Exactly how I will rank this page for ‘Northampton SEO’
SEO practices span all industries, the things we do to rank for ‘Northampton SEO’ are no different from dominating national financial markets, but here we’re competing with other people who know what they’re doing (apparently).
We think we’re better, so we launched this page on 27th September 2023 as a ‘flexing of our muscles’ to show potential clients that GSD really do get sh*t done.
If you’re looking for SEO services then you can request it below.
Intro
Yes, we do have a traditional SEO agency ‘arm’.
But we’re more than that, we invest in SEO ourselves, we grow our own businesses as well as our clients who are mostly with us through referrals or white label partnerships.
If you’re not familiar with white label SEO, it means that other companies like designers, web developers, PR agencies or even recruiters sell their clients SEO and we service it for them. So, in basic terms, we’re the experts that people who pretend they’re experts rely on to get sh*t done for them behind the scenes.
Specifically, if you’re looking for help with complex SEO problems, link building or attaining seriously high level digital PR links then we can help. Otherwise we’re probably not a good fit.
If you’re looking for a full service digital agency then it’s best you keep searching, but if you’re looking to actually get somewhere with SEO or Digital PR then get in touch.
Project ‘Northampton SEO’: Rules of Engagement
Our goal was simple, rank for ‘Northampton SEO’ above all the competing agencies for a few reasons:
Many agencies that are ranking really don’t know what they’re doing, most don’t even have a team to deal with SEO, let alone the knowledge.
We used to employ, hire or work with several of the now owners of competitors, but we’re still the boss.
The majority don’t even build links so shouldn’t class themselves as SEO agencies in our view.
Because we can.
Historically, we haven’t worked with clients directly so there has never been a need to rank, but now, why not? Let’s see how we get on, worst case no-one will read this anyway.
All of our current SEO clients, some of which are in Northampton, come to us through a white label ‘gig’ or referrals, we believe in getting sh*t done and not just working with anyone because they agree to pay our invoice.
Believe it or not, many agencies all over the world do not understand SEO intrinsically, they outsource many parts to specialists like us, especially when it comes to link building or creating pages like this to rank for very specific terms.
So, we’ve never needed to rank for local keywords to get customers, as they flock to us, but here we are.
The rules are simple: no holds barred.
Rank at the top of Google for the term ‘Northampton SEO’ ASAP without using any type of SEO technique that we wouldn’t sell to a client unless you’re using it to prove a point that SEO is often mis-sold.
We’ve even had a little competition in the office. A few leading members of our team are competing to see who gets the best results, the loser pays for the xmas party! It’s serious stuff.
I’m that confident that I will win this competition that I’m even going to document here exactly how I will do it, how I will beat them and every other SEO agency in Northampton in the process.
Follow my journey below, but first, let me tell you how I’ll start.
My thought process
I’ve been in SEO for the best part of 17 years now, a long old time and if I’m honest, not much has changed. Before you SEO fanboys start shouting “you’re wrong” and tune out of the rest of this page, let me explain.
SEO was always supposed to be about giving the user the best answer for the question they asked, simple as that.
Yes, along the way people like me have been able to ‘game’ the system in our favour, using white text, loads of headings, bolds, italics, buying links, directories, comment links, long pages full of content (the irony) and many more methods to gain an advantage.
The crux of what Google has tried to do has never changed, neither have the ways to deliver on that, it’s just these methods above have become the topical subject.
They have been automated, cracked down on and then frowned upon for no reason other than some minority used them incorrectly and got the ban hammer.
That doesn’t mean they didn’t (or still don’t) work. In fact I could show you case studies of our own personal websites that we have ranking using 3 of those frowned upon techniques that many have long since stopped using.
The reason that agencies have stopped using these methods isn’t because they don’t work, it’s because often they try short cuts, automation or simply listen to the wrong people rather than try it for themselves.
Even worse, are people like this:
The root of the issue is that, believe it or not, there no rules in SEO, there is no way you can really learn the subject without doing it yourself or following one of the very few SEO pros that will actually tell you relevant, actionable and more importantly ‘live’ information.
You can’t go to school and learn SEO, you can’t follow Googles guidelines unless you have £m’s in budgets to create the next meerkat, you have to learn it yourself and this is often the problem. The industry is actually dominated by people who have read SEO out of a book or who follow the guidelines of the people we are all trying to manipulate, do you really think Google will tell you how to defraud them out of £bn’s in ad revenue? No.
