SMX West is in its final day and it’s been a great three days of sessions. Today’s panel, What’s Needed for SEO Success in 2013 and Beyond is filled with industry experts including Greg Boser (@GregBoser), Annie Cushing (@AnnieCushing), Janet Driscoll Miller (@janetmiller), Duane Forrester (@duaneforrester), Rae Hoffman (@sugarrae) and Matt Cutts (@mattcutts).
Session is getting started with Danny making light of the fact that we had to walk close to a mile to get lunch. Danny’s introducing the panel (see above) with various jokes taken at Matt Cutts’ and Greg Boser’s expense.
Danny is opening with a general question about authorship. Is authorship the new page rank?
Matt’s response: Reputation will matter more and more as we move forward. Over time, we (Google) will be caring more about identity and social. He’s also saying it would be great to see commenters on blogs who have authority to get credit for that also. Matt is recommending implementing authorship on your site.
Greg: Believes it’s a natural progression as human page rank is harder to game. He raises a good point about authority for authors needing to be adjusted such that a post by Danny Sullivan gets its due credit on Search Engine Land, but something on his personal blog about a topic he isn’t as authoritative about, shouldn’t be given the same credit.
Rae: Asks a question about individuals “selling” their authorship in ghost posting and how that will be monitored.
Matt: mentions that there are FTC legislation against “sock puppet” accounts and that there are checks and balances to make sure ghost postings aren’t allowed under an authority account.
Annie: Seeing posts in the SERPs with authorship photos getting higher traffic.
Danny asks a follow up question: Will brands have some version of authorship
The question is shifted slightly to if brand and authoritative domains will pass some of their weight and authority to the authors that post on them?
Greg: Believes that some of that value will be passed to a blogger or writer.
Matt: We saw this in Danny’s move from SES to starting Search Engine Land. It took a bit of time but his authority was built quickly.
Greg: Believes that if you start a new site as a blogger, your authority will help give trust to that new site or domain. Additionally, larger brands and sites are struggling with how to implement authorship due to legal questions and who owns content etc. Thus, for the “small guys” there is an advantage to move quickly with authorship
Janet: Asks Matt a question about authorship for videos, pictures etc.
Matt: He believes that some form of authorship will come to more rich media. He has no timeline for that.
Rae: Asking if authorship value will flow both ways. Will her “value” give credit to a blog and visa versa.
Greg: Notices that Google has been wanting people to use one identity, your name, across accounts. He believes this is a signal that Google is paving the way to have a much more transparent approach to who is behind content an assigning value accordingly.
New discussion topic from Danny: Shifting to links… Now that we’ve gone through penalty linking through advertorials. Is the world of linking going to break down? Shouldn’t we all just shift to social?
Matt: Links in his opinion have many many many more years ahead of us as valuable. Black hat tactics that were used in the past are getting less and less successful. Google’s put a lot of time and energy into shutting down link networks etc. Thus, good links that are built naturally will still provide value for a long time.
Matt: Its easier to be real than to fake being real. Thus, come up with a really great idea, make a fantastic user experience and content and great linking will follow.
New discussion topic from Danny: Where is social going? If links are the democracy of the web, there is so much more social sharing. Will social indicators and sharing ever eclipse links?
Duane: Not sure they will ever eclipse links but there will come to a natural equilibrium. Social is a great way to understand what people are talking about and find interesting and can form hypothesis from that to determine what is relevant in search. They give us great intent. Social will continue to play a big roll but its not determined how it will be fully used just quite yet.
Danny: Out of the box, links had issues and the algo’s have refined over and over and over again. How are they refining social indicators.
Duane: There is SO MUCH DATA to deal with and they provides their own challenges.
Matt: Processing the social data won’t be the limitation. The challenges and limitations come down to noise or intent.
Greg: Likes the point about links and social coming to an equilibrium. We (SEO’s) are all looking for the date when we all “switch” from linking to social. He doesn’t believe that’s the correct mindset and that we need to keep focusing on both and how they work hand in hand. It’s never going to be one or the other.
New discussion topic: What’s going on with mobile as it relates to mobile?
Matt: Mobile is going to surprise a lot of people. Be sure you look at how your site looks and performs on mobile.
Duane: Mobile usage will go from 9 billion to 25 billion devices. Look into responsive design and how your site renders on a phone. Think about how people are looking for content based on their situation/location etc. Though we are talking a lot about social, you can do mobile NOW.
