- Are you looking for an SEO
strategy that will actually increase your traffic? Well keep watching. Because I'm going to show you my four pillar SEO strategy that works. (upbeat music) Alright so let's start with pillar one of my SEO strategy framework. So the first pillar of
this SEO strategy is to focus on pleasing your users. So what does it mean to please your users? It means that
users/searchers should have a seamless experience on your website. And just to illustrate how
important user experience is for SEO performance here is a quote from John Mueller who is the head webmaster
trans-analyst at Google. John said, I see lots
and lots of SEO blogs talking about user experience, which I think is a great
thing to focus on as well, because that essentially kind of focuses on what we are trying to look at as well. We want to rank content that is useful for them (Google Search Users) and if your content is
really useful for them, then we want to rank it. So the main takeaway here
is that Google values user experience. So how do you go about actually
improving user experience on your website? And improving your user
experience all starts with technical SEO. And there are two parts to technical SEO that you need to understand. There are high impact technical issues, and there are low impact technical issues. But before I jump in to all of the technical issues that you can fix to improve user experience, I want to tell you a quick
story to help illustrate the importance of understanding
how to do technical SEO. So back in 2016 a supplement
company in St. Louis came to my company because
they wanted help with their SEO performance and they were
already doing really well, from many different perspectives. They were doing well with social media, they were doing well off line. They were doing very, very well
and the company was growing month to month. But they needed to improve their
organic search performance. So as soon as we brought
them on as a client, the first thing we did was
we ran a complete SEO audit. And because they're an e commerce website we wanted to make sure
that the website was built on a strong foundation
before we started building out new content and assets and trying to acquire backlinks. So we focused purely on the
technical side of their website and the user experience
side of their website first. So in this audit we uncovered all kinds of stuff
including their navigation not being set up correctly and their site architecture
not being built well. And then we also found all kinds of issues having to deal with duplicate content. Thin content and several
other technical issues that you're going to be learning about later on in this video. So then after going through the process of finding all these
technical issues and user experience issues, and then fixing all of them, we were able to increase
this client's organic search traffic by 93%. And this was all achieved
just by improving the technical performance
and the user experience on their website. So now that you know
the power of improving the technical performance of your website, I'm going to show you
the high impact actions you should focus on. So the first action you
need to take to improve you website's technical
performance and user experience is to increase your website loading speed. So I don't know about you
but a slow loading website is one of the most painful experiences you can have online. And the truth is a slow loading website won't only hurt your
organic search performance, but it can actually hurt
your business as well. According to HubSpot, a one second delay in
website loading speed, can reduce conversions by 7%. Now that's the bad news, but the good news is that
increasing your website loading speed can also
have the opposite effect. According to Mozilla Firefox they were able to reduce
their average website loading speed by 2.2 seconds which
increased their downloads by 15.4% and when you think about it, that's a massive increase
for a website like Firefox that gets a ton of traffic already. Now there are countless studies showing the importance
of website loading speed and it's effect not only on your organic search traffic performance
but also on your business's performance as well. But I'm not going to bore
you with more statistics. If you want you can go and search for all these
different studies because there are probably hundreds at this point. But I want to do now is
I want to jump into the practical steps you can
take to start increasing your website loading
speed as soon as possible. So at the very minimum
you should aim to get your website loading speed
to three seconds or below and not to be captain obvious the lower is better. And so the first thing you need to do to increase your website loading speed, is to benchmark your current speed. And my favorite tool for benchmarking website loading speed is Pingdom. Here is how you use it. Simply go to tools.pingdom.com and enter your URL. And when I'm working on a new website I'll run the site through
Pingdom five to 10 times from different locations, so I can get an average loading speed. This process will look
a little bit like this. So as you can see here I have five tests all from different locations which all are showing different website loading speeds at that
time and that location. And then what I do is
just go ahead and average them all out so I can get a general idea of what the average loading speed is for this particular website. Because now this will act as a benchmark, so that I know how I'm
