Here's a little secret: Smart SEOs expect to lose their rankings.

It might not even be a penalty. Maybe it's a competitor who will pull ahead of you in the search results. Maybe it's an algorithm update that will redirect a dramatic portion of your audience. Someday, maybe, a more advanced Siri clone will eliminate the point of rankings altogether.

Are you prepared for that day? Do you have a backup plan?

Today, we're going to approach the threat of lost rankings in a way you might never have seen before. First, we're going to talk about what we believe it takes to keep your rankings. Second, and more importantly, we're going to talk about how to design an SEO strategy that will remain successful even if you lose your rankings.

Let's get started.

A bulletproof vest is best worn before you get shot

This is your bulletproof vest.

When clients approach us with penalized sites, they are devastated. With no severance package or unemployment option, a Google penalty is worse than a layoff. With a gap in employment history and nothing but a penalized website to point to in your resume, it may even be worse than getting fired. Recovery is difficult, time-consuming, and resource intensive.

Let's not mince words. It can destroy families.

If you're taking risks with your website, and it's not going to survive a Google penalty, I beg of you, make the changes now. Don't wait until it's too late. You will regret it.

You need link quality control standards

Whether you've been building links yourself or outsourcing to someone, audit your link profile. It's worth it. Take a look with fresh eyes, and with the mindset that you've just been penalized. What would you remove? Here are some suggestions:

  • Open up Webmaster Tools and take a look at the sites that have linked to you the most using exact match anchor text(s). Are any of them site-wide links? If so, I highly recommend replacing them with single links if at all possible. (or nofollow/remove them if you find suspicious)
  • Take a look at your anchor text. Other than your brand or domain name, does any specific anchor text take up more than 20 percent of your inbound links? If so, based on my personal experience, you're at risk of getting penalized for that keyword, and possibly of facing a site-wide penalty. You should either change the anchor text, remove these links, or dilute them with future link building efforts.

  • Are you buying links or building private link networks? Stop immediately. Expect all of these links to be eliminated at some point. While even links from link sellers don't usually count against you, all you are doing is building a false sense of authority. When these links are discounted by Google, you will lose all future value. The more links you buy, the higher that risk becomes. Also, keep in mind that while sellers are the ones who usually get penalized, buyers and spammers are not immune. It may be a good idea to remove all paid links that don't send referral traffic, and to replace them with no-follow links if they do send referral traffic. Either way, stop this link building practice entirely.

Design is crucial

We've discussed in depth why UI and UX are absolute necessities:

  • Google's guidelines clearly state "Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines." I'm not claiming that following the guidelines guarantees rankings (that would be insane). I'm simply pointing out that violating the guidelines is a good way to ask for penalties and ultimately algorithmic demotions.
  • Most sites can more easily double sales by doubling conversion rates than by doubling traffic, and design is a crucial part of that.
  • Great user experiences ultimately turn into repeat sales.
  • When you earn popularity (rather than manufacture it), you end up expending fewer resources to bring in the same number of sales.
  • Good design earns natural links. If you think that statement is insane, just turn your attention to any one of the most popular sites on the web. Nearly all of them are tools. Here, I'm not necessarily talking about design aesthetic. I'm simply stating that if you actually design something, as opposed to sharing "great, unique content," you are likely to be taken seriously. Again, just turn to the most linked to sites on the web to see what I'm talking about.

  • UI and UX can be split tested and measured with provable results. This is somewhat true for "raw" SEO as well, and you can read more on this here, but the impact of UI and UX is much easier to measure.

Here are a few specific ways to leverage UI and UX that we've talked about:

  • Use responsive design, so that pages adapt to fit the various kinds of screens modern consumers use.
  • Really understand how to set up split tests, and other statistical testing techniques. I can't stress enough how important this is.
  • Conduct user tests as well, to see how your target audience will actually interact with the site, in order to make things as intuitive as possible.
  • Embrace consumer psychology and build it into the design of the site itself.

