Last week in Marketing Club – SEO Fundamentals Room Jan 11, 2022, we focused on building Authority.
00:06:50 Rob started Questions to the Moderators
00:06:50 Question 1 – Itamar, what do you think about Authority Building?
00:18:50 Question 2 – Arnout, what do you think about the Authority building?
00:21:12 Question 3 – Suhail, what do you think about the Authority building?
00:46:12 Question 8 – What are your opinions on Link Intersecting?
Rob Bertholf
1 – Itamar, what do you think about Authority Building?
00:06:58 Itamar Blauer
Authority building is sometimes considered off-SEO, which means the conditions happening outside of your website, such as Linking Building (when you receive links from other industry players, industry-specific publications or institutions and relevant websites.) However, Authority building is more than pure link building. To acquire high authority backlinks from other sites, you need to have a trustworthy and credible website along with consistent content. Therefore, it’s critical to have a link-worthy website and content. Another point is that sometimes SEO and Branding conflicts with each other. How? Branding needs consistency. If you’re creating content from keywords that will possibly yield a higher ranking but has no affinity with your offerings and Branding, this shows a conflict. However, as SEOs, we aim to create relevant content compatible with our brand and offering.
00:09:09 Firuze Gokce
Another way of Authority building is to create informational content on the topic you’re covering and support that topic with other topic clusters, which means subtopics or categories of your main subject. When you develop informational content, it’s critical to understand the needs and questions of your audience and consider content writing within the range of your audience’s inquiries. Therefore, understanding user intent and feeding content to meet their demands is essential.
There is a human aspect for being an authority website, too. Joining any industrial networking events, attending, or opening booths at trade shows presents a vast opportunity for connecting and developing authentic relationships, translating into backlinking opportunities for both parties. It shows how much you care about your industry, how strongly you hold on to your topic and how communicative you are in sharing the information.
00:10:50 Carol Ching
Carol gave an example for one of their clients, which sells snowboards. Thus, Carol’s company is helping them to be an authority for snowboards. They are trying to understand the main topics, how people are searching for, and their needs. Then Carol’s team developed content addressing the needs of people who like or are interested in snowboarding. Therefore, understanding their audience and their needs and topics they are searching for help them to be an authority website and show up on the first page of Google.
00:11:50 Kyla Herbes
Kyle’s method is to create a topical trust flow around that subject matter (topic). One of the ways to do that is finding membership-based organizations in the client’s industry. For example, if his client is a realtor, he tries to convince his client to register for the “National Association of Realtors”. Since the National Association of Realtors is a high authority and high-quality website, receiving a link to the client’s website will help his client increase their authority.
00:13:48 Renee Bigelow
She wanted to touch on Itamar’s point on the conflicting SEO and Branding. Sometimes, conflicting keywords on Branding increase the authority of the website. There is a feedback loop around the search terms, branded search terms or search terms related to the branding. There is a gap between the keywords used by the brand and the keywords used by the customers in many instances. It’s crucial to understand the keywords used by your audience and develop content with those keywords. Customer journey is different from how you envision it is consumed and how the bots see the content. Customer journey very is complicated and nonlinear. That will be another critical component to take into consideration for authority building.
Another point is when partnering with organizations, as a guest contributor or having them as guest contributors, always try to connect with brands with the Halo effect. Having a halo effect means organizations that have already built their Authority. That way, you’ll transform their power towards the credibility of your website. And the same thing is valid for the other brand that you receive a backlink from.
00:17:30 Itamar Blauer
To Kyle’s point on paying subscriptions to industrial or business association memberships: Sometimes, it is hard to convince the client to pay the membership fee. Clients did not fully understand the benefits of being a member. When they become a member, there is another leverage for companies:
- The businesses can meet with other companies and do business together
- They can cooperate or collaborate
- They can distribute PR releases,
- They can discover the availability of link exchange in a meaningful way (by creating content for each other)
- They can organize webinars or podcasts together to be linked and shared on many platforms
2 – Arnoult what did he think about the Authority building?
00:19:00 Arnout Hellemans
What people often overlooked in many instances is that the companies have many lost opportunities for sponsorships, getting mentioned or featured in industrial association publications.
00:21:12 Rob Bertholf
3 – Sohail, what do you think about building Authority?
00:21:21 Sohail Butt
At the agency he is working, they use the HARO (Help a Reporter Out) technique. There are thousands of journalists in the system who needs industry-specific expert opinions for basing their story. Become a member of the system as a source for yourself or on behalf of your client. Follow up the emails asking for expert opinion. Pitch your idea. If the journalist likes your answer, then they’ll contact you.
That way, you can create quality backlinks.
00:22:20 Rob Bertholf
4 – There is a debate on HARO not helping Authority building as it used to be. Are you still experiencing HARO’s effectiveness?
00:22:44 Sohail Butt
Yes, they still see the effectiveness of HARO until two months ago, it was still bringing positive results.