going to improve on that. It's important to have
benchmarks because it's going allow you to track your progress as well. So after you get your
average website loading speed you now need to start taking
the steps to improve it so the question is where do you start? Well, there are countless resources online about how to improve your
website loading speed, but there is one thing that is going to determine how fast your
website actually loads. The one thing that's
going to determine how quickly your website loads is your web hosting. Listen you can make all kinds
of micro changes to try to improve your website loading speed but nothing is going
to have a bigger impact than your actual web host. And so I have tried hundreds of web hosts throughout the years and the
only one that I can truly recommend and the one
that I personalize use is WP Engine. So now you know the importance
of a fast loading website. But now I want to talk
about the second big technical SEO action, you need to take. The second high impact
technical SEO action you need to take is to make sure that your website is mobile friendly. So I honestly sound like a
broken record at this point but it is so incredibly
important that your website is mobile friendly. Because the majority of all traffic that is coming to your
website at this point more than likely is going
to be coming from mobile and there are some exceptions to the rule such as my website which
is primarily B2B traffic. I'm going to be getting a
lot more desktop traffic but it is not always going to be that way, and it is a safe action
to take to make sure that your website is responsive and is friendly on a mobile device. But listen I don't want
you to just take my word for it because I want to give you some real data about this
trend that is going on with mobile traffic. According to Smart Insights
mobile digital media time in the U.S. is now
significantly higher at 51%, compared to desktop at 42%. So now the question is how do you go about
actually making your website mobile friendly and responsive? Well the first step is to see if your website is
currently mobile friendly. And so, the best way to accomplish this and to see if your website
is currently mobile friendly is to use Google's own tool for checking mobile friendliness. So you can just open up Google and search mobile friendly test in Google and you can use the
embedded tool that they have in the search results, but I prefer using the actual tool that they have provided, and all you need to do is
just enter your target URL click run tests to get started, and after the analysis is complete, Google will tell you whether or not your website is mobile friendly. So what do you do if your website is not mobile friendly? Well, there are a few options. The first option is if
you have the capital to invest you can reach out to web design and web development
companies in your local area. So jus a simple search like St. Louis web design company will give you lots of options to choose from. Or what you can do is you can create a job posting on Upwork and hire a freelance web designer which is usually more affordable than hiring a company. You just have to be comfortable working with people
outside of your country. For example, my web designers are located in Ukraine and my video
editor is located in Russia. So you have to feel
comfortable working with people all around the globe. And I can tell you from experience they often tend to be
some of the best workers that you will encounter in your business. But now lets say you don't have the budget to hire a company or freelancer. Then the third and most affordable option is to do it yourself. So going about doing it yourself will depend on the
content management system. Also known as a CMS. But for example, if you're on WordPress all you need to do is
use a responsive theme. And there are both free
and paid themes you can use if you want go this route. So now you know that your website needs to load very, very, fast. Your website needs to be mobile friendly, and now I want to explain the
third and final high impact technical SEO action you need to take which is to make sure that
you develop an effective site architecture. So I'm not going to get to deep into how to develop a site architecture, because there are tons of
great resources out there and I could create an entire video just on that topic alone, but there are three primary objectives that you need to achieve
when you are structuring your site architecture. So you need to find a fine
balance between structuring your architecture for number one, user experience which means how easy is it for users to go through your website and to flow through your website and is your website forcing
them to think in anyway because a good website will feel seamless and the user won't even
have to think as they're trying to go through the website. The second thing you need to
consider when structuring your architecture is how well
it can be crawled by Google spiders because you want
Google to be able to crawl your website efficiently
so that it can index all the pages on your website, into the search engine. And the third and final
objective that you need to achieve on structuring your architecture is building the actual authority, through your architecture. Because if you develop a
really great site architecture you'll be able to spread
