The Transcript

Content Marketing Means Much More to SEO Than Link Building

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Loren Baker: Hi, this is Loren Baker. You’re listening to another episode of Search & Deploy here on the Rainmaker.FM Network. Search & Deploy is brought to you by Rainmaker and by Foundation Digital, a boutique content, marketing, SEO, and outreach firm run by yours truly, along with Greg Boser and Dax Herrera.

Today, we’re going to be diving a little bit into linking — which, along with technical site changes and what not, is one of the building blocks of SEO, if not the bread and butter of SEO as a whole.

Linking is some pretty controversial stuff. SEOs, over time, have developed many ways to build links. Some good, some bad. Some permanent, some temporary, but at the end of the day, creative — which to each his own, whether or not it works, or whether or not Google will crack down on it.

What I want to talk about from a linking perspective and really discuss today in detail is what I see still going on in the world of SEO.

I’ve been running over some data from some link audits, competitive link analysis, for the past week or so. It’s really interesting to see what competitors in the same space are doing to not only get links on the root domain value to the home page that builds up overall trust and authority, trust flow if you use Majestic SEO, but also some of the techniques that people are using to build links down to the page level, the money page level, or even back to the blog post.

Still surprised to see that there are still some, not really shady, but amateur ways to build links down to the page level and seeing that some of it works. But like I said before, there are temporary ways to build link value to a website for SEO purposes, and there are more so permanent.

Proof from the Past: Why Speaking to an Audience Has Always Helped with Link Building, Search, and Building Engaged Audiences

Loren Baker: Today, I want to get into something that’s been pretty dear to my heart for the past 15 years or however long I’ve been in this industry — content marketing. When I started out as a digital marketer back in ’98, ’99, whatever year that was, there was no Google at the time. When I was working on client accounts, we were trying to figure out ways to get traffic to websites, outside of just search results.

Search engines at the time were like Alta Vista, Go.com, Excite, and stuff like that. A lot of the determining factors in how you ranked were really on-page and content on the site. What we would do was we would find fan pages, Geocities pages, email newsletters of different groups on the web that were loyalists — the same kind of product or target market that our clients would have.

We would provide content to them, ask for links, and asked to contribute an article to their email newsletter, get a link back to the client. At the end of the day, those efforts were done in order to drive traffic. When Google entered the picture, what I saw from that was that the links that were obtained years previously were becoming of high value from an SEO perspective.

So let me talk about a scenario on a story. I used to do online marketing for a check company. Back between the Great Depression and the ’90s, there was a thing called personal checks. Basically, when you went to the supermarket, when you went to pay, you would write the amount that you wanted to pay on a piece of paper and sign your name. You would be able to pay that way instead of just running your debit card through the machine. Well, checks were kind of boring because they were one piece of paper.

So I worked for a company that printed checks with licensed characters and materials. There would be WWF checks, NASCAR checks, model train checks for people that were into model trains, superhero checks, stuff like that to give people real personality when they were in the supermarket line paying for their groceries.

What we did was a lot of affinity group marketing. I would go and find Geocities fan pages and newsletters of fans of the WWF, or really getting granular and fans of the Iron Sheik, fans of Hulk Hogan, or fans of Andre the Giant. I would write them an email asking if they would look at these checks, if they’ve ever used them, and if they felt that their fan base would like them, could they give us a link from their fan page or send something out to their email newsletter, yada, yada, yada.

Again, this was in the infancy of the web, so what would happen was I would typically get an email response back in the course of a day, if not hour, if not group of minutes, saying, “Wow! Thank you so much for writing us. This is awesome. I really want to share your product with our fans that find AndretheGiantRules.geocities.com or whatever.” Actually, it wasn’t even sub-domains then. It was like Geocities.com/Tilda/AndretheGiantRules/whatever.

Typically, they would link in their navigation, write an article, or like I said, put out an email newsletter — really, really highly targeted stuff and the kind of links that Google originally wanted to build the web from, from a quality perspective, from a trust perspective, from a “Hey, all of these influencers are talking about this site. Therefore, it must be important” perspective.