Danny: But what about concerete SEO things to do on mobile?
Matt: It’s important to make sure your site is lean and loads fast as that’s important on mobile.
Danny: Will Google mobile bot look at sites and penalize sites if they’re not mobile friendly or responsive?
Matt: He wouldn’t go that far to say there are penalties that would be applied. He saw a stat that only 4% of sites are optimized for mobile. It’s something you can do now. Google can crawl as both a desktop robot as well as Google mobile. Thus a WordPress site (like Danny’s search engine land) that has mobile optimized themes can be seen across devices.
Duane: As more and more people move in the direction as mobile, is your business moving with them to mobile?
Annie: Look at your data and isolate mobile to see how many people are hitting your site from mobile devices and look at how the site performs against your goals. Use advanced segments in Google Analytics to evaluate your traffic.
Matt: Look at your server logs and break out mobile vs. desktop. What you will see is an exponential curve and you ALWAYS want to pay attention to exponential curves.
QUESTION: What do you suggest for someone starting in SEO?
Danny: Check out search engine land and check out the SEO section. Also go to Google or Bing and look for SEO guide.
Greg: Stop using the word SEO… it’s no longer about “tactics” its about “strategy.”
Matt: What Google wants is what users want.
Duane: There are best practices that you need to understand. You need more than just tactics. You need to have good negotiating skills, know basics about psychology, how to work with other teams, you need to know usability, you need to know paid search, you need to know ROI. If you’re still an SEO saying “my job is just to get traffic” then you’re not long for this world.
Janet: Clients still want “ranking” but they don’t exist anymore. You need to educate and shift the discussion away from rankings and educate about how “ranking” is really about getting traffic and traffic is about getting sales/leads/conversions etc.
Duane: Keep your company focused on what is actually important to your business goals. Forget about rankings.
QUESTIONS: A client/company doesn’t want one author associated with their brand, what do you suggest?
Matt: That is something we’ll look at in time. It’s fair feedback.
Rae: You could use the rel publisher tag.
Greg: Believes that Google will still know where you’ve moved to if you leave one company or blog and go to the next. Google will be treating your authorship like your career.
Matt: Google tries to compensate and accommodate if people don’t install their markup correctly.
Danny: What’s up with Bing? (as it relates to authorship)
Duane: We’re watching what’s happening with Google and authorship. They may have their own version in the future but that’s not confirmed. In the meantime, Schema.org is open to anyone. Make sure you are testing your markup language using tools. Be very careful about it as so many people get it wrong.
Danny: Will you every provide a tool to show who the top authors?
Matt: Doubt it… anytime there is a leader board people want to spam it.
AND THE SOUND IS GONE…
Greg: Blames the sound on Google censorship.
Duane: “Matt… is this sound (not provided)” ?
Danny: “The sounds working just fine in the PPC room!”
A ROAR OF LAUGHTER…
QUESTION: Do we used company branded profiles for authorship (“Verison_Bob”) or their own personal accounts when blogging for a company?
Matt: Finds it annoying when he sees “Verison_bob” and would prefer the personal side. One way to compromise is, as a business, let a person be their personal brand. But don’t leave it just to one person so all of your eggs aren’t in one basket.
Duane: Consider as a company having social tasks and blogging etc as part of “what you do” as employees
Greg: Likes what Raventools does. Both personal and business twitter accounts are made known.
New discussion topic: What do you consider to be the most important SEO “think” for 2013
Duane: Usability. Pay for testing, invest in usability. Your customers are happy with you when they can use your site effectively. That makes people want to talk about you and that makes Bing happy
Annie: Shift your focus from keywords to landing pages and how they perform. You’re not seeing keyword data in your analytics reports from organic anyway. Focus on whats making you money
Matt: Global view… its going to be the same in 2013 as previous years. Think about what a user wants and then give it to them in a compelling and interesting way. Tactical … annotate your web forms so that when a Chrome user gets an auto complete form field. When their ready to give you money and buy, autocomplete will help that. When you’re using the disavow tool, remember one URL per line and its a text file, not excel etc. Lastly, “when will the next Panda update be” – he’s updating that it is coming relatively soon, not a specific day as reported. Panda updates are going to be changing. In the past, updates caused a fair amount of ranking data to change in one day. In the future, you’ll see more gradual ranking changes. Expect more gradual shifts.
