If you run a business, there’s no doubt you’ve been told you need to be busy on social media channels.
But, essentially you need to know that your efforts on those platforms are driving traffic to your website and making it quicker for customers to find you online. In short, you need to know you’re getting a return on investment.
The question is this: do social signals actually influence your SEO?
Social Engagement and SEO: The Answer Is Indirectly
Social media allows you the chance to impact your business’s SEO in an array of indirect ways.
How to Measure That Indirect Impact
Just because you can’t tie the indirect impact of SEO and social signs doesn’t mean it’s time to pack up shop and shut down all your social profiles. While there may not be a very specific formula for directly connecting SEO and social, it definitely doesn’t mean your social effort are futile.
Let’s say you have a ton of followers on Twitter. That doesn’t really guarantee that you’re going to enjoy higher ranks on Google and the other search engines. However, it also doesn’t mean that won’t change tomorrow.
For instance, in 2013 Google said that they did include social signals. A year later in 2014, they said they did not.
According to Justin Kirby, CaveSocial Co-Founder, if a business’s content tends to be drawing people from various social networks to your URL constantly, SERPS are going to view your content as respected and eventually your rankings will increase.
Social Is Much More than SEO Rankings
Increasing your business’s website rankings in search engines really shouldn’t be your only goal when it comes to social signals.
Just look at these other benefits:
Link building
Increased website traffic
Social profile growth
Content visibility
Each of these can, and will, contribute to increased rankings.
Now, SEO revolves around honest experiences and trustworthy brands which means your rankings get better as you provide quality content, delivered consistently from a variety of sources.
When you create a marriage between your social and content, you’ll see how your ranking and website traffic will improve.
Let’s not forget about social reputation and brand awareness, either.
“The correlation between social signals and ranking position is extremely high, and the number of social signals per landing page has remained constant when compared to with the values from last year’s whitepaper. … The top-ranked websites in Google’s rankings displays vastly more social signals than all other pages…. This is primarily due to the overlap between brand websites performing strongly in social networks and being allocated top positions by Google.”
Essentially, the more ways people are able to find you in search engines, the more you’re able to control your brands’ images. Simply open the first few pages of Google on a search of your product or brand. Be consistent in your efforts and you’ll be able to “own” some topics online with your killer content and, ultimately, your services and products.
So Many Reasons to Be Active on Social Media
While there may not be a clear recipe of what you should be doing on social for your efforts to affect SEO, that doesn’t mean social signals won’t affect SEO whatsoever.
There are plenty of reasons to be active on social, like engaging one-on-one with customers and growing your community. All the growth and social activity to see on your networks will lead to increase website traffic, increased interest in your offerings and more content views.
SEO Is Becoming More Dependent on Engagement
Human marketing, that is, having an online presence and engaging with your community, is good for all sorts of reasons. It’s especially good for your bottom line.
Search engines are hard at work building algorithms that are way more in tune with human thinking since at the end of the day, humans are the ones using the search engines. So the closer they get to being human, the better the results will be.
But don’t just take my word for it. Searchmetrics created a list of correlating factors between social signals and search engine positions.
What you can see here is that 8 out of 10 highest correlations between search engine positions and rankings are tied to social engagement factors. That means that those factors that tie in best with the search engine positioning is related to how people react to content on social media.
Human beings’ reactions on social media don’t happen because of numbers or because you’ve created a perfect site (from a technical viewpoint). It does happen because your content appeals to your audience; it resonates with them; they can relate. They’re human!
We could get into a whole heated debate about a link between causality and correlation. But there’s really one main thing we need to know: content that is likely to entice engagement has a better chance of higher rankings and content that ranks well will help your bottom line.
Matt Cutt’s Viewpoint
So, just how far is Google from using social media signals as factors for ranking? Can the SERPS use follower and engagement metrics from the likes of Facebook and Twitter to evaluate an individual’s authority?
The answers to those questions were certainly buried in the headlines in Matt Cutt’s video.
Supporting what Matt had to say, Google’s John Mueller has categorically stated Google doesn’t use social signals in its search ranking factors.