00:24:48 Rob Bertholf
Rob’s point of view in building authority is whether there is a way to create a relationship with an authority website where they also see you as an authority. Thus, we need to think, plan, and execute carefully to be accepted as credible experts. When you are taken as an authority, people come to you to ask questions or have your opinions which opens the door for higher visibility, recommendations, receiving requests for backlinking opportunities. Do not forget that being an expert and authority with your website also brings more customers, sales or leads because our ultimate goal is to have a profitable business.
00:24:50 Itamar Blauer
Haro is an excellent way to build authority. Once you’ve established trust and credibility with a journalist, they want to contact you directly to ask questions or understand a topic. Besides, you can also find journalists on LinkedIn writing relevant subjects to your niche and authority and send them a message saying that if they need information about a topic that is in your authority, you can help them.
00:27:16 Karin Tierney
The landscape for HARO is indeed so competitive, but once you’ve established a relationship with a journalist, it’s enriching. Definitely, worth chasing.
00:27:34 Renee Bigelow
Twitter is a great place to connect with reporters. If you follow them and engage in conversations with them, they will recognize you and eventually pitch ideas or stories to them, or they find you whenever they need a subject matter expert like you.
00:30:00 Rob Bertholf
5 – How do we build up brand authority from the ground up? What’s the process like?
00:30:10 Karin Tierney
She starts with creating all the social media profiles even they won’t use it or use only a c few of them. Then she develops a landing page with all the social media links. That way, she protects the brand name and, if there is any sharable content, utilize it to help link building because it’s a citation. That’s also Rob’s 101!
00:30:38 Rob Bertholf
6 – Do you use any tools to see if your brand name is available on social media platforms?
Rob has shared a super old-school tool called Knowem (https://knowem.com/). This tool provides you with a searchable database to find whether your brand name, product name or personal name are available on 500 social media sites.
00:31:43 Itamar Blauer
He entirely agrees with Karin’s point. He had a client who did not claim all their handles of brand names from social media platforms. And now it’s a significant problem to sort it out.
Another thing that Itamar adds
If it’s a brand-new website and you start from scratch, don’t start by blogging.
- Think about laying out the foundation and start with basics like an About Page, A product/products page or a Services Page.
- Show people what you stand for, your story, and your values. Make keyword research (how people search to find your client’s solution and which keywords they are using),
- Talk with your client, get their data feed if they have any, and understand what kind of problem they’re solving.
- Learn how users are seeing your client’s products and services. (Ask whether they have any consumer research available)
Then you can think about creating blog content by using topic clusters. Another reason why you can’t start with blogging because you don’t know how often or when Google will crawl your website. And it’s better to establish your branding/about and products/services pages first for Google to crawl and understand who you are and what are you doing. Then it’ll be a good idea to write blog posts and start getting backlinks. To get backlinks, you can use HARO and point the backlinks to your home page.
00:35:34 Bob Clark
He always starts by opening A G-Suite Account. He can’t say that it’s proven otherwise but opening a G-suite account sends Google a signal that this is a legitimate business and ready to pay for what’s necessary. It escalates.
00:36:31 Rob Bertholf
It’s an exciting point what signals Google is using:
- Google My Business account
- Reviews on Google Business Profile or any other social platform
- Knowledge graph on Google
- Social Media Accounts and Profiles
- Directory Submissions (Yelp etc.)
00:37:48 Bob Clark
7 – He is also curious about if anybody knows how podcasts impact SEO? Does Google see Podcasts as a signal?
00:38:20 Arnout
Videos. Google has transcriptions of the videos. Suppose you appear on a podcast, webinar or video interview and talk about a particular niche or subject when a relevant topic or passage is searched in Google. In that case, Google matches it and shows the video on search results.
Another thing worth mentioning is that if you participate and share on Twitter, Clubhouse or any platform, that will also signal to Google. If you do not feel yourself enough subject matter expert, just listen to what other people are talking about and learn from them. Don’t feel intimidated to join the conversation and express your point of view or experience. All these things come together and help Google pick you up and build your authority and network.
Arnout talked about an article he wrote and shared it on Twitter. He found out that he received traffic from Android referrals to GA. Suddenly he saw that his article was shared on Twitter and retweeted a lot. Then the article also mentioned at Search Engine Round Table and MOZ. He didn’t do promotion, but the article got picked up and got viral. He described it as an organic link building. You don’t push it. The
00:41:58 Rob Bertholf
Rob agrees with Arnout. Also shared an example of Firuze.blog where she recaps each room every week. She is creating value and unique content. When he is teaching his mentees, he is referring to firuze.blog whenever relevant topics come up.
- Develop great content
- Know the industry that you are in
- Understand your angle. How you are going to niche in.
- Promote your content
- Creating content is just the beginning of a process. Send and publish your article on social media channels your audience is in.
When we are talking about Authority building, there is an issue with black hat or white hat. Check out the presentation where I put my thoughts on Optimization (white hat and manipulation, what is unethical and malicious). I’m curious to hear your ideas.
