So your new website needs backlinks. If you’ve ever worked on SEO for a new site, you’ve run into the challenge of trying to outrank websites with more authority than your site. More than likely these sites have more backlinks than you do – which is a huge contributing factor when we talk about “site authority”.
So this post is about a really simple strategy to get new backlinks – and when done successfully, it’s really convenient.
But I’ve got to warn you – this isn’t a perfect strategy.
A lot of these requests get lost in the noise. Understandable, considering people get on average around 88 emails a day.
Sometimes, these requests for backlinks get ignored since it isn’t a high priority.
Also, these requests for backlinks get denied entirely. They’ll respond, but it won’t be the kind of answer you’re looking for.
So what is the answer?
You need to craft a request for backlinks that is really hard to turn down or ignore.
That sounds like a tall order, however once you know what website owners want, it becomes much easier.
And if you’re interested in earning high-authority links, you’ll definitely need the knowledge of how to write a pitch for a backlink request.
Know what site owners want
There is a truth about getting links – and it’s not fair.
Sometimes bad websites get the best backlinks since they know how to pitch it.
What I mean is there are lots of websites that are deserving of backlinks because they have great content. But not all those websites craft a great pitch, so they don’t get linked to.
It sucks, it is unfair, but that’s the way it is.
The main takeaway is that websites don’t give backlinks to anyone with a domain.
Here’s an example of the type of garbage pitches that get sent out all the time:
(I just saw Tim share this on https://www.facebook.com/groups/ahrefsinsider/ which is a great FB group about Ahrefs, which you might need if you’re looking for good link targets )
What’s the benefit for the site?
The reason why any website accepts backlinks ultimately is to help themselves out.
Getting backlinks right is crucial for a great link building strategy, so almost every site wants to have the best links.
If you actually want a backlink, you need to explain to the site owners which benefit they will recieve.
This is massive.
You can’t afford ignoring this if you’re seriously trying to get lots of high-authority backlinks to your website.
Here’s what most webmasters look for in a link:
The content is relevant to their site
The content is detailed and deep
The content is well written/produced
The site is legitimate
Explain these in a short email. If you follow the steps I’ve shared with you, I guarantee you that you’ll get responses (and, yes, backlinks).
Backlinks, also called “inbound links” or “incoming links,” are created when one website links to another. The link to an external website is called a backlink. I’m sharing a lot of this information from Moz’s learning center – thats where I got started learning SEO and if you want to learn more you should check them out
Why backlinks are important?
Backlinks are really crucial for SEO because they represent a “vote of confidence” from one site to another.
In essence, backlinks to your website are a signal to search engines that others vouch for your content. If many sites link to the same webpage or website, search engines can infer that content is worth linking to, and therefore also worth surfacing on a SERP. So, earning these backlinks can have a positive effect on a site’s ranking position or search visibility.
Giving & Earning Backlinks
Earning backlinks is an essential component of off-site SEO. The process of obtaining these links is known as link earning or link building.
Some backlinks are inherently more valuable than others. Followed backlinks from trustworthy, popular, high-authority sites are considered the most desirable backlinks to earn, while backlinks from low-authority, potentially spammy sites are typically at the other end of the spectrum. Whether or not a link is followed (i.e. whether a site owner specifically instructs search engines to pass, or not pass, link equity) is certainly relevant, but don’t entirely discount the value of nofollow links. Even just being mentioned on high-quality websites can give your brand a boost.
The video below details a little bit about how Google looks at the quality of a backlink:
Just as some backlinks you earn are more valuable than others, links you create to other sites also differ in value. When linking out to an external site, the choices you make regarding the page from which you link (its page authority, content, search engine accessibility, and so on) the anchor text you use, whether you choose to follow or nofollow the link, and any other meta tags associated with the linking page can have a heavy impact on the value you confer.
Competitive backlink research
Backlinks can be time-consuming to earn. New sites or those expanding their keyword footprint may find it difficult to know where to start when it comes to link building. That’s where competitive backlink research comes in: By examining the backlink profile (the collection of pages and domains linking to a website) to a competitor that’s already ranking well for your target keywords, you can gain insight about the link building that may have helped them. A tool like Ahrefs can help uncover these links so you can and target those domains in your own link building campaigns.