Okay, so let’s go in depth into Matt Cutt’s comments to try to understand why Google doesn’t do so.
Do Twitter and Facebooks Signals Play a Part in Google’s Ranking Algorithms?
That’s what Matt Cutts answered in the video. Let’s break it down.
1. Twitter and Facebook posts are treated like other web pages
Every individual tweet on Twitter, for example, is a standalone website in Google’s eyes. On Facebook, a re-share, a status update and even a link share are all “pages” on their own to Google.
What we need to understand here is unspoken implication. While a lot of people assume Google tries to index every single page on the World Wide Web, this isn’t true.
While the search engine’s resources are certainly vast, there are limits. What’s more, with the rate at which web pages increase, Google recognizes that not every page is equally valuable, if at all. So the search engine builds its own crawling bots algorithms in order to be selective in what to crawl.
2. Google is limited in how much social web it crawls
Matt has made it clear that Google can’t always crawl all the pages on social sites.
However, while Google can see every tweet posted in real time, for example, doesn’t mean they do actually index every tweet. In a study conducted in June 2015, it was found that Google still indexes less than 4% of all tweets.
3. Social signal correlations that have higher rankings for sites don’t equal causation of those rankings
Matt has made something very clear that caused a bit of a stir: several sites, particularly Moz and SearchMetrics, have published correlation studies depicting social signals like Google+1s and Facebook Likes as arguably one of the highest correlating factors for those sites that rank highly on Google. This has led many people to jump to the conclusion that social signals are the cause of higher rankings.
Then there’s the level-headed Cyrus Shepard from Moz who tried to explain that an associating factor doesn’t necessarily need to be a causal factor. The more likely explanation is that sites that seem to get higher social engagement tend to be sites that attract a lot of other signals that do contribute to their search ranking power.
What’s important to keep in mind is that social media exposure tends to increase the opportunities that sites will indeed link to your content.
4. Be active on social media to build your brand and drive traffic
According to Matt, there are some really valid reasons for being active on social platforms, whether or not social has an impact on rankings.
Marry up good network building and an active social presence and you’ll soon notice a growing brand reputation, the development of authority and trust, better customer service and increased traffic to your sites via the conversations you have and the links you post.
5. It all needs to be a long-term project
This is really important.
During the three year experiment of Google Authorship (which may just be coming back), one of the hot topics in the world of SEO was “author rank” – that is, the idea that Google could use the author’s individual authority for given topics as a factor in search ranking.
But Matt Cutts has made it clear in the video why using individuals’ authority as a ranking is a long-term goal for Google. Establishing a person’s identify and verifying it is hard.
Social Engagement and SEO – It’s All a Bit Like a Fine Wine
Google is incredibly careful in their search results. There is absolutely no incentive for them to rush an unreliable or incomplete signal into their ranking factors. In fact, there are enough disincentives to put them off.
Precisely evaluating and measuring the complex signals that could indicate how authoritative an organization or individual is on social media, particularly with regards to certain topic areas, is massively complex and made even more difficult when major areas where these signals exist are difficult for Google to get to.
This doesn’t mean that Google doesn’t value these signals. Every single indication we have had from Google spokespeople, has been that certain areas of social signals as well as authors as subject authorities continue to be areas of intense interest for the search engine.
In fact, during his 2013 Pubcon keynote speech in Las Vegas, Matt mentioned that social signals shouldn’t be looked at for short term benefits like direct ranking, but rather as long term efforts. In other words, over time the search engines will start watching who consistently gets great social signals over and over again as an indication of who is a trustworthy authority figure.
Just like a reputable wine maker wouldn’t serve a fine wine before its time, the search engines aren’t going to serve ranking factor before its time. While social signals are definitely important, and active use of social media has become essential, you need to be investing in them for the long-term.
You need to know that if you build real value that people will value, overtime, that is going to become valuable to the search engines as well.
Social Media Channels Are Search Engines
We think that social engagement already ties into SEO rankings.