Understand modern on-site SEO

On-site SEO goes much further than keyword placement:

  • Pages that have no clear purpose or that don't do a very good job of serving their purpose are at risk of Panda penalization and similar algorithmic demotions.
  • Pages that are "made for AdSense" or that otherwise use advertisements overzealously are high risk.
  • Pages with repetitive keyword use, or that sacrifice user experience for "optimized" SEO value, face similar risks.
  • Including the keyword in the title is still very effective, but titles should also be built to maximize click-through rates and viral sharing.

I'm also with Rand Fishkin on these points:

  • Pages aren't just unique, they offer unique value. It meets a particular need in a particular way that no other page on the web effectively delivers.
  • The user experience is phenomenal. It loads quickly, looks good, it's intuitive, it works well on any device, it's easy to understand, and it's fun and/or memorable to use.
  • The page is optimized for crawlers/bots, so that multiple versions of the same content use rel=canonical to define only one URL for the "real" page. Robots.txt and meta robots shouldn't limit bots overzealously. Pages that are down temporarily should return a 503 status, not a 404, and 301 permanent redirects should be used when pages are removed permanently. Use plenty of internal links and make sure every page on your site can be reached from at least one link (preferably more).
  • Use the keyword in the title when possible, and put identical or very similar text in the H1 tag. Don't overuse the keyword in your main body, just write about the topic at hand. Get keywords in your internal links where it makes sense. Use a meta description that compels people to click through to visit your page from the search results, without worrying too much about your keyword. Don't worry about meta keywords.
  • Make it easy to share the page on social networks, and don't overwhelm users with too many options.
  • Make your site accessible and easy to use on any device with responsive design.
  • Take advantage of authorship, metadata, schema.org, and rich snippets to make your search result stand out.

Aim for an error-free site

Errors can do a lot of harm to an otherwise high quality site. Start by checking for errors in Google Webmaster Tools and eliminating anything that shows up there:

From there, you can move on to a tool like Moz's crawl diagnostics report.

Here are some common SEO errors that you need to avoid:

  • No product descriptions on ecommerce sites, or using boilerplate descriptions from the manufacturer, which will show up as duplicate content.
  • 404 pages, especially those that are linked to internally or externally
  • Redirects other than 301
  • Long title tags (titles longer than 70 characters won't display properly in the search results)
  • Missing meta descriptions. An optimized call to action in the meta description is often far better than the random text Google pulls on its own, although those pursuing a long tail strategy may sometimes do better by ignoring meta descriptions.
  • Poor internal linking, so that some pages on your site aren't linked to by any other pages
  • No robots.txt
  • No sitemap

Don't let errors like these ruin the potential of your site.

Refine your content

Analyze your existing pages. How many of them are contributing significant traffic? Among those that are bringing in significant traffic, are those users satisfied?

You need to either eliminate or fix any content that doesn't meet these standards:

  • The title alone is worth sharing in social networks, and begs to be clicked on.
  • The content lives up to the promise of the title.
  • The content offers data, a unique spin, and/or unique value that isn't found in any other prominent place on the web. In short, it differentiates itself completely from anything else that ranks for your target keyword(s).

I highly recommend taking advantage of SurveyMonkey or some other form of market research in order to measure the value of your content and look for suggestions for improvements. Test how consumers value your content over the top-ranking pages. If they don't value your content more than the top search results, it doesn't deserve to rank, and it never will in the long term.

Build serious quality links

Don't build even one more link until you can build a link from one of the top sites in your industry. I mean top tier links. We're talking just one step below The New York Times. E2M Solutions doesn't rank because we've built hundreds of links. It ranks because we've built links from Moz, Forbes, CopyBlogger, VentureBeat, ProBlogger, and SearchEngineJournal.

In short, there isn't even a chance that somebody will look at those links and think "that doesn't offer any 'real' marketing value, it's just for SEO."