Having done SEO for several years, I run into people all the time who aren’t always thinking about 404s, redirects, backlinks, spiders, canonicals, and indexing like we do. Talking about this stuff in public will get a confused looking person with their eyes glazing over.
That’s typical, but when you get the same blank stare from the decision-maker at your company, this could be a bigger issue.
SEO is a crucial part of any company’s success. Lots of CEOs and small business owners are really under-educated and nervous about SEO. They know they need it, but they don’t understand how SEO works or get the time commitment it takes or the value it brings.
Whether you work for an agency or an in-house marketing team, trying to convince executives to bolster their SEO budget can be a good challenge. There are some simple tricks, though, that can help you communicate the importance of SEO and the reasoning behind your tactics and choices.
1. Help Them Learn SEO Terminology
Many fields have their own industry jargons, SEO too, no exceptions. The same way you start nodding off when accountants get excited about massive spreadsheets, somebody from another department will lose you when you start talking in industry buzzwords.
Don’t be like these guys! “NO BRANDCUFFS!”
Starting a conversation with this in mind is a great way to start.
Take time to teach and educate your audience about the basics of SEO and clearly define any and all jargon terms. Clarifying, defining and discussing relevant metrics can also be handy in helping your audience get a better grasp of what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.
2. Describe Exactly Why You’re Taking a Certain Plan of Action
SEO involves lots of hard work that happens behind the scenes and often, it doesn’t bring overnight results.
Lots of people in the business world have trouble trusting SEO since the results don’t seem to come in their desired timeframe. It can be challenging convincing your bosses to take your recommendations without a set timeframe or concrete benchmarks.
As you explain why you chose to do something or why you made a certain decision, try to keep the overall big picture or goal in mind and to explain both what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.
For example, if you discovered an epidemic of duplicate content on the site, you might immediately set about rewriting the content or redirecting unneeded pages the ones you want to focus on. Your boss may then question you about that. After all, why not leave those pages alone because the more content – even duplicate content – is just more exposure, right?
And because you’re knowledgeable on SEO – you know about how duplicate content doesn’t help your site. And when they discuss it with you, you could say ” well Google doesn’t like it.” but you need to explain more to get your boss the right information.
Instead, explain a little more about how Google works, how the same content would literally compete with itself on the search engines, and all the other reasons beyond “Google doesn’t like it.” They’ll have fewer questions when you pre-load them with the right answers.
3. Craft the Right Message for the Right Audience
Depending on how large your organization is, maybe you have regular meetings with lots of different departments. Employees from marketing and the IT department, all the way up to the c-suite are going to have questions about what’s happening and why SEO is important.
Someone from IT would like to know the technical issues as well as any bugs or fixes that need working out. The marketing department would be more interested in how SEO is attracting the right people to your site, and the CEO will likely care less about what your SEO plan is, as long as it boosts the company’s bottom line.
If you want higher buy-in and support for your SEO plan, you need to relate to your audience. Then you can craft your presentation in a way that “speaks their language.”
For example, a meeting with IT department may detail which technical implementation is necessary for making the website more mobile-friendly. A similar meeting with leadership may involve discussions about the time and resources that your SEO plan will need, the opportunities that it will open up, and the potential ROI that can result should the plan be successful.
4. Collect Data
When you speak to people who aren’t educated about SEO, you might get a weird stare or sarcasm. They may think you could be making stuff up to take advantage of their ignorance.
That’s why data and documentation to back up your SEO strategies, your SEO wins, and your reports. Again, you should always be remembering to focus on the kind of metrics that would be most beneficial and interesting to the audience. Keep your explanation simple and limit SEO jargon.
5. Increase Your SEO & Personal Credibility
It can be hard, proving the power of SEO to a CEO. It can also be just as difficult for them to take you seriously.
How do you improve your own credibility so your leadership listens to you?
It begins with leading your department. Answer questions customers may have in the company’s website content, write articles on behalf of your company, and become a valuable industry resource by providing educational content like a how-to guide.