Anyway, back to the point of this section, my thought process.
As I have been in this industry for a long arse time, I can dissect a competitor, keyword or opportunity in a very short space of time. I don’t use many tools, systems or algorithms to determine my thinking, I use good old fashioned experience.
But, the most important thing in any SEO campaign is to be the same and different together, in equal amounts, let me explain.
The great thing about anything in the world of digital marketing is you can steal how other people are doing it.
Whether that’s your Facebook ads, your email marketing campaigns or your SEO - all the information you need to replicate the market leader is available online, for all to see.
SEO is perhaps the easiest to find.
A quick look at your competitors website, their content and backlink profile and you have all the knowledge you need to compete and beat them.
Within 10 seconds of scanning the website you can see if they’re using tactics like landing pages by keyword, stuffing content or using all the tools available to them like alt tags, schema, markup etc.
Next step is to look at their backlink profile, what are they doing? Using comments, guest posts, outreach, PR or anything else?
Then if you can identify a client you can analyse what they do for them too, it’s pretty easy if they leave a trail at the bottom of their website like “SEO by ABC Agency”.
Tangent notice, I find at least 60% of competitors using those little links at the bottom of their clients website, often they’re also hosting the website and then preaching about how they use white hat link building in their blogs and services pages.
Honestly, you couldn’t write how weird the SEO industry is.
So, you now know if the competitor is building SEO specific landing pages, how deep their onsite work is and how they build links. Combine with this information with the most crucial bit, if they’re a competitor on your search term, you can assume that Google likes what they’re doing, as it’s ranking anyway you can rule out any doubt that what they’re doing could be wrong.
This is the most important factors in SEO and it’s often the most overlooked.
Agencies will literally tell you that methods like comment links that were frowned upon and apparently punishable by banning years ago are black hat while ranking behind someone doing exactly that.
The proof is in the pudding.
Let’s use a real competitor for Northampton SEO to demonstrate how I’d do it.
I’m going to pick on POD Digital…Sorry.
Firstly, they have a landing page dedicated to Northampton, it’s got a decent amount of content on it, the titles are forced to include ‘Northampton’ , they’re not fully utilising alt tags, file paths, image descriptions and they’re using the exact same template for other locations.
My thoughts are that they’ve done a 40% job, created the page, gone through all the effort but haven’t maximised the opportunity, used all the tools they have available to rank better and have been a bit lazy in copying all the content on other pages. But hey, it ranks OK right so we can’t be too hard on them.
Now on to their links…
Well, they don’t have any links to the Northampton page specifically other than a measly directory so I’ll jump to the homepage to see their tactics.
19000 LINKS!
Wow, ahhh hold that thought, it’s from only 200 odd domains, awks.
First sign of something being off.
Ahh, we have some golden nuggets here, they have links from all their clients so we’ll go in to that next.
Other than a few directories, a few guest blogs and author bios the majority of the links are coming from their clients websites.
It also looks like they have some redirects from old Creare links, if they’ve done some link stealing here then credit, but it’s probably something more ‘normal’ than this based on their tactics.
Next step is to check on the links their clients have, this will tell us exactly what they’re actually doing for their ££.
It was nice of them to leave us a handy list.
I checked 13 of their clients at random, here’s what I found.
They don’t actively build links, the only evidence I can see to the contrary is in 2021 where they did some guest blog work but the placements were super poor and the links were on pages that had multiple other ‘sponsored’ links within the irrelevant content.
Their onsite work is pretty ok, they do create pages and content that adheres to the fundamentals of what is needed to rank, but they miss the cream on top and don’t go deep enough.
This could mean they don’t sell SEO currently so no judgements here, just an example of how I would judge a competitor and in this example my competitor happens to be an SEO agency in Northampton.
Now I have all the info I need to decide my starting strategy.
I’m going to do what all good artists do, steal.
Stealing Pod’s and other ranking websites SEO strategies, link building methods and onsite practices gives me a foothold and shortcuts many years of learning.
Once that is created I will then fill in the gaps, create the things they and others do not do, for example from my scans of POD and other agencies in the area I can see that no-one is really utilising social media, forums or question and answer websites for their link building.