People these days don’t just head over to a search engine to look something up, they use social media channels. Check out this article on why social is the new SEO.
So let’s say you’re active on Twitter. Then it is possible that people will find your business’s new content after searching for market-related tweets with Twitter’s search function. Likewise, brands that make use of stunning visual content can benefit from making that content visible on Instagram and Pinterest by categorizing their pins and using hashtags.
What’s more, if someone wants to look up your company, they’re more likely to open up Facebook and Twitter to do a quick search and check out your presence on each platform.
If Not Now, Definitely Soon
Ultimately, the World Wide Web is all about relationship building, expressing your identity, fostering audiences and sharing ideas. It’s intrinsically social and there is absolutely no reason why SEO best practices would chose to go against the grain – particularly since the rules governing SEO are supposed to make the web a more useful and enjoyable place.
Does social engagement really tie into SEO rankings? We sure think so – but right now, there’s no clear way to measure it.
What’s your take on it? Let us know in the comments!
Last week, we sat down with a few members from the SEMrush team. In a nutshell, SEMrush is today the world’s leading provider of competitive intelligence and keyword research for professional digital marketing campaigns, with versatile, affordable plans. And yes – we use and love their software.
We talked to Tara, Michael Stricker, Michael Isaac, and Tyler in our Q&A session. (Bios of the team members are at the end of this post.) We asked them how SEMrush came to be, common marketing problems to be faced today, SEO insights for website owners, among other things. It was a great session, with a lot of useful knowledge shared from their team – read, enjoy, and share!
Tell us a little about how SEMrush was started (what’s your founding story)?
Michael Stricker: “It was a dark and stormy night…” – Oleg and partners are the only ones who can answer this… they concocted something to aid their SEO data-gathering, and their peers were so taken with the result that they offered to pay for it… and the rest is history. Tyler: Oleg and Dmitry were tech guys working for a marketing firm with the task of creating “cool tools” (as Oleg puts it) for their company to run more efficiently. The point wasn’t profit; just create something cool and useful for the industry. They got so into it that they spun off the tools to create SEOQuake then SEMrush. Tara: Please see this for quotes directly from Oleg.
What kind of daily problems does SEMrush answer for online marketers?
Michael Stricker: Questions arise regarding what keywords your market is using most frequently. SEMrush enables astute marketers to get inside their prospect’s heads for a minute. The fact that it also affords an X-ray into what is working best for one’s online competitors is the icing on the cake. Add to that keywords, ads, clicks and spend for AdWords and you’ve got a chocolate layer cake. Sweeten that with Google Shopping data regarding keywords and prices and you’ve got a tray of high-converting cupcakes on top. Now, consider mobile search terms, visibility tracking and then specify local search down to the city and state, and you’ve got a tiered wedding cake for SEOs married to the data. Roll out the SEO Audit to help find and fix link errors and such that can trap search spiders and prevent your site from being fully indexed and you’ve got confections fit for a Technical SEO. Do that in 28 countries worldwide and Bing U.S. and you’ve given the world a slice of the pie. Michael Isaac: When people use SEMrush, they are constantly looking for answers. “What will be my next keywords?”, “Who should I be looking at the closest as a competitor?”, “What are the next errors I should fix on my site?”. We help our users find out all of this information every time they log in. We can tell them who is ranking for the same keywords they are, what issues we find with their site through our Site Audit tool, what keywords they should target next through their SEO and multiple other reports that can contribute to their overall success. We have users that are logging in every day fully utilizing the data we have in our database to improve themselves and find new information that will grow their online marketing efforts. Tyler: Prospecting clients with overview report and site audit. Which keywords to optimize for and which to stay away from. Who’s linking to me, what kind of links, and which links I should no-follow. Who’s spending what and how much in ads? Tracking and reporting SEO/PPC progress. Tara: While we market SEMrush as a competitive intelligence tool, there are many other things it can do for digital marketers. As a content manager and writer, I appreciate the insight SEMrush offers in editorial direction. I can use it to see which topics we’ve covered thoroughly or where we need more content. SEMrush allows me to combine instinct and data to produce informative content our readers enjoy. You’re not just competing with others, you’re competing with what you’ve already done on your own website.