You need to start building links that meet at least some of these quality criteria:

  • The links would be worth building even if they were nofollow
  • The links will be worth it just for the brand impressions and referral traffic
  • Being featured on this site will lend your site an air of credibility, and badges saying you've been featured on these sites will actually improve your conversion rate. Take our blog sidebar, for example:

If a link doesn't meet at least one of these three criteria, I would argue that it's not really worth building. We'll touch more on this later on in the post. For now, just realize that links below this tier are worth earning naturally, but they generally aren't worth building manually.

Understand co-citations and co-occurrence

SEOs are increasingly noticing their own pages, and pages of their competitors, ranking in ways that don't make sense according to traditional knowledge of the link structure of the web. Specifically, we are seeing evidence of the following two phenomena:

Co-Citation – This is when a site links to you as well as an authoritative or relevant site. In other words, if a page or a domain tends to link to authoritative sites, Google will tend to take links from that site more seriously.

This is the concept of "good neighborhoods" versus "bad neighborhoods." For this reason, you want to build and attract links from sites that tend to link to high quality sources. This will separate you from low quality areas on the web. (In fact, you yourself should link to high quality sources, since the algorithm encourages links to high quality sites by helping you become part of a "good neighborhood.")

Co-Occurrence – This is when a site mentions your brand name or your domain name without a link, but talks about it in the context of related subject matter. Rand Fishkin uses the example of OpenSiteExplorer. In that case, the description in the search result used text that wasn't found anywhere on the page, and instead quoted text from an entirely different page on the web that was only talking about OpenSiteExplorer. (It's worth noting that the previous page title, redirects, and anchor text likely played a part in this as well.) This is one example of Google using statistical data rather than links to determine what specific brands are all about. Google also appears to use search terms and other behavioral data to form ideas about sites on the web.

While knowledge of co-citation and co-occurrence can be helpful in your manual link building efforts, the only way to fully take advantage of it is to attract natural links and discussions about your brand online. (More on this later in the article.)

Gain social traction

Social media activity doesn't have a direct impact on rankings in any significant way. While there is some correlative evidence that it's important, links are still much more powerful for SEO.

While a lack of social media activity alone isn't going to harm your rankings, it can become the straw that breaks the camel's back. Google's internal quality guidelines make it clear that a site's reputation plays a big part in its quality.

In some circumstances, runaway success in social media has had an unquestionable impact on rankings. While social signals don't seem to play an important part in long term rankings, viral activity does affect "freshness" attributes, and can cause a page to rank number one for very competitive terms for a relatively short period of time.

In short, if your page is "trending" in social networks, expect it to gain credibility.

I will circle back to social strategy later on.

Implement Google authorship

Google authorship allows you to use Google+ to link content to your name. You can learn how to set it up here. For now, authorship is most important because it gets your picture listed next to your search results, which can have a strong positive impact on click-through rates. Needless to say, this is a good way to pick up some extra traffic:

There is also the possibility that authorship will eventually play a part in an algorithm that recognizes a concept called "author rank." In other words, it is possible that if you as an author tend to write content that users like, content that you produce in the future will be more likely to rank. It remains to be seen whether this is feasible, and exactly when it might happen.

Now that you have your bulletproof vest, it's time to go to war

That's right; everything I've talked about up until now was just to get you prepared for this:

I don't want anybody to face a Google penalty, and I've done my best to tell you how to avoid it, but none of this changes the fundamental flaw of most SEO strategies. If you couldn't survive the loss of your rankings tomorrow, your SEO strategy is broken.

Let's talk about how to fix it.

Be where your audience is

If you are popular in places where your target audience hangs out, you will be popular among your target audience. It's simple logic, but most SEOs are surprisingly lacking in this department.

A fundamental goal of any cohesive online marketing strategy should be to develop a presence at your target audience's hangouts. This ensures that no matter what happens to your Google rankings, no matter how ad prices fluctuate, and regardless of any changes in the social media landscape, you will be recognizable among the people who matter.

Now, what most people hear when I say this is that they should start guest posting. I'm going to argue in a second that that's not the only thing you should be doing, but for now, let's focus on some things you might be missing.

