[Build Backlinks Online] A Wakeup Call: Are You Prepared for the Day Your Rankings Vanish?

Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'A Wakeup Call: Are You Prepared
for the Day Your Rankings Vanish?'

Posted by Pratik.DholakiyaThis post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted
to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community.
The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of
Moz, Inc.
Here's a little secret: Smart SEOs expect to lose their rankings.


It might not even be a penalty. Maybe it's a competitor who will pull ahead of
you in the search results. Maybe it's an algorithm update that will redirect a
dramatic portion of your audience. Someday, maybe, a more advanced Siri clone
will eliminate the point of rankings altogether.


Are you prepared for that day? Do you have a backup plan?


Today, we're going to approach the threat of lost rankings in a way you might
never have seen before. First, we're going to talk about what we believe it
takes to keep your rankings. Second, and more importantly, we're going to talk
about how to design an SEO strategy that will remain successful even if you lose
your rankings.


Let's get started.

A bulletproof vest is best worn before you get shot



This is your bulletproof vest.


When clients approach us with penalized sites, they are devastated. With no
severance package or unemployment option, a Google penalty is worse than a
layoff. With a gap in employment history and nothing but a penalized website to
point to in your resume, it may even be worse than getting fired. Recovery is
difficult, time-consuming, and resource intensive.


Let's not mince words. It can destroy families.


If you're taking risks with your website, and it's not going to survive a
Google penalty, I beg of you, make the changes now. Don't wait until it's too
late. You will regret it.

You need link quality control standards



Whether you've been building links yourself or outsourcing to someone, audit
your link profile. It's worth it. Take a look with fresh eyes, and with the
mindset that you've just been penalized. What would you remove? Here are some
suggestions:

Open up Webmaster Tools and take a look at the sites that have linked to you the
most using exact match anchor text(s). Are any of them site-wide links? If so, I
highly recommend replacing them with single links if at all possible. (or
nofollow/remove them if you find suspicious)
Take a look at your anchor text. Other than your brand or domain name, does any
specific anchor text take up more than 20 percent of your inbound links? If so,
based on my personal experience, you're at risk of getting penalized for that
keyword, and possibly of facing a site-wide penalty. You should either change
the anchor text, remove these links, or dilute them with future link building
efforts.


Are you buying links or building private link networks? Stop immediately. Expect
all of these links to be eliminated at some point. While even links from link
sellers don't usually count against you, all you are doing is building a false
sense of authority. When these links are discounted by Google, you will lose all
future value. The more links you buy, the higher that risk becomes. Also, keep
in mind that while sellers are the ones who usually get penalized, buyers and
spammers are not immune. It may be a good idea to remove all paid links that
don't send referral traffic, and to replace them with no-follow links if they do
send referral traffic. Either way, stop this link building practice entirely.

Design is crucial



We've discussed in depth why UI and UX are absolute necessities:

Google's guidelines clearly state "Make pages primarily for users, not for
search engines." I'm not claiming that following the guidelines guarantees
rankings (that would be insane). I'm simply pointing out that violating the
guidelines is a good way to ask for penalties and ultimately algorithmic
demotions.
Most sites can more easily double sales by doubling conversion rates than by
doubling traffic, and design is a crucial part of that.
Great user experiences ultimately turn into repeat sales.
When you earn popularity (rather than manufacture it), you end up expending
fewer resources to bring in the same number of sales.
Good design earns natural links. If you think that statement is insane, just
turn your attention to any one of the most popular sites on the web. Nearly all
of them are tools. Here, I'm not necessarily talking about design aesthetic. I'm
simply stating that if you actually design something, as opposed to sharing
"great, unique content," you are likely to be taken seriously. Again, just turn
to the most linked to sites on the web to see what I'm talking about.


UI and UX can be split tested and measured with provable results. This is
somewhat true for "raw" SEO as well, and you can read more on this here, but the
impact of UI and UX is much easier to measure.