How would SEMrush benefit a typical marketer looking to analyze or boost their SEO rankings?
Michael Stricker: Market insight comes with crowd-sourced data about what it is that web users are actually searching for, and the words and phrasing they use indicates just where they are on the “path to purchase”. Competitive insight gleaned from understanding your keyword strengths (unique, well-performing content and keywords), weaknesses (gap analysis), opportunities (popular keywords unique to competitors), and threats (keywords that are very competitively shared by commercial foes) all feeds into a holistic picture of what works and what does not, so that experimentation and attendant risk is minimized and positive SEO results can be accelerated and maintained. Knowing when to avoid pursuit of steeply-competitive keywords can preserve working capital for small or new domains. Gaining knowledge of competitors who invoke your brand to gain traffic for themselves is like a suit of golden armor. Forewarned is forearmed. Michael Isaac: Typical marketers are always looking for ways to improve their SEO and watch their competition closely. We believe here at SEMrush that we have came up with the perfect tool to conduct this research. We have tools that will provide insight on possible keywords you are looking to target or have been keeping an eye on. We offer multiple tools and reports that will assist you with tracking your competition and adding their SEO/PPC campaigns to determine where they have been struggling the most. Tyler: How wouldn’t they? Unless they feel like wasting a million hours manually crawling SERP results then they need SEMrush. They probably won’t need every feature, but life without a tool like SEMrush is like setting yourself up for failure– as a digital marketing. Tara: One of my favorite features about SEMrush is the position tracker report. I have my personal website set up in SEMrush and the tool sends me e-mails to let me know how I’m doing. I don’t have very much time to devote to analyzing my own website, and SEMrush automatically sends me reports to let me know what’s going on and how my site is doing against others in the same niche. While I log into the tool for deeper analysis and updates, I often use this to guide my website’s content strategy without having to log into the tool. It’s a blessing for a busy editor.
How have you seen the SEO landscape change since SEMrush was started?
Michael Stricker: Do you mean the stampede of arctic animals? Or, the blind, headlong rush of iterative marketers looking for the ‘next trick’? The emergence of Content Marketing and Inbound Marketing. The level of triggered communications that makes marketing automation possible. The incredible data-gathering such as heat-mapping and analytics that sparked a renaissance in Conversion Rate Optimization. The rise of the consumer to equal voice and footing with brands, and the new reliance on Online Reputation Management and Social Customer Relations. The double-digit increases in AdWords budgets, and Google’s revenues. The way that free PLA Ads became a paid advertising channel and the new balance as budgets shift to increased investments in Google Shopping. The dominance of Mobile SEO and smartphone use. The prevalence of App use on smartphones, so much so that Google Now must overlay search results into Apps to gain face time with mobile users. The rise of AI and machine learning in use by Google to improve search results. The improvement of location by IP, cell tower, triangulation, GPS, and now, in-store beacons that informs personal results. Tyler: The PPC environment is way more competitive– Campaigns are running much leaner and opportunities dry up faster than they use to because so many people are using competitive tools like SEMrush. Tara: I’m still relatively new to using SEMrush, but as a content writer well aware of the affect Google Panda had on the industry, SEMrush is now an important tool in content strategy, allowing me to make the most out of those long tail keywords (most of which are also evergreen) for a long-term content strategy.
We love SEMrush’s Twitter chat, #semrushchat! Tell us a little about how you started and grew that.
Tara: Olga Andrienko began #semrushchat in October of 2014. It’s grown from there! Olga will go into more detail about the success of the chat on the SEMrush blog over the month of September. When I first started at SEMrush half a year ago, #semrushchat was one of the easiest ways for me to connect with the digital marketing community right away. It’s one of the best networking opportunities I’ve experienced – all from the comfort of my desk.
What’s one good SEO tip for achieving better rankings you’d give to a typical website owner?