  • I mentioned before that you should be building serious quality links. Post on sites that are worth it for the referral traffic, the brand exposure, and the prestige alone.
  • Your goal is to become a thought leader. That means you want to bring unique value to the table. What is your angle? What makes you different from the other people who post on the site?
  • At least some of what you say should be entirely original. That means you'll need to conduct original research, use proprietary data, combine ideas from disparate disciplines, or dig up insider information. And you'll need to figure out how to do that on a fairly consistent basis. Think of Search Engine Land, with insider quotes from Google employees, or Moz and Search Metrics, with their correlative "Search Engine Ranking Factor" studies.
  • Learn to ask the right questions. At CopyBlogger, I discussed at length how to do just that. No matter what you are talking about, there are intriguing questions to ask. Cultivate your curiosity. It is by far your greatest asset. Only by asking unique, intriguing questions can you arrive at compelling, never-before-seen answers.
  • Get emotional. If content doesn't make an emotional impact, it's less likely to get shared and propagate through your community. Research has demonstrated that intense emotions like anger and fear, and more importantly, surprise, laughter, and awe, cause people to share content with their peers. Disaffecting emotions, like sadness, on the other hand, discourage social sharing. The awe component is especially important, and leads to the surprising fact that science articles (of the right kind) are more likely to get shared than almost anything else. (The striking popularity of I F*king Love Science is testament to this fact.) Awe-inspiring content causes your audience to see the world in a different way. Needless to say, this underscores the importance of saying something genuinely new.
  • Give them something they can use. While an awe-inspiring, intense post can propagate even in the absence of actionable content, it becomes virtually unstoppable when you have it. People can't stop sharing things that they can actually put to use in their own life. This is doubly true because it makes the sharer look better. Take a look at the most emailed posts on CNN. Compared to the most read, you see a lot more practical content here.
  • You need both broad and niche appeal. Produce content that appeals to your most hardcore following, as well as content that links your core topics to more general subjects that everybody can relate to. While nothing is worse than alienating your core audience, you will never grow if you fail to find any mainstream appeal.
  • Speak the language. To keep that hardcore audience engaged, you want to learn their inside jokes, their cultural sensibilities, their wants and needs, and their shared interests. Focus on the positives and avoid building a cultural identity around what you are not. The key is to make enough references to let your core audience know that you are "one of them," but to keep that much needed mainstream appeal. By the way: don't fake it. The internet can smell insincerity a mile away, and often detects it even when it's not there. Be yourself first: but be yourself in the context of a specific subculture.
  • Touch on cultural hot buttons. What's trending in your niche and worldwide? The last thing you should do is merely regurgitate what's happening on the news, but if you fail to reference it, your content is going to seem less relevant. Social "triggers" play a big part in sharing activity. Such triggers aren't always about things that are happening right now. They can just as easily be linked to deep-seated cultural nostalgia. The point is, certain topics, images, and symbols trigger our awareness of certain things. You can use existing triggers to capture the attention of others, and you can incorporate triggers within our content in order to share ideas. (One of the best examples of the trigger phenomenon is that of Rebecca Black's terrible song "Friday," which always got searched for most often on Friday.)
  • Tell stories and use examples. You can and should get abstract, since this is where new ideas and general concepts come from, but if you don't tie it back to something concrete, people aren't going to believe you and they aren't going to listen. In fact, if you change just one thing about your strategy, this is probably the best one to start with. Just write the post you were going to write, then return to it with some real-world examples. This works wonders.
  • Get visual. We humans are visual creatures, and we are more likely to remember and pass on information if it gets shared with us in a visual format. What would this BuzzFeed article be without its pictures?
  • Don't "try" to go viral. Much of what I've just talked about helps with social sharing activity, but one thing you should probably avoid doing is actually trying to go viral. Most truly viral content does little to solidify a brand. Viral hits are the "one hit wonders" of the internet. In fact, many things are viral quite simply because they are terrible, or easy to remember. (Remember the Windows 7 launch party fiasco?) A more important goal is to get people to keep coming back. People aren't loyal to those who make them laugh. They are loyal to those who change their lives. If you can do both, you'll be unstoppable. If you can only do one, change people's lives.