When they would link, they would use the words ‘NASCAR checks’ or ‘WWF checks.’ Ultimately, that helped with those exact match queries as well. Then Google came along, introduced page rank. That basically killed everything, put together a marketplace for links. People were buying links, selling links, spamming links, setting up networks of fake sites that would build links to one specific page — all kinds of stuff was going on.

It was a great time to be in link building. It was probably a great time to be working on the Google Webmaster spam team. Once the crackdown came, it was a great time to have been in traditional link building or content marketing. I’ve said this before in podcast. Content marketing is nothing new to SEO. It’s the foundation of SEO at the end of the day, along with technical and link building.

Content on your site that speaks to an audience has always helped to get engaged audiences to a website. It’s helped to get conversions. It’s helped to get rankings and traffic from search engines. Content that you put out there on third-party sites, that you get in front of influencers, or you send through an email has always driven targeted traffic to the site. It’s always resulted in links.

Getting the Respect SEO Deserves and Making Sure Your SEO Strategy Isn’t Shortsighted

Loren Baker: Today, I want to go over what I see as being the ultimate way to go about content marketing from an SEO perspective, really getting into goals, ways to work together, and what not. Again, let’s back up a little bit. When I was going though a lot of this link analysis, what I was seeing is that not only the site that I’m going to be working on and a lot of other competitors were putting together really short-sighted content marketing, not even campaigns, but like bumps in the night, so to speak.

I’m looking at one site and there was one infographic put together, hosted on the site blog, and that infographic had one link to it. It was full of great data. It was full of great detail, but it had one link going to it and maybe one or two social shares only from the site’s Twitter account.

That infographic was actually really great material. It wasn’t probably designed in the best way possible. But what I could see from this was that someone put it together, didn’t tell anybody — which is probably the case — got it hosted on the blog, and then really half-assed it from there. Got one link from one crappy site, and then let it go.

You see a lot of that in the world of content marketing for SEO. It seems to be 95 percent miss and 5 percent hit. I think a lot of that really has to do with how SEO has always been treated within companies. Site owners typically do a much better job of getting their stuff out there and getting promoted and shared, but a lot of the time, traditionally, SEO has been viewed as something that is outside of the traditional digital marketing mix.

I’ve been to meetings where I’ve had all people at the table — whether it’s been advertising affiliates, email, what not — and basically every single idea that the SEO brought to the table, every single case, or every single piece of data was shot down. It was not seen as being sustainable to the company at large.

A lot of the time, the ability to actually get success from an SEO perspective is whether or not you have the respect in the room. Say you’re putting together a content marketing campaign with the goals of links and you’re the SEO. One thing you have to think about is that content that a brand or website puts out of there represents that brand or website in so many different ways.

You’re talking about branded content that you’re going to put out and try to promote on social media, try to promote through blogger outreach, try to get links from, try to get on different social voting sites, try to get on different image-sharing sites. If you haven’t taken the time or your agency hasn’t taken the time to sit back, look at the big picture and the education involved with doing so, then you’re practicing shortsighted content marketing, an attempt to get SEO value.

What you really have to do is look at the big picture. When this content goes out there, if it’s shared in the way that you want it to be shared, you really want to get SEO rankings, links, and organic traffic. That’s key.

The Importance of Building Conversation With Your Content

Loren Baker: Also, things to think about — is that content also going to build conversation? Is it going to build social conversation? If that content that you’re throwing out there or putting together for an SEO goal, if that’s shared on your brand or your site’s Facebook wall/timeline — I just dated myself — is that content going to lead to Likes, to shares, and to comments? Positive comments or negative comments? How well does that content represent the brand in social media?

If that content represents that brand in an incredibly well light, then, ultimately, that content can lend to brand advocacy. ‘Brand advocacy’ in social is my fancy word for shares, or Retweets, or Pins. If that content speaks to your audience, then your audience is going to share that content. The more Pins, the more shares, the more Retweets, means the more influence. It’s also an indicator of SEO value at the end of the day.