precious backlink authority through your entire website and even to your most important pages, so that your website will become more authoritative and as
your website becomes more authoritative it becomes
much easier to rank. So at this point you understand
the three high impact technical SEO and user
experience optimization actions that you need to take. But now I want to show you
some of the micro technical issues that aren't going
to have a huge impact on your performance, but they're still very important to fix to make sure that you've
built a very strong foundation for your SEO campaign. So the first micro technical
issue you need to handle are broken links and 404 errors. So to find broken links all you need to do is use a free tool like brokenlinkcheck.com and once you're there, juts enter your URL and
click find broken links. And lastly, export all of the
broken links that this tool finds to whatever type of SEO
campaign sheet you're using so that you can then go through
and start fixing all these broken links. And if you're using WordPress, there is a plug in you can install called broken link checker, which will perform the same
function as brokenlinkcheck.com except it's going to
just crawl your website and you're going to be able to identify what those broken links are, probably at a higher rate than using brokenlinkcheck.com So keep in mind that
broken links and 404 errors do sometimes go hand in hand. But you should be auditing
both of them separately because there are certain circumstances where you need to take different actions depending on what you have identified. So the process for when
you find broken links is very straight forward. You just go through all
of your broken links and you fix all those broken links and you make them not broken anymore. But when it comes to 404 errors, there is kind of a different
approach and there is some strategy behind handling 404 errors that appear on your website. So in most cases, you just want to let a 404 page be a 404 page because
it is a signal to Google that you actually want that
page to be removed from the index because it no longer exits. But there are sometimes
where you do not want certain pages to continue
to be 404's and usually the one circumstance where
you do not want a 404 to be pulled out of the
index and to just be a 404 page is when that 404 page has backlinks. And when a 404 page has
backlinks you have two options, number one, you can redirect that 404 page to a relevant
page on your website, which should be your first option and if there isn't a relevant
page on your website, then you just want to take that 404 page and redirect it to the home page so that you can salvage that link equity. So at this point, how do you actually go about finding 404's errors? There are many different ways to go about finding them, but my favorite way to find
404 errors is to use Google search consul. So to find 404 errors
in Google Search Consul, simply go to the crawl section, click on crawl errors, and then click on the not found tab, and then lastly go ahead and just export, all of these 404 errors. And after you export these results, you'll want to see if any of these pages have backlinks. So copy all of URL's and then open up your favorite backlink analysis tool. For this example, I'll be using ahrefs. So once you're inside ahrefs, click on the more option in the navigation and then click on batch analysis. And then once you're in this
section go ahead and enter your URL's and click start analysis. Then all you have to do is
just take note of the URL's that have backlinks and then
decide where you're going to 301 redirect them on your website. And as I mentioned before it is a good idea to
try to find a relevant page on your website to
redirect that 404 page before just sending it to the home page. So the next micro technical issue that you want to tackle
are going to be redirects. So there are two types of
redirects that cause problems. Number one, 302 redirects. And number two, redirect chains. Let me start with 302 redirects. So the main reason why you
want to fix 302 redirects is because of the small possibility that they do not pass link equity. The reason I'm saying the possibility, is because of what John
Mueller said back in 2016 about 302 redirects. Back in 2016 John Mueller said it's incorrect that 302 redirects wouldn't pass page rank. That's a myth. So now although John Mueller
is probably telling the truth it's still a good idea to
take the tried and tested approach which is to use a 301 redirect because you know for sure that a 301 redirect is
going to pass link equity and it's going to pass page rank to the site that you are redirecting to. So then the question is, how do you find 302 redirects? In my experience, the absolute best way to find 302 redirects is to
use Screaming Frog SEO Spider So I'm inside Screaming Frog SEO Spider And all you need to do
now to find 302 redirects is just enter your domain
and then start the analysis and then you're going to click
on the response codes tab and then click the filter
and then select redirection and then after that just go
ahead and export the results. So then all you need to do now if you have 302 redirect is you just need to go through the process
of changing all of those 302 redirects to 301 redirects. And of course the one
exception to this rule is if you are using the 302 redirect for its actual purpose which
is as a temporary redirect but in most cases you're