For some more depth on this, take a look at our ultimate guest blogging guide over at Moz. It's a guide to and an example of the kind of guest posting I believe you should be taking part in.

Now, I want to clarify something. While everything I just said applies to guest posting, it's by no means limited to it. In fact, while guest posting is a powerful strategy, it really isn't the only one you should be using. Remember, the title of this section is: Be Where Your Audience is. So I ask again. Where are they? Blogs make up just a small part of their hangouts.

Look for relevant forums:

Many of these forums outright tell you how many people are on the site, this very second. In any case, it's clear how active the audience is from the number of posts. Frequent these forums. Lurk for a while and learn their culture. Learn what questions they ask and what they care about. Learn their idiosyncrasies.

Make those forums a part of your blog. You want to live, breathe, and eat these forums, because this is where your hardcore audience lives. Answer questions. Ask questions. Get involved. Quote your interactions on these forums in your blog posts, and write full blog posts to respond to topics within the forums. You might even want to ask some of the top posters on these forums to write guest posts on your blog.

The goal should be to make your blog an extension of this community, augmented with just enough mainstream appeal to keep growing. For more on this, Patrick O'Keefe has written an amazing guide. An important takeaway from that? Ninety percent of the discussions happening online about banks are happening on forums. I suspect this is the case for most topically oriented discussions.

If you don't believe me, here's a screenshot from a physics forum. Physics.

Capturing attention on a forum like this can work wonders for your exposure.

Social network groups:

I mentioned forums before anything else because this is where most of the lively discussions surrounding topics are happening. While there are plenty of discussions happening on social media, many of them aren't actually topically oriented.

That said, there's no reason to ignore social media. You can try searching for Google+ communities relevant to your topics:

Facebook groups and Pages can also be useful in some cases, and LinkedIn's groups can sometimes be useful for B2B professionals. Twitter, for the most part, is only good for finding influencers, though answering questions on Twitter can be useful. There's another way to leverage social networks, but I'll get to that in the next section.

Quora:

Quora is an excellent place to build exposure. I've found that posts on Quora tend to send traffic for longer periods of time than most social networks. Anywhere on the net where you can answer questions about your topic in front of a reasonably sized audience is a place that you should be. Kristi Hines has an awesome post over at KISSmetrics about this.

Blog comments:

Don't forget about blog comment sections. Some blogs have developed a large enough following to have "regulars" who contribute to their comment section. These are the kinds of blog sections you should try to take part in.

In general:

A good litmus test for the usefulness of an online discussion location is the number of "regulars" present. If these discussions keep bringing people back, this is the kind of place you want to be posting. If people post once and move on, it's not worth the effort.

Do not just show up to these discussions with a link to your content. You want to become a person of value within these communities. That means you should pour every bit as much value and effort into your community posts as your blog posts and your guest posts. While the format of the information isn't always going to be the same, the effort should be.

If you can only afford a half-hearted attempt, don't make an attempt at all. It's a waste of time.

Social media doesn't work like you think it does

You might get the impression from what I wrote above that I think forums are more important than social networks. Far from it.

In the last section, I was arguing that you need to go where your core audience is, and distribute as much value as possible. For the most part, your target audience isn't on social networks. At least, they don't particularly care about your topic while they're on social networks. They are there to talk to their friends and family, and to share light content. In general, you won't find a hardcore audience on Facebook or any major social network. (I've already talked about the exceptions to the rule.)

So why are social networks still important?

I've stated a few times that you need both a hardcore and a mainstream audience. Social networks are a place to reach and retain your mainstream audience. While it's always better to get an email address than a Facebook Like, it's much easier for people to Like your Facebook page than to give away their email address. Social subscriptions are noncommittal and "safe." By the same token: simple, witty, visual content with mainstream appeal is the kind of thing that makes its way through social networks. Social networks are for entertainment.

