You're a SEO manager for a new company working on a new site. Where to?
-
So, you've recently begun as a SEO manager for a new company who's just launched a lovely, gleaming corporate site to boot. The onsite stuff is taken care of and your attention turns to link building.
Now you've been in the game for a few years. You've seen things change in that time. Directories are out. Link networks are done. You're not going to embark on reciprocal linking either because it's bad and looks horribly tacky. Black Hat, White Hat - you know the score.
You're lucky that the company produces a page or two of news a day - it's original, informative, is great for keeping your clients informed and you punt this on Twitter and FB. A bit of link bait, eh?
But there's a rub: your competitors, with their bigger budgets, and industry clout, have been around for a some time longer than your company has been. They've snapped up all the good (industry-related) sites to get links from. You've approached all potential targets with the offer of good, relevant content and affiliate partnerships but they aren't having any of it. You're simply out-sized by the big boys next door - you can't compete. They're rich kids.
There just seems nowhere to get links from. Do you just go the route of press releases and articles? Do you use paid blogging services? Grovel at doorsteps. The industry you're in is incredibly commercial - no meek altruist is going to take pity and give you a couple backlinks out of kindness.
What do you do? What indeed...?
-
Thanks.
I see how my sentence allowed longtail to be merged with PPC. I actually wanted that to mean going after long tail with SEO efforts.
This is a good strategy, but to recommend looking for a new job in a less developed industry is almost like saying just give up and try something easy.
Some people can interpret it that way.
I think that it is a mistake for an SEO to accept jobs that are above his ability level or jobs where the resources that the company plans to put into an effort are not adequate to become competitive.
A lot of SEOs are selling the $500/month package to business owners who really should be spending the $5000/month needed to compete in their industry.
One of my favorite quotes is... "It's not the size of the dog in the fight, its the size of the fight in the dog."
But even with that powerful attitude a smart chihuahua will stay in his weight class.
-
I saw "look for a job in an industry that is not as developed", I agree totally with you point regarding attacking long tails on PPC. This is a good strategy, but to recommend looking for a new job in a less developed industry is almost like saying just give up and try something easy.
-
Wow, you saw PPC and didn't read any further.
-
I don't think that is good advice at all, those that think that SEO is not worth doing or impossible in certain sectors either are too lazy or do not know how. Simply throwing money at PPC is an option, and does provide short term benefit, but it's not a long-term solution for continued ROI.
-
Ye, I've made the plea but when resources are limited there's only so much you can you I suppose. I'm also going to see what the useless PPC man is up to - perhaps throw more of my 2¢ into the fray.
Being selective as at which industry I go into next has become more and more apparent. Probably good advice for any SEO with enough experience who can afford to be selective.
-
What do you do? What indeed...?
Become an expert at PPC and attack ALL of the long tail keywords.
Make a case to the boss for the resources needed to wage war at the level needed to become competitive.
You can also look for a job doing SEO in an industry that is not as highly developed or as cut-throat. I know of a lot of industries where I would not want to be an inhouse SEO.
-
This is one of those scenarios where you just have to be creative, tgood content, linkbait and social connection will be key here. Build up a good social following through twitter, facebook, google+ etc.. where you can reach out to users, follow industry specific blogs and become part of the conversation.
Once that following is built you can start syndicating creative linkbait - think of original content for your industry that your followers will appreciate and want to share themselves - think infographics, Whitepapers, video, unique captivating content. This is the kind of stuff that people will start to talk about, link and share themselves on the social and blogospheres building you natural links. It may be hard to achieve, but without a big budget it may be your best option.
Article and PR syndication rarely works, usually it results in low quality, spammy articles with 1 exact anchor link per 250 words. Looks tacky and spammy, and I am sure it looks the same to Google.
-
Hi TCE,
Best of Luck For New Role in New Company.
Start with a company blog, find a particular niche in what your company is doing and start writing things about that.
Invite one or two good industry writers for writing on your blog. So if you cant write they can help you.
Start following good blogs, twitter accounts of your competitors, industry vertical and other influential of your business area, so you can have the idea and news about the new and current things which is shaping your industry. It also become a thought for your blog post.
Do some local, participate in some events which relates to your business, help them to promote by mentioning in your blogs.
Dont search for where to get links, strive for the good content from your industry. Ask your offline marketing department give you some hint about core value of your company and product so you can write it down.
Create a video interview of your owners, customers publish them.
Gather a data of industry and try if you can make a good infograph.
There are a lot more things you can do with new companies, ask others to share their experience why they join this new company and so on..
I hope this will help to you.
Thanks
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What would be the best course of action to nullify negative effects of our website's content being duplicated (Negative SEO)
Hello, everyone About 3 months ago I joined a company that deals in manufacturing of transportation and packaging items. Once I started digging into the website, I noticed that a lot of their content was "plagiarized". I use quotes as it really was not, but they seemed to have been hit with a negative SEO campaign last year where their content was taken and being posted across at least 15 different websites. Literally every page on their website had the same problem - and some content was even company specific (going as far as using the company's very unique name). In all my years of working in SEO and marketing I have never seen something at the scale of this. Sure, there are always spammy links here and there, but this seems very deliberate. In fact, some of the duplicate content was posted on legitimate websites that may have been hacked/compromised (some examples include charity websites. I am wondering if there is anything that I can do besides contacting the webmasters of these websites and nicely asking for a removal of the content? Or does this duplicate content not hold as much weight anymore as it used to. Especially since our content was posted years before the duplicate content started popping up. Thanks,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Hasanovic0 -
Hacked site vs No site
So I have this website that got hacked with cloaking and Google has labeled it as such in the SERPs. With due reason of coarse. My question is I am going to relaunch an entirely new redesigned website in less than 30 days, do I pull the hacked site down until then or leave it up? Which option is better?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Rich_Coffman0 -
Sudden influx of 404's affecting SERP's?