probably not gonna be using three or two redirects on purpose. So now, I want to show you how to find redirects chains. And so the question is what the heck is a redirect chain? So bear with me as I go
through this explanation but a redirect chain occurs
when you have a redirect redirecting to a redirect. And the reason why this needs to be fixed is because you could be missing
out on precious link equity as a result of the unnecessary redirect. So the way to fix this
issue is to simply redirect the other page to the live page. That way the link equity
will now flow directly to the live page instead of through a buffer. So now how do you actually go about finding redirect chains. Well, the best way to
go about finding them is to use Screaming Frog
SEO Spider once again. Alright so I'm back inside
Screaming Frog SEO Spider, and all you need to do
is enter your domain and start the analysis, and once the analysis is
complete click on reports, and then click on redirect chains, and then you have access to
all of the redirect chains that your website currently has. So then all you have to
do is just go through and start fixing all these
existing redirect chains, that your website has so
you can start recapturing that precious link equity
directly to the page that is currently alive. So now that you understand how to find and fix redirects I now
want to show you the final two micro technical issues
that you need to tackle. And these two issues are most common with e commerce websites. So if you have an e commerce website make sure you pay attention to this part. So the first issue is thing content. And at it's most basic level, think content is going to be any page that doesn't add much value to the user. And also keep in mind that thin doesn't necessarily
mean short word counts. It can also mean that the
pages are regurgitated content where the content doesn't
actually bring anything new to the table. And that is why Google's Panda
algorithm hates thin content. So with that said, these
types of pages either need more content or need to
be eliminated completely because they will drag your website down. And so here is how you
can find thin content on your website. All you need to do is open
Screaming Frog SEO Spider enter your target domain
and start the analysis. Once the analysis is complete, stay on the internal tab and
make sure the filter is set to all and then click export. Now what you want to do
is open up the CSV file. Highlight the first row
and then place a filter on this row. Then scroll to the right
until you find the word count column and then you can
delete all of the columns to the left of this column
except for the address column. Then what you want to do is
assort the word count column in ascending order so that
the pages with the lowest word count are at the top. And now, you're going to have access to all the pages on your site
that have very low word counts and that may qualify as thin content that you'll need to take care of. And so the last micro
technical issues that's very common with e commerce
websites is duplicate content. So duplicate content occurs
when more than one page on your website has
the same exact content. And this also applies to both
content on the actual pages and your metadata as well. So the reason why you want to fix duplicated content is
because it doesn't add value to your users. But more importantly
Google's Panda algorithm absolutely hates it. So with that said, this
is how you can find duplicate content. So my personal favorite way
to find duplicate content is to use Siteliner. All you need to do is enter
your URL and then let this tool work its magic. Once the analysis is complete, you'll see all the pages on your site that have duplicate content and in my experience the free version is more than enough to show you whether or not duplicate content is an issue on your particular website. Alright, so now that you have a firm grasp on optimizing your site
from a technical perspective and from a user experience perceptive it's time to jump into pillar two, which is the process of
satisfying search intent. So the first stage of this
process is to find keywords, and build your keyword database. And so, to achieve that
goal I'm going to show you three of my favorite methods for finding keywords and content ideas. So let me start with the first method, which is to use AnswerThePublic. Alright so I'm here on AnswerThePublic and all you need to do
is enter a keyword phrase and usually it's best
to enter a broad phrase because then you're going
to get more long tail ideas, out of that. So after you've entered
your keyword juts click questions and once the
analysis is complete just click download CSV
and then add all of these ideas to your keyword master list. My second favorite method for finding great keyword and content ideas is to use relevant forums. So here is how you do it. All you need to do is open up Google and enter a simple search string
such as fitness plus forum. Then just go into the
first one that you find and take note of the categories, because these are topics
that you can expand on in the future to find new keyword ideas. So the next thing you want to do is just go into a section
and copy all of the ideas that have user engagement around them and then add them to
your keyword master list. And lastly, my third favorite
keyword research method is to use Quora, so here is how you do it. So go to the Quora.com and enter a topic into the search bar in the right hand side. And then simply go into the topic and copy all of the ideas