Let’s get one thing straight. Social signals do not necessarily help SEO. If you get more Likes, if you get a lot of Tweets, if you get a lot of Pins, that’s nice, but those specific numbers in metrics are not helpful from an SEO perspective. What is helpful from an SEO perspective is the ability to drive targeted traffic back to your site and your landing page.

Although all of those specific numbers may not help, if you are putting out a piece of content that speaks directly to your audience, that content is hosted on the site and there is a reason for the targeted person to click over to the site — and then there’s different ways for the person to interact or a different navigational path or funnel that can be started with that content — then that page is going to have a much better bounce rate. It’s going to have much better time on site. It’s going to have much more interaction and human traffic signals that, in the grand scheme of things, should lead to better SEO.

Also, having your brand out there in front of a lot of targeted eyeballs is not a bad thing, either. What this really means is that, when you’re putting together a content marketing plan, you need to bring most people to the table, especially if you’re the SEO wanting to get this content through. Again, I’m not talking about individual site owners or what-not, although you can put together an imaginary board of marketers in your head that this should appeal to.

What I’m really talking about is the larger company, or even the smaller company or maybe even the publicly traded company. Who are the stakeholders that you should bring to the table when you’re planning your content marketing, and how does it help you?

Press Releases, Getting Your Content Out There, and Paid Media — And Why It All Matters So Much

Loren Baker: We’ve already talked about social media and branding. The SEO person, the social media person, brings the PR person to the table. Most press releases or digital press release distribution systems — which are different than wires because I remember when PR Web launched. It was a cutting edge thing at the time, “Hey instead of sending your press release through fax, send it through email, and put it on the web.”

When you upload a press release to something like PR Web, it gives you the option to upload an image. If you’re taking the time to put together images, or infographics, or ecards, or infograms, or Twitter cards for a content piece or campaign, why not sync up with the PR team? See what kind of data they’ve put together with studies. See what kind of announcements they can make.

If your piece of content is interesting enough, it should warrant the ability to put together a release, or support of release in the grander scheme of things. Upload that image to the digital release, getting it out there. So talk to PR, paid media. If you’re putting out your content and it’s building organic social brand advocacy and it’s ready for prime time in terms of outreach.

Talk to the paid media person. Chances are, from a paid media perspective — what I’m talking about here is the person who’s running AdWords — it’s the person who’s running Facebook advertising, Twitter advertising, and possibly they’re running the paid Outbrain account, who knows — talk to them about how your content can support their goals. There’s a couple of ways that this can be done.

First of all, if something has been proven to work organically on Facebook, then a boost, a little push — whether it’s 100 bucks or a 1,000 bucks — to a very targeted group, the same group that’s interacting organically on that work, can lead to paid amplification, or social amplification. This is really where the traffic numbers scale. You can also get that work in front of the influencers that may link to you.

Basically, if you see something working and it’s driving a hundred Likes organically, boosting it can turn that hundred into a thousand, into 10,000 — can drive traffic through the roof. Then say if you’re going back to a page that has something integrated like a quiz, email signup, or whatever, there’s other on-site metrics, so talk to the paid media person, communications.

Why Newsletters Should Be an Integral Part of Your Communication

Loren Baker: Typically, what falls under communications that’s incredibly important for content marketing campaigns are email newsletters. If you’re fans of other Rainmaker.FM shows, you probably hear about the power of email and getting your message to the end user and their intimate inbox all the time. Go through your email newsletter lists, if you have one. Go through the email newsletter lists of a site that you’re managing or the place that you work. I bet you that in that list are influencers from your space.

Let’s look at an example, so Zappos. Zappos probably has a list of millions and millions and millions of customers that have purchased shoes — running shoes, climbing shoes, cross training shoes, workout shoes.

Say, for example, Zappos is putting together a content piece, maybe it’s an ebook, ‘The Ultimate Guide to Shoes for CrossFit’ or ‘The Ultimate Guide to Shoes’ based upon any kind of exercise that you’re doing. Basically a book talking about different exercises or events and the kind of shoes you should wear, and that...