We launched our site in July 2010. By the end of 2011 we ranked on page one organic results for 108 relevant phrases. During 2011 we went from four phrases in the top three results to 44 phrases in the top three. Here are the SEO tactics we used to get the equivalent of $100K in PPC ads in 2011 for free.
Starting in early 2009, we took 18 months to build a subscription-based information service for investors. Half way through that process we started thinking about marketing and joined SEOmoz to learn about SEO. (First and foremost, thanks to the SEOmoz team and community for educating us on how to do SEO, as we were total novices!) Based on what we learned we made changes to our site architecture, URL naming conventions, image naming conventions, and content strategy before we launched.
Because we are a self-funded startup we knew we wouldn't have a big (or any, really) PPC budget. In our sector (financial services) many of the phrases we wanted are $10/click because we are bidding against well funded competitors (online brokers mostly). Given our conversion rates and lifetime customer value we can't make money by buying visitors at $10/click. We had to rely on organic traffic and SEO.
SEO Results
We made solid progress with our SEO in 2011. We are analytical types and like to graph the number of phrases we have in Top 3 and Page 1 organic results each week.
For Page 1 results we went from 14 phrases at the beginning of 2011 to 108 phrases at the end of 2011:
For Top 3 organic rankings in 2011 we went from four at the start of the year to 44 at the end of the year:
The impact of these ranking improvements was significant. We quadrupled our Google referred organic traffic during the year. At the start of the year we were getting 2000 visitors per month from Google organic visits. By the end of 2011 we were getting 8000 visitors per month from Google organic visits:
For us, this increase in organic search traffic helped us grow our business nicely during 2011.
Over $100,000 Of PPC Ads Equivalent
We wanted to know how much that organic traffic was worth to us in terms of equivalent PPC ad spend. So we went to the Google Keyword Tool and looked up the Exact Match estimated CPC for each phrase where we ranked. Then we multiplied that number by the actual visits we received for that Exact Match phrase.
For example, we rank for "call option" which has an estimated CPC (for Exact Match) of $13.66. We got 286 clicks from that phrase in 2011, which would have cost us 286 x $13.66 or $3907 if we had purchased those clicks via PPC. Do that same exercise for all of the phrases that sent us organic traffic during 2011 and you get a number in excess of $100,000. Those are visits we got for free because of our SEO. (Did I mention how much we appreciate our training from SEOmoz yet?)
Cool. So How Did You Get Those Rankings?
Ah, yes. The secret sauce. Because we are grateful to the community here, we are going to share our tactics. None of this is rocket science or breaking new ground. But rather than vague assurances, we can say for certain these tactics worked for us.
On-page optimization. We created an Excel file and mapped our site so we knew which phrase was mapped to which URL. We limited ourselves to one phrase per URL (okay, maybe two phrases if one was the plural of the other). Then we used the Report Card feature of the On Page tools here until we got an 'A' grade for every phrase/URL pair. We did this for about 200 phrases we care about. Yes, it took a while (a little bit of time each day spread over six months).
Internal linking. If a blog article on one concept mentions a concept we have another blog article for then we make sure the first points to the second with appropriate anchor text. We also interlink our Tutorial with our Blog. We actually repeat this process about once every 90 days, so to make sure that older content is referring to newer content (and vice versa) as we add more content pages.
New content. We add at least one page of unique content per week to the site (300-500 words written by us and relevant to our audience). We have a list of phrases we'd like to rank for that we don't currently rank for and tend to create content around one of those phrases each week.
Link building. We build deep links to every page. For some pages, optimized for long tail phrases, it only takes 1 or 2 links with appropriate anchor text to get a decent ranking. But for most of our phrases it requires many more links than that. We wrote a ton of guest blog articles and article marketing articles (non-spun, non-spammy) and posted them on themed (investment related) blogs and sites. An example is this guest post on a PR5 site.
BLU. Blogger Link Up is a free email list where people post requests for articles every day (there are a few of these kinds of sites). If you write something they will give you a link back. Before spending time creating new content for someone else we always check their traffic stats and look at their site. If their site is spammy looking then forget it. But many of them are quality, well-curated sites that will provide a decent link in exchange for quality content.
HARO. If you aren't using HARO you should be. It stands for Help A Reporter Out. You sign up (free) and then get a daily email from journalists looking for sources on articles. If you are relevant to the article they are working on and offer them some expert answers or content they may cite you in their article (and give you a link back). Major publications use HARO and we have successfully gotten links on sites like American Express's OpenForum (PR6 site) through this process. It's not the same as having an expensive PR firm, but it will give you at least some access to the same kind of publications a PR firm would.
Press releases. Never underestimate the links you will get if you issue a press release. We use PRWeb but there are others. Make sure the release is SEO optimized (put in a few links to deep pages on your site). Seems like no matter what you issue at PRWeb there are dozens of sites that will republish your release, creating dozens of new links. Yes, you have to pay for the releases. Do it a couple times a year, minimum.
Forum participation. This does not mean posting spam in forums. This means find where your audience hangs out and provide meaningful participation. After you've established yourself as credible (posted a certain number of non-spam postings) then most forums will let you have a do-follow link in your signature line for each post. Yes, it takes time to read and participate in the forums. You will not only get some link love (for the bots) but eventually but you will also get human visitors who just like what you're saying in the forums and come check you out.