Like I said above, you’ll need to be documenting all of these things to show how your SEO effort helps by contributing to an increase in the company’s bottom line. To accomplish this, you may try things like:
Record conversion data from organic search traffic and tie that number to company earnings. Setup Google Webmaster Search Console & Google Analytics, for monitoring revenue from contact forms and e-commerce, which will speak to leadership and the marketing department.
Report on how you are doing compared to competitors. Create a list of 3-10 competitors who are currently beating your company for your most important keywords and show them the average monthly search volume of those keywords or terms are. Showing these lost opportunities can be enough to spur any executive to bolster and support your SEO efforts.
5. How Your SEO Sees SEO
Several company executives realize that SEO is a critical part of their company’s success. However, they may not know or care to know how SEO works.
That’s why they want someone to do it for them.
However, you can geek out on them all day long about how this or that is doing great and blowing the competition out of the water, and they just won’t seem to get on board with your enthusiasm.
Again, all they care about is company revenue.
Sometimes CEO’s know about SEO and get the basics on how it works. You should still refrain from getting overzealous and spare them the numbers and statistics. You can communicate via SEO topics they know about, but fight the urge to go really deep. Maybe they’re interested, however, they’re super busy and their primary concern is whether their investment in SEO is worth it.
The best way to do this is agreeing on some indicators of success and performance ahead of time before the campaign gets started. Because SEO takes time, bi-monthly reporting meetings are great for keeping leaders in the know, reassuring them that you’re moving towards those goals.
It can be challenging getting buy-in for SEO initiatives. It can also be frustrating trying to communicate with people who don’t know the nature and challenges of working on getting sites to rank. Know your audience, prove the value of SEO, and always using data to back-up the successes of your strategy are some ways these difficult and frustrating conversations can become more successful.
Google is the latest big tech company to make a move into banking and personal financial services: The company is gearing up to offer checking accounts to consumers, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal, starting as early as next year. Google is calling the project “Cache,” and it’ll partner with banks and credit unions to offer the checking accounts, with the banks handling all financial and compliance activities related to the accounts.
Google’s Caesar Sengupta spoke to the WSJ about the new initiative, and Sengupta made clear that Google will be seeking to put its financial institution partners much more front-and-center for its customers than other tech companies have perhaps done with their financial products. Apple works with Goldman Sachs on its Apple Card credit product, for instance, but the credit card is definitely presented primarily as an Apple product.
So why even bother getting into this game if it’s leaving a lot of the actual banking to traditional financial institutions? Well, Google obviously stands to gain a lot of valuable information and insight on customer behavior with access to their checking account, which for many is a good picture of overall day-to-day financial life. Google says it’s also intending to offer product advantages for both consumers and banks, including things like loyalty programs, on top of the basic financial services. It’s also still considering whether or not it’ll charge service fees, per Sengupta — not doing so would definitely be an advantage over most existing checking accounts available.
Google already offers Google Pay, and its Google Wallet product has hosted some features beyond simple payments tracking, including the ability to send money between individuals. Meanwhile, rivals, including Apple, have also introduced payment products, and Apple of course recently expanded into the credit market with Apple Card. Facebook also introduced its own digital payment product earlier this week, and earlier this year announced its intent to build its own digital currency called “Libra” along with partners.
The initial financial partners that Google is working with include Citigroup and Stanford Federal Credit Union, and their motivation per the WSJ piece appears to be seeking out and attracting younger and more digital-savvy customers who are increasingly looking to handle more of their lives through online tools. Per Sengupta’s comments, they’ll also benefit from Google’s ability to work with large sets of data and turn those into value-add products, but the Google exec also said the tech company doesn’t use Google Pay data for advertising, nor does it share that data with advertisers. Still, convincing people to give Google access to this potentially sensitive area of their lives might be an uphill battle, especially given the current political and social climate around big tech.
Is it the web page that’s slow or is it your network connection? In the future, Google’s Chrome web browser may have an answer for you. Google announced today a plan to identify and label websites that typically load slowly by way of clear badging. The company says it may later choose to identify sites that are likely to be slow based on the user’s device and current network conditions, as well.