Rae: Authorship. Be creative… SEO is harder now. It’s not as easy as it used to be so step up your game. The sooner you accept that you need to put some serious effort into this, the better off you’ll be.
Greg: Embrace the big data thing! Mine your data, look at internal data to help guide your strategies.
Janet: It’s not about the rankings. You’re a marketer first and an SEO second. Thing broadly beyond the classic “SEO”. Its about usability. Use more rich snippets as you can to get the visibility and traffic.
Last week I got a lovely surprise. A tweet peep, Jen Dainer, tweeted me a picture of some Google search results. She’d started typing “copywriter” into everyone’s favourite search engine and before she’d completed the word, there I was ranked at number two (right after Wikipedia). Someone else then told me I was ranked number three for the word “copywriting” .
To say I was pleased is a massive understatement. I don’t pay an SEO company. I’ve done it all myself and SEO wasn’t my primary focus. Do you want to know how?
Before you call “bullshit”, read the post and the disclaimers at the end.
Regular, relevant content
I publish a new post on The Copy Detective every week. Every Wednesday at 8am to be exact. I have a clear idea about who my blog readers are and what they care about, and I do my very best to make sure each blog post is relevant and valuable.
Let me repeat that, because it’s important when it comes to SEO: Relevant and valuable content.
Once I pick a topic, I do some quick keyword analysis using Google’s keyword tool. I don’t spend very long. Just long enough to get a feel for the kind of phrases people search on when looking for my topic, and I use those phrases throughout the post.
I’ve made sure my content is linked to my Google + profile via the rel=author tag. This proves authorship, which Google likes and when my posts show up in search results my mug is there too, which helps my website stand out on the page.
Copywrite Matters on page 1 SEO
I also publish a monthly newsletter, create semi-regular video tutorials and publish slide presentations from my workshops, seminars and videos.
My goal for each piece of content is quite simple: it’s to help someone write better copy.
The SEO lesson? Write for your audience and be generous with your knowledge.
Guest blogging on credible sites
There is a lot of talk right now, amongst SEO and blogging circles, that guest blogging is going to get hammered by Google (in a bad way). The point Matt Cutts makes in this video is that writing low-quality blogs and articles and getting them published on low-quality blogs will get you penalised by Google.
When it comes to using guest posting as an SEO strategy, quality is everything. The quality of the post you write, quality of the links you include and the quality of the blog it’s published on. If it’s all high quality, Google will reward you.
I write guest blogs to share my expertise and build my reputation. I write unique articles that are written with the specific audience of that blog in mind. I only submit posts that I would be proud to publish here on The Copy Detective.
By doing that I might get some traffic and subscribers, which is awesome, but I might just stick in someone’s mind when they need a marketing or SEO copywriter.
The SEO lesson? Think beyond the link.
Hear more from Matt Cutts on guest blogging.
You can find my guest posts about copywriting and marketing Dynamic Business, Problogger, the Australian Business Women’s Network, Grassroots Internet Strategy and Firepole Marketing.
Commenting on other blogs
I regularly read and share a whole raft of blogs from other copywriters, marketers, SEO specialists and business thought leaders. When I feel like I have something to add to the discussion I leave a comment.
Does this bring me the SEO pot of gold? No. What I am doing is participating in a community, hopefully in a meaningful fashion, and building relationships as I go. That’s the kind of activity that Google likes to see.
Remember, you’ll only get people clicking your link if your comment has sparked some interest, so put some thought into it! Once you get the click, you need to make sure you drop them off in a valuable location. If your content sucks, the click is wasted.
In fact, you can read my experience on what makes a good blog commenting strategy and Copyblogger’s thoughts on the same topic.
The SEO lesson? Again, think beyond the link. Showcase your knowledge and take part in a community.
Social media shizzle
Anyone who has known me for a little while knows that I am fairly prolific on social media. I looooove to tweet, share, update, post, retweet, like and +1. I love the people I’ve met through social media and the rich content I’ve been exposed to.
The top two sources of traffic to my website are Twitter and Facebook, with LinkedIn appearing in the top ten. That shows that social media is a great mechanism to share your high-quality content and attract people to your website. I also regularly post on Google +. It doesn’t send me heaps of traffic but Google clearly loves Google + and that’s enough for me to stick around and get to know people.
More importantly than traffic, social media is all about the audience. Social media lets me find out what people think and what they are interested in, and I use that to drive my content marketing strategy.