Here are a few specific ways to leverage UI and UX that we've talked about:

Use responsive design, so that pages adapt to fit the various kinds of screens
modern consumers use.
Really understand how to set up split tests, and other statistical testing
techniques. I can't stress enough how important this is.
Conduct user tests as well, to see how your target audience will actually
interact with the site, in order to make things as intuitive as possible.
Embrace consumer psychology and build it into the design of the site itself.


Understand modern on-site SEO



On-site SEO goes much further than keyword placement:

Pages that have no clear purpose or that don't do a very good job of serving
their purpose are at risk of Panda penalization and similar algorithmic
demotions.
Pages that are "made for AdSense" or that otherwise use advertisements
overzealously are high risk.
Pages with repetitive keyword use, or that sacrifice user experience for
"optimized" SEO value, face similar risks.
Including the keyword in the title is still very effective, but titles should
also be built to maximize click-through rates and viral sharing.


I'm also with Rand Fishkin on these points:

Pages aren't just unique, they offer unique value. It meets a particular need
in a particular way that no other page on the web effectively delivers.
The user experience is phenomenal. It loads quickly, looks good, it's
intuitive, it works well on any device, it's easy to understand, and it's fun
and/or memorable to use.
The page is optimized for crawlers/bots, so that multiple versions of the
same content use rel=canonical to define only one URL for the "real" page.
Robots.txt and meta robots shouldn't limit bots overzealously. Pages that are
down temporarily should return a 503 status, not a 404, and 301 permanent
redirects should be used when pages are removed permanently. Use plenty of
internal links and make sure every page on your site can be reached from at
least one link (preferably more).
Use the keyword in the title when possible, and put identical or very
similar text in the H1 tag. Don't overuse the keyword in your main body, just
write about the topic at hand. Get keywords in your internal links where it
makes sense. Use a meta description that compels people to click through to
visit your page from the search results, without worrying too much about your
keyword. Don't worry about meta keywords.
Make it easy to share the page on social networks, and don't overwhelm users
with too many options.
Make your site accessible and easy to use on any device with responsive
design.
Take advantage of authorship, metadata, schema.org, and rich snippets to
make your search result stand out.


Aim for an error-free site



Errors can do a lot of harm to an otherwise high quality site. Start by
checking for errors in Google Webmaster Tools and eliminating anything that
shows up there:




From there, you can move on to a tool like Moz's crawl diagnostics report.


Here are some common SEO errors that you need to avoid:

No product descriptions on ecommerce sites, or using boilerplate descriptions
from the manufacturer, which will show up as duplicate content.
404 pages, especially those that are linked to internally or externally
Redirects other than 301
Long title tags (titles longer than 70 characters won't display properly in
the search results)
Missing meta descriptions. An optimized call to action in the meta
description is often far better than the random text Google pulls on its own,
although those pursuing a long tail strategy may sometimes do better by ignoring
meta descriptions.
Poor internal linking, so that some pages on your site aren't linked to by
any other pages
No robots.txt
No sitemap



Don't let errors like these ruin the potential of your site.

Refine your content



Analyze your existing pages. How many of them are contributing significant
traffic? Among those that are bringing in significant traffic, are those users
satisfied?


You need to either eliminate or fix any content that doesn't meet these
standards:

The title alone is worth sharing in social networks, and begs to be clicked
on.
The content lives up to the promise of the title.
The content offers data, a unique spin, and/or unique value that isn't found
in any other prominent place on the web. In short, it differentiates itself
completely from anything else that ranks for your target keyword(s).



I highly recommend taking advantage of SurveyMonkey or some other form of
market research in order to measure the value of your content and look for
suggestions for improvements. Test how consumers value your content over the
top-ranking pages. If they don't value your content more than the top search
results, it doesn't deserve to rank, and it never will in the long term.

Build serious quality links



Don't build even one more link until you can build a link from one of the
top sites in your industry. I mean top tier links. We're talking just one step
below The New York Times. E2M Solutions doesn't rank because we've built
hundreds of links. It ranks because we've built links from Moz, Forbes,
CopyBlogger, VentureBeat, ProBlogger, and SearchEngineJournal.


In short, there isn't even a chance that somebody will look at those links
and think "that doesn't offer any 'real' marketing value, it's just for SEO."