The best way to think about social networks effectively is to think of it as a different place than your blog. As I said before, forums, Q&A sections, and the occasional hardcore groups hiding on social networks should be thought of as an extension of your blog. Social networks themselves are more like the after party.

Here's what I mean:

  • Take a look at the stuff in your personal Facebook feed. How much of it consists of long, drawn out text? How much of it consists of links to blog posts? How much of it consists of images with funny text attached? I'm willing to bet almost all of it belongs to that last category. You want to post the kind of thing that shows up in people's Facebook feeds.
  • Don't post links to your blog posts. Post images with SomeECards and Imgur meme sensibilities. Distill the central point of your blog post into a single image with a caption. Ideally, the caption-image combo should be funny, relatable, actionable, and awe-inspiring. Now just attach a link to the text field of your image. You will get more Facebook sharing activity, more referrals, and more new page Likes by doing this than by doing just about anything else. QuickSprout had a great post on this topic.
  • Not sure what kind of content works on social media? Take a look at the front page of Reddit, strip away (most of the) geek and political sensibilities, and there you have it. Just look for the Reddit spin on your topic. This will put you miles ahead of most of your competitors. (By the way, don't post to Reddit. Just don't. Trust me.)
  • Very few sites send more referral traffic than Pinterest, the image board. The best strategy for dominating on Pinterest is to post what Colby Almond calls "instructographics." These are actionable graphics that resemble infographics, except instead of focusing on data, they focus on "how-to" guides.
  • On a related note, if you absorb the sensibilities of Pinterest and mix them with those of Reddit, you are virtually guaranteed to win the internet.
  • While your social media posts should make you more relatable, they shouldn't suck the magic out of your branding. You want to post a range of material. Heavily shared content comes in a wide range of flavors, from amateur and informal to high quality and polished. You want to post both kinds of content. This makes you relatable, but it also elevates you above the competition. "Anybody" can cut loose and be themselves. Few people can give others something to aspire towards.
  • Post frequently, and don't try to "sell" anything. You want to saturate people's social feeds, and more importantly, you want them to love you for it. As I said before, social media is all about entertainment. It's the main reason people are there, according to more than one study. Entertain your audience, and do so regularly. This is a game of brand impressions, not conversions. Just keep posting links to your site in the text field of your images. The people who want to learn more will click through.
  • Start with an audience of friends and family. If you can't get them involved and excited about what you're doing, something is probably wrong.

If you want success on social networks, you can't copy the most popular pages. Most of them are popular only because they are associated with a celebrity or a pre-established brand. If you want an example of a brand that's actually built a presence on Facebook, take a look at LondonDrugs, a Canadian retail chain. The moderately sized chain is made up of 77 stores. Look at their posts:

Posts like these have earned the brand nearly 75,000 likes, with thousands of them "talking about this" each week. Most of what they publish are images, sized perfectly for Facebook, and they only occasionally link to their own sales and deals. The images tend to be actionable, and occasionally get funny. Pages like these can build a brand.

So, I've talked about finding your hardcore audience on forums and the like, as well as drawing in a mainstream audience via social media. Is there another piece to building an online community? Absolutely.

Join the inner circle

While you could build an audience from scratch, starting with hardcore forum regulars and mainstream social networkers, things are going to move along much faster if you make friends with influential people. Influencers are the crucial shortcut to trustworthiness and exposure online. Join forces with them, and everything else gets easier.

Let's talk about how to do that.