My strategy will be to copy and do all the things others are not, something that has worked for me in industries from local plumbers all the way up to global $bn SAAS start ups.
Now, let’s go in to the specifics.
Some more detail about the Google algo
So How Does It All Work Anyway? A Little Look At Google Algorithms And SEO
In 1998, a couple of young nerds named Larry Page and Sergey Brin were busy knocking one out in a basement, so the story goes, to release a little search engine they called Google. For those of us who can still remember, unlike its competitors of the time, Google wasn’t riddled with ads on its homepage, in fact it wasn't too different to what we have today. A logo and a search box. Type in what you want to see, and hit enter.
Search results in 1998 were still based on the same metrics as 2023, namely search relevance, authority, and quality. Only difference was the rudimentary algorithm ‘PageRank’ from those early days was easily gamable. Since then, many algorithm updates and iterations have been introduced to Google in an effort to ensure its visitors only see the most useful information, and in 2021, Google’s ‘MUM’ showed up, that’s right. Google’s own MUM, or the model T-5 as they call it. Just 96 away from the T-101 then, eh… Nothing to worry about, right?
This algorithm is claimed to be 10,000 times more effective than their last one -’BERT’, in filtering through content to determine what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’. It’s all pretty interesting to dig into if you’re into the more intricate details of how things work.
Anyway, today we’ll go through some basics about Google, just to lay out the foundation of how the old girl works, and what prospective users can expect from the engine and what the engine expects from them if it’s their intention to use it, (which it should be).
What is Google and how does it work?
Google is a search engine that uses ‘crawlers’ and ‘indexing’ to look through content, identify useful information and imagery, and then present it to visitors looking for answers. Crawling is exactly how it sounds. Google is constantly trawling through millions of web pages, looking for both great content, and anything that might be deemed as cheating the algorithm.
Of course, these days there’s more to Google than just the search engine. It’s useful for A LOT more than just checking to find out if armadillos enjoy listening to jazz music. From Docs and Sheets, to Gmail and Meets (drop the mic), it has useful tools for days. That’s not what we’re here to talk about though. We’re talking about search engine algorithms, SEO, and PageRank. So let’s see what, from the horse’s mouth, gets Google going.
Relevance
Google’s search engine wants to provide the most relevant results it can for its users. It’s crawlers search high and low to find the best pages, so you need to be sure you’re creating content with SEO in mind. This requires keyword research that focuses on your niche. It also means you need to get to grips with things like keyword density, and how to structure your content so it is well presented, in a way that compliments your niche. These days Google is just as good at looking at pictures than it is at reading text, so keep everything relevant!
Authority
Domain authority, or DA, is generally based on a webpage’s backlink profile, and can be effectively measured by ‘Moz’ - an outside entity from Google that uses its own algorithms to measure the trifecta. The more backlinks pointing to your site, the more Google recognises it as an authority in your niche. This has been true since 1998, however, it’s worth repeating, back then there were a lot of ways to trick the algorithm into believing a poorly laid out website with little to no valuable content was a source of great knowledge.
In the modern era, to gain ‘topical authority’, your content still needs to be deemed as useful and original, with plenty of link juice to catch Google’s attention, and eventually start placing you in the ranking slots you deserve. It brings us to the third sector of our trifecta!
Quality
It’s hard to truly say what is the single most important metric that Google’s MUM looks for, but without a doubt, without quality, you will fail to rank. Quality means well-written, useful, relevant, as already mentioned, well-researched topics that are presented to viewers in an easily digestible way. If the quality is there, it’s safe to assume it will also be relevant, and with those two in check, the linking will follow, and before long you’re checking off all the boxes that Google wants to see.
Is Google worth using?
Yes. Love it or hate it for any reason you like, but Google is head and shoulders above the competition, reportedly taking over 90% of all global search queries annually. Although it has its controversies, it’s the place to be when it comes to search engines. For businesses and content creators, too, Google actually is a fair playground. They do everything they can to create an even playing field, and if you work as hard as the next person, you will see results equal to them, regardless of how ‘big’ their name is or how long they’ve been on the grind.
A little tip for the road…
If it’s your intention to find a place in Google’s top end rankings, you should make it your business to study how SEO works just as much as the topic you want to be the authority on. Make it easy for Google to appreciate your work, optimise the hell out of it, have it looked over by some trusted experts, and you’ll quickly have your toe in Google’s door, if that’s what you’re into.
