Wil Reynolds, the CEO of SEER Interactive puts on a great presentation, period. If you haven’t seen him speak, no worries – he has what seems like a never-ending collection of YouTube videos of presentations he’s given at other conferences. So before ever meeting him, you already get the feeling you know him because of how many videos he has and how authentic he comes across.
This presentation was the first one of the #Linklove Conference, so he made sure to start off with a bang by sharing something many of us in attendance were not prepared for. The number one biggest mistake that SEOs make apparently, is believing in “quality links” as the way to dominate in the SERPs. We hear it all the time, go out and get high quality links from trusted sources and your golden, right? Wrong.
The Other New York SEO Company
Wil’s company is apparently being beat for the KW “SEO Company” by a company with 2 blog posts (in the last 3 years).
How? All manipulative type links, none of which said their company name, and many, which seemed to be ridiculously obvious paid links. Compare that with his company’s site, which has a fantastic blog that gets posted to regularly, by their entire team, and includes great research and actionable tips, that gets shared and retweeted a lot. His suggestion, when people start going off about social signals as the way to rank, at least for uber-competitive keywords, take it with a grain of salt!
Ok, so big deal, one of his competitors did some junky link building and it worked, nothing new here. How is focusing on quality links a mistake exactly? Well, one of his clients worked with a PR (public relations) agency while hiring him for SEO.
Side note: I’m personally a big fan of leveraging traditional PR methods for link building, I mean what could be better than getting an editorial link from the New York Times or CNN?
Apparently it sounds better than it is. His client was doing everything right, everything that Google and Matt Cutts says you should do. They had gotten links from the NY Times, Cosmo, Oprah, and a slew of other high quality newspaper and magazine sites. Not paid links mind you, they were being written about! The client was apparently online for over a decade, they had .edu links from research done, their keyword gets 4 million searches a month, and the CEO is someone media outlets seek out for their articles. Add to that the fact that none of their competition in the SERPs have that and you have what looks on the surface to be the most ideal situation for an SEO.
Yet with all of that working in their favor, they dropped in rankings. Hard.
“SEO History is littered with over-weighted strategies that fail…” – Wil Reynolds
Diversification Is A Must
1st (Actionable) Lesson: Diversify! – His assessment was that their client was…wait for it…over-weighted with high quality trusted website sources, yet failed to climb the rankings. So lesson to be learned, as soon as you see one tactic start to work for you, immediately switch tactics and diversify.
Their competitors were buying blogroll links, like crazy. Clearly that was working for them, though he didn’t feel comfortable exposing his client to that level of risk. Still though, you see that working and you start thinking…
No, instead he implored us to challenge ourselves to get the same kind of links while staying in the white/grey hat store. Spend the time you would normally think of every bat-shit crazy way to build garbage links and instead brainstorm with your team to come up with something truly creative.
You CAN Battle Black Hat with Good Ideas
First, they started looking for mid-level bloggers. (Not sure where to find these guys? You can search Google Blogs, Technorati, Postrank, and use Ontolo) – They offered product reviews for links, which worked great. Still, they needed something else, a big push to get them over the hump. One of their guys came up with a “national day” around their product with the client giving away about $5,000 worth of product. The result:
- They used this to grow their email list – not directly related to links but helped client increase sales (which is the end game, right?)
- Competitors of theirs actually linked to their nearly non-branded “National Day” microsite
- The Mid-Level bloggers got in the mix, started putting the custom badges up on their blogs and linking
- The media started linking to it.
- They’ve since reached #3 in the rankings for the KW and haven’t looked back since.
So what’s the point then? Do we go out and get high-quality links or not? His take is that getting high quality links helps your more aggressive tactics fly under the radar.
The SEO Graveyard
Wil also mentioned something that sounded familiar – because if you watched his videos like I told you to earlier, you would know that he’s mentioned this before:
Go to page 8 and beyond in the SERPs for certain KWs, the SEO graveyard of sorts. That barren wasteland is filled with some great diamond content in the rough. Basically, you get all riled up and psyched that you’re going to make the most amazing resource content ever, realize its hard, then give up. Wil comes around with his metal detector looking for gold rings in the sand, finds what you built, updates it and make it shiny and new, then uses that for links. Money.
Final Mistakes – Having No Army & No Muscle
Don’t wait until you need social promotion of your work before you start promoting other people’s work. Be that shining star that cared about them before you needed them.
Twitter following can be an army.
Final thoughts from Wil’s presentation:
- Use Twitter Search: There is a tweet every 10 minutes for “stole my phone”. Use Twitter Search to find people whose problems you can solve and get creative to get the links.
- Ever wonder how top bloggers embed stuff… Incentivized embeds – Get in front of the right person and incentivize them to get the ball rolling with the infrographics, etc.
- Want to get top resources in your niche to link to you? – Have the quality PDFs, Excel spreadsheets, FREE tools – Always keep in mind: What’s In It For Me?
