple terms, this is how the algorithm functions. You do something that should cause an improvement in ranking. Instead of giving you a positive change, you’re given a negative movement in the SERPs. For the next 20 days, they’re monitoring to see if you do anything fishy to “recover”. Namely, things that only SEOs would do, such as: change anchors, delete links, etc. If you do get caught, this short term negative effect becomes more of a long term one. How to fix it Be patient and don’t do anything for 20 days. If you suspect that some action you took caused your rankings to decrease, don’t make a decision for 20 days. Set a calendar appointment and forget about it. Keep doing everything as you usually do. Maintain the same link velocity, continue to send social signals, etc. Just don’t make any moves around that particular action that you think caused the drop. If it truly was the Random Documents Algorithm, and you’ve been a good boy, you’ll see something like this: Read More

The post The REAL Reason Why Your Backlinks Don’t Work first appeared on Diggity Marketing.

Reduce Sandbox Length by Timing your Backlinks

Matt Diggity — Sun, 01 Mar 2015 08:43:49 +0000

What is Sandboxing? Definition: When you build links to a site and you see little to no ranking benefit. Back around mid-2014, we started to see a sandboxing effect on new domains that had been recently registered. Before that time, you used to be able to register a new domain, build some backlinks to it, and within 5 days it could potentially be on page 1. Now a days, SEOs are reporting sandbox periods of 3-6 months long. People have been discussing various ways to beat the sandbox and reduce the time it takes to rank. In general, the most widespread theory is that you want to create a viral effect. Here’s my recipe for sandbox reduction, and the results I’ve gotten by using it… Social Fortress – For most “real” businesses, a website’s first links are usually from social websites. Once their site is made, a business naturally goes out to brand itself on Facebook, Twitter, G+, etc. This social fortress should constitute the first links that you create to your website. Business Citations – After social profiles are created, a typical business would like to make sure potential customers can find them in local and industry-specific directories. Leverage directories like these to build free but natural links to your homepage. Social Signals – After that, create a social signal campaign to drip out 50-200 Facebook shares, Twitter tweets, etc over the next 30 days. This is where the virality comes from. To generate signals, I use SEO Butler’s 200 signals package, namely for their ease of use, delivery of quality signals, and repeatedly good results. Use coupon code “DIGGITY10” for 10% off. Guest Posts – Now that the stage is set, it’s a safe time to build links. I stick to quality guest posts from websites with traffic in this beginning phase. Why? Because in the natural course of the internet, most new links are created on brand new pages. Similar to how guest posts are created. The name of the game is to look as natural as possible. Results Here are the results of two separate tests running the sequence listed above. Of course, there are various techniques people use to skate around the sandbox, but this is what I use and it seems to be working quite well, and quite consistently. Give it a shot and share your results as well. What is Sandboxing? Definition: When you build links to a site and you see little to no ranking benefit. Back around mid-2014, we started to see a sandboxing effect on new domains that had been recently registered. Before that time, you used to be able to register a new domain, build some backlinks to it, and within 5 days it could potentially be on page 1. Now a days, SEOs are reporting sandbox periods of 3-6 months long. People have been discussing various ways to beat the sandbox and reduce the time it takes to rank. In general, the most widespread theory is that you want to create a viral effect. Here’s my recipe for sandbox reduction, and the results I’ve gotten by using it… Social Fortress – For most “real” businesses, a website’s first links are usually from social websites. Once their site is made, a business naturally goes out to brand itself on Facebook, Twitter, G+, etc. This social fortress should constitute the first links that you create to your website. Business Citations – After social profiles are created, a typical business would like to make sure potential customers can find them in local and industry-specific directories. Leverage directories like these to build free but natural links to your homepage. Social Signals – After that, create a social signal campaign to drip out 50-200 Facebook shares, Twitter tweets, etc over the next 30 days. This is where the virality comes from. To generate signals, I use SEO Butler’s 200 signals package, namely for their ease of use, delivery of quality signals, and repeatedly good results. Use coupon code “DIGGITY10” for 10% off. Guest Posts – Now that the stage is set, it’s a safe time to build links. I stick to quality guest posts from websites with traffic in this beginning phase. Why? Because in the natural course of the internet, most new links are created on brand new pages. Similar to how guest posts are created. The name of the game is to look as natural as possible. Results Here are the results of two separate tests running the sequence listed above. Of course, there are various techniques people use to skate around the sandbox, but this is what I use and it seems to be working quite well, and quite consistently. Give it a shot and share your results as well. Read More

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