Step 1: Research
The first part of any SEO campaign is research and within 30-minutes I’ve found a few things that interest me and give me a head start in this process.
The competition is strong, you have digital and SEO agencies alike, new and old ranking well, people who have been servicing clients in Northampton for over decade like Pod Digital, One Four Six, Freetimers and others. You also have more recent newcomers like Novus, Loop and Thrive (USA based so we’ll rule these out).
All are ranking on merit because they’re doing something well, but some have forced this ranking (which is fine by me) but it gives me a starting point.
As always with our campaigns, we start with looking at who is doing what onsite. It’s super easy to spot people who are trying to ‘game’ the system in their favour by using multiple landing pages with tedious titles and useless content just to fool the big G algorithm into ranking their page.
Cough cough.
Come on guys, it’s not 2010 anymore.
My research continues…
There are some websites that are still utilising very old school tactics, which is cool, they can still work but others have moved on are utilising link building methods that some would consider dodgy. I wouldn’t, for me what works, works. As long as the client is happy with your link building methods then who cares right?!
Others are using some cracking link building strategies. Clearly these guys know what they’re doing and kudos for implementing a solid strategy.
Penny pinching is certainly not happening here.
Many of the competition are not building links at all! What? How can you sell ‘SEO’ without building links for your clients?
Believe me, this has been going on for years and it’s not Northampton specific.
I could show you at least 15 Northampton SEO agencies who are selling an SEO service that they either know won’t work, or worse, they believe it will as they don’t understand it.
I know of one who shall remain nameless (think numbers) who actually sell an SEO package for hundreds of pounds a month and what they do for that money is submit you on Google My Business and then spend a third of your money on Google Adwords so your traffic grows. They actually think this is ‘SEO’ - it gets worse - they have 50 clients paying for this.
Note to whoever is selling the above, please call me I would like to give you a job!
Back to reality.
Anyway, as you can probably sense amongst this loose attempt to take you through my thought process, I’m pretty passionate about this stuff.
I know that many of the competing websites that stand in my way are using old school landing page tactics, some are good at link building, some aren’t doing any. So where do I start?
Step 2: Content
Any normal person would create a typical keyword specific landing page like these guys have done averagely , make their life easier and only talk about dreary USP’s and the services they pretend to offer, not me, I like to be different and push the boundaries, not just for me and my clearly personal beef, but my clients performance too.
If I’m not at the forefront of what works in SEO, how can I be qualified to sell it?!
Any decent keyword, with more than a few competitors will need some dedicated content to rank on any search engine.
Think of it like this, if you were searching for a 65 inch 4k TV and you landing on the Argos homepage, rather than the specific product you wanted you’d be annoyed wouldn’t you?
This is why Google prefers to be super specific with the pages it ranks, it tries to match them to the searches query as much as possible. So you can make G’s life easier by including keywords that match your intended targets queries, like creating a page about Northampton SEO for example ;) where you talk about that term as much as possible in a way that doesn’t offend the reader.
This would then more than likely be the most relevant page on your website for that keyword, and so it would rank best.
Most people go about this process by using multiple related search terms, you would see things like “how much does a Northampton SEO cost” and “Do I need a Northampton SEO agency” as titles on their pages, followed by some ultra generic content just for the sake of it.
Although it still can work, it’s for different reasons than it used to.
Gone are the days where you could spam lots of titles and paragraphs with your ‘Northampton SEO’ words and know it would work, you have to be a little more switched on these days to do it accurately, but there are still the old traditionalists who prefer the sledgehammer approach.
What I decided to do was be a little more creative, to show off our abilities and knowledge in a playful way, rather than create a boring landing page that no-one will ever read. And here we are, this is what happened, some back-handed attempt to belittle the competition while proving a point, the narcissist in me never sleeps!
Anyway, regardless of the ‘why’ the ‘what’ is important, at the end of the campaign we’ll have the top ranking page of any Northampton SEO agency and it will tell you exactly how I did it, with a few boring tangents along the way, like this sentence.
The content on your content page needs to achieve a few things, first it must be related and targeted at one keyword (ideally) but you can use the latent semantic indexing style, using variants like:
Northamptonshire SEO agency
SEO agency in Northampton
Best Northampton search engine agency
You get the point.
