Episode Summary
Organic traffic is essential to online strategy, and so it’s the primary goal of many companies that implement a digital system to acquire customers.
To this end, companies strive to create good content to reach the right audience through their digital channels. But it’s not enough to have amazing content; people have to see it. Even large brands have to focus on building links to better their search ranking.
That is why there are companies that do off-site SEO work that could improve your search presence and contribute to your brand image. One of them is uSERP.
In this episode of Content Logistics, our host Camille Trent welcomes Jeremy Moser, the CEO of uSERP. Camille and Jeremy get into the importance of off-site SEO work and investing in it. They discuss link building, SEO tools, and which activities actually work.
Guest Profile
- Name: Jeremy Moser
- What he does: Jeremy Moser is CEO of uSERP.
- Company: uSERP
- Noteworthy: Jeremy is the co-founder and CEO of uSERP, a digital brand-building agency. He's also the Chief Marketing Officer at Wordable, which he acquired in 2020. On the side, he runs Copy Course, where he teaches copywriting.
Key Insights
- Relationships are the king of off-page SEO work. As a search engine optimization technique, link building is an action aimed at improving search engine visibility. There are many tips and strategies for building links, and Jeremy believes that relationships are key. "Building relationships with blog owners, site owners, journalists, going straight to the source, and kind of just building those relationships first-hand — it's just going to have the biggest impact over time. Anything else tends to be a really short-term mindset, where maybe you're praying and praying. You're scraping a list of around 5,000 different sites; you're spamming them an email and asking them for a link. I'm sure anyone listening to this who owns a website has seen those emails come in. You'd probably just hit ‘spam’ and move them to the trash. That kind of stuff can work in some spaces where it's less competitive."
- The importance of unique data. The quality and quantity of your backlinks can help your site rank better. To get backlinks to your site, you need to know what people are linking to and why. Jeremy explains why unique data represent a practical approach. "This is going to be things like unique studies, or survey your existing customer base or maybe people in this niche and ask them really interesting questions that people haven't asked before in a certain study. So then you can compile a lot of that data. And that's just so useful when you're reaching out to different journalists or media owners. And you're saying, 'Hey, I surveyed a thousand people in X, Y, Z space, and here's all the crazy interesting stuff that we found. Feel free to take a look at this, and let me know if you want to chat more about it.' And that alone is going to drive a ton of really high quality backlinks to your page."
- You need really good content, but you also need to distribute it. Common link-building strategies include content marketing, creating valuable tools, fixing broken links, and public relations. According to Jeremy, good content is just the basics, so people can at least consider you. However, it should be distributed and promoted so it can reach your audience. "When we're looking at things like studies, one of the best things we've seen is sourcing expert quotes. So if you're going to do a study in a certain niche, go interview 10, 20, 30, or 40 different people in that space and get their thoughts for your article. That not only adds value to your piece, but it also gives you that kind of built-in distribution network where if you're scratching their back, they're probably going to scratch yours at the end of the day."
Episode Highlights
What Do You Need for Link Building?
“You need a really good piece of content, where people are landing on it and actually consuming it. It’s a good piece. It’s got a lot of unique data. It’s got custom images that maybe people can view. Maybe it has a video, too — that’s good for visual learners and keeps people on the page longer. You need all of this when we’re talking about link building because you don’t want to drive anyone to these pages for them to just bounce immediately. […]
Once you get a lot of that good quality content going, and you get that to start picking up some keywords and rankings, that’s when you want to start shifting your focus to building links directly to those pages because we’ve seen it having just the biggest impact overall. It’s obviously great to have a ton of links to your root domain overall and have a really good brand authority in that sense. But we see, even in competitive spaces, that it’s just not enough. You need links to specific pages, especially if you’re going up against big competitors. You want those pointing back to those unique pages beyond just your homepage, and so that’s where you start to really make the shift once you’ve published that great content.”
Useful SEO Tools
“Your first one should probably just be Ahrefs or Semrush. Just get familiar with those, especially if you’re doing this for the first time, or you’re looking to get someone on your team to start doing this. Definitely get them one of those tools. Just run them through. They each have their own free courses that you can dive into, and they are actually really helpful. They go pretty in-depth on not just what the tool can do for you but how to put that into action, things you can actually do, and campaigns you can actually start to run.”
What Activities Work and Don’t Work in 2022?
“Don’t start by doing a lot of cold emails. I’m sure if you’ve worked at a company or if you own a site, you get a lot of these emails on a weekly or daily basis asking you to add a link to certain posts. It’s just like nonstop spam, and it can work if you’re sending enough emails, but the conversion rate is probably half a percent or something like that. So you’re going to have to just send them a massive amount of emails; you’re probably going to piss off a lot of people in the process. So the results there are just not great, especially in the competitive space. […]
What we found to be key, for at least your initial focus, is just relationships. Just identify a list of 50–100 different companies that you would love to get a link from, mentioned from, or a story from, and just contact those. Start contacting those journalists — you could, maybe, follow them on Twitter or LinkedIn, build a real relationship with them, and prioritize the long game there.”