Michael Stricker: Learn what your market is looking for, how they’re asking for it, and at what step along the ‘buyer journey that they are signaling intent by using certain phrases. Work on every step of the ‘funnel’, but pay special attention to the terms of ‘transactional’ or commercial intent. If I had time to say two tips, the second would be, Learn from competitors so you can do what works, with less expense, and risk. Michael Isaac: The best way to achieve better rankings would be to analyze your competition. What are they doing that you are not? By reviewing who is ranking within the top position and reviewing their landing pages, descriptions and titles being used, you can then structure your content to be more relevant to the keywords you are targeting and leap over your competition. Tyler: Have a well thought out URL structure before committing to a website. Tara: Many people start blogs and websites to establish themselves as experts. Whether you have a website or not, you need to take some time actually living in your community (Facebook and LinkedIn groups, Twitter chats, meetups, other networking events) to really grasp it. This can inform your instincts about industry trends, while SEMrush can help you sure up your content strategy around what you already know. Also, know where to go for help and don’t be afraid to ask for it. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses within digital marketing. People often ask me for content and editorial advice, but I always review in-depth data analyses from SEMrush with helpful members of our marketing, sales, and customer success teams. Sometimes they find a story or trend that I’ve missed.
For someone just starting out in SEO, what are some best tips?
Michael Stricker: Brands must do R.P.S. — Real People Stuff. Affiliate marketers who can afford to shed burned-out domain names as they get penalized by Google, be it manually or algorithmically, may be able to afford to rely on iterative techniques like mass link-building or blog networks or link wheels, but brands that must preserve their equity cannot take that risk. The more Google knows about users, their interests and the context of their searches, the harder it will be to fake relevance. So, be prepared to learn as much as possible about search queries, market segments, affinities and interests, buyer and prospect personas. Then, apply that information to put the right message in front of the right person at the right time. Until search becomes predictive and passively delivers great stuff to humans, you still have a chance to influence search outcomes. Tyler: Learn, learn, learn, then apply, then learn some more, then post on twitter. Tara: 1) Participate in Twitter chats. It’s the most friendly and accessible way to learn. I recommend: #semrushchat, #cochat, #inboundhour, #scottsbizchat (especially for small e-commerce sites), and #LinkedInChat for general networking. 2) Find your niche and own it! It’ll evolve and change over time, and that’s okay. 3) Blog as you learn. Answer your own questions in blog posts so your audience can see your growth. It’s an extra reward for your research. Give credit to those who help you or provide useful information. 4) Make sure your message is clear. I recommend checking out Don Purdum’s blog and podcast for more information on how to do that. 5) If you’re starting out at an agency or other business involved in SEO, you should be able to learn something every day. If you’re just fetching coffee and not being offered the opportunity to learn, move on – there are plenty of other organizations that will take an interest in your personal success and personal brand. (SEMrush is hiring, by the way!)
We love SEMrush and it’s impressive capabilities! Thanks for being here for our Q&A chat.
Tara: Thanks so much for including us!
Who Is Michael Stricker? Michael Stricker markets the leading research tool for Competitive Intelligence as U.S. Marketing Director of SEMrush. The hundreds of digital marketing campaigns he has constructed and consulted deliver millions of impressions to enterprise web-based businesses. Decades of agency experience enable his actionable strategies, creative concepts, scalable processes and do-able tactics to achieve business goals. Michael has spoken at ClickZ Live (formerly SES), Etail, HERO Conference and SMX East, and contributes to blogs such as CIO.com, B2Community, SEMrush.com. Who Is Michael Isaac? Mike Isaac is the Customer Success Content Manager at SEMrush. Who Is Tyler Wilson?
Tyler Wilson is a sales executive at SEMrush. A recent graduate from Temple University’s Fox School of Business, Tyler came to SEMrush in January 2015 with two years of digital marketing experience– interning for DMi Partners and SEOM interactive. Who Is Tara M. Clapper? Tara M. Clapper is Technical Editor (blog editor) at SEMrush and Senior Editor at The Geek Initiative, a website celebrating women in geek culture. The author of thousands of blogs and hundreds of small business websites, Tara enjoys blogging about SEO copywriting, content management, corporate culture, personal branding, networking and LinkedIn. She has over a decade of experience in digital publishing.
If you’ve been hanging around blogs over the last year or so, you’ll realize that citations are a big thing. Citation is a skill that bloggers need to learn in the twenty first century in order to see their pages rank well.
Think of these like high quality backlinks that affect the overall rank of your blog and also create a pretty large impact on how your audience perceives your blog.
What exactly is this citation thing anyway?
What are Citations?
Citations can simply be thought of as a means of presenting another website as a link within the body text of your own. The term stems from the academic field where extensive literature reviews usually result in citations that are lengthy and reference a large number of topics on the subject at hand. Similarly, citation in a blog or website references relevant topics so that readers who are interested in these topics can get further information if they so desire. Citations make up the major part of creating backlinks for your site in the modern era of search engine optimization.
Why are Citations Important?
Citations allow for the building of backlinks. The higher the quality of a backlink, the better your page ranks in search results and the more authoritative your own page is in comparison to others on the same topic. Citations are important for two major reasons. Firstly, they allow you to share contact with another, higher-impact blog. If enough traffic comes from your link to their site you may be able to form a suitable link sharing agreement, thereby increasing your traffic. Alternatively, and more importantly, a good backlink foundation allows your website or blog to rank well in relevant search results. The basis of your citations comes from proper use of something called the anchor tag.
What is this “Anchor Tag”?
Basically, it’s an HTML tag that replaces an actual HTML link with actual words. Thus instead of a URL, you can have a short description that, upon being clicked, sends the user to the URL hidden beneath it. Search engines utilize anchor texts to figure out the content of the site you’ve linked to. This means that proper use of anchor tags can affect both your linked-to sites and your own site. The use of the anchor tag represents a particular metric that search engines have taken to tracking termed link relevancy. Link relevancy is determined by what content is on the source page and what the anchor text attached to that source page represents.
Link Relevancy
Search engines cleverly utilize human beings penchant for linking relevant things to figure out exactly what the source page is relevant regarding search terms and keywords. Link relevancy indicators utilize this particular inclination along with complicated natural language processing in order to generate an idea of how relevant the link in question really is. Google’s Penguin update started being more specific in its determination of natural search terms and this allowed the algorithm to determine with a good degree of accuracy when it was dealing with non-organic links by determining if the same anchor text yielded the same link results each time. To this end, links should be made throughout the body of a page with as much variety as possible while still remaining relevant to the source page.
How Does Anchor Text Affect SEO?
As we said before, anchor text allows the building of links that raises the search rank of a page. After understanding search relevancy, we can now form a picture of what our anchor tags should contain to be proper examples of good SEO link building, from Backlinko. Remember that you’re trying to have different anchor texts that lead to your external page in order to create more organic content. To this end, what you should do is to brainstorm possible options that you may have for the creation of alternative anchor texts for your outbound links. It is important that you keep these thoughts in mind when developing your anchor tags:
Do NOT create zero-anchor situations such as “Click Here…”
Do NOT overuse anchor text. Overuse of anchor text makes a search engine look at your linking suspiciously and may actually hurt your search rank rather than helping it.
5 Types of Anchor Text
Anchor text comes in many types and each type has their own particular use. The most common anchor types that you are likely to encounter during your time building SEO type links are:
Zero Anchor Text: These are the text anchors that simply come with a “Click Here” appended to them via anchor tag. Not recommended at all.
“Naked” URL’s: This also defeats the purpose of the anchor tag as some URL’s are usually made up of non-words and incomprehensible strings of letters. On the off-chance that the link is actually made up of good keywords (as is the case in many links from WordPress blogs), the link might end up helping itself out.
Exact Match Anchor: One of the best anchor tags to use in a localized anchor tag strategy. These give a geographical area and a relevant keyword. In some SEO strategies, they allow for more localized searches which can lead to a much higher conversion rate.