  • Everybody talks about guest posting, and hopefully I've made it clear that we're strong advocates of it, when it's done properly. But it's not the only way. This isn't the first time I've talked about turning guest posting on its head, but this is such an important topic that I will probably keep bringing it up. Here it goes: don't be afraid to open your wallet to influencers. I'm not talking about buying links. I'm talking about paying a high profile blogger, graphic designer, photographer, or expert to produce a piece of content for your blog. Leverage their network and their existing audience. Carry those people over to your blog so that they can see the content. Then capture that value.
  • Whether or not you open your wallet, you need to offer value to work with influencers. These are very busy people, and they're not going to work with you for free. If you don' have money, take advantage of whatever skills you have, whatever services you can offer, and present influencers with an offer that they can't refuse. Approach them as human beings and don't turn it into a sales pitch, but please, please, please offer value.
  • There are some influencers who just love interacting with their audience. The ones who will are gold mines. Interact with them, exchange emails, and just carry on conversations with them for as long as you can. Quote these conversations in your blog posts. Credit them everywhere you can. Just keep it going. The results are twofold: dramatic increases in the quality of your content, and influential relationships that will keep on giving.
  • Remember that influencers are just normal people. While they are often more driven than the average person you run into, they are still just human beings who crave human contact from people who aren't trying to take advantage of them or put them on a pedestal. Keep this in mind and it will be surprisingly easy to build relationships with influential people.
  • Credentials go a long way. The more authority you accumulate, the easier things get. If you work together with one influencer, you can use this as a stepping stone to get taken seriously by other influencers. If you have a large, rabid audience, influencers have something to gain by working with you. This is a flywheel strategy. The more authority you earn, the easier it is to earn still more.

As an extension of that last point, influencers are more likely to take you seriously, and mention you to their audience, if there is something on your site worth talking about.

Do you have a linkable asset?

I've touched on content strategy throughout this whole post. I've mentioned how important design is, touched on how powerful online tools and software are, stressed the necessity for unique value, and even mentioned that the title alone should be strong enough to carry your content.

But we haven't talked about linkable assets.

What is a linkable asset? I've blogged about it at Search Engine Journal. To some extent, every piece of content you publish should be a linkable asset, something that an influencer would be willing to link to.

But that's not really what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about the force that powers the most successful sites on the web. Sites like:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Google
  • YouTube
  • WordPress
  • Adobe
  • Blogger
  • Wikipedia

I mentioned before that all the top sites on the web are built around their tools. In fact, these sites wouldn't exist if it weren't for the tools that they offered. Surrounding those tools are fervent communities of hardcore users. And surrounding those hardcore users are mainstream audiences. Put it all together and you get something that deserves media attention.

And that's what I'm talking about. Doing something that deserves media attention.

I don't want to play-down the value of good outreach. Without it, even the best on-site asset will fall flat. But that shouldn't be your mindset while you brainstorm. Your mindset should be that this asset is only worth developing if it's worth linking to with even the most bare-bones outreach. That is the quality to shoot for.

It's all relative, of course. You don't have to be the next Facebook to be newsworthy. You don't need to have a huge amount of money to make it happen. You just need to identify a problem that people want solved, and create a free, on-site asset that solves that problem. The point is to genuinely and completely solve a clearly defined problem, and to do it for free. This is the value that you are exchanging for attention on the web.

Some examples:

  • Tools
  • Videos
  • Ultimate Guides
  • eBooks
  • Presentations
  • Infographics
  • Original Research (Studies, Surveys, Experiments, Etc.)
  • Case Studies (Be sure to make them useful. They aren't just an excuse to brag.)

It's better to have just one linkable asset than it is to have years and years of blog content. Put the two together and you become a force to be reckoned with.

"Outbound" isn't dead

Up until now, I've been talking about "inbound" marketing strategies. I strongly believe that you don't have a long term business unless you can earn an audience and keep it. When you have an audience who wants to see what you'll say next, it's very hard to go broke.

At the same time, if you can't make money selling a product on advertising alone, you may not have a business at all.

You can and should pay for traffic for as long as it offers a positive ROI. Even Hubspot, the king of inbound marketing, uses AdWords. Neglecting paid strategies is a bad idea. If you don't have a product valuable enough to sell with advertisements, I strongly advise you to develop one.