you find that have a lot of user engagement around them. So now that you know a
few ways that you can find keywords and content ideas, you now have to go through the process of actually qualifying those
ideas and then prioritizing your keyword list because you're not going to be able to go out
after every single keyword that you found so you need
to have a process in place to be able to filter through
all these keywords that you found and then most importantly
be able to prioritize them so you can actually start taking the steps to target those specific keywords. So the truth is that most people use search volume from the
Google keyword planner as their guiding light to determine what keywords they want to go after. And this is totally fine. And this is the most common practice. But I want to take it up another notch. And I want show you five different ways you can qualify your
keywords and content ideas, so you can practically
guarantee the success of any page that you're going to create around the keywords that you choose. So here are the five
qualifiers you should be using to prioritize your keyword list. So as I mentioned the first
and most commonly used keyword qualifier is search volume. So what you need to do to find search volume is just go
into the Google keyword planner and enter your keyword. And then the Google keyword
planner is going to show exactly how much search volume
this specific keyword phrase gets and also how much search
volume other related keywords get as well. So as I mentioned I do
believe you should use search volume as your primary qualifier for what keywords you're
going to go after, we should also use these other
methods I'm going to show you to really get a clear
understanding of what's possible for that particular keyword phrase. So let me show you those now. So my second favorite qualifier
is to use user signals. So basically, any place where there are communities and where users
engage on the platform through the process of
commenting on things liking things, up voting things, etc. These are all signals that
people in your industry are interested in a particular topic. And this is extremely valuable
because you're getting validation that the keyword content idea that you're going to go
after is actually interesting and that people in your
industry are actually interested in it and that's really
important before you put all this effort into
creating a really great page. You want to make sure that people actually care about the idea so using user signals is a great way to feel
confident in taking those actions to create a really great page. And then the third keyword
qualifier that I love to use is how well the idea is trending
at this particular time. So to find this information go to Google trends and
throw your keyword in there. Now keep in mind your idea
doesn't need parabolic trend growth but it
should be concerning if it's declining because it may be an idea that isn't evergreen and you should be focusing a lot of your effort on keywords and content ideas that are evergreen because you want to continue to grow your traffic over time as opposed to getting
a huge spike of traffic and then it just slowly
decreasing over time. Those are topics you don't really want to focus on unless you have a news based
website or a non evergreen based website. And now the fourth keyword qualifier is to see how well the idea
has performed on social media. So to find this information
I recommend using BuzzSumo. So just go to BuzzSumo.com
and enter your idea. Then BuzzSumo will show
you all the social shares your idea has generated
and this is important because if your idea has gotten
a lot of social traction, that is a good sign. That's a great qualifier. This is a good idea to actually go after, because people are sharing it, people are interested in it. And those are all great signals. And the final keyword qualifier
that you need to consider is how link worthy the topic actually is. So in other words, are websites in your niche
willing to link to pages, about this particular topic? So all you need to do to
find the link worthiness of a topic is to use any
popular link analysis tool such as Ahrefs, Majestic
or even Open Site Explorer. So in this case I'm just
going to use Ahrefs. So all you need to do is just go to the SERPs for your target keyword. And then export the top 10. And then just open up
Ahrefs and then go to the batch analysis tool, and then put those URL's
into the batch analysis. And then from there, if these results have backlinks then you know that this
topic is link worthy. So now the question is, does a keyword need to
meet all of this criteria, for you to actually go after it? And of course the answer is no, but if you find keyword ideas that do meet all of these standards
and do meet these criteria you can pretty much guarantee the success of that content given you create a page in the way that I'm about to show you. But with that said, this process of qualifying your keywords and content ideas is so that you're not guessing about what topics your audience actually cares about. And instead you're using real data, and you're using real signals to determine what topics you should be going after based on real signals. And that's really,
really important because you don't want to be guessing what type of pages you should be creating. You should just be following exactly what your users are showing