From an SEO point of view, when you use social media to actively interact with people and share awesome content, you are showing Google your “social proof”. You’re showing Google that people trust and like you and that can give you a few extra SEO brownie points.
The SEO lesson: Social media should be more marketing and less SEO.
Directories and other links
I also have Copywrite Matters listed on a few directories, like TrueLocal and Hotfrog. I have to admit that I don’t really rate these as hard-working components of my SEO strategy. Why? Just creating a directory profile isn’t enough. It needs to be refreshed regularly and create action, like a blog.
If I were getting regular reviews and comments, I think these directory listings would help me more but, to be honest, it’s not something that keeps me up at night.
Wrap-up
So there you have the regular activities that have rocked me to page one of Google for a number of really great keywords about copywriting. I do all this myself, without the help of an SEO company. I am an SEO copywriter but writing optimised copy actually doesn’t feature very highly as I write. When I’m happy with the post, I go back and look for opportunities for optimisation.
In fact, getting a good search engine ranking isn’t what I’m thinking about when I’m doing any of this stuff.
As I mentioned above, my goal in everything I do is to help others write better copy. I make sure my content marketing is consistently regular and always has my audience in mind.
Some SEO specialists might laugh at my efforts and call “bullshit” on my results. I welcome you to skim down to my disclaimers but I think the results speak for themselves. Of all my leads, 95% now come from search engine searches and the higher I rank, the fewer tyre kickers I get.
For anyone considering their own SEO, I’d love to know… is this something you could do? Or are doing now? Do you do anything differently? Let me know!
The Copy Detective
DISCLAIMERS
#1 Yes, the SEO results I was sent are probably skewed
While I love that people outside of my house are finding me at the top of their search engine results, I double-checked my SEO ranking in Market Samurai. It told me I was ranking really well for more specific terms like “SEO copywriter Melbourne” and “copywriter Melbourne” (amongst others) but I wasn’t really on the radar for high-level terms like “copywriter”.
I put the results I was sent down to Google’s preference for local results, and Market Samurai not necessarily factoring that in AND the fact that I know these two people from social media. That vague connection could be influencing their results.
#2 This isn’t 100% comprehensive SEO strategy
This is just what I do as part of my regular content marketing, social media marketing and SEO strategy. My first priority is always to create and share valuable relevant content and engage with the people who care about what I care about.
Session is getting started with Danny making light of the fact that we had to walk close to a mile to get lunch. Danny’s introducing the panel (see above) with various jokes taken at Matt Cutts’ and Greg Boser’s expense.
Danny is opening with a general question about authorship. Is authorship the new page rank?
Matt’s response: Reputation will matter more and more as we move forward. Over time, we (Google) will be caring more about identity and social. He’s also saying it would be great to see commenters on blogs who have authority to get credit for that also. Matt is recommending implementing authorship on your site.
Greg: Believes it’s a natural progression as human page rank is harder to game. He raises a good point about authority for authors needing to be adjusted such that a post by Danny Sullivan gets its due credit on Search Engine Land, but something on his personal blog about a topic he isn’t as authoritative about, shouldn’t be given the same credit.
Rae: Asks a question about individuals “selling” their authorship in ghost posting and how that will be monitored.
Matt: mentions that there are FTC legislation against “sock puppet” accounts and that there are checks and balances to make sure ghost postings aren’t allowed under an authority account.
Annie: Seeing posts in the SERPs with authorship photos getting higher traffic.
Danny asks a follow up question: Will brands have some version of authorship
The question is shifted slightly to if brand and authoritative domains will pass some of their weight and authority to the authors that post on them?
Greg: Believes that some of that value will be passed to a blogger or writer.
Matt: We saw this in Danny’s move from SES to starting Search Engine Land. It took a bit of time but his authority was built quickly.
Greg: Believes that if you start a new site as a blogger, your authority will help give trust to that new site or domain. Additionally, larger brands and sites are struggling with how to implement authorship due to legal questions and who owns content etc. Thus, for the “small guys” there is an advantage to move quickly with authorship
Janet: Asks Matt a question about authorship for videos, pictures etc.
Matt: He believes that some form of authorship will come to more rich media. He has no timeline for that.
Rae: Asking if authorship value will flow both ways. Will her “value” give credit to a blog and visa versa.