YouTube videos. We weren't sure about this one until we did it, but it's totally worth it. Create a channel on YouTube (which will get you one do-follow link from a PR9 site) and post some videos. We saw a noticeable increase in rankings once we did this. We think that PR9 link really helped.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+: Set up profiles and every time you write a blog entry post it to these outlets.
You Had Better Like To Write
The bottom line is we spend a ton of time writing. Writing for our own site, writing guest blogs and articles for other sites, writing to answer HARO requests, answering questions in forums, etc. We probably spend half our time on new content creation and writing in general. Yes, you can outsource the writing but (1) it costs money, and (2) much of what you get back won't be of high enough quality to use (at least, within our financial niche that has been our experience). Better to write it yourself.
We've definitely come to realize that SEO is not a sprint; it's a marathon. Even though we made good progress in 2011 we have another hundred phrases we want to rank for in 2012. That's over eight per month. Time to get back to writing!
Even for more seasoned SEOs who understand the tactics you used, I really liked the core approach and accountability. You set a goal, you measured it ruthlessly, and you improved on it. Regardless of tactics, that's how you get the job done.
Beautifully said Sir.
But here I just want to say to all the Mozers that the unethical and paid promotion might ranked you higher but it doesn't earns you a reputation and good image that's why if you lost your ranking your whole business also vanished. But if your promotion is 100% genuine than after a certain limit of time you don't need to worry about your ranking as ethical techniques earn you a reputation and branding which never let your business goals down.Which is even more important to rank higher.
Your right the approach at the core is simple. Set goals, measure and track. Regaurdless of some of the above contravery it seems like we can is a good systimatic core approach.
Bottomline for me is that this make me excited about doing SEO.
okay back to researching for me so I can start tracking and refining!
This post is worth going to the official SEOmoz blog. The final part is TERRIFIC.
I second that Salva, it has enough value to be promoted to the SEOMoz blog! But since its just about the PPC & ads, that's why the SEO community in general may not take much itnerest, as PPC is not everyone choice to pick!
Mike,
Awesome post! I like your link ideas, but I think you hit the nail on the head with "You Had Better Like To Write" and creating atleast one new post on your site every week.
While I do use myblogguest also I will give BLU a shot! Thanks for the suggestion
True that hey, writing tonnes and tonnes of content is as white hat as it gets. Its a rather painful and laborious task but if done diligently and effectively the results can be so astounding.
When I thought I had seen it all in terms of link building, you show me Blogger Look Up. I will definitely check this out and see what kind of results I get.
Mike, I think you bring up something extremely important that went virtually unnoticed on this post. It's something I will be trying to emphasize in the future to the rest of the SEO community. Here's what it is: You didn't use any SEO magic tricks. All the things you did that built your foundation and made you rank have been talked about before.
When I first got into SEO, I had the wrong mindset. I was always looking for some new cool trick that would make a site rank #1. There wasn't. It's about doing the important things right and investing the majority of your time and resources on them.
For example - Internal linking. That's been talked about a million times on almost every SEO blog! Yet some people don't utilize the kind of power it holds. People don't invest their time to perfectly optimize their internal links, because they can have more impact than high quality external links in some cases.
An example? One of my client's competitors, who has a DA of only a few points higher, has a page solely for a keyword, the same keyword my client's homepage is trying to rank for. The on-site SEO is generally the same, and we have a ton of quality external links, but they're ranking SOLELY on internal links. Yet so many "SEOs" don't invest the time & resources to take advantage of something so simple.
Thanks Mike, and congratz! That's not easy what you did.
I love this post. I use a lot of the same link building strategies that you do too... BLU included. Another one you might be interested in if you like BLU is myblogguest.com, which is another great place to find guest posting opportunities.
Truth be known, one look at the link profile and you can see that the BIGGEST source of links look like they're not typical guest posts. They're paid posts in a private blog network. Seriously folks...when someone comes on here claiming awesome success in such a competitive niche in a short time period, be skeptical. In the spirit of TAGFEE, I'll come right out and say it, the backlink profile looks pretty spammy. Lots of .edu guest book spam, public wiki spam, private blog network spam, blog comment spam, and on and on. There are some pretty solid legitimate links. But the anchor text targeted links appear to be mostly spam. It takes about 5 mins. to check the site out on OSE and MajesticSEO to see quite a bit of spam. It was hard to find any press releases btw. For me the best way to learn link building strategy is to study the link profiles of websites that rank well in these competitive areas.
Needless to say, I thumbed this post down.
cnoble, in the beginning of our 18 months of link building we experimented with hiring 3rd party SEO providers (like most people do when they're new and don't know anything). They promised a lot and in the end, delivered spam. We tried a few of these guys and they all failed. They were cheap, but you get what you pay for (not much). So we took matters into our own hands and did non-spam link building ourselves. We saw dramatic increases in rankings from the hand-built links were earned in exchange for content. The YouTube channel, in particular, gave us a big boost when we added that (even though we only have a few short videos there).