Years ago, you wouldn’t need to be clever, you could just write a load of words on a page and it would rank. In fact I did, I conducted an experiment in a now sold agency of mine where we published a page of some 40,000 words talking about ‘Leicester SEO’ - guess what? Within a week it was number 1 on Google.
Did we care? Yes.
Did it get us any more business? No.
And there lies the dilemma, no-one who is actually a potential customer will actually search for ‘Leicester SEO’ or ‘Northampton SEO’. They will search the problems they face, not the solution, as they probably don’t know the solution yet, that’s the job of the agency to educate them. But first you have to get their attention.
The theory is simple, rank higher for searches that your potential customers will look for. For example, If this page was actually trying to get SEO customers in Northampton rather than some vague attempt to make my ego bigger, I would be hoping to rank for terms like “how do I get more customers through my website” or “ways to increase my restaurants revenue”.
Those are the search terms that potential customers are actually looking for, search terms like ‘Northampton SEO’ are basically a dick swinging contest (can I still say that?) - Maybe it’s a genital swinging contest these days - who knows.
That’s why I don’t really care about what I write here. I know that only a few competitors with loads of time to kill will get this far down the page and no potential customers will find it anyway.
For anyone who has missed it - and because I probably need to get another repetition of ‘Northampton SEO’ in here - what I’ve been doing is finding a way to get my target keywords (you know what they are by now) without being super boring, not sure if I’ve achieved that, you can be the judge.
Quick tangent on keyword stuffing
SEO Dark Age Tactics That Went Out With The Woolly Mammoth: Keyword Stuffing
Picture a prepared whole turkey that’s been crammed to the brim with an absurdly unhealthy amount of Christmas stuffing. Alright, now you’re done with that, let's move on to the subject of this blog - namely, keyword stuffing. During the golden era dark ages of Google SEO, a cheeky trick like this could take your lagging webpage out of the rankings at 69, and bring it back in at number 1, and there were some truly innovative ways to do it.
That was until Google killed all the fun with their ‘Florida‘ update in 2003, a massive algorithm change that saw cataclysmic shifts in rankings across the board. Instead of being recognised as the creative geniuses they believed themselves to be, top ranking websites whose pages were stuffed to the brim with keywords, sometimes in egregious ways, were relegated back to the bottom feeding pits they crawled out of.
Let’s have a little stroll down memory lane, to when life as an SEO pioneer was a lot funner, *cough, easier, cough*, and have a look at some go-to methods of a by-gone age that don’t work for sh*t anymore.
What is Keyword Stuffing?
Keyword stuffing is forcing an unnatural amount of keywords into your text in an effort to manipulate Google into believing your material has an authority on the subject matter. Before the Florida update, the algorithm would simply read your text, and register that you are mentioning a keyword more than your competitor, therefore your content must be richer with information. I would give you an example of what keyword stuffing once looked like, but I wouldn’t want to penalise my own work now.
While an effective SEO copywriter should still seek to insert their keyword around once every 300 or so words of copy, due to Google’s constantly updating algorithms, they should be more concerned with inserting them in natural ways, built around meaningful snippets of intel that mean something to the audience. Otherwise, all you’re left with is - ‘keyword stuffing lots of words in a sentence’.
If Google detects that your keywords are abnormal, or unusually distributed, you’re going to have a hard time earning its trust, even if your content does have some diamonds in it. You will be looked over as a potential authority. All that being said, let’s look at a couple of methods I used to rumble competitors using back in the good old days, when you could just round up any number of keywords you liked and whip them into shape.
Text Stuffing
We’ve covered it, but this was the practice of sticking a target keyword literally anywhere. At the start of every sentence, in the middle of sentences, twice in the title, three times in the footer and header without any other text. Think of that stuffed turkey.
Website meta tags
This was a ‘hidden’ trick of sorts, and not like the hidden text we will look at next. There was a time when meta tags found at the back end of a website's pages and posts held some bearing on Google’s search results, and as a result, ‘experts’ were cramming the hell out of whatever space there was with potential keywords. They were abused so badly that in 2009 Google came out and said they would blanket disregard them completely going forward.