Google hasn’t yet determined how exactly the slow websites will be labeled but says it may experiment with different options to see which makes the most sense.
For example, a slow-loading website may show a “Loading…” page that includes a warning, like a caution icon and text that reads “usually loads slow.” Meanwhile, a fast website may display a green progress indicator bar at the top of the page instead of a blue one.
And for links, Chrome may use the context menu to help users know if the site will be slow so you can decide whether or not you want to click.
In the long-term, Chrome’s goal will be to identify and badge websites offering “high-quality” experiences, which may include other factors beyond just the website’s speed. The company didn’t yet detail what those other factors may be but says the identification process will include more stringent criteria that are rolled out gradually over time. However, the goal will be to make these “good user experiences” something any web developer can achieve.
With the recent addition of Pagespeed Insights to Search Console and even posts from Google that speed is now a ranking factor, if your site is slow now is the time to fix it.
I’ve been working a lot of overtime so far in November, with Black Friday coming in a few weeks and new clients and oh yes the sky is falling again in the local Local Search world. Some people are calling it Possum 2.0 – and others are calling it Bedlam.
Yeah – sounds about right. Threads on Bright Local, Google WHC, Search Engine Land, and numerous facebook groups are all echoing people’s reports of massive changes in the map pack starting at the beginning of this month around November 5.
What Does Google Bedlam Look Like in the Wild
I have to admit, I’m kind of annoyed at that heading, it would’ve been so much easier to make a possum joke. Anyways – here’s a visualization from Local Viking, a tool I use primarily for checking out where a GMB (Google My Business page) ranks in different areas of a city. It also lets you schedule GMB posts too.
Here’s one of my own local listings rankings in the Sacramento area on October 31, 2019. These rankings have been very stable for about 5 years now.
Once the Bedlam update hit on November 5th, 2019, we saw this listing was nowhere to be found in the map packs, even though we still rank well organically for the keyword search.
We didn’t panic too much because the next day on November 6th, 2019 it seemed like we bounced back into the fray… and traffic to the site wasn’t visibly down much at all.
As of today, November 12, 2019 – it doesn’t feel like the dust has quite settled yet – day by day the listings are still jumping around all over the place.
Google Bedlam’s Actual Impact on Traffic
We talk about rankings a lot and that’s these tools do their best to measure visibility on the SERPS, but here’s the weird thing. In spite of the “visibility” issues and “lost rankings” I’m still seeing more traffic to this GMB page than I have seen all quarter. Feels like the listing is being shown more than the tool is reporting. When I check my hand I see the listing pop up about 15-20% of the time. I’ve been checking it pretty frequently on multiple devices at home, at my office, and while I drive around to meetings in the greater Sacramento area. Sometimes I see it and do a little dance, sometimes I don’t see it and I find myself cursing Google, lol.
So although the rankings and visualizations look bad, the actual impact is pretty low, at least for me. Posts are seeing record numbers of views and my maps traffic is up 800% vs last month.
Spam Listings Winning Right Now
What I am noticing is a lot more spammy listings keyword-stuffed entries with no reviews, “low quality” GMBs that don’t have a lot of citations and have really poor rating averages, and an increase in fake address GMB’s showing up. Proximity to city center appears to have a bigger impact than before – then again, the listing I’m showing is pretty central to downtown Sacramento so I’m still out on how that factors in exactly.
The general consensus in the SEO community seems to people going into a holding pattern – they don’t want to overreact and see how this shakes out. I’m running some more tests this week to test some theories, so I’ll update this post soon to reflect what I learn.
Google is now rolling out the highly anticipated page speed report in Search Console that was shown off earlier this year.
Google officially previewed the new page speed report this past May, but it was first uncovered back in February. That marks roughly 9 months of waiting for this report to launch.
Google Search Console Page Speed Report
Google’s new page speed report pulls data from the Chrome User Experience Report and automatically groups URLs into the categories of “Fast,” Moderate,” and “Slow.” It looks just like other Search Console reports that group URLs together based on how well they meet certain criteria (such as having valid structured data markup).
The report also identifies the issues causing slowdowns and further categorizes pages by grouping URLs with similar issues together.