You need to start building links that meet at least some of these quality
criteria:

The links would be worth building even if they were nofollow
The links will be worth it just for the brand impressions and referral
traffic
Being featured on this site will lend your site an air of credibility, and
badges saying you've been featured on these sites will actually improve your
conversion rate. Take our blog sidebar, for example:



If a link doesn't meet at least one of these three criteria, I would argue
that it's not really worth building. We'll touch more on this later on in the
post. For now, just realize that links below this tier are worth earning
naturally, but they generally aren't worth building manually.



Understand co-citations and co-occurrence

SEOs are increasingly noticing their own pages, and pages of their
competitors, ranking in ways that don't make sense according to traditional
knowledge of the link structure of the web. Specifically, we are seeing evidence
of the following two phenomena:


Co-Citation â This is when a site links to you as well as an
authoritative or relevant site. In other words, if a page or a domain tends to
link to authoritative sites, Google will tend to take links from that site more
seriously.




This is the concept of "good neighborhoods" versus "bad neighborhoods." For
this reason, you want to build and attract links from sites that tend to link to
high quality sources. This will separate you from low quality areas on the web.
(In fact, you yourself should link to high quality sources, since the algorithm
encourages links to high quality sites by helping you become part of a "good
neighborhood.")


Co-Occurrence â This is when a site mentions your brand name or your
domain name without a link, but talks about it in the context of related subject
matter. Rand Fishkin uses the example of OpenSiteExplorer. In that case, the
description in the search result used text that wasn't found anywhere on the
page, and instead quoted text from an entirely different page on the web that
was only talking about OpenSiteExplorer. (It's worth noting that the previous
page title, redirects, and anchor text likely played a part in this as well.)
This is one example of Google using statistical data rather than links to
determine what specific brands are all about. Google also appears to use search
terms and other behavioral data to form ideas about sites on the web.


While knowledge of co-citation and co-occurrence can be helpful in your
manual link building efforts, the only way to fully take advantage of it is to
attract natural links and discussions about your brand online. (More on this
later in the article.)

Gain social traction



Social media activity doesn't have a direct impact on rankings in any
significant way. While there is some correlative evidence that it's important,
links are still much more powerful for SEO.


While a lack of social media activity alone isn't going to harm your
rankings, it can become the straw that breaks the camel's back. Google's
internal quality guidelines make it clear that a site's reputation plays a big
part in its quality.


In some circumstances, runaway success in social media has had an
unquestionable impact on rankings. While social signals don't seem to play an
important part in long term rankings, viral activity does affect "freshness"
attributes, and can cause a page to rank number one for very competitive terms
for a relatively short period of time.


In short, if your page is "trending" in social networks, expect it to gain
credibility.


I will circle back to social strategy later on.

Implement Google authorship

Google authorship allows you to use Google+ to link content to your name.
You can learn how to set it up here. For now, authorship is most important
because it gets your picture listed next to your search results, which can have
a strong positive impact on click-through rates. Needless to say, this is a good
way to pick up some extra traffic:




There is also the possibility that authorship will eventually play a part
in an algorithm that recognizes a concept called "author rank." In other words,
it is possible that if you as an author tend to write content that users like,
content that you produce in the future will be more likely to rank. It remains
to be seen whether this is feasible, and exactly when it might happen.

Now that you have your bulletproof vest, it's time to go to war

That's right; everything I've talked about up until now was just to get you
prepared for this:




I don't want anybody to face a Google penalty, and I've done my best to
tell you how to avoid it, but none of this changes the fundamental flaw of most
SEO strategies. If you couldn't survive the loss of your rankings tomorrow, your
SEO strategy is broken.


Let's talk about how to fix it.

Be where your audience is

If you are popular in places where your target audience hangs out, you will
be popular among your target audience. It's simple logic, but most SEOs are
surprisingly lacking in this department.


A fundamental goal of any cohesive online marketing strategy should be to
develop a presence at your target audience's hangouts. This ensures that no
matter what happens to your Google rankings, no matter how ad prices fluctuate,
and regardless of any changes in the social media landscape, you will be
recognizable among the people who matter.