Hidden Text
You’ve probably heard of names like Newton, Einstein, and Galileo… But the genius who came up with this little trick goes unnamed in the history books of SEO. Keyword stuffing hidden text was accomplished by spamming blocks of a keyword, then simply changing the text colour to match your background. A savvy technician could completely fill every blank part of a screen with a single phrase or word, and unless a visitor held down their mouse key and dragged it across the page, revealing the debauchery at hand, nobody would be any the wiser… Beautiful.
Can Google detect keyword stuffing?
Yes. With the introduction of Google’s Florida update in 2003, and then an improved version to their algorithm in 2009 - ‘PANDA’, Google aimed to heavily penalise websites that were caught blatantly keyword stuffing, even going so far as to completely remove them from search.
In 2023, algorithms are so advanced that newcomers should not even consider trying to fill their content with the same phrase if they want to avoid heavy penalties. It’s simply considered spam, and can even end up seeing a manual penalty being slapped onto your URL. Moral of the story, then? Don’t do keyword stuffing and web design. Especially if you’re underage.
Is keyword stuffing illegal?
Alright, calm down. All this talk of ‘heavy penalties’, ‘keyword stuffing and web designing at the same time’. It might sound criminal to some, and might get you put on Google’s naughty step, but it won’t get you thrown in jail. It’s something all SEO experts need to learn about and understand, though. Figuring out how to naturally insert key phrases and words shouldn’t be that big of an issue if the content you’re creating is rich and informative enough. Given enough time, the turkey will start stuffing itself, before it’s even been plucked.
Anyway…
Some considered it a dark day when the ‘Florida’ update landed. The old school spam tactics of yesteryear that made some SEO novices feel like geniuses are long gone. Google’s latest algorithm that is due to drop any day now will likely make keyword acknowledgement even more obscure as they continue to push for original and informative content over anything else. It is an ideal time for content creators looking to establish subject authority and don’t want to deal with the sleight of hand and tricks of their competitors who are still aiming to riddle the algorithms above all else.
Step 3: Link Building
If you fell asleep during my rant, you might have noticed that a large part of my research and emphasis about my process for outranking the competition here will be focused on link building.
Why’s that? I hear some of you ask from the back of the room, don’t worry David, I’ve got you.
Unless you have been sleeping for the last 15 years of SEO evolution, link building was, has always been and will always be the only real way to effect search rankings.
Of course there are many levels to this and link building often gets a bad rep by people who don’t understand the difference and those who are lucky enough to have businesses that do not require link building.
I’m sorry, but if your marketing budget is over £5m a year, you don’t need to actively work your SEO, so your views are irrelevant to those who have to manipulate search engines to get results, like the majority of businesses in the world.
So, for the purposes of this article let’s assume you’re not going to create a talking meerkat as your next marketing strategy and get the whole internet talking about you so you don’t need SEO.
Link building in its many forms is the only way for Google to really judge the popularity, trend-worthiness or authority of any particular website. It’s the rationale behind the whole algorithm that the search engine is based upon and that has never changed. It’s impossible for it to do so.
Literally impossible.
While I think about it and for the purposes of this article (again) I’m going to tell you that bad link building doesn’t really exist. Yes, if you get 3 million links on some porn, drugs or whatever site you will probably not rank on Google, but if a couple of dodgy links was enough to make any website be penalised by Google then I would rank number 1 for every search term in the world by building some crud links to all of my competitors.
The way it works is simple, any link you build that isn’t ‘bad’ gives you good link juice, the more of this good link juice you have the better you will rank. So those of you out there disavowing 375829741274 links thinking it will benefit you more than just building some good ones, enjoy that.
9th October Update: Got a bit bored writing here so added some fluff from one of our writers to bulk it out a bit.
‘Do I Need to Build Links to Rank on Google?’ And other Mysteries of The SEO Underworld
Ever put hours on end into a brand new domain for your latest business venture? Have all sorts of ‘masterminds’ work with you to make it look as flashy as possible, then eagerly submit to Google’s index so you can start selling your new products, only to find it doesn’t even rank? Nah… Me neither.
I hear about it though from CEOs and the likes who come to me desperately looking for solutions. Normally the answer lies with another familiar 3 letter acronym you might be familiar with. You guessed it, but some people can’t even spell it. ‘SEO’. There’s plenty of ways to build a website’s search engine optimisation and the rankings that come with it. Today in particular we’ll be touching down on possibly the most important part - link building.