A few of our press releases:
https://www.prweb.com/releases/options-trading/covered-calls/prweb4304334.htm
https://www.prweb.com/releases/2011/11/prweb8939751.htm
https://www.prweb.com/releases/covered-calls/option-trading/prweb9103302.htm
yeah, like I said, there are some legitimate links. Those PRWeb ones aren't easy to find in the backlink profile. And there are a few that seem to be excellent valuable content out there. However, it's clear to see that the spam linkbuilding is still going on. And in fact, the timing of the linkspam matches up closely with the steep inclines in your charts above. There are a ton of paid blog network style links posted the last half of November 2011, just three months ago. Majestic shows a huge spike in link building in November. Low an behold, your charts here show some gains in November as well. Also anchor text reports show that most of your anchor text targeted links are the spam ones. Your legitimate content links using your brand name primarily. Many of your "legitimate" links are nofollowed. Here are just a few of your more powerful links:
Posted 11/21/11 - https://seo-voyage.com/small-business-marketing/acer-predator-ag7750-ur22p-gaming-pc-reviewed
Posted 11/21/11 - https://www.unique-article-database.com/all-about-the-acer-predator-ag7750-ur22p-pc-gaming-takes-another-step-forward/
and several others. Your PRWeb examples above are dated July 2010 (links w/ targeted anchor text), Nov. 2011 (no anchor text links), and Jan 2012 (anchor text links)
There are thousands of links and I don't really care to put much time into researching your backlink profile. My opinion is that this post is only written for the anchor text link you're getting from it.
The increase in our rankings and traffic in Q4 was driven primarily by two things: (1) the addition of our YouTube channel which went live Oct 1, 2011 (you can see that on the channel's home page), and (2) the press release on PRweb dated Nov 6, 2011 (which, if you Google the title of the release inside quotes you will see that it has 4270 instances in Google's index; that's a lot of legitimate non-spam links created in November by other sites picking up the release).
I don't think it's fair to attribute the rank improvements in your targeted keywords primarily to those two activities, while ignoring (you didn't even mention the private blog network spam in the original post) the anchor text targeted link building you did. It's kind of misleading.
Again...the november press release doesn't have any anchor text rich links! Perhaps the real reason was the spam...and you're falsely attributing the success to YouTube and Press Releases. In full disclosure, I have some websites I use to test link building tactics, even spam linkbuilding tactics.
It's misleading to act like the spam isn't partly responsible for the success. If it wasn't effective then you wouldn't have bought those Acer Computer articles sponsored by borntosell.com just a few months ago....am I right? Come on....are mozzers really buying this "white hat" success story after looking at the link profile? Where's Aaron Wall when you need him?! haha.
@ Mike Scanlin In the first line of your article you said that your site has been launched in July 2010 and you achieved your desired success by the end of 2011 means exact 18 months. And now in the above comment you justifying yourself that in the first 18 month you had outsourced your campaign to someone else. Which finally proves us that you had not worked yourself until now.
I really don't want to cross check your backlink portfolio just to know how ethical are you and your campaign is. But I just found this point which points against you.
Well apart of it as a good mozer I am congratulating you for your wonderful success, Because in our industry at the last of the day the thing which only matters is just where you stands in SERPs.
well done for checking cnoble.
@scanlin - well done on the rankings. I think its wrong to not even mention the spammy links that have been built for your site - you've got a lot of shady looking links...
I just opened up open site explorer and opened up a random 10 links with the anchor text "covered call" and 7 were spam, directories or bought blogroll spots.
There are articles with well written text, but they are on dodgy looking sites (eg. article before yours links to a popular holiday term, the article after yours links to popular jewellery term).
A little disappointed that SEOmoz have promoted this without checking. Yes its good to promote and publicise white hat techniques - but its not right to say they work when it's just as likely to have been the spam that had the impact.
Absolutely zero validity to this as a test.In any scientific industry (or even in a school lab test) this would be thrown out as an unfair test.
Saying something doesn't make it true. Perception is a funny old game though...
Hi Raunaq, thanks for the congrats.
Yes, we've been online for 18 months. Yes, we used outsourced SEO for the first few months. We stopped that in 2010. During 2011 we dabbled with various low cost outsourcers but never got any links above PR1, and most of them were spam (our fault for not paying enough to get better outsourced SEO; didn't have the budget for it). Everything PR2 or higher (and many of the PR1) are links we got outselves.
We have a couple hundred pages of optimized original content on our site, which took 18 months to create. We probably have 5x to 10x that number of guest blogs and artilces that we've written, too. Most guest blog articles get 2 links, and we are systematic about link building to our subpages with these links. Yes, it is labor intensive to do all the writing and maintain the link spreadsheet.
While I think there are some great references in this post in terms of guest blogging through BLU or HARO, I do agree with cnoble. Looking at link profiles of websites does give you some valuable information on different link building tactics and their respective results on SERP and SEO.
It is very sad to see eg.: when a trusted PR7 US News site, such as topix.com gets involved in link selling, only to earn a few thousand dollars "pocket money" for its editor...
https://topixsellinglinks.blogspot.com/
I'm more amazed these sort of 'spammy' backlink techniques still work (if they are in fact adding to the author's site serp rank). Hell, I might have to break out the SEO guide I wrote in 1997 and try some of those schemes again ;) I liked this article. There's some great ideas in here for marketing consultants/agencies to use when talking to prospects. Any time you can quantify your services (in this case, the real dollar value of the 'free' traffic they will be getting from search engines), you can price your services accordingly and show them the real bottom-line ROI. Deal closed.
I think it's completely believable that the author tried this 'less than clean' stuff in the beginning (didn't we all at some point), didn't see any real, long term results, and then focused on the kind of quality optimization described in the article. I bet most of us did the same thing. When I stopped looking for 'tricks' and instead focused on providing cool stuff to users, I realized that Google wasn't bs'ing when they repeated their mantra of 'develop your sites for your users, not googlebot.'