Partial Match Anchor: This depends upon the ability of a search engine indexing bot to determine the relevant location and other information from the surrounding words in order to rank the link. It has the benefit of allowing you to be freer with your anchor text and helps you create more natural outbound links. Highly recommended.
Hybrid Anchor: These are a combination of links that associate different anchor tags with each other allowing for a more targeted strategy, while at the same time giving you the freedom to create links naturally. The links usually relate branded items with non-branded items and are also highly recommended.
The flavor of anchor text that you use can make it more difficult for search engines to rank the link and therefore affect your overall search ranking and how well regarded your site is.
How Can I Generate Authority Links? 7 Key Ways
Authority links in the past (as close as 2013) was a whole different game to what it is today. In fact, if you follow the same link-building strategies that you would have done in 2013 today, it’s likely to hurt more than help. When you’re trying to generate authority links for your site, it’s important that you follow best-practice. There are a few very successful ways to build backlinks that are high quality and help your search engine ranking immensely. A few of these are:
Create a Resource: Developing a resource is as simple as compiling a single location that gives information to visitors. What resource links do is they give other websites a handy place to link to that covers all their needs in a single URL. This makes it attractive to link to this resource site and allows a lot of traffic to come through it through linking and cross-linking. Resource pages are useful and amazingly good at generating high-quality backlinks, and all it takes is a little bit of skill in content curation. Knowing your audience also does a great deal for creating resource pages that are beneficial to them, making it all the more likely that you’ll generate backlinks from that page.
Bridge the Content Gap: One of the hardest things for site owners to do is to catch the attention of their target demographic. It’s what many content producers and marketers spend countless hours trying to figure out. How to attract your audience’s attention is one of the most important things you learn in advertising. Bridging the content gap means reaching out to your audience and grabbing their attention by giving them something that they want but that other content hasn’t managed to satisfy yet. You’re trying to fill the gaps left by other content producers. There are countless opportunities that exist out there that have yet to be explored. All it takes is a little bit of imagination.
Use the Power of Infographics: If you don’t know what an infographic is, you probably haven’t seen new content at all in the last 3 years. Infographics are a unique way of blending text copy and images into a nice, holistic piece of content that catches the eye but doesn’t bore the audience with tedious walls of text. If anything, infographics are the way that all content marketers should seek to converse with their audience. Developing infographics on trending themes is a great way of getting backlinks and sharing what you know at the same time. These text-pictograms have become one of the most effective ways of leveraging an audience’s attention span to your own benefit.
See what the Competition is Doing: Monitoring the places other sites you compete against in your niche are doing is a great way for you to develop an idea of where quality backlinks are to be found. You can start off by studying the types of links your competitors have by doing a system of competitive auditing. From that you can come up with a plan to outperform them. Imitation has always been the sincerest form of flattery and if your opponents have managed to find a workable solution for getting high quality backlinks, then you can follow suit and do what they have done, even improving on their methods immensely.
Capitalizing on Broken Links: Google’s main source of determining how well your site ranks on the Internet is still based heavily on your links. In such a case a broken link could spell disaster for a site’s link-building hopes. Enter broken link building. Essentially, in this type of strategy, you spot a link that leads nowhere and point it out to the webmaster of the site, while at the same time asking for a link where that dead one currently is. It’s a very good strategy for developing a rapport with owners of authority sites. One link from an authority site can generate as much or more traffic than ten mid-range or low-impact sites can. That’s a lot of traffic to spotting a broken link.
Find the Influencers for your Niche and Interview Them: Influencers make up a major part of content marketing strategy. They’re called “influencers” because their opinion usually sways a large portion of a target demographic. One of the reasons that they are such influential people is because a lot of people are interested in them. Interviewing an influencers creates a post based on what you found out about that person and also provides an authority link for others who may want to garner information about or directly link to information that supports one of their article’s points. This is another type of resource site with the same overall effect: a lot of links coming inbound from high-authority sites that raise your overall search ranking.