Now, what most people hear when I say this is that they should start guest
posting. I'm going to argue in a second that that's not the only thing you
should be doing, but for now, let's focus on some things you might be missing.



I mentioned before that you should be building serious quality links. Post on
sites that are worth it for the referral traffic, the brand exposure, and the
prestige alone.
Your goal is to become a thought leader. That means you want to bring unique
value to the table. What is your angle? What makes you different from the other
people who post on the site?
At least some of what you say should be entirely original. That means you'll
need to conduct original research, use proprietary data, combine ideas from
disparate disciplines, or dig up insider information. And you'll need to figure
out how to do that on a fairly consistent basis. Think of Search Engine Land,
with insider quotes from Google employees, or Moz and Search Metrics, with their
correlative "Search Engine Ranking Factor" studies.
Learn to ask the right questions. At CopyBlogger, I discussed at length how
to do just that. No matter what you are talking about, there are intriguing
questions to ask. Cultivate your curiosity. It is by far your greatest asset.
Only by asking unique, intriguing questions can you arrive at compelling,
never-before-seen answers.
Get emotional. If content doesn't make an emotional impact, it's less likely
to get shared and propagate through your community. Research has demonstrated
that intense emotions like anger and fear, and more importantly, surprise,
laughter, and awe, cause people to share content with their peers. Disaffecting
emotions, like sadness, on the other hand, discourage social sharing. The awe
component is especially important, and leads to the surprising fact that science
articles (of the right kind) are more likely to get shared than almost anything
else. (The striking popularity of I F*king Love Science is testament to this
fact.) Awe-inspiring content causes your audience to see the world in a
different way. Needless to say, this underscores the importance of saying
something genuinely new.
Give them something they can use. While an awe-inspiring, intense post can
propagate even in the absence of actionable content, it becomes virtually
unstoppable when you have it. People can't stop sharing things that they can
actually put to use in their own life. This is doubly true because it makes the
sharer look better. Take a look at the most emailed posts on CNN. Compared to
the most read, you see a lot more practical content here.
You need both broad and niche appeal. Produce content that appeals to your
most hardcore following, as well as content that links your core topics to more
general subjects that everybody can relate to. While nothing is worse than
alienating your core audience, you will never grow if you fail to find any
mainstream appeal.
Speak the language. To keep that hardcore audience engaged, you want to
learn their inside jokes, their cultural sensibilities, their wants and needs,
and their shared interests. Focus on the positives and avoid building a cultural
identity around what you are not. The key is to make enough references to let
your core audience know that you are "one of them," but to keep that much needed
mainstream appeal. By the way: don't fake it. The internet can smell insincerity
a mile away, and often detects it even when it's not there. Be yourself first:
but be yourself in the context of a specific subculture.
Touch on cultural hot buttons. What's trending in your niche and worldwide?
The last thing you should do is merely regurgitate what's happening on the news,
but if you fail to reference it, your content is going to seem less relevant.
Social "triggers" play a big part in sharing activity. Such triggers aren't
always about things that are happening right now. They can just as easily be
linked to deep-seated cultural nostalgia. The point is, certain topics, images,
and symbols trigger our awareness of certain things. You can use existing
triggers to capture the attention of others, and you can incorporate triggers
within our content in order to share ideas. (One of the best examples of the
trigger phenomenon is that of Rebecca Black's terrible song "Friday," which
always got searched for most often on Friday.)
Tell stories and use examples. You can and should get abstract, since this
is where new ideas and general concepts come from, but if you don't tie it back
to something concrete, people aren't going to believe you and they aren't going
to listen. In fact, if you change just one thing about your strategy, this is
probably the best one to start with. Just write the post you were going to
write, then return to it with some real-world examples. This works wonders.
Get visual. We humans are visual creatures, and we are more likely to
remember and pass on information if it gets shared with us in a visual format.
What would this BuzzFeed article be without its pictures?
Don't "try" to go viral. Much of what I've just talked about helps with
social sharing activity, but one thing you should probably avoid doing is
actually trying to go viral. Most truly viral content does little to solidify a
brand. Viral hits are the "one hit wonders" of the internet. In fact, many
things are viral quite simply because they are terrible, or easy to remember.
(Remember the Windows 7 launch party fiasco?) A more important goal is to get
people to keep coming back. People aren't loyal to those who make them laugh.
They are loyal to those who change their lives. If you can do both, you'll be
unstoppable. If you can only do one, change people's lives.


For some more depth on this, take a look at our ultimate guest blogging
guide over at Moz. It's a guide to and an example of the kind of guest posting I
believe you should be taking part in.


Now, I want to clarify something. While everything I just said applies to
guest posting, it's by no means limited to it. In fact, while guest posting is a
powerful strategy, it really isn't the only one you should be using. Remember,
the title of this section is: Be Where Your Audience is. So I ask again. Where
are they? Blogs make up just a small part of their hangouts.


Look for relevant forums:


Many of these forums outright tell you how many people are on the site,
this very second. In any case, it's clear how active the audience is from the
number of posts. Frequent these forums. Lurk for a while and learn their
culture. Learn what questions they ask and what they care about. Learn their
idiosyncrasies.


Make those forums a part of your blog. You want to live, breathe, and eat
these forums, because this is where your hardcore audience lives. Answer
questions. Ask questions. Get involved. Quote your interactions on these forums
in your blog posts, and write full blog posts to respond to topics within the
forums. You might even want to ask some of the top posters on these forums to
write guest posts on your blog.


The goal should be to make your blog an extension of this community,
augmented with just enough mainstream appeal to keep growing. For more on this,
Patrick O'Keefe has written an amazing guide. An important takeaway from that?
Ninety percent of the discussions happening online about banks are happening on
forums. I suspect this is the case for most topically oriented discussions.


If you don't believe me, here's a screenshot from a physics forum.
Physics.




Capturing attention on a forum like this can work wonders for your
exposure.


Social network groups:


I mentioned forums before anything else because this is where most of the
lively discussions surrounding topics are happening. While there are plenty of
discussions happening on social media, many of them aren't actually topically
oriented.


That said, there's no reason to ignore social media. You can try searching
for Google+ communities relevant to your topics:




Facebook groups and Pages can also be useful in some cases, and LinkedIn's
groups can sometimes be useful for B2B professionals. Twitter, for the most
part, is only good for finding influencers, though answering questions on
Twitter can be useful. There's another way to leverage social networks, but I'll
get to that in the next section.


Quora:


Quora is an excellent place to build exposure. I've found that posts on
Quora tend to send traffic for longer periods of time than most social networks.
Anywhere on the net where you can answer questions about your topic in front of
a reasonably sized audience is a place that you should be. Kristi Hines has an
awesome post over at KISSmetrics about this.


Blog comments:


Don't forget about blog comment sections. Some blogs have developed a
large enough following to have "regulars" who contribute to their comment
section. These are the kinds of blog sections you should try to take part in.


In general:


A good litmus test for the usefulness of an online discussion location is
the number of "regulars" present. If these discussions keep bringing people
back, this is the kind of place you want to be posting. If people post once and
move on, it's not worth the effort.


Do not just show up to these discussions with a link to your content. You
want to become a person of value within these communities. That means you should
pour every bit as much value and effort into your community posts as your blog
posts and your guest posts. While the format of the information isn't always
going to be the same, the effort should be.


If you can only afford a half-hearted attempt, don't make an attempt at
all. It's a waste of time.

Social media doesn't work like you think it does

You might get the impression from what I wrote above that I think forums
are more important than social networks. Far from it.


In the last section, I was arguing that you need to go where your core
audience is, and distribute as much value as possible. For the most part, your
target audience isn't on social networks. At least, they don't particularly care
about your topic while they're on social networks. They are there to talk to
their friends and family, and to share light content. In general, you won't find
a hardcore audience on Facebook or any major social network. (I've already
talked about the exceptions to the rule.)


So why are social networks still important?




I've stated a few times that you need both a hardcore and a mainstream
audience. Social networks are a place to reach and retain your mainstream
audience. While it's always better to get an email address than a Facebook Like,
it's much easier for people to Like your Facebook page than to give away their
email address. Social subscriptions are noncommittal and "safe." By the same
token: simple, witty, visual content with mainstream appeal is the kind of thing
that makes its way through social networks. Social networks are for
entertainment.


The best way to think about social networks effectively is to think of it
as a different place than your blog. As I said before, forums, Q&A sections, and
the occasional hardcore groups hiding on social networks should be thought of as
an extension of your blog. Social networks themselves are more like the after
party.


Here's what I mean:

Take a look at the stuff in your personal Facebook feed. How much of it
consists of long, drawn out text? How much of it consists of links to blog
posts? How much of it consists of images with funny text attached? I'm willing
to bet almost all of it belongs to that last category. You want to post the kind
of thing that shows up in people's Facebook feeds.
Don't post links to your blog posts. Post images with SomeECards and Imgur
meme sensibilities. Distill the central point of your blog post into a single
image with a caption. Ideally, the caption-image combo should be funny,
relatable, actionable, and awe-inspiring. Now just attach a link to the text
field of your image. You will get more Facebook sharing activity, more
referrals, and more new page Likes by doing this than by doing just about
anything else. QuickSprout had a great post on this topic.
Not sure what kind of content works on social media? Take a look at the
front page of Reddit, strip away (most of the) geek and political sensibilities,
and there you have it. Just look for the Reddit spin on your topic. This will
put you miles ahead of most of your competitors. (By the way, don't post to
Reddit. Just don't. Trust me.)
Very few sites send more referral traffic than Pinterest, the image board.
The best strategy for dominating on Pinterest is to post what Colby Almond calls
"instructographics." These are actionable graphics that resemble infographics,
except instead of focusing on data, they focus on "how-to" guides.
On a related note, if you absorb the sensibilities of Pinterest and mix
them with those of Reddit, you are virtually guaranteed to win the internet.
While your social media posts should make you more relatable, they
shouldn't suck the magic out of your branding. You want to post a range of
material. Heavily shared content comes in a wide range of flavors, from amateur
and informal to high quality and polished. You want to post both kinds of
content. This makes you relatable, but it also elevates you above the
competition. "Anybody" can cut loose and be themselves. Few people can give
others something to aspire towards.
Post frequently, and don't try to "sell" anything. You want to saturate
people's social feeds, and more importantly, you want them to love you for it.
As I said before, social media is all about entertainment. It's the main reason
people are there, according to more than one study. Entertain your audience, and
do so regularly. This is a game of brand impressions, not conversions. Just keep
posting links to your site in the text field of your images. The people who want
to learn more will click through.
Start with an audience of friends and family. If you can't get them
involved and excited about what you're doing, something is probably wrong.



If you want success on social networks, you can't copy the most popular
pages. Most of them are popular only because they are associated with a
celebrity or a pre-established brand. If you want an example of a brand that's
actually built a presence on Facebook, take a look at LondonDrugs, a Canadian
retail chain. The moderately sized chain is made up of 77 stores. Look at their
posts:




Posts like these have earned the brand nearly 75,000 likes, with thousands
of them "talking about this" each week. Most of what they publish are images,
sized perfectly for Facebook, and they only occasionally link to their own sales
and deals. The images tend to be actionable, and occasionally get funny. Pages
like these can build a brand.


So, I've talked about finding your hardcore audience on forums and the
like, as well as drawing in a mainstream audience via social media. Is there
another piece to building an online community? Absolutely.

Join the inner circle

While you could build an audience from scratch, starting with hardcore
forum regulars and mainstream social networkers, things are going to move along
much faster if you make friends with influential people. Influencers are the
crucial shortcut to trustworthiness and exposure online. Join forces with them,
and everything else gets easier.


Let's talk about how to do that.