you in your industry. So now that you have a nice
list of qualified keywords what you need to do now is, you need to develop your
search intent strategy. And you've probably heard me say this before but satisfying search intent is the most critical step of this process. You might be wondering, why? Well the reason why is because if you don't satisfy search intent there is a very high probability that you will not rank. The good news is that it is very easy to satisfy search intent correctly. All that you have to do is just model your competitors who are ranking on the first
page for your target keyword. So let's say your target
keyword is SEO audit tool. So if you look at the
results for this keyword phrase SEO audit tool, you'll notice that the majority
of the results are actually SEO audit tools. And so that means, that if you wanted to rank for that particular keyword phrase you would need to create
your own SEO audit tool. And that is literally all it takes to satisfy search intent. Just look at the first page and model what is currently ranking. If all of the results are tools then you know you need to create a tool and you don't need to
create a 3000 word article and this is a very, very important point because a lot of people think that every single keyword target in a page that you want to rank
in Google needs to have 18 to 100 words or 2,000 words But this is just simply not true. All that matters is how you're going to satisfy search intent and if the intent is someone is just looking for a tool then you just give them the tool. They don't want to read an article about the tool. They want the tool. And so understanding
how searchers think when they're conducting these
search queries is so critical to your success in SEO. And so, the more you study it the more you'll get better at it but, the best way to go about it is just model what is currently ranking. So now it's time for me to talk about the big action piece of this pillar which is the process of
actually creating a keyword targeted page. So I'm not going to get super
deep into the process of creating keyword targeted pages, because first of all I have an
entire course content academy that is dedicated to creating SEO content because it is such an intense process, but I'm going to share
two very important things you need to understand when it comes to creating effective
keyword targeted content. So the first thing you need to understand if you want to create great and effective keyword target and pages is that your page or blog post or whatever page you're using to target that keyword it needs to be different than
what is currently raking. And then number two it needs
to be also 10x more valuable than what is currently ranking as well. So in my opinion most of
your efforts should be focused on how you're
going to differentiate your page against the pages
that are currently ranking because it's much easier to be different than it is to try to be more valuable in my honest opinion. So I'm going to be
dedicating a lot of time into teaching you how to differentiate your keyword targeted
pages from your competitors in future videos. But for now, I'm going to show you a few methods you can use to
really make these pages stand out. So the first way to differentiate your keyword targeted pages is
to challenge industry norms. So this is generally going
to apply to blog posts but challenging industry norms is a very effective way
to attract attention to your keyword targeted pages. So then all we need to do is just make a list of all of the industry norms or common practices within your industry and then figure out how
you're going to disrupt those ideas or figure out
how those ideas are wrong essentially and this point
actually brings me to differentiation technique number two, which is to establish a unique perspective or gather unique data. So the good news is that
having a unique perspective is very easy because no one else has walked a day in your shoes and so you automatically
have a unique perspective and therefore, you can
make your content unique just from that perspective alone. But if you want to make
your content even deeper and you want to add levels to it, one of the best things that you can do is create your own unique data or research and so this is a
very, very powerful technique and it really can act as
a great form of link bait when you create your own unique data. So my third and final
differentiation technique is to tell relevant stories. So stories are extremely powerful and we use them to make
sense of the world. The good news is that storytelling is nothing more than a
skill that you can develop. So what I recommend you doing
is to start to build your story archive so that you
can pull relevant stories whenever you need to
and you can inject those into your content. And you've probably noticed
throughout this video that I've dropped several different stories and the reason for this is to first of all keep you
engaged in the content but most importantly is to help solidify the concept that I'm
explaining at a deeper level because it's easier to relate with a story than it is for me to just
throw information at you. So the main takeaway is
that you need to start using stories and the good
news is that it's very easy because no one else has your stories. So these are just a few of
the methods I personally use to differentiate all of my