Here are a few things you must know about paid advertising:

  • Conversion rate optimization is crucial, but it needs to be done properly. If you're doing it without statistical significance, you're not doing it at all. If you're testing button colors and layouts before you test core landing page concepts, you're doing everything backward. CRO is about finding objections and obstacles, and removing them. I discussed an important CRO framework over at Unbounce, and I also highly recommend their eBook.
  • Targeting is important. You don't want to waste money on irrelevant impressions if you can help it. If you're using Google AdWords, choose your keywords carefully, and avoid words like "cheap" or "free" if you're actually trying to sell anything. Retargeting is another way to reach relevant people. WP Curve has an awesome introductory guide on the subject of retargeting, and MDG has another great guide for retargeting on Facebook.
  • Don't be afraid to reach out directly to bloggers or site owners and buy advertising directly from them. If you do this on relevant sites, the referral traffic can be amazing. Sometimes it's possible to do this even with just a one-time payment. Keep in mind that if you do this, the link needs to be nofollowed. Failing to do this can get your site penalized by Google.
  • In some cases, it may be worth paying for traffic even when your goal isn't to sell. This is a fusion if inbound and outbound strategies. If you choose to do this, clearly define a goal and tie that goal to lifetime value. For example, estimate the lifetime value of your average email subscriber, and aim for a campaign that produces enough email subscriptions to justify the cost. In general, if you are paying for traffic, you should at least be aiming to pick up an email address. In general, even social media subscriptions aren't valuable enough to justify the traffic costs. Mere brand impressions certainly aren't enough.
  • A possible exception to this is a "cost-per impression" campaign. This is when you pay for brand impressions, instead of referral traffic, much like traditional television ads. Brand impressions often do correlate positively with sales, and if you can demonstrate this correlation with your own data it might be worth doing it. Just remember that it can be measured. Don't hide behind the belief that it can't in order to justify wasting money.

Keep in mind that no matter how much value you can pull out of paid traffic, you aren't building a long term business unless you are retaining an audience and keeping yourself "top of mind" among these people.

Leveraging your audience

Up until now, I've sort of taken for granted that if you build a hardcore, repeat audience, as well as a steadily growing mainstream presence, sales will inevitably follow. There is some truth to this, but things don't always work out so well.

It's undeniable that brand impressions, especially when they are voluntary, dramatically increase the likelihood that your audience will choose you over a competitor. Unfortunately, content loyalty does not always translate into sales, and if you postpone "selling" indefinitely, you will not optimize the value of your audience.

So, how can you leverage an audience for profit?

  • Phrases like "data driven marketing" and "big data" are taking off in a big way right now, and there's a very good reason for that. Nothing maximizes sales quite like relevance, and data-mining is the way to maximize relevance. DMN News has a fantastic PDF guide to data driven marketing. The key is to seek out correlations in your customer data, use those to make hypotheses about the best way to maximize their value, and then test those hypotheses scientifically. The end goal of all of this is to target the members of your audience who are most likely to find your marketing messages relevant. You need to balance this with the expectation of privacy to avoid violating trust.
  • Regardless of the presence or absence of data-driven strategies, actual sales material should make up a relatively small percentage of the content that each member of your audience sees. While some of them are more likely to respond than others, everybody has a limit, and if you cross that limit, they will unsubscribe. This means that you lose all future value from that customer, and potentially some of the value that their friends might have offered as well. It's always better to play it conservative.
  • You can and should leverage your existing audience for referrals, as long as you do it sparingly. It's okay to incentivize them with free products or contests. Just remember that nobody is willing to "sell out" their friend just for a "chance to win a free iPad." Your audience members should be utterly convinced that their friends will actually want to subscribe long before you try to bribe them to make a recommendation. Done right, this is a fantastic way to grow your audience.

Feeling ready?

It's been our goal to arm you with the knowledge necessary to thrive in SEO by building a strategy that transcends search engines. If you learned anything, I'd love it if you shared this with your audience. As always, thanks for reading.