Everybody talks about guest posting, and hopefully I've made it clear that
we're strong advocates of it, when it's done properly. But it's not the only
way. This isn't the first time I've talked about turning guest posting on its
head, but this is such an important topic that I will probably keep bringing it
up. Here it goes: don't be afraid to open your wallet to influencers. I'm not
talking about buying links. I'm talking about paying a high profile blogger,
graphic designer, photographer, or expert to produce a piece of content for your
blog. Leverage their network and their existing audience. Carry those people
over to your blog so that they can see the content. Then capture that value.
Whether or not you open your wallet, you need to offer value to work with
influencers. These are very busy people, and they're not going to work with you
for free. If you don' have money, take advantage of whatever skills you have,
whatever services you can offer, and present influencers with an offer that they
can't refuse. Approach them as human beings and don't turn it into a sales
pitch, but please, please, please offer value.
There are some influencers who just love interacting with their audience.
The ones who will are gold mines. Interact with them, exchange emails, and just
carry on conversations with them for as long as you can. Quote these
conversations in your blog posts. Credit them everywhere you can. Just keep it
going. The results are twofold: dramatic increases in the quality of your
content, and influential relationships that will keep on giving.
Remember that influencers are just normal people. While they are often more
driven than the average person you run into, they are still just human beings
who crave human contact from people who aren't trying to take advantage of them
or put them on a pedestal. Keep this in mind and it will be surprisingly easy to
build relationships with influential people.
Credentials go a long way. The more authority you accumulate, the easier
things get. If you work together with one influencer, you can use this as a
stepping stone to get taken seriously by other influencers. If you have a large,
rabid audience, influencers have something to gain by working with you. This is
a flywheel strategy. The more authority you earn, the easier it is to earn still
more.



As an extension of that last point, influencers are more likely to take
you seriously, and mention you to their audience, if there is something on your
site worth talking about.

Do you have a linkable asset?



I've touched on content strategy throughout this whole post. I've
mentioned how important design is, touched on how powerful online tools and
software are, stressed the necessity for unique value, and even mentioned that
the title alone should be strong enough to carry your content.


But we haven't talked about linkable assets.


What is a linkable asset? I've blogged about it at Search Engine Journal.
To some extent, every piece of content you publish should be a linkable asset,
something that an influencer would be willing to link to.


But that's not really what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about the
force that powers the most successful sites on the web. Sites like:

Facebook
Twitter
Google
YouTube
WordPress
Adobe
Blogger
Wikipedia



I mentioned before that all the top sites on the web are built around
their tools. In fact, these sites wouldn't exist if it weren't for the tools
that they offered. Surrounding those tools are fervent communities of hardcore
users. And surrounding those hardcore users are mainstream audiences. Put it all
together and you get something that deserves media attention.


And that's what I'm talking about. Doing something that deserves media
attention.


I don't want to play-down the value of good outreach. Without it, even the
best on-site asset will fall flat. But that shouldn't be your mindset while you
brainstorm. Your mindset should be that this asset is only worth developing if
it's worth linking to with even the most bare-bones outreach. That is the
quality to shoot for.


It's all relative, of course. You don't have to be the next Facebook to be
newsworthy. You don't need to have a huge amount of money to make it happen. You
just need to identify a problem that people want solved, and create a free,
on-site asset that solves that problem. The point is to genuinely and completely
solve a clearly defined problem, and to do it for free. This is the value that
you are exchanging for attention on the web.


Some examples:

Tools
Videos
Ultimate Guides
eBooks
Presentations
Infographics
Original Research (Studies, Surveys, Experiments, Etc.)
Case Studies (Be sure to make them useful. They aren't just an excuse to
brag.)



It's better to have just one linkable asset than it is to have years and
years of blog content. Put the two together and you become a force to be
reckoned with.

"Outbound" isn't dead

Up until now, I've been talking about "inbound" marketing strategies. I
strongly believe that you don't have a long term business unless you can earn an
audience and keep it. When you have an audience who wants to see what you'll say
next, it's very hard to go broke.


At the same time, if you can't make money selling a product on advertising
alone, you may not have a business at all.


You can and should pay for traffic for as long as it offers a positive
ROI. Even Hubspot, the king of inbound marketing, uses AdWords. Neglecting paid
strategies is a bad idea. If you don't have a product valuable enough to sell
with advertisements, I strongly advise you to develop one.