Content Repurposing: You might have had content that performed well but seems to be a bit dated now. You don’t have to toss it out as old content, but you can refurbish it and republish it as repurposed content. Some of the content you made at a previous date was probably not well received because at that point in time your article wasn’t a relevant piece and the industry’s attention was held elsewhere. Giving it new form and function allows you to resurrect these posts, especially if they become more relevant in the present day. Repurposing content and presenting it in an alternative format (such as on Slideshare) makes for a great draw for social media sharers, since Slideshare is much more suited to a social media platform. Repurposing content in this way can gain you a lot of inbound links through social media shares and external linking.
Keep an Eye on your Citations
After understanding how important citations are, and how they function, you’re in a much better place to deal with citing links correctly and increasing your search rank through dedicated link building. It might seem like a tedious process, and at times it can be, but it’s far more effective at getting your traffic and search rankings up than almost any other method of promotion out there. It works hand in hand with SEO strategies to guarantee that your site finds itself among the top search results for a particular keyword.
If you’re up on the game in SEO, you know a big name in it is Matt Cutts. The leader of the “webspam” team at Google, he’s a proclaimed “voice” in SEO and all things rankings. When he talks, people often listen; retweet; share; and reply.
The latest buzz from Matt Cutts was posted on January 20, 2014—just three days ago. And already it’s been viral in the Internet world. The reason for the intense, instant feedback was the topic he wrote about. Matt’s blog was entitled “The decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO” and posed the statement, guest blogging is dead.
“Google Will Take a Dim View” …The Worst The Blog Got
Matt Cutts, Photo Courtesy @ affordableseofl.com
The blog basically stated that all who were guest blogging should stop, and that guest blogging has gone from respectable to totally spammy. He said to stick a fork in the whole opportunity and don’t rely on it for SEO. Note, he never said it was entirely dead, not once in his whole blog; his most distinct ending words were that “Google will take a dim view of guest blogging going forward.”
Matt Takes It Back?
Matt actually added an “add-on” within 24 hours of writing his blog (possibly affected by the huge amounts of noted blogger voices on Twitter and other platforms denouncing his view) saying that he didn’t mean to “throw the baby out with the bathwater.” He stated very plainly that he did not mean to discount high quality and multi-author blogs, that he stated are “compelling, wonderful, and useful.”
He Actually Has A Point About The Spam
OK, so just like everything good, anyone—and on the Internet, seriously, anyone—can take it and turn it into something bad. Dirty, grimy hands have touched things like articles, blogs, press releases, web pages, and of course—guest blogging. I recently received a LinkedIN invitation to join a guest blog. I’ll put their name out there: SEO Libra. The invitation read, “Regarding For Free SEO Guest Blogging. Add Guest Posting for Free. Regards.” Ugh, it makes me shudder again.
Grimy fingers like these turn content into spam, spin and trash it, try to recycle it, and overall give content a bad name in various avenues. But does that mean content in general stops working for everyone? Of course not. It only stops working in the wrong hands. In the right hands, content becomes well-written. It is original. Creative. Powerful. It has the possibility to go viral and make a positive impact on the web.
Case Study
Express Writers started blogging on SocialMediaToday about 5 days ago. We’ve had over 300 social shares on each post that was a featured guest blog on SocialMediaToday; new followers on all our social media platforms; connections from other writers and peers; and more than 10 new client inquiries. Guest blogging, my friends, is powerful. It works.
What Did You Say, Cutts?
Don’t forget, Cutts has said other things in the past that were discounted. A couple years ago, Cutts said a statement in a Google forum stating that press releases no longer held value for SEO. He was since proven wrong by SearchEngineLand experts, who did an actual case study with screenshot results that showed exactly the opposite of Cutts’ statement—that in fact, PR links were being counted by Google.
Copyblogger’s CEO Weighs In
The CEO of Copyblogger, Brian Clark, said it best on Twitter: Why change because Matt Cutts said something? Build quality, no matter what. (For more, read Copyblogger’s blog on why guest blogging isn’t done yet.)
Excellent advice. Don’t change what’s working because one person said something. Keep it up, and always maintain quality—and you’ll always see results.