Clicking on one of the identified issues to learn more information will bring users to Google’s Page Speed Insights tool. From there, site owners can learn more about how to optimize their pages to solve the specific issue.
In addition to checking on the slow and moderate pages, you can drill deeper into the fast pages to learn more about their performance:
Google recommends using this report both for monitoring performance over time and for tracking website fixes. When an issue is fixed, site owners can return to the report to track whether users actually experienced a performance improvements.
Google says this report, is currently “experimental” in the sense that it will be revised and improved upon over time. However, unlike typical Google experiments, this report will be rolling out to everyone.
You know what they say, keep your friends close and your enemies closer. So I’m always watching to see what strategies other people are trying against me. Sometimes you see something useful. This isn’t one of those times.
Google announced it will stop indexing and ranking Flash content in its search engine. This means Google will no longer process content within Flash SWF files, either on websites designed fully in Flash or web pages that have portions of the page in Flash.
What is Flash. Flash was introduced in 1996 by Adobe as a way of producing richer content on the web and on computers. It was a very popular web publishing platform in the late 90s but as time went on, fewer and fewer browsers continued to support Flash.
What is changing. Back in 2008 Google first began crawling Flash files and a year later, Google got more sophisticated in how it indexed those SWF files. But it never really ranked content within Flash files all that well.
Google’s announcement. Google said, “Google Search will stop supporting Flash later this year.” Specifically, Google said “in Web pages that contain Flash content, Google Search will ignore the Flash content.” “Google Search will stop indexing standalone SWF files,” also Google added. That means Google won’t be indexing or ranking content within Flash web sites or Flash elements on a web page.
The impact. Google said, “most users and websites won’t see any impact from this change.” Apple stopped supporting Flash when it introduced the iPhone on those devices and the company may have been credited as killing Flash. As we said above, fewer and fewer browsers have supported Flash. Google said “Flash is disabled by default in Chrome (starting in version 76), Microsoft Edge, and FireFox 69.”
Alternatives. Google said you should look towards HTML5 and other newer forms of JavaScript. But Flash is something Google will stop working with for indexing.
Why we care. If you have a website fully designed in Flash or parts of your website’s content in Flash, and you depend on Google search traffic, you should really consider updating your website and stop using Flash going forward.
Google announced Thursday that Site Kit is available globally for WordPress users.
What is Site Kit. Site Kit is a WordPress plugin that allows users to set up and configure Google services to get insights in their WordPress dashboards.
Users can see stats from Google Search Console, Google Analytics, PageSpeed Insights, AdSense all in one place.
Because it’s a plugin, it doesn’t require source code editing. Site owners can also assign roles and grant individual permissions
The company released Site Kit in developer preview earlier this year and says thousands of developers have installed it.
What does the dashboard offer? There is a main dashboard, shown above that provides a high-level view of significant changes and how users are finding your site.
Individual page reports show how specific content is performing.
You can also do things like enable PageSpeed Insights and Analytics in order to “see whether page load time affects bounce rate.”
Why we should care. The ability to see all of the metrics about your site’s SEO that are captured across these various Google products in one with Site Kit will give WordPress users an out-of-the-box dashboard experience without the headache of pulling data from these disparate sources.
Google has just announced that it’s buying wearable company Fitbit for $2.1 billion. In a blog post announcing the news, Google SVP of devices and services Rick Osterloh said that the Fitbit purchase is “an opportunity to invest even more in Wear OS as well as introduce Made by Google wearable devices into the market.”
The news comes just days after a report from Reuters, which claimed that Google was in talks to buy the popular fitness tracker company.
Under the deal, Fitbit will be joining Google itself. (It’s similar to the current situation with Nest, which is wholly under Google now, compared to when Alphabet had originally acquired the smart home company but left it as a separate division under the corporate structure.)
According to a separate press release issued by Fitbit, the company will still take privacy for health and fitness data seriously, noting that “Fitbit health and wellness data will not be used for Google ads.”
The acquisition makes a lot of sense: Google has spent years trying (and largely failing) to break into the wearables market with its Wear OS platform, but it’s struggled to make a real impact.