Qualifying something as "spammy", though, is always a judgement call. I was/am perhaps in the minority of 'internet markerting people' who thought companies like DemandMedia got a bum rap in the whole 'panda' update. Yeah, they mass-created content that would be attractive to search engine users, but they DID create original content and it's not ALL bad. To me it doesn't matterm because the end users will always be the final arbiter of what qualifies as quality content.
After 12 years of doing 'online marketing' in all of its various incarnations, one thing I learned is to never blanket-judge certain techniques as 'spam' or 'blackhat'. It wasn't that long ago that advertising and marketing strategies now known as 'remarketing', 'location-based ad serving' and 'social marketing' were considered highly intrusive, spyware and sometimes criminal by the general Internet user. I bet if you went back just 5 years, general internet users would not believe that companies like Google, Facebook, MSFT etc would be so openly tracking all browsing behavior across any device you use, real-time physical location (sometimes), your real-life social network, all your social interactions, (soon ALL of your TV, movie, gaming, phone call data), shopping history etc. Those same people would then blow a gasket if you told them that they are using this data for their own products and sharing this data with 'partners', app developers, advtertisers, gov't institutions. It would have been impossible to legally collect this astonishingly personal and comprehensive profile dataset. W-T-F?
Even if you went totally illegal and stuffed someone's PC with malware downloads, BHOs etc - you couldn't have collected the unprecedented amount of structured data freely available today. A great example of this shift in user perception just happened. My girlfriend is watching Hulu in the other room as I write this. She just came in and said that on the Tv screen, it displayed a personal message (using her name) and recommended other shows based on what she was watching. She loved it. But i asked her if five years ago that appeared on her TV, she said she would have been terrified. God, I remember when just getting someone to give up an email address was a hurculean feat.
"We've definitely come to realize that SEO is not a sprint; it's a marathon."
The most important statement made in the article.
You communicated the process very well and helped me re-think my own process. Thanks!
Great post Mike!
This just goes to show that the information on how to do SEO the correct way is out there! All you have to do is actually follow the advice and learn from other people's mistakes.
I think if all SEOs stopped cutting corners then they and their clients will benefit.
Thanks for sharing!
Love this post. A real inspiration to people likE myself who are not SEO professionals. I am just someone who has an interest in SEO and wants to build his new company after the recession took hold of the last one!
Finally promoted to SEO Blog as mentioned by saliva and seconded by me. Awesome! Congratz brother! :)
This is perhaps the best post I have read so far on SeoMoz. This is THE example of how SEO should be done and the fact that you show the results of the strategy you have implemented is very valuable and inspiring.
All best.
It shows that you guys are the analytics types. Loved the title :) How did you know where you rank for all those terms? I doubt you did a manual check for all the phrases.
We use SEOmoz to track our rankings for the 200 phrases. You can export that data to a csv file. Then copy 100 at a time and paste into Keyword Tool. Then Download the Exact Match results to a file. You can Copy the column with estimated CPC from the Keyword Tool file and paste it into the SEOmoz file. The rows will be in the same order so it only takes a couple of copy/paste operations to get all the PPC data into the SEOmoz ranking file. Then do the same thing with Analytics data to get your actual clicks per key phrase for the time frame you're interested in.
SEOMoz is great for tracking rankings of keywords.
A great tool for seeing which keywords you are in the top 20 for (or that your competitors are in the top 20 for!) is SEMrush. Obviously it's limited by the number of keywords in its database (albeit that there are millions) and I'm sure not 100% accurate, but it's quite a nifty way of just having a quick nosey into competitor search visibility.
Thanks for the tips scanlin and staceycav. I've heard of SEMrush, but never gave it a serious try, so will give it another look. Regarding SEOmoz, am not a PRO member and just came back to the site, so still learning what i can and cannot do. Thanks for the advice.
p.s. - someone must think it was a stupid question considering the thumbs down :/
Hi Jeffrey,
The only stupid question is the one you didn't ask when you had the chance :)
Don't let the thumbs down bother you ...especially when your question actually resulted in a couple of other people sharing more info!
If you haven't already signed up for a 30 Day Free Trial of Pro, you can do that and then you will have access to all of the Pro Tools for a month so you can see exactly what is available in the SEOmoz Toolset.
Sha
Thanks Sha. Overall the community is actually one of the things that attracts me to SEOMoz.
Will definately try the PRO tools. Since i got 30 days though, I'm planning from beforehand how i can use the tools so I can make the most out of them. The more value I get from them, the easier it'll be to justify keeping them :)
No problem, Jeffrey!
If you want me to run a 'keywords they're ranking for' type report offin SEMRush for someone (to give you an idea as to how much data you can get) let me know :)
I don't use that as much as I use other tools but nonetheless quite handy for competitor analysis.
Thanks a lot stacey shall keep it in mind for the future. Cheers :)
I do actually attest to the somewhat accuract of SEMRush in comparison to other tools.
There are several statistics avaialble online that give you an indication of the number of clicks you should get based on the rankings 1 - 10, especially in the top 3.
Our sites collectively rank in the top 3 and in the top ten for approx 3000 keywords [tracked using SEO powersuite rank tracker] and mapping the traffic in Google Webmaster and GA I was suprised at its closeness to the expected numbers.