keyword targeted content. But if you really want to
learn how to create effective keyword targeted content, one of the best things to do is analyze keyword targeted content that
is already performed well. So below this video I'm
going to give you access to 21 examples of perfect SEO content and this is a SWI file
that you can download 100% free and it's just going to show you 21 real pieces of keyword targeted content and pieces of link bait that have performed exceptionally well. So Like I said, the link
will be below the video and it is 100% free. So at this point all
that is left is for you to start strategizing and brainstorming how you're going to
actually create your keyword targeted content. Now unfortunately, this
is as far as I can go because at this point you
just have to actually create the content or outsource
the creation of the content or give it to team member to create, but no matter which path you're taking the content has to be created. Because listen at the end of the day it doesn't matter how much
information I give you, how guidance I give you. All that matters is that
you take the information I give you and you take action on it. Because if you don't take action on it none of the information is going to work. But you taking action is what will determine your success
and most importantly when you take action you solidify the concepts that
you learned so much faster, and when you have real experiences, that is the best way to learn. So now the question is, what do you do after
you've created a perfect keyword targeted page? Well, you have to promote it and you have to build backlinks to that page if you
really want it to succeed. Because at the end of the day, almost every single page
you're going to create is going to need backlinks
to be able to reach the first page and of course there are exceptions to the rule. For example, if you have a
super authoritative website, you're not going to need
a ton of backlinks to rank but for most of us we're going to need to
acquire new backlinks to any new keyword targeted
page that we create, in order for it to reach the first page in most cases. So you may or may not know this but I created a massive
guide on how to build backlinks and all that you
need to do is just follow this guide and you'll learn
everything you need to know about building backlinks to your website. And I'll have a link below this video so that you can go and check that out. And because I've already
created this massive guide that actually ranks on the first
page for the keyword backlinks which is pretty awesome, I'm not going to show you
how to build backlinks in this particular video but I am going to give you six link building tips that you should follow. So the first link building tip is that relevancy is king. So the majority of your backlinks should be coming from websites that are relevant to yours. And this is the most important
element of link building. You should only be
focusing on prospects that are closely relevant to your business and it's a good idea to focus on the most relevant opportunities first, and then work your way down to the less relevant opportunities. And this is actually what I like to call the relevancy pyramid where
you start at the absolute most relevant opportunities, which is a small percentage and is the top of the pyramid, but as you go down the pyramid you're going to have more opportunities but they're going to be
less relevant and so, I'll have the link below
the video about the relevancy pyramid, but Like I said, focus all of your effort on
acquiring the most relevant links possible. So the second tip is
that authority is queen. So if relevancy is king, then authority is king. So the ideal situation is
that you find a website that is 100% relevant to yours and also has a lot of authority. If you can find both of these factors you're going to get a lot of link power going to your website. The third link building tip is that creating content assets and creating linkable content assets is the most scalable link
building strategy there is. Because at the end of the day, it is much easier to promote a really valuable piece of content than it is to promote a
product page or a category page or even a home page because
people are much more willing to link to a page that adds a ton of value in your industry as opposed
to any of those other pages. The fourth tip is that
contextual links are best. So in general, you should try
to get back links that are in the actual meat of the content and the way you do that is
usually through getting links naturally but you can
use some other methods to get those links higher up, because when you land something like a guest post for example, you're going to get a link in author bio which can
be somewhat effective for sending link authority to your website but nothing is more effective then getting link in the actual body of a piece of content
on another relevant website. So the fifth tip is that
anchor texts matters. So in addition to my huge guide on how to building backlinks, I actually have a guide and
a video on how to optimize your anchor text and so, I have a link below this video
for you to check that out but understanding how to
optimize anchor text is so incredibly important to your success with your link building efforts. And my sixth and final link building tip is that you need to prioritize relationships over backlinks. So why do I say you should prioritize building relationships over backlinks? Well it's quite simple. Because, you want to focus all of your effort and all of your time, especially when you're new to an industry in building relationships
