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
-
Do home page carry more seo benefit than other pages?
hi, i would like to include my kws in the URL and they are under 50 characters. is there anything in the algo that tells engines to give more importance to homepage?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | alan-shultis0 -
Competitor has same site with multiple languages
Hey Moz, I am working with a dating review website and we have noticed one of our competitors is basically making duplicated of their site with .com, .de, .co.uk, etc. My first thought is this is basically a way to game the system but I could be wrong. They are tapping into googles geo results by including major cities in each state, i.e. "dating in texas" "dating in atlanta" however the content itself doesn't really change. I can't figure out exactly why they are ranking so much higher. For example using some other SEO tools they have a traffic estimate of $500,000 monthly, where as we are sitting around $2000. So, either the traffic estimates are grossly misrepresenting traffic volume, OR they really are crushing it. TLDR: Is geo locating/translating sites a valid way to create backlinks? It's seems a lot like a PBN.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Disavow or not? Negative SEO
Since last November we have been receiving a lot of low quality backlinks from over 700 websites. It looks like one of our pages from our website has been copied with the links being kept as they are. I have left a link to an example of this here: https://goo.gl/eWQODJ Please note, all examples seem to be copied in the same way. We have also started seeing a decrease in the amount of organic traffic (Analytics Picture), As you can see the decrease is not yet so drastically high, but it is still a decrease and this is the third consecutive month we have seen this decrease. Do you think it is worth it to use Disavow tool for all of these bad link or not? uuuLt
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Tiedemann_Anselm1 -
Spam signals from old company site are hurting new company site, but we can't undo the redirect.
My client was forced to change its domain name last year (long story). We were largely able to regain our organic rankings via 301-redirects. Recently, the rankings for the new domain have begun to plummet. Nothing specific took place that could have caused any ranking declines on the new site. However, when we analyze links to the OLD site, we are seeing a lot of link spam being built to that old domain over recent weeks and months. We have no idea where these are coming from but they appear to be negatively impacting our new site. We cannot dismantle the redirects as the old site has hundreds, if not thousands, of quality links pointing to it, and many customers are accustomed to going to that home page. So those redirects need to stay in place. We have already disavowed all the spam we have found on the old Search Console. We are continuing to do so as we find new spam links. But what are we supposed to do about this spam negatively impacting our new site? FYI we have not received any messages in the search console.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | FPD_NYC1 -
Looking for a seo mentor
Currently i am google analytics and adwords certified and own my own blog site, i have not actually started a full seo campaign but tonight i am. Basically im not sure if ill get my wish with this but i honestly wish i could have some one or some ones to possibly mentor me or help me go in the right direction with seo. I have applied for a few jobs in the seo field and i know my stuff but i lack projects to show them proof. if anyone out there is willing to help me please respond! 😛 maybe i can help out on some projects with you to get more experience
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | djgbshows0 -
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 -
Article Re-posting / Duplication
Hi Mozzers! Quick question for you all. This is something I've been unsure of for a while. But when a guest post you've written goes live on someone's blog. Is it then okay it post the same article to your own blog as well as Squidoo for example? Would the search engines still see it as duplication if I have a link back to the original?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Webrevolve0 -
Getting sites unbanned in bulk
Prior to the Panda update we had 1 main site, and 300 or so satellite sites. The satellite sites all had an identical template with identical content. The satellite sites all got flagged, and the main site persevered. We'd like to TRY to get all of these sites unbanned in bulk. My question is...how 'DIFFERENT' should these sites be? I know that a real google employee will be looking. All of these sites will be in the same industry...so how 'different' can the content really be? I am going to try to do this in sets of 10 and purchase a different template for EACH city/satellite site, as well as having varying categories, but realistically how doomed/successful do you think this endeavor will be? Any advice? realistic timeline?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ilyaelbert0