Sure some of the numbers were off but compared to screwed results that other tools provide SEMRush has been on top form and allows me to provide better estimations month in month out to directors
Can't give this a thumbs up or down, maybe sideways.
Ardent believer in HARO, press releases and other relatively non-expense ways to get name recognized. I discuss such options every week on my BlogTalkRadio show on cost-effective marketing: Piggy Bank Promotions.
But I disagree with two things here:
a) You're assuming everyone who comes here is going to understand all the SEO terms you're using. Most of the small business owners/entrepreneurs who listen to my show still understand this--and really don't have the money to hire someone who does, or to take classes that will help them. I understand you'd like them to read your book...but even that's too complicated for the average business owner.
b) Your advice that everyone should do their own writing is BAD advice...plain and simple. Relatively few people are equipped to be good writers, let alone copywriters. It takes a lot of skill to move from article writing to web content writing to press releases to newsletters and other options. It takes still other skills to figure out what makes a really interesting story/topic and then the add'l evaluation of who's going to be interested in hearing about this subject. Is it right for MySpace? Facebook? LinkedIn? One shouldn't automatically be sent to all the others.
By all means people should explore their options, but know what you can (and should) do for yourself as a small biz owner, and when you should seek help.
Wmeyeroff, I'm not sure if your comment is directed at me or someone else (?) but I don't have a book.
I agree that writing is a skill. The point I was trying to make when I said "you had better like to write" is that you will need thousands and thousands of words on your chosen niche/subject in order to get backlinks. You don't have to personally do the writing but someone needs to do it, and it needs to be high quality so that other sites will want to post it.
"the title goes SOOOOOOOOOOO trafficbaity"
I respectfully disagree; I think the title describes the content perfectly.
The "marathon" not a sprint is a good analogy. I'll use it!
Thanks for the insights, overall a good article no doubt of that. At some point you say “Those are visits we got for free because of our SEO”. Just because you did not paid Google for the traffic this does not mean is free. You still lost time planning, executing, assessing the results, failing sometimes, going back to the drawing board and so on. On the other hand you probably earned more valuable traffic than those 100K $ (because the unaccounted long tail).
Will give a chance to HARO in the near future. Thanks for the post.
It's really a great article which I have read on GUest Blogging. I will use all these techniques to build my site backlinks. This is a great source shared by you Scanlin. Thanks for this & keep it up.
This is exactly what I do for clients - like, you could have read my strategy verbatim - I can never let them see this post ;)
Mike- Excellent post and well communicated. In a highly competitive market, we also focused on the majority of the efforts you mentioned doubling the number of keywords we received traffic from. In addition to free traffic, we also focused on and refined our conversion paths. (Specifically following best practices for lead forms.) As a result of both a traffic and conversion centric approach, we increased our Y-O-Y free/organic traffic 13% but increased our conversion of that traffic 19%. The result was a Y-O-Y increase in free leads of 34% for a ROI of $154,000 in free visits and free leads vs. what it would cost us to buy them via Google AdWords. Making sure your goal steps are optimized for conversion will ensure all of the great SEO efforts you mentioned and executed upon are maximized. This is often overlooked. Cheers!
Hi, scanlin, very nice article, just want to ask how did you manage to get doFollow link from the YouTube Channel?
edited:
OK, I see this question has been asked, but all I see is nofollow links..
Edit2:
Found it. Yes it is only in the old look of the channel.
Great post, my team and I use these same tactics, I am glad to see Organic SEO on the rise. I get tired of lazy agencies convincing clients that Renting... (PPC) keywords is the best way to go. Organic Marketing Rules, PPC has its place in marketing, but it should never be used as the Tip of the Sword in an online marketing strategy.
Thanks Scanlan for the afformation
Mike, your post is almost on the level of confession. This is how it is. To make things even more real, you should to add that some forum moderators and blogers refused to publish yours hard work, and you started all over again… Thank you for encouraging sharing of your experience.
‘SEO is not a sprint; it's a marathon’ indeed.
Hey Sergei,
Yes, it is true that sometimes we would write unique content for someone (after running the idea by them in advance) and then they would either not post it or, worse, they would post it but change the links to point to one of their sites instead of ours or make the links no-follow (very frustrating!).
But, by and large, most people were honorable and as long as you uphold your end of the deal (don't send them low quality or spun content) then they will uphold their end. Despite the occassional setback (where you spend time on something and get zero value in return) our experience with SEO has been overwhelmingly positive. We've met some great bloggers and site owners.
For us, it's a labor of love kind of thing. We're totally passionate about our space and love talking to customers about it and writing about it. It's also fun to see progress, which is why we track our rankings so closely. Keeps us motivated to do more, because this stuff really works if you do it right and keep at it.
Thanks for writing YET ANOTHER guest post! I am guessing you are enjoying the link from SEOMOZ too! Great info...I am going to use as a check list for this year.
Thank you for sharing this!! This is great ammunition in my quest for hiring a copywriter/blogger for our SEO dept. Content is so frickin' important to SEO, but too much time gets spent on the technical aspects, analytics/reporting, and strategy. Leaving no time for the most important piece of our campaign. It's maddening!! So, thank you for lighting a fire under my a$$ - it's time to make this happen.
-Matt
With almost 500 root links and 3000 total link it isn't too hard to rank. Getting those links the "white way" is the hardest part...
Great post. I think this is a top ten for me.
