Uploaded byCraig Bradshaw
Do you want more links or more money?
The webinar by Craig Bradshaw discusses the misconception that link acquisition is the primary driver of SEO success. It emphasizes shifting focus from quantity of links to creating valuable content that drives conversions and traffic, while understanding that links are just one of many ranking factors. The ultimate goal is to align outreach efforts with true marketing purposes to enhance brand visibility and economic value.
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Do you want more links or more money?
- 1. mediaworks free webinar effectiveoutreach for your brand: do you want more links or more money? craig bradshaw – head of creative
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- 3. www.mediaworks.co.uk In the fast-pacedworld of digital marketing, it seems everybody is clamouring for one thing: links. But are they really the holy grail of rankings?
- 4. www.mediaworks.co.uk Google uses over200 ranking factors to determine the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) position a site should occupy. As links are just one of these factors, you could be spending too much time, money and effort on stockpiling citations and mentions from third party sites. In short, could these efforts be streamlined to improve your digital strategy?
- 5. your host … Mediaworks |Game-Changing Content Marketing | Leeds Business Week www.mediaworks.co.uk Craig Bradshaw Head of Creative
- 6. Mediaworks | Game-ChangingContent Marketing | Leeds Business Week www.mediaworks.co.uk running caffeine photo-jacking likes :
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- 8. www.mediaworks.co.uk this isn’t aboutone simple thing you can do to get more links
- 9. www.mediaworks.co.uk it’s about encouragingyou to change the way you think about how search engines work
- 10. www.mediaworks.co.uk and how youcan be more incisive with your outreach, and better measure the economic value of the work you’re doing to earn links
- 11. www.mediaworks.co.uk Google has openlystated that they are a machine learning company. In the future, only a machine will know what it takes to rank well, and it will never be able to explain it to you Moreover, it will have multiple contingencies, will constantly be evolving, and it will spot patterns and connections that we will never think of connecting.
- 12. www.mediaworks.co.uk By focusing onSEO strategy purely on links, you may be ignoring a plethora of non-link metrics that correlate with high vs. low rankings. And you never know when a machine will decide that links no longer influence successful searches for users
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- 14. case study www.mediaworks.co.uk a genuinequote from the SEO Manager of a FTSE 100 company …
- 15. www.mediaworks.co.uk seo manager: Iwant 20 links from this next project. me: we don’t think link volume numbers are a good indicator of the success of a campaign. me: what if we only built one link, but that link generated 1,000 visits and £50k worth of new business – would you still deem the campaign a failure? seo manager: yes. everyone knows seo is all about links. me: …
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- 17. www.mediaworks.co.uk The problem withthis statement is that it confuses correlation and causation Correlation - when two or more things or events tend to occur at about the same time and might be associated with each other Causation – when two or more things are connected by a cause/effect relationship
- 18. www.mediaworks.co.uk For example, insick people, a runny nose and a sore throat correlate to each other - they tend to show up in the same patients. That doesn't mean runny noses cause sore throats, or that sore throats cause runny noses, however. Forgetting that leads to sloppy thinking – the same is true for links.
- 19. www.mediaworks.co.uk This is keybecause SEO has turned from an exercise, where we essentially try and acquire/point links to a piece of content Instead it has now evolved into something where we have to go out and earn a wide range of ranking signals
- 20. www.mediaworks.co.uk In order tomake this change, we need to think smarter about outreach In order to earn ranking signals, we need to have an audience that will help amplify your message; whether that’s: • the content that you create • the unique value that you provide • your core service/ product • the message about your brand
- 21. evidence of linksfading www.mediaworks.co.uk
- 22. www.mediaworks.co.uk link volume alonehas not been a reliable, correlative metric for rankings for almost a decade
- 23. www.mediaworks.co.uk Position Ranking URL ExtLinks (Domain) Ref Domains (Domain) Ext Links (URL) Ref Domains (URL) 1 http://www.silverbean.com/ 1,202 125 414 83 2 http://www.icrossing.co.uk/ 11,545 934 5,585 480 3 http://www.statusdigital.co.uk/ 8,595 47 8,593 46 4 http://www.jellyfish.co.uk/ 68,678 634 56,933 252 5 http://www.saberlightdigital.co.uk/ 7,869 20 7,867 18 6 http://daykinandstorey.co.uk/about/what-we-do/ we-do/ 14,812 66 1 1 7 http://www.latitudegroup.com/ 17,632 525 15,312 332 8 https://www.mediaworks.co.uk/ 1,076 185 86 20 9 http://www.coastdigital.co.uk/ 237,059 460 173,648 260 10 http://www.koozai.com/ 46,121 1,660 13,282 588 rankings for “digital marketing agency” on google.co.uk, taken on 25th march 2015
- 24. www.mediaworks.co.uk the rankings forthis keyword (and many others) shows numerous examples where the pages with the highest link volumes are being outranked by pages with lower link volumes at both domain and page level. there’s simply not enough of a correlation between link volume alone and rankings for this keyword for a conclusion to be drawn on what drives the ranking result.