You’d be surprised at the number of agencies out there right now who are claiming to be SEO experts, that are promising heaven and earth on Google rankings, but don’t even offer link building as a service. They’re misleading potential clients, and the worst part is, they don’t even know it. The agencies ‘selling SEO’ are the ones who can’t spell it. Anyway, I’m not here to b*tch. Let’s get into it and have a look, and hopefully start shining some light on the subject.
What does link building do?
Link building increases your domain authority, and with it your Google search rank. It is an SEO strategy that lets Google know your website has valuable information on it, and can be relied on to give the best answers to a question. There are a few reasons why this is the case - different types of links help to signal that your website is the best for the job, and full of valuable content.
Internal Links
Internal links take visitors to your website from one page to another. They help users navigate through relevant topics, and should be used to create subject ‘silos’. Silos are just as they sound, primary information hubs that content links to and from, all aiming to build a vast architecture of information on a single subject. They help demonstrate to Google that you are a reliable ‘topic authority’. In short, information rich internal links that take Google from one page to another on your website are going to get it salivating at the mouth.
Building silos and becoming a topic authority are two important subjects that are too deep to delve into while simply discussing links, however these are two subjects I’ll be happy to dive into at another time to really open up that can of worms and help people get a better grasp.
External Links
An external link is simply an outbound link from your website to another website. They are used to reference other domains where information may have been quoted or cited from, whether it be a source of data, or just a picture to your favourite Spice Girl. (Mine’s the ginger one).
While external links are not known to have a direct effect on your own domain authority, they can still hold intrinsic value if you work in a niche that frequently needs to cite stats or sciency stuff. Visitors are more likely to keep coming back if they know they can trust you and your sources, and guess what? Google likes sites that have lots of visitors who stick around. They have their value but it doesn’t mean they’re necessary.
Backlinks
Backlinks are links that send traffic from other websites to your website. Google sees other URLs using your website as a source of reliable information, and starts to recognise you as an authority in your niche. Every backlink that points to your site also increases Google’s confidence in you, and with increased confidence comes higher rankings.
Backlinks are another subject to discuss all in themselves, but to keep it short, for beginners especially, the best way to build a backlink profile is to create incredible content. Once other writers, businesses, and creators start noticing you, if you have enough rich and relevant subject matter, they will have a good reason to cite you in their own work. Now is as good a time as ever to start getting stuff done!
Do links still matter for SEO?
Yes. Links will always be a relevant metric to weigh up a domain’s authority. Google wants to direct visitors to its engine towards reliable websites, and when its algorithm sees a domain with a vast backlink profile, it will have the confidence to send people there.
It might seem disheartening to new kids on the block, but as with all things SEO, it takes time to get established and recognised. That’s not to say you can’t rapidly rise through the ranks in an obscure niche with good quality content. If you’re trying to go toe to toe with established big boys though, you’re going to need to put in the time and effort to gain Google’s trust. Work hard, build your silos, get the links, and get on page one. Easy.
Can you rank in Google without links?
The short answer is yes, but it’s more complicated than that. You can easily slot into Google’s rankings if your targeted keyword or topic is obscure enough. The thing is, the more obscure a subject, the less likely it is anyone is going to be searching for it in the first place. Bear in mind that, beyond organic rank 5 on Google searches, results get less than 5% of the click through rate, dropping rapidly to less than 1% going onto page 2. So if you’re not ranking in the top 5, you will be at a real struggle vs competitors.
Just ‘ranking’ isn’t enough in the current day. I know sometimes I might sound like I’m flogging a dead badger, but you really do need to get established and build yourself as a topical authority with great content to start getting them links and getting Google’s trust.
Like I was saying…
Link building is very important, maybe the most important part of SEO when it comes to establishing domain authority, but it is not a substitute for poor or shallow content. Bad content means you cannot establish topical authority, and without that, you will struggle to get backlinks. If you want to become an authority, your number 1 goal should be creating plenty of quality, informative content with your own original voice and perspective, then start collecting your backlinks.
When the content is ready, the backlinks will come, it’s like a snowball effect in a sense, all it takes is time and consistency. Now, if you already have an established base and you’re reaching out to SEO agencies who are trying to take your hard earned cash without offering viable solutions to start generating backlinks for you, it’s time to raise your eyebrows and find someone who can. (Me).