I also use a lot of these link building methods and Blogger Link Up has been my best kep secret for over a year. I have not heard about HARO but I'm really glad that you've shared this along with other methods for building back links.
Great work! This is spot on. It's all about content and deep linking. The onpage report on SEOmoz is extremely helpful.
Wow..look at the haters up top. As they say Haterz gon hate?
Nice post. I learned at least one thing. Plus I was on the fence about PRWEB and I'll give it three runs.
This is great information. I will be checking BLU and bloogerguest out ASAP.
summing this up
I run some personal and news/ business related blogs and surely i got some good links out of this post
mainly HARO , Bloogerlinkup ,mybloguest.com and sourcebottle for Australian users.
Not to mention that this article definetly proves that all white hats have dabbled in a bit of gray and black hat techniques at some part of time.
Cheers
Jeff
I'm honestly very impressed with some companies that spend fortunes paying for PPC campaigns rather than saving money and having some of their emloyees use real-world interactions to create better leads and stronger connections online through these channels that you mentioned.
Prospects trust you prior to them coming to your site because of advice and support they had outside your company site.
Thanks for sharing these channels!
Now that I'm reminded about BLU and HARO again - I should finally start utilizing them as well.
This post surely justify one epic phrase "Content is Kingdom" thanks for sharing some nice website. Singing up for HARO now!
It's great to see you are getting results from your efforts. At the end of the day, it really is about getting results. You don't survive as a business without them.
This really is a good and inspiring article.
Good job on putting it together and letting us know some of your secrets and tactics :)
There are some great nuggets in here and this is a great starting point for those of us who are not expert SEOs and are looking for a starting point for a new site. Thumbs up from me.
What tools/resources did you use to find relevant keywords to try and rank for? I have an "A" on my on-page optimization report card,but having trouble ranking for the keywords. I also use the keyword analysis from SEOMOZ and look for keywords that are under 50% in compeitiveness.
I used several tools to find keywords. Started off with Google Keyword Tool (GKT) and typed in everything I could think of. I let it generate suggestions, too. Then I exported everything and sorted a couple of ways: (1) # of monthly searches (I removed single word phrases because they're too broad and often way too hard to rank for), (2) competition (removed anything with 95% or higher unless it was super relevant to what we're doing; otherwise tried to find low competition, relevant, long-tail phrases that had at least 500 or more searches per month -- once you're done optimizing and ranking for those you can move to the less common phrases).
Then, in another totally separate task I used ispionage.com to look up what my competitors rank for (I'm told there are other tools that do this, but the free version of ispionage.com will give you top 10 results -- click on the SEO tab after you've entered a domain name). Then I'd take the list of words they rank for and go back to GKT to check on frequency and competition.
I've also used the tools here at SEOmoz and a few others (spyfu.com, seoprofiler.com, wordtracker.com) to make lists of phrases. In the end the goal is to build a big list, and then sort by frequency (so you don't spend time on words that only get 20 searches per month) and then by competition (really hard to rank for 99% competition phrases).
You will probably find there are more phrases than you have time/content to rank for. So now you have to scan the list thinking about relevance and intent. Prioritize the list and start working on it. For my company, our dream list has just over 200 phrases in it but we've only had time to tackle about 140 of them so far. Some of the 140 we do not yet rank for, and there are another 70 we want to create new content for to try and start ranking for them. Not enough time in the day!
One other tool I forgot to mention in my original article is yourversion.com. It's free. You give it a list of phrases you care about and it monitors the web looking for new occurrences of those phrases. The more specific you are the better (if you give it something generic you will get too many matches to be useful). In many cases those new occurrences are new blog articles. Couple of opportunities for any matches it finds: (1) leave an interesting/valuable comment to the article, or (2) contact the blog owner and offer another article on the same subject, since you already know the publish stuff on that subject.
There are some really useful tools here that you've mentioned, I'll deffinately be looking into using some of them myself!
kevin, at the end of the day difficulty score is not important, what you should be asking yourself is whether you can match the number of root domain links to the page and the domain with the guy who holds #1 spot. If the answer is "yes", then you have great chances of ranking
I think it is so great to see a person/company take full advantage of the information available on this site and many others. White Hat SEO has no secrets; it is all about good quality work, good quality product/service, smart planning, and commitment. Congratulations I think this is awesome. You are probably 1/10,000 that actually have the guts to do it yourself and the commitment to do it right.
I can't understand why this is getting thumbs down! It seems well written and useful to me.
We haven't used HARO before but we have used fashion 4 media - it seems to be the same thing but focused on fashion sites.
Out of interest which tool do you use to monitor SERP positions? Moz's tracker or another tool?
Thanks!
Hi Nigel,
The above stats were generated with Moz's ranking tracker.
Thanks for the post, I love it! great advice and great review of some SEO tactics!
HI
Great post, congarulation for succes site, keep it up.
I think its time to forget directory submissions:D
Sam
I think the article is great and there are a lot of good link building tactics, but you probably shouldn't say it was free at least not like that yes the traffic you got was free, but the issue I have is a lot of times people who are novices see "SEO" and "Free Traffic" and get excited and then they usually hire someone to do the work for them, but often time's wont want to pay them for it because they think it's all free, but the labor put into is not free. It takes time and time is money and that's my only issue with this. Also, it's one thing to do SEO for your own site and another to hire someone to do it. I realize here you were doing your own, but still I imagine there was a payout for you and whoever helped you meaning the cost of getting that traffic wasn't actually free.