Here are a few things you must know about paid advertising:

Conversion rate optimization is crucial, but it needs to be done properly.
If you're doing it without statistical significance, you're not doing it at all.
If you're testing button colors and layouts before you test core landing page
concepts, you're doing everything backward. CRO is about finding objections and
obstacles, and removing them. I discussed an important CRO framework over at
Unbounce, and I also highly recommend their eBook.
Targeting is important. You don't want to waste money on irrelevant
impressions if you can help it. If you're using Google AdWords, choose your
keywords carefully, and avoid words like "cheap" or "free" if you're actually
trying to sell anything. Retargeting is another way to reach relevant people. WP
Curve has an awesome introductory guide on the subject of retargeting, and MDG
has another great guide for retargeting on Facebook.
Don't be afraid to reach out directly to bloggers or site owners and buy
advertising directly from them. If you do this on relevant sites, the referral
traffic can be amazing. Sometimes it's possible to do this even with just a
one-time payment. Keep in mind that if you do this, the link needs to be
nofollowed. Failing to do this can get your site penalized by Google.
In some cases, it may be worth paying for traffic even when your goal isn't
to sell. This is a fusion if inbound and outbound strategies. If you choose to
do this, clearly define a goal and tie that goal to lifetime value. For example,
estimate the lifetime value of your average email subscriber, and aim for a
campaign that produces enough email subscriptions to justify the cost. In
general, if you are paying for traffic, you should at least be aiming to pick up
an email address. In general, even social media subscriptions aren't valuable
enough to justify the traffic costs. Mere brand impressions certainly aren't
enough.
A possible exception to this is a "cost-per impression" campaign. This is
when you pay for brand impressions, instead of referral traffic, much like
traditional television ads. Brand impressions often do correlate positively with
sales, and if you can demonstrate this correlation with your own data it might
be worth doing it. Just remember that it can be measured. Don't hide behind the
belief that it can't in order to justify wasting money.



Keep in mind that no matter how much value you can pull out of paid
traffic, you aren't building a long term business unless you are retaining an
audience and keeping yourself "top of mind" among these people.

Leveraging your audience



Up until now, I've sort of taken for granted that if you build a hardcore,
repeat audience, as well as a steadily growing mainstream presence, sales will
inevitably follow. There is some truth to this, but things don't always work out
so well.


It's undeniable that brand impressions, especially when they are
voluntary, dramatically increase the likelihood that your audience will choose
you over a competitor. Unfortunately, content loyalty does not always translate
into sales, and if you postpone "selling" indefinitely, you will not optimize
the value of your audience.


So, how can you leverage an audience for profit?

Phrases like "data driven marketing" and "big data" are taking off in a big
way right now, and there's a very good reason for that. Nothing maximizes sales
quite like relevance, and data-mining is the way to maximize relevance. DMN News
has a fantastic PDF guide to data driven marketing. The key is to seek out
correlations in your customer data, use those to make hypotheses about the best
way to maximize their value, and then test those hypotheses scientifically. The
end goal of all of this is to target the members of your audience who are most
likely to find your marketing messages relevant. You need to balance this with
the expectation of privacy to avoid violating trust.
Regardless of the presence or absence of data-driven strategies, actual
sales material should make up a relatively small percentage of the content that
each member of your audience sees. While some of them are more likely to respond
than others, everybody has a limit, and if you cross that limit, they will
unsubscribe. This means that you lose all future value from that customer, and
potentially some of the value that their friends might have offered as well.
It's always better to play it conservative.
You can and should leverage your existing audience for referrals, as long
as you do it sparingly. It's okay to incentivize them with free products or
contests. Just remember that nobody is willing to "sell out" their friend just
for a "chance to win a free iPad." Your audience members should be utterly
convinced that their friends will actually want to subscribe long before you try
to bribe them to make a recommendation. Done right, this is a fantastic way to
grow your audience.
Feeling ready?

It's been our goal to arm you with the knowledge necessary to thrive in
SEO by building a strategy that transcends search engines. If you learned
anything, I'd love it if you shared this with your audience. As always, thanks
for reading.




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