Let’s talk about “Link Intersect”. He strongly suggests using a tool for “link intersect”. Ahrefs (https://ahrefs.com/) is the tool that he’s using. With this tool, he loads his website and all the prominent competitors. Then Ahrefs looks for the backlink profile of all the pages and brings you the backlinks your competitor has, but you don’t.
Additionally, it also shows how often we see this situation. When you got a list like that, your goal is to receive the backlinks from the same websites that your competitors have. However, getting backlinks from directories like Yelp is easy, where almost all your competitors get. On the other hand, if a backlink profile only occurs on one site, it is hard to get the same backlink opportunity because probably it’s a personal relationship.
8 – What are your opinions on Link Intersecting?
00:46:18 Joshua Monge
One of the reasons that Joshua likes to be in this room is that all of the moderators talk about ethical ways. Yes, it may be true that black heat tactics bring successful results, but it’s only in the short run, and ultimately, they are punished by Google. There is enough data and resources to create a strategy and plan (with ethical methods). Rob’s slide on the comparison chart for what is ethical, unethical or malicious is an excellent summarization that you can understand the fundamentals. You probably never hear us in this room talking about the malicious tactics. I highly urge you to check out his slide to understand and evaluate the situation. We never endorse keyword stuffing, plagiarism and clocking. Always think around the fundamentals, create value for your audience and have your strategy and tactics that are ethical.
00:48:37 Karin Tierney
Karin has another suggestion: Even you cannot get the same backlink that your competitors have, there is still value in what you’re doing: You’re making yourself aware of what your competitors are doing. Because you can mimic that strategy elsewhere
00:50:45 Jon Muranko
He wants to add something that was overlooked: Fixing the broken links. Revisiting your site and checking out the broken links is a good strategy too.
00:52:52 Rob’s framework for building authority
- Start with asset build-up
- Claim your accounts on all relevant social media channels
- Submit your business to the relevant industrial directories, business associations, local chamber of commerce
- Get reviews (from review websites like Yelp or Google Business Profile) and publish them on your website.
- Create sharable and high-quality content so that others would share your content on social media channels.
- Distribute your press release
- If somebody mentions you but does not hyperlink to your website or product, reach out to them to tell them how much you appreciate their mention and kindly ask whether they can also link to your website or product.
- Link Intersect: Make a competitor analysis, see who’s receiving links from who (which website), and explore opportunities for getting links from those same websites.
- Link Prospect/link outreach: Try to find websites where they can link back to your blog post or the product page. Find ways to write a guest post on other blogs or resources. Like Firuze.blog does. She constantly talks about us when recapping the room, and we talk about her. There is a symbiotic relationship going on.
- Fix the broken links.
00:55:39 Renee Bigelow
Sometimes startups do not understand the value of personal relationships or offline relationships in the industry or their network. Unfortunately, there are a lot of opportunities missing. If they ask about the possibility of guest posting or hyperlinking to the content, they will be surprised by how effective and easy to utilize those relationships.
00:57:00 Jon Muranko
Jon shared his experience concerning press releases. Yahoo News is a great place to take advantage of. If your article is newsworthy, Yahoo news will publish it, and then you can post it on your social media accounts declaring that Yahoo News publishes your content piece. Yahoo news has a high authority for both Google and newsreaders.
00:59:24 Joshua Monge
Author tags on pages: Author tags are boxes at the end of the blog posts showing who the author is for that article and linked to the author’s bio page. They signal another sign for authority.
01:00:57 Bob Clark
There is Semantic SEO too. Using all the query and SERP data, Google understands what type of SERPs will best work for that query. If you can create content pieces that answer the queries in a way Google-like, that’ll also help your Authority.
01:12:38 Question from the Audience
9 – Is back linking still alive? Is it redundant?
01:14:29 Itamar Blauer
Itamar: Backlinks are still important because they are the references directed to your site. However, make sure that the backlinks must be relevant, industry-specific, and valuable for your business.
01:16:25 Joshua Monge
Quality content is still essential. Seeking backlinks is for promoting your content. Don’t pay for backlinks. This is not a good practice or ethical. Always think about creating content that creates value and people like to share it on their social media accounts.
01:17:11 Kyla Herbes
Whenever Kyla receives a backlink, she also requests to backlink to her related blog post from the website.
There are a few more questions asked during our conversation. The rest can be found on Marketing Club – SEO Fundamentals Room Replays on Club House.
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Room Information
Marketing Club: The largest Marketing Club in ClubHouse
Every Tuesday at 8 am Pacific Time
https://www.clubhouse.com/event/PQ48lGnw
Date: Jan 11, 2022
Theme: SEO Fundamentals
Next Chat: Every Tuesday at 8 am PST
Moderators:
Karin Tierney: https://alzina.marketing/
Joshua Monge: https://waymakerseo.com/
Kyla Herbes:https://houseofhipsters.com/
Bob Clark:https://misspepper.ai
Jon Muranko https://www.marketingbypermission.com/
Itamar Blauer https://www.youtube.com/c/ItamarBlauer
Firuze Gokce: https://firuze.blog