with the key influencers in your industry, more importantly, the
people that have established audiences in your industry. And the reason for this is quite obvious, because you want to be able to pull some of that audience from them and build your brand that way as well, but the only way for that to be possible is you have to add value to these people who have established audiences and if you do it the right way, and you take your time, this is going to lead to
back links down the road. This is going to lead to social shares. And most importantly,
this is going to lead to real relationships that
can actually benefit not only your business but
benefit their business as well. So those are the six tips you need to know for building backlinks effectively and if you really want to
learn how to build backlinks from point A to Z, to make sure you check out
my guide below this video. Alright, I can't believe it but we are finally to the
fourth and final pillar of my SEO strategy which is to optimize and amplify. So the first stage of
this pillar is on the conversion level, and the reason why is
because what a lot of people don't realize is that
when you start getting organic search visitors, the majority of those
people that land on your site will never come back
to your website again. And that is why it's
absolutely fundamental that you have the ability to remarket to these people that
land on your website so, how do you go about doing that? Well there are two ways
to accomplish this goal. So the first way to accomplish this goal is to start building retargeting lists an these can be on Facebook this can be on Google AdWords. This can be on YouTube. And this can also be on Twitter etc. And just to be clear this doesn't mean that you're going
to start advertising to these individuals but it's just a good idea to have
these retargeting lists built on Facebook, on Google AdWords, and any other ad platform, because these are assets
for your business. And the reason why is because even if these searchers or anyone
who lands on your site doesn't become a customer
or doesn't subscribe to your email list or
doesn't convert in any way on your website, you will still have the
ability to advertise and re-market to these individuals
on these other platforms. And this is incredibly
powerful for your business. The second conversion tactic
that you should be using is to start trying to get
some of these searchers and website visitors onto an email list. So they're have been
countless marketing channels and mediums that have come and gone all throughout history but the one that has stood
the test of time is email and it still continues to be one of the best channels
for nurturing your prospects and most importantly being able to market to those prospects. And in my experience, there is no better way to
get people on your email list than using lead magnets. So an example of a lead magnet is the SWI feel you're
going to download below the video which is called 21 examples of perfect SEO content. And the reason why lead
magnets work so well, is because it is an exchange of value. So the way it works is that you're getting value because of the
information that I'm giving you and then my business is getting value because you have freely
given me your email in exchange for that value and when you give me your email that gives me the ability
to continue building a relationship with you. So those are the two
primary conversion tactics you must be using. And now at this point I want to show you one
of my absolute favorite amplification methods for growing your organic search traffic without having to create
any new content and without having to acquire any new backlinks. This method is called the
authority transfer technique. And you can use the
authority transfer technique whenever you publish a new blog post. So here is how it works, number one, you publish
your new blog post. Number two, you identify
relevant pages on your website that have existing backlinks. And then number three, you place internal links on the relevant pages that will link to your new blog post. So why is this, effective? So the reason why the
authority transfer technique is so effective is because you're giving
your new content asset a boost right out of the gate, and it's crazy because
sometimes this methods is enough to get you to the top of the second page and even sometimes to the first page without getting any backlinks at all. And this technique just shows
you the power of understanding how to distribute link
equity on your website. So if you like the
authority transfer technique then you're going to love
the other two amplification methods that I share in my
free download below this video called SEO cheat codes. So that is all for this SEO strategy. So if you've got a lot
of value from this video please give it a big thumbs up and please subscribe to
my channel if you want more SEO and marketing
videos just like this one. And also, if you have any questions at all or you just have some thoughts
you want to share with me please leave them below in
the comment section because I respond to every single one. So I just want to thank you so
much for watching this video and for spending your time with me today, and I look forward to seeing
you in the next video. Thank you so much.