Greg: Notices that Google has been wanting people to use one identity, your name, across accounts. He believes this is a signal that Google is paving the way to have a much more transparent approach to who is behind content an assigning value accordingly.
New discussion topic from Danny: Shifting to links… Now that we’ve gone through penalty linking through advertorials. Is the world of linking going to break down? Shouldn’t we all just shift to social?
Matt: Links in his opinion have many many many more years ahead of us as valuable. Black hat tactics that were used in the past are getting less and less successful. Google’s put a lot of time and energy into shutting down link networks etc. Thus, good links that are built naturally will still provide value for a long time.
Matt: Its easier to be real than to fake being real. Thus, come up with a really great idea, make a fantastic user experience and content and great linking will follow.
New discussion topic from Danny: Where is social going? If links are the democracy of the web, there is so much more social sharing. Will social indicators and sharing ever eclipse links?
Duane: Not sure they will ever eclipse links but there will come to a natural equilibrium. Social is a great way to understand what people are talking about and find interesting and can form hypothesis from that to determine what is relevant in search. They give us great intent. Social will continue to play a big roll but its not determined how it will be fully used just quite yet.
Danny: Out of the box, links had issues and the algo’s have refined over and over and over again. How are they refining social indicators.
Duane: There is SO MUCH DATA to deal with and they provides their own challenges.
Matt: Processing the social data won’t be the limitation. The challenges and limitations come down to noise or intent.
Greg: Likes the point about links and social coming to an equilibrium. We (SEO’s) are all looking for the date when we all “switch” from linking to social. He doesn’t believe that’s the correct mindset and that we need to keep focusing on both and how they work hand in hand. It’s never going to be one or the other.
New discussion topic: What’s going on with mobile as it relates to mobile?
Matt: Mobile is going to surprise a lot of people. Be sure you look at how your site looks and performs on mobile.
Duane: Mobile usage will go from 9 billion to 25 billion devices. Look into responsive design and how your site renders on a phone. Think about how people are looking for content based on their situation/location etc. Though we are talking a lot about social, you can do mobile NOW.
Danny: But what about concerete SEO things to do on mobile?
Matt: It’s important to make sure your site is lean and loads fast as that’s important on mobile.
Danny: Will Google mobile bot look at sites and penalize sites if they’re not mobile friendly or responsive?
Matt: He wouldn’t go that far to say there are penalties that would be applied. He saw a stat that only 4% of sites are optimized for mobile. It’s something you can do now. Google can crawl as both a desktop robot as well as Google mobile. Thus a WordPress site (like Danny’s search engine land) that has mobile optimized themes can be seen across devices.
Duane: As more and more people move in the direction as mobile, is your business moving with them to mobile?
Annie: Look at your data and isolate mobile to see how many people are hitting your site from mobile devices and look at how the site performs against your goals. Use advanced segments in Google Analytics to evaluate your traffic.
Matt: Look at your server logs and break out mobile vs. desktop. What you will see is an exponential curve and you ALWAYS want to pay attention to exponential curves.
QUESTION: What do you suggest for someone starting in SEO?
Danny: Check out search engine land and check out the SEO section. Also go to Google or Bing and look for SEO guide.
Greg: Stop using the word SEO… it’s no longer about “tactics” its about “strategy.”
Matt: What Google wants is what users want.
Duane: There are best practices that you need to understand. You need more than just tactics. You need to have good negotiating skills, know basics about psychology, how to work with other teams, you need to know usability, you need to know paid search, you need to know ROI. If you’re still an SEO saying “my job is just to get traffic” then you’re not long for this world.
Janet: Clients still want “ranking” but they don’t exist anymore. You need to educate and shift the discussion away from rankings and educate about how “ranking” is really about getting traffic and traffic is about getting sales/leads/conversions etc.
Duane: Keep your company focused on what is actually important to your business goals. Forget about rankings.
QUESTIONS: A client/company doesn’t want one author associated with their brand, what do you suggest?
Matt: That is something we’ll look at in time. It’s fair feedback.
Rae: You could use the rel publisher tag.
Greg: Believes that Google will still know where you’ve moved to if you leave one company or blog and go to the next. Google will be treating your authorship like your career.
Matt: Google tries to compensate and accommodate if people don’t install their markup correctly.