Otherwise thanks for some of the links you shared some of these I hadn't heard of others I did.
Kate, yes, i realize now that I overstated the free-ness of what we had done. There was the cost of my SEO Pro membership (totally worth it), the cost to send press releases on PRWeb (worth it), and we did hire some writers (which was not worth it).
Still, even if we spent $2K-$3K in 2011 (close the real amount) on all SEO stuff it certainly paid for itself last year and will continue to pay dividends this year. Whereas PPC does not have a tail; you just have to keep paying (which is okay if you have the conversion rates and lifetime customer values to support it). So I could argue that because of the tail on last year's SEO efforts (meaning: we still rank this year) it was worth even more than the $100K of PPC click-equivalent we got last year.
In any case, I think SEO is a viable strategy for people like us who have more time than money and are passionate about a niche.
Hi Mike
Thanks for sharing this post.I especially like the way in which you have explained your SEO techniques and methods in detail.
Very nice blog post. Full of good information. Nice job!
This is a good piece with solid, actionable advice, but it's labour intensive. How would you recommend I go about offering this level of service from my one-man department to 20-25 clients?
Nonetheless, some great nuggets in there and lots to think about. Well done.
First, thanks to everyone for the kudos. Appreciate it. Especially from this crowd. Happy to give back as I've learned a lot from you all.
iainb, I don't know how we could scale what we've done for 20 sites. That would be impossible for me. Maybe you can hire some trainable interns.
The keys to my success are (1) perseverance, (2) organization, and (3) quality writing (I love my niche, so I have a lot to say on the topic). The writing you might be able to outsource to someone familiar with the niches you're working on. Give them a list of 100 key phrases and say you want one 400-500 word article on each of those 100 topics (well, give them 3 as a trial, then 10 more, and then the whole list if they do well).
Then it's up to you to find good places to post those unique articles. The better the article, the better the placement you can get. That requires a lot of research, and asking bloggers/webmasters if they'll accept a quality post relevant to their blog/site's theme. Lots of email (and another spreadsheet to track it). Put in some graphics if you can; people like images/graphics in their articles.
I don't know how to scale HARO (which has been the source of some great links for us). I respond to about 3 HARO requests per week and get about a 40% call back rate from the jouralists (and 75% of the callbacks/interviews result in a link, including multiple PR6 and PR5 links). I comment on personal finance or investing topics mostly, but also on startup company issues.
Most of what we've done is hand crafted link curation (like the internal linking, and reaching out to targeted sites we wanted to be on (relevant to our audience)). It's not rocket science but you are correct in that it is incredibly time consuming. One of those jobs that never ends; there's always more you could be doing.
Congratulations on 2011 =]
I like and sincerely appreciate your ending remark about writing. If you can generate great content, people will begin listening to you. People want to share remarkable articles, and if your company is known for developing high-quality content, people will want to be associated with you. It does take a certain degree of expertise in a field to create sharable content, but if you can add a unique perspective when looking at a topic from the outside, that's also a worthwhile approach to take.
Again, I completely agree with your comment on loving to write. It's a genuine way to generate traction on any platform. Great post!
Brand new to SEOMoz today!! Best article and info I've read this year (last 12 months). Keep them coming!!
Hey Carl!
Welcome to SEOmoz...you've obviously come to the right place :)
Look forward to catching you around the blog comments and Q&A.
Sha
Great post and it helps to realize that SEO as mentioned is not a sprint, it's a marathon - each step has to be done, there are no jumps over the fence, step by step, step by step - walking in circular way to the top of the mountain.
Love this Post. Useful for ppc and SEO, mention all things in this post step by step easy to understand and also implement. Thanks a lot
I can relate. I too am a small business guy doing my own online marketing and you advenures ring so true. Both in the amount and kinds of effort but also in the results.
It's great to know others have been on the same path as myself and are finding success. It provides me with some needed inspiration. Please keep us updated.
While most of info was fairly basic, did learn about HARO and will try it to see if there is a payoff
You are right. Content and link building are still most important works in SEO. Save $100K is awsome.
Summed it up nicely at the end there - if you're going to succrssful in search, you better enjoy writing!
Scalin,
Kudos to you for such perseverance and yes, hard word definitely pays (literally).
I just went through your site and must say that it is pretty well structured. However is there any specific reason for having a secure protocol i.e. https instead of http?
- Sajeet
Hey Sajeet, Thanks.
We choose https because we are a finance site and people enter their portfolio of stock and option positions. We felt they would appreciate the extra security with their personal information (I think all online brokerages use https).
However, we did have a choice to make the public site (the not-logged-in part) http instead of https, and just keep the logged-in members section https but there were cases where certain browsers (IE7, for sure; maybe others) would put up odd security warnings about switching from secure to non-secure or vice-versa (or if we tried to use a non-secure include file (Javascript, CSS, or image file) on a secure page then there were complaints from some browsers. We decided for simplicity to just use https everywhere. Also, some brokers (Etrade, TDAmeritrade, etc) have their public site as https, too, so we felt it was becoming a standard for finance sites.
As a consequence of that decision we had to add a 301 redirect rule for any http request that comes in (to point to the https version of the same request).
Great article Mike! Impressive that your results were all achieved from self-learning! Interesting as well with the comparison of organic/paid.
To connect with journalists, we use something called "SourceBottle" here in Australia which sounds very similar to HARO. Thanks for the recommendation! I've now signed up and am keen to start answering some of their questions!
Nice article Mike. Looks like you guys have been working very hard...
I started using myblogguest.com a few months ago, and I second staceycav that it is a great tool for not only finding quality sites and blogs to get your articles published on, but also to find articles for your own site / blog. As with anything though, you do have to filter out the "written for article marketing only" type of articles which tend to be a bit thin on value.
There is one pesky thing that is bugging me though. You say your PR 9 YouTube link is "do-follow". Is this correct, and if so, how did you get this? I have a number of YT channels and they all show as no-follow. I scanned the comments to see if anyone else mentioned this, but didn't see anything, so I hope I am not being an idiot here...
Does anyone else have do-follow YouTube links?
Thanks.
There is 1 do-follow link available in the YouTube channel profile. Search for "Website:" and it's right after that. I'm not sure it's available if you choose the "new channels design".
Bravo on your success! I finally gave in and and starting using SEOmoz and am never going to look back! I mean I would probably pay close to $500 a month for this!
I really like how you gave some real life examples of how you achieved your success. For example :), instead of just saying "We did a lot of Guest Blog Posts using several tools...", you went above and beyond and talked about exactly what tools you used and how long it took to find results.
Then even after I was done reading, I saw you posted some more examples in the comments. This is defiantly one of my new favorite SEOmoz posts and surely one I am going to print out and read over and over again!
~Nick
Great article. Very hands-on and practical. I have a few questions about your target keywords though. When you pick your list of 100 target phrases and then write articles for those phrases; are you posting those articles on your own site in hopes that they rank, or are you using those articles as guest blogs?
If we want to rank for phrase XYZ we would first create a page about XYZ. We'd keep working on the page until it gets an on-page grade of "A" by the SEOmoz on-page report card tool. It's a page dedicated to just that phrase (so if you have 100 phrases you need 100 unique pages). It's not a hard and fast rule that you have to have an "A" grade for your on-page optimization in order to rank but in our experience it helps a lot.
Then we internally link to that new page with "XYZ" (or variants) anchor text. We also check if that new page contains any phrases in the content that we've previously written pages for and if so link the new XYZ page to the older pages. You have to do this tastefully or else your content contains too many links to be readable/usable. Common sense should prevail here.
Then we start writing articles (for EzineArticles and a few others) and guest blogs (for sites where we ask the curator in advance if they'd be interested) about XYZ (or something closely related so we can use XYZ within the article) and create external links to the XYZ page with "XYZ" (or variants of XYZ) as anchor text.
Thanks for the prompt response. That sounds like an awesome strategy, thanks. One more question.. Do you usually use blog posts or new pages on your site for XYZ?
We use both, new pages and blog postings. But we only create 1 page per phrase. So if we did a new page about XYZ (in our Tutorial section, for example) we would not do a blog posting targeting XYZ (and vice-versa).
Great piece, funnily enough our Lead SEO guy here at our offices took a call from a guy at HARO this morning :)
This is so information and nice blog. Keep it up..
Thanks for sharing with us...
Great Blog post - the best thing about this is that it is all about great SIMPLE seo and not bull crap or PPC (i don't like ppc, you can get far more (as this shows) from hard work and keeping it simple). well done.
Nice article Mike. Looks like you guys have been working very hard...
Great article. Very hands-on and practical, sounds like an awesome strategy,
I think the article is great and there are a lot of good link building tactics
Thanks,
[spam removed by moderator]
Nice post, although you can find decent content writers if you look in the right places. Go to Constant Content for quality, editor-reviewed work. Or get hold of a decent writer, like me!
Hey Alex. Didn't know about Constant Content. Looks interesting but they don't have a category for Investing, only Business. I might try it for a couple of articles and see how it goes. But my earlier point about having more time than money still holds. I don't want to outsource everything or we'll give up the profitability we've achieved by doing the work in-house.
We've also considered having an "investment writing contest" where we give a valuable prize but we own all the submissions. Might get more submissions than the prize is worth (that we could sprinkle around various places); not sure. If anyone has experience with this; speak up! Kind of like 99designs but for writing...
You can also make requests on CC, asking for exactly what you want in articles, and setting a price in advance. I just write there by the way, I not actually promoting it!
In photography (my other hat) competitions where the organizer keeps the rights are not popular with the pros. As a writer I would be interested in a writing competition where the prize was a regular, and paid, writing gig with the site.
Hi there was an panda updates on 19 Jan 2012 ..please write about it ,my blog https://www.timetravell.com is hit by this updation
Okay this post is good and actually helpful but the title goes SOOOOOOOOOOO trafficbaity that it crosses the line in excessiveness. Please do not use hyperbole to attract clicks, it helps no one and it ends up devaluing what otherwise is really good content.
The title does seem a little linkbaity because they are going for the equivalent of expensive keywords, and many of us may not be, but the general principle is very insightful and something that I have not seen discussed much here. That principle is this: there are always going to be keywords that would cost you more than you would benefit, but if you can achieve organic rankings for them, you can get almost as much benefit without any of the costs.
The title suits perfectly, since they explain exactly the how you save your money and they do the math.
Agreed. I thought it was a post about techniques to acquire free PPC ad credits or coupons.
Having said that, I found the post quite useful. Thumbs up.