Hi Mozzers, We've recently updated a site of ours that really should be doing much better than it currently is. It's got a good backlink profile (and some spammy links recently removed), has age on it's side and has been SEO'ed a tremendous amount. (think deep-level, schema.org, site-speed and much, much more). Because of this, we assumed thin, spammy content was the issue and removed these pages, creating new, content-rich pages in the meantime. IE: We removed a link-wheel page; <a>https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Asuperted.com%2Fpopular-searches</a>, which as you can see had a **lot **of results (circa 138,000). And added relevant pages for each of our entertainment 'categories'.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ChimplyWebGroup
<a>http://www.superted.com/category.php/bands-musicians</a> - this page has some historical value, so the Mozbar shows some Page Authority here.
<a>http://www.superted.com/profiles.php/wedding-bands</a> - this is an example of a page linking from the above page. These are brand new URLs and are designed to provide relevant content. The old link-wheel pages contained pure links (usually 50+ on every page), no textual content, yet were still driving small amounts of traffic to our site.
The new pages contain quality and relevant content (ie - our list of Wedding Bands, what else would a searcher be looking for??) but some haven't been indexed/ranked yet. So with this in mind I have a few questions: How do we drive traffic to these new pages? We've started to create industry relevant links through our own members to the top-level pages. (http://www.superted.com/category.php/bands-musicians) The link-profile here _should _flow to some degree to the lower-level pages, right? We've got almost 500 'sub-categories', getting quality links to these is just unrealistic in the short term. How long until we should be indexed? We've seen an 800% drop in Organic Search traffic since removing our spammy link-wheel page. This is to be expected to a degree as these were the only real pages driving traffic. However, we saw this drop (and got rid of the pages) almost exactly a month ago, surely we should be re-indexed and re-algo'ed by now?! **Are we still being algor****hythmically penalised? **The old spammy pages are still indexed in Google (138,000 of them!) despite returning 404's for a month. When will these drop out of the rankings? If Google believes they still exist and we were indeed being punished for them, then it makes sense as to why we're still not ranking, but how do we get rid of them? I've tried submitting a manual removal of URL via WMT, but to no avail. Should I 410 the page? Have I been too hasty? I removed the spammy pages in case they were affecting us via a penalty. There would also have been some potential of duplicate content with the old and the new pages.
_popular-searches.php/event-services/videographer _may have clashed with _profiles.php/videographer, _for example.
Should I have kept these pages whilst we waited for the new pages to re-index? Any help would be extremely appreciated, I'm pulling my hair out that after following 'guidelines', we seem to have been punished in some way for it. I assumed we just needed to give Google time to re-index, but a month should surely be enough for a site with historical SEO value such as ours?
If anyone has any clues about what might be happening here, I'd be more than happy to pay for a genuine expert to take a look. If anyone has any potential ideas, I'd love to reward you with a 'good answer'. Many, many thanks in advance. Ryan.0 -
Negative SEO? Or?
We had another website attacked by negative SEO, so now I'm getting a little suspicious. The website went from around 26 linking domains to 1001 links from 311 linking domains in webmaster tools. They're all in different languages, and directories. I asked everyone at the organization and they said they didn't sign up for any services. I trust them, because I know they don't have time to breath right now, with 7 product launches this month. OSE says 79 links from 26 linking domains, so the spam links must be gone now.. but the website's been wiped pretty much clean from Google.com and is just starting to slowly (very slowing) crawl back 😞 Is there anything else that could be targeting the website with hundreds of links? Anything I can do to protect it? I've disavowed the links, but they're gone now so it probably won't help. Thanks in advance for ideas 🙂 UPDATE: The website is still not recovering in Google.com. It seems to be ok in .ca, but a recent conundrum is that it's been basically wiped clean from Bing and Yahoo rankings. I've emailed Bing and the team says it is indeed indexed, and not penalized (manually anyways). OLE says the "bad links" are no longer there, but webmaster tools still lists them all (I know, they don't update that often). My latest strategy is to start building some really strong links into the website with killer content. Their products are amazing (tv lift furniture) so it shouldn't be difficult. Just time consuming! I'm also being super-active on their social media platforms, to see if this helps boost rankings in the mean time. Any further tips to recover from negative SEO?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SmartWebPros
(Note: I do not need link removal tools. We have a process that's working just fine).0 -
Cross linking websites of the same company, is it a good idea
As a user I think it is beneficial because those websites are segmented to answer to each customer needs, so I wonder if I should continue to do it or avoid it as much as possible if it damages rankings...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mcany0 -
Satelite sites
Hi there I want to drive traffic to one of our eCommerce sites by building satelite sites that focus on our chosen niche longtail keywords. so, 'where can i buy fake snow' wherecanibutfakesnow.com The problem is for other keywords ie. fake 'ice cubes', the com and co.uk are already taken. So, my question is, should i settle for a .net / .biz / .eu etc. or choose the next best keyword/phrase that i can secure a .com/.co.uk top level domain name for? Many thanks, Ben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SnowFX0 -
How Fast Can You Rank a New Domain?
How long would it take to get a 1 page ranking for a new site after Penguin? Thinking about starting fresh. New site would have fresh content and keyword in the domain.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | veed230 -
Google Panelizes to much SEO
I just read this interesting article about a new Google Penalty that will be up in the next upcoming weeks/months about Google making changes to the algorithm. The penalty will be targeted towards websites that are over optimized or over seo'ed. What do you think about this? Is this a good thing or is this not a good thing for us as SEO marketeers? here's the link: SEL.com/to-much-seo I'm really curious as to your point of views. regards Jarno
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JarnoNijzing0