Danny: What’s up with Bing? (as it relates to authorship)
Duane: We’re watching what’s happening with Google and authorship. They may have their own version in the future but that’s not confirmed. In the meantime, Schema.org is open to anyone. Make sure you are testing your markup language using tools. Be very careful about it as so many people get it wrong.
Danny: Will you every provide a tool to show who the top authors?
Matt: Doubt it… anytime there is a leader board people want to spam it.
AND THE SOUND IS GONE…
Greg: Blames the sound on Google censorship.
Duane: “Matt… is this sound (not provided)” ?
Danny: “The sounds working just fine in the PPC room!”
A ROAR OF LAUGHTER…
QUESTION: Do we used company branded profiles for authorship (“Verison_Bob”) or their own personal accounts when blogging for a company?
Matt: Finds it annoying when he sees “Verison_bob” and would prefer the personal side. One way to compromise is, as a business, let a person be their personal brand. But don’t leave it just to one person so all of your eggs aren’t in one basket.
Duane: Consider as a company having social tasks and blogging etc as part of “what you do” as employees
Greg: Likes what Raventools does. Both personal and business twitter accounts are made known.
New discussion topic: What do you consider to be the most important SEO “think” for 2013
Duane: Usability. Pay for testing, invest in usability. Your customers are happy with you when they can use your site effectively. That makes people want to talk about you and that makes Bing happy
Annie: Shift your focus from keywords to landing pages and how they perform. You’re not seeing keyword data in your analytics reports from organic anyway. Focus on whats making you money
Matt: Global view… its going to be the same in 2013 as previous years. Think about what a user wants and then give it to them in a compelling and interesting way. Tactical … annotate your web forms so that when a Chrome user gets an auto complete form field. When their ready to give you money and buy, autocomplete will help that. When you’re using the disavow tool, remember one URL per line and its a text file, not excel etc. Lastly, “when will the next Panda update be” – he’s updating that it is coming relatively soon, not a specific day as reported. Panda updates are going to be changing. In the past, updates caused a fair amount of ranking data to change in one day. In the future, you’ll see more gradual ranking changes. Expect more gradual shifts.
Rae: Authorship. Be creative… SEO is harder now. It’s not as easy as it used to be so step up your game. The sooner you accept that you need to put some serious effort into this, the better off you’ll be.
Greg: Embrace the big data thing! Mine your data, look at internal data to help guide your strategies.
Janet: It’s not about the rankings. You’re a marketer first and an SEO second. Thing broadly beyond the classic “SEO”. Its about usability. Use more rich snippets as you can to get the visibility and traffic.
Last week I got a lovely surprise. A tweet peep, Jen Dainer, tweeted me a picture of some Google search results. She’d started typing “copywriter” into everyone’s favourite search engine and before she’d completed the word, there I was ranked at number two (right after Wikipedia). Someone else then told me I was ranked number three for the word “copywriting” .
To say I was pleased is a massive understatement. I don’t pay an SEO company. I’ve done it all myself and SEO wasn’t my primary focus. Do you want to know how?
Before you call “bullshit”, read the post and the disclaimers at the end.
Regular, relevant content
I publish a new post on The Copy Detective every week. Every Wednesday at 8am to be exact. I have a clear idea about who my blog readers are and what they care about, and I do my very best to make sure each blog post is relevant and valuable.
Let me repeat that, because it’s important when it comes to SEO: Relevant and valuable content.
Once I pick a topic, I do some quick keyword analysis using Google’s keyword tool. I don’t spend very long. Just long enough to get a feel for the kind of phrases people search on when looking for my topic, and I use those phrases throughout the post.
I’ve made sure my content is linked to my Google + profile via the rel=author tag. This proves authorship, which Google likes and when my posts show up in search results my mug is there too, which helps my website stand out on the page.
Copywrite Matters on page 1 SEO
I also publish a monthly newsletter, create semi-regular video tutorials and publish slide presentations from my workshops, seminars and videos.
My goal for each piece of content is quite simple: it’s to help someone write better copy.
The SEO lesson? Write for your audience and be generous with your knowledge.
Guest blogging on credible sites
There is a lot of talk right now, amongst SEO and blogging circles, that guest blogging is going to get hammered by Google (in a bad way). The point Matt Cutts makes in this video is that writing low-quality blogs and articles and getting them published on low-quality blogs will get you penalised by Google.
When it comes to using guest posting as an SEO strategy, quality is everything. The quality of the post you write, quality of the links you include and the quality of the blog it’s published on. If it’s all high quality, Google will reward you.