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- 26. www.mediaworks.co.uk instead of focusingon traditional link building focus your efforts on outreach that will address traditional marketing purposes, and try to earn links through differentiation such as …
- 27. links get traffic www.mediaworks.co.uk linksthat get traffic
- 28. www.mediaworks.co.uk links aren’t thewin! instead of focusing on link acquisition, focus on earning attention and trust, and look at ways to earn the link afterwards you are responsible for the website traffic of a real business, not just for ‘building links’ invest in tactics that will serve multiple marketing purposes and solve a searcher’s problem
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- 30. www.mediaworks.co.uk came from anunlinked brand mention!
- 31. www.mediaworks.co.uk wouldn’t have beenable to claim the success without the link!
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- 33. www.mediaworks.co.uk Use Demographics datain Analytics to find interests of people that visit your site, or break down your site’s visitors into different customer profiles. For example, if they are interested in films, prospect and outreach the key sites that fit that particular demographic.
- 34. www.mediaworks.co.uk Alternatively, you canalso use Facebook Graph Search to find interests of people that like a certain page, work for a certain company etc. Moz has a great guide here - http://moz.com/blog/facebook-graph-search- guide
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- 36. www.mediaworks.co.uk and it onlytook us the time it took to send a polite request to a journalist relative cost of acquiring the same amount of traffic through PPC £1,606
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- 38. www.mediaworks.co.uk although traffic mightbe up, you need to ask yourself, am I making improvements in a way that means success for my client? If you’re earning links that drive conversions, these are the results that convince companies to increase their spend on SEO
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- 40. www.mediaworks.co.uk Only a DomainAuthority 15 website!
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- 42. www.mediaworks.co.uk Display Planner inGoogle AdWords gives you valuable insight into the places that your target audience is likely to visit, or sites that are thematically relevant to the keyword/categories you want to target. Hypothetically, if a placement is a good source of goals/conversions through paid, it makes sense to try and do targeted outreach to that site too.
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- 44. www.mediaworks.co.uk being incisive ismuch better than throwing the kitchen sink at link building think about how to target people across the whole sales funnel; from providing information to genuine purchase intent
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- 47. www.mediaworks.co.uk Filter by organictraffic in the Acquisition section of GA, and then add ‘Landing Page’ as a secondary dimension. From here you can infer what keywords/categories are driving traffic to the site. You can also make judgements on what point a user is in the conversion funnel based on the content of these pages.
- 48. www.mediaworks.co.uk promote the toplanding pages through outreach, based on the stages of the funnel that you are wanting to target.
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- 50. www.mediaworks.co.uk the value ofa link is not embedded in the link itself the value of a link is derived from the knowledge used to best segment that will amplify your message, and the ability of the link to solve a customer’s problem
- 51. also known as… www.mediaworks.co.uk
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- 55. Princesway North Team ValleyTrading Estate Tyne & Wear NE11 0NF +44 (0)191 404 0100 [email protected]
Editor's Notes
- #23 Take a look at the top 10 ranking URLs for the keyword “Online Marketing Agencies” in the UK. I’ve used SERP Scraper from the URL Profiler team to scrape the ranking results, and URL Profiler itself to fetch the link data from Majestic.
- #24 Take a look at the top 10 ranking URLs for the keyword “Digital Marketing Agency” in the UK. I’ve used SERP Scraper from the URL Profiler team to scrape the ranking results, and URL Profiler itself to fetch the link data from Majestic.
- #25 We have ranking URL, external links and referring domains to the page and at a domain level. As you can see, there’s really no pattern here:
- #27 We have ranking URL, external links and referring domains to the page and at a domain level. As you can see, there’s really no pattern here: