Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, '6 Ways to Earn Higher Rankings
Without Investing in Content Creation and Marketing - Whiteboard Friday'
Posted by randfish
With all the buzz about content marketing and how wonderful a way it is to
earn higher rankings, it's easy to forget about all the other tools that good
SEOs and marketers have at their disposal. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand
covers six ways to improve your rankings without spending a dime on content
creation and marketing.
6 Ways to Earn Higher Rankings Wihout Investing in Content Creation
& Marketing - Whiteboard Friday_1
For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This
week I thought I'd address something that's going on in the broader SEO and
inbound marketing communities, which is this idea that the only thing that SEOs
do anymore is create content and do content marketing. So we build some content
and then we go market and we outreach and we try and get people to link to it.
That is truly minimizing the job requirements, which are vast, incredibly
vast and much bigger than this idea. So I thought I'd take a little stab and
drop a pebble in the ocean of things that SEOs are responsible for by tackling
these six ways, six out of probably 600 ways that you can earn higher rankings
without investing in content creation or content marketing.
So, first off, number one, you can make your snippets better and your pages
serve that intent. Let me show you what I'm talking about.
So basically, in the search results page, this is a very small mockup of
that, but I might do a search and I'll see a bunch of titles and then the URL
below it and the meta description below that. I might even see an author
profile. I might see video snippets. If you've got some rich snippet mark-up,
I'll see those in here, and this leads off to your page. By improving both the
snippet here, so that could mean adding rel="author",
that could mean adding a video, that could mean adding some rich mark-up,
that could mean changing the title, tweaking the title to be a little bit more
compelling to click on, changing the description, even actually, surprisingly,
changing the URL. Some studies have show recently that URLs in fact do
contribute to whether people choose to click on them.
Then it's not just about making this compelling, but also making whatever is
on that page, whatever is on that snippet match what's on the page that users
get to, because as we know, pogo sticking, people jumping off of this page hurts
you in two big ways. One, it hurts you because the engines directly look at pogo
sticking behavior and go, "Oh, people click on this and then they go back and
they don't like it. I'm out of here. I don't want to rank this page." Two, you
don't have an opportunity to convert those people into buyers or into potential
sharers or linkers to your content.
All right, so number one, completely outside of content creation can
seriously move your rankings up.
Number two, improving the crawl friendliness and the pages-of-value ratio on
your website.
So I was talking to a very smart SEO over email the other day, and he said
something that I loved. He said, "I have never seen and never worked with a
large site where improving crawl bandwidth didn't mean significant increases in
organic search traffic." I thought that was very wise and well said. That's
certainly been the case that I have seen as well, but I liked his phrasing of it
in particular. So this idea that, well okay, I've got a good page here, a good
page represented by smiley face dude, and smiley face dude is linking out to,
well, three not so great pages, pages that Google doesn't particularly want to
index. They don't provide a ton of value to them or their searchers or to users
in general. It's often the case that websites just have these.
Go and look at your website. I bet you'll click around, and you'll be like,
"Man, why do we even have this page anymore? This doesn't help anybody. It
doesn't help anybody." Well, if you improve the ratio of those pages, get rid of
or toss out or even just remake some of those pages, you can significantly
improve your crawl bandwidth and the happiness that Google sees with your site.
I'm not just talking about sort of penalties, like Panda, that might affect
people who have very large quantities of low quality stuff.
But, in addition to this, in addition to the ratio, you can also look at your
navigation. If you've got something like this, so this is a pretty clean
navigation system. This one page is linking out to six or seven other pages.
That's fine. But what about when I get to this page and he's linking to one
other page, who links to one other page, who links to one other page, who links
to one other page, who links to another page that's actually a duplicate of that
first page I was talking about? Improving this kind of stuff, making these
models of navigation clean, making your site more indexable, making your
navigation get you into deep pages in fewer clicks, and making all of the pages
accessible rather than having to go down these wormholes can really improve your
site's traffic as well.
Number three, probably the simplest one on the list. You make your pages
faster, the Internet will reward you. Some of this is direct. Some of this is
Google essentially saying, "Yes, page speed is a very small portion of our
ranking algorithm. We do take it into consideration." But a lot of it is not
Google directly. A lot of it is users being much happier and doing the same
thing we talked about up here, which is reducing your bounce rate, reducing that
pogo-sticking activity, and meaning that you have an opportunity to convert a
lot more of those people into buyers, sharers, appreciators of your brand.
Number four, I actually really like this one. This is one of my favorite ways
to do link building in general, link earning in general, and that is to leverage
your network to help attract those links, shares, traffic, endorsements, etc.
I've seen a couple people that I really admire in the field who've basically
taken this tactic. They say, "Hey, whenever someone tells us we really love you,
we think your service is amazing", they say,
"Thank you so much. That means the world to us, and it would mean even more
if you would tell someone about it," your friends, your social network, point to
us on your site somewhere.
We don't care if it's a followed link, a no followed link, we're not asking
for links. What we're asking for is if you think you've got something great by
working with us, by buying our product, by using our service, by interacting
with us, we helped you in some way, please share it. That's all I'm asking. I
saw it in one woman's email signature. She just said, "If I have ever been
helpful to you, it would be awesome if you could share our website."
I don't know what the conversion rate is like for her, but it doesn't even
matter if it's 0.001%. That is a bunch more links and shares and help. What a
wonderful way to earn the kinds of signals that will help you rank better.
By the way, for a little bit more on this topic and a specific tactic here,
check out a blog post I wrote a little while ago called "The Help Me Help You
Dinner." It's a little Jerry McGuire I know, but sorry.
Number five, go try this process for me. Identify the pages on your site that
make people happy but that aren't earning organic search traffic. Here's what I
mean. They've got high engagement, a low bounce rate, a good number of visits, a
high browse rate, meaning people are clicking and visiting other pages after
them, but they don't get organic search traffic.
This actually happens quite a bit, that you see pages like this. Oftentimes,
not always, but oftentimes the culprit here is that the keyword targeting and
the keyword optimization just isn't there. Essentially, these are pages that are
created not by SEO folks or by SEOs who just kind of forgot or were targeting
keywords that have long since stopped being searched for. Go improve those. Go
find the keywords that those pages should be ranking for and then update the
page, the titles, the content a little bit. You usually shouldn't have to tweak
much of the content at all on the page in order to get the targeting right and
dialed in just a little bit. Sometimes you might even change the URL, and then
you can do a URL rewrite or a 301. That's fine too.
If you're doing a more significant update process, go ahead and relaunch and
reshare it as well, especially if a lot of people have forgotten about it or
search engines have forgotten about it. Just that update, just that freshness
signal can help you get a little bit more in your rankings.
Last thing I'll mention. I don't know where the ideas come from that classic
link building is entirely dead. It's not, and one of the things that is truly
still alive and still very powerful is what I call classic competitive style
link building. I recognize that kind of low-quality guest posting and directory
link building and a lot of these other more manual, scalable features have
really gone away, but classic competitive link building is still just as
valuable as it ever has been and not just for SEO, but for the traffic you can
earn from those places too.
So go and use your favorite link building tool. We like Open Site Explorer or
Fresh Web Explorer if you're looking at sort of things that have been just
recently published. We do have a tool as well called Link Intersect that helps
you find pages that two or more of your competitors are linked to by but you
have not been, those kinds of things. I think Majestic SEO also has a feature
like that, so you can check them out.
Then you create this sort of prioritized list for outreach and starting to
try to contact some of these people. What I recommend, because a lot of people
get disheartened if they go to the first guy and there's just a bunch of hoops
that they have to jump through and it's very hard to find any contact
information and then it's very hard to get a response and when you do get a
response, it's negative, and you can just get beaten down.
What I like to do, therefore, especially because getting links from a diverse
group of places is often more valuable than just getting one or two here or
there, is to go ahead and prioritize the list by how easy you think it will be.
If there's a journalist who's already following you on Twitter and they've
written about some of your competitors and you figure they're going to keep
writing about this topic, why wouldn't they write about you?
Great! Do a little bit of outreach. Ask them what you can do to be a feature
in the next story. It's probably a relatively simple one. If there's a page
that's listing resources of the kind that you already have, great, go reach out
to them. That's probably a very simple one.
This sort of stuff and hundreds more like it are all in the realm of what
modern SEOs still have to be doing in addition to the newer obligations that we
have around content creation and content marketing, all of this social media
work and those kinds of things. So I try not to forget any of this, but I know
that we have a lot of other obligations as well.
I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. We'll see you again
next time. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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