I write guest blogs to share my expertise and build my reputation. I write unique articles that are written with the specific audience of that blog in mind. I only submit posts that I would be proud to publish here on The Copy Detective.
By doing that I might get some traffic and subscribers, which is awesome, but I might just stick in someone’s mind when they need a marketing or SEO copywriter.
The SEO lesson? Think beyond the link.
Hear more from Matt Cutts on guest blogging.
You can find my guest posts about copywriting and marketing Dynamic Business, Problogger, the Australian Business Women’s Network, Grassroots Internet Strategy and Firepole Marketing.
Commenting on other blogs
I regularly read and share a whole raft of blogs from other copywriters, marketers, SEO specialists and business thought leaders. When I feel like I have something to add to the discussion I leave a comment.
Does this bring me the SEO pot of gold? No. What I am doing is participating in a community, hopefully in a meaningful fashion, and building relationships as I go. That’s the kind of activity that Google likes to see.
Remember, you’ll only get people clicking your link if your comment has sparked some interest, so put some thought into it! Once you get the click, you need to make sure you drop them off in a valuable location. If your content sucks, the click is wasted.
In fact, you can read my experience on what makes a good blog commenting strategy and Copyblogger’s thoughts on the same topic.
The SEO lesson? Again, think beyond the link. Showcase your knowledge and take part in a community.
Social media shizzle
Anyone who has known me for a little while knows that I am fairly prolific on social media. I looooove to tweet, share, update, post, retweet, like and +1. I love the people I’ve met through social media and the rich content I’ve been exposed to.
The top two sources of traffic to my website are Twitter and Facebook, with LinkedIn appearing in the top ten. That shows that social media is a great mechanism to share your high-quality content and attract people to your website. I also regularly post on Google +. It doesn’t send me heaps of traffic but Google clearly loves Google + and that’s enough for me to stick around and get to know people.
More importantly than traffic, social media is all about the audience. Social media lets me find out what people think and what they are interested in, and I use that to drive my content marketing strategy.
From an SEO point of view, when you use social media to actively interact with people and share awesome content, you are showing Google your “social proof”. You’re showing Google that people trust and like you and that can give you a few extra SEO brownie points.
The SEO lesson: Social media should be more marketing and less SEO.
Directories and other links
I also have Copywrite Matters listed on a few directories, like TrueLocal and Hotfrog. I have to admit that I don’t really rate these as hard-working components of my SEO strategy. Why? Just creating a directory profile isn’t enough. It needs to be refreshed regularly and create action, like a blog.
If I were getting regular reviews and comments, I think these directory listings would help me more but, to be honest, it’s not something that keeps me up at night.
Wrap-up
So there you have the regular activities that have rocked me to page one of Google for a number of really great keywords about copywriting. I do all this myself, without the help of an SEO company. I am an SEO copywriter but writing optimised copy actually doesn’t feature very highly as I write. When I’m happy with the post, I go back and look for opportunities for optimisation.
In fact, getting a good search engine ranking isn’t what I’m thinking about when I’m doing any of this stuff.
As I mentioned above, my goal in everything I do is to help others write better copy. I make sure my content marketing is consistently regular and always has my audience in mind.
Some SEO specialists might laugh at my efforts and call “bullshit” on my results. I welcome you to skim down to my disclaimers but I think the results speak for themselves. Of all my leads, 95% now come from search engine searches and the higher I rank, the fewer tyre kickers I get.
For anyone considering their own SEO, I’d love to know… is this something you could do? Or are doing now? Do you do anything differently? Let me know!
The Copy Detective
DISCLAIMERS
#1 Yes, the SEO results I was sent are probably skewed
While I love that people outside of my house are finding me at the top of their search engine results, I double-checked my SEO ranking in Market Samurai. It told me I was ranking really well for more specific terms like “SEO copywriter Melbourne” and “copywriter Melbourne” (amongst others) but I wasn’t really on the radar for high-level terms like “copywriter”.
I put the results I was sent down to Google’s preference for local results, and Market Samurai not necessarily factoring that in AND the fact that I know these two people from social media. That vague connection could be influencing their results.
#2 This isn’t 100% comprehensive SEO strategy
This is just what I do as part of my regular content marketing, social media marketing and SEO strategy. My first priority is always to create and share valuable relevant content and engage with the people who care about what I care about.
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