Guides – Marketing Agency St. Louis

Beginners Guide To Link Building

studio2108 — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 16:48:08 +0000

Beginner’s Guide to Link Building for SEO

Everything you ever wanted to know about PPC, SEO, and Content Marketing. It’s not voodoo magic. Arm yourself with the information you need to hold your agency accountable for results.

Overview

What You'll Learn

Chapter ONE

Links and Search

Chapter two

The Anatomy of a "Good" Link

Chapter Three

How to Develop a Link Building Strategy

Chapter four

Tactics for Acquiring Links

Chapter five

The Dangers of Link Building

Chapter six

Get the Most Out of Your Link Building Campaign

CHAPTER ONE

Links and Search

In a nutshell, how search works, how Google makes $$$, and what all this has to do with link building.

Link building is the search engine optimization (SEO) practice of acquiring backlinks to gain authority and trust to ultimately improve your rankings within search engines.

A backlink is simply a link back to your website from another website. Backlinks are acquired by pitching relevant, uniquely useful content to other websites (i.e., blogs, publications, and industry authorities).

Link building is a vital component of any SEO strategy. There are literally hundreds of factors that affect rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs), yet you’ll be hard-pressed to rank without a robust backlink profile.

We’ll even go so far as to say this:

Your business will not rank in SERPs if you do not continually build relevant, quality links to uniquely helpful content on your site. All other factors being equal, links are the deciding factor when search engines choose which sites to rank—and which ones to bury 100 pages back.

But in order to gain a big-picture understanding of why link building is important to your business’ bottom line, you first need to understand:

How search engines work
How search engines make money
Why search engines care so much about links

We’ve got a lot of ground to cover, so let’s get started.

How search engines work

Search engines like Google use a complex algorithm — called PageRank — to decide which web pages to display in SERPs. Over the years, this algorithm has become smarter and smarter, producing more and more accurate answers to a myriad of questions.

While Google holds the precise inner-workings of its algorithm close to its vest, marketers have a good idea of the factors the algorithm takes into account when ranking pages through experimental data and information about all of Google’s major algorithm updates.

The algorithm is based on 200+ factors, but it essentially comes down to this:

Does your site have good content?
Do you have a wide variety of links pointing to that content?

All factors being equal, the key to ranking is good content plus a robust backlink profile.

Here’s how the algorithm, crawlers, and SERPs work in practice:

You need something

Let’s say you need a dog-sitter for your weekend escapade to Michigan. You want them to be reasonably priced, and you want them to be able to come to your home and possibly stay the night. So you type “dog sitter rates overnight” into Google.

Google scours the whole internet for an answer

Google sends out what is called a “spider” or “crawler,” which looks at trillions of pages, determines what they’re about, and “indexes” them, or files them away to display in queries. To date, Google has indexed more than 130 trillion pages.

Google uses its algorithm to decide SERP ranking order

For “dog sitter rates overnight” — a very specific keyword — there are more than 328,000 results! Google has to decide how to rank them somehow. To do this, they use an ever-changing ranking algorithm, PageRank, which relies on signals like quality of content, site structure, and (you guessed it!) your backlink profile.

Google displays the most relevant web pages

From your keyword — “dog sitter rates overnight” — Google can ascertain that you have a specific need. You need a dog sitter who can stay overnight, and you need to know how much that service will cost you. Then, it will parse through its index and, according to its algorithm, display only those results it thinks best matches your intent.

You get your answer

It’s right there in the SERP. Google went to great lengths to make sure you got your answer and got it quickly — a good overnight dog sitter will run about $35 to $65 per night. And, with any luck, if Google did its job right, you’ll be back the next time you have a question — perhaps even to look up good restaurants in Michigan.

But wait—why does Google care so much about links?

Hint: It has a lot to do with $$$$

Okay, okay. So links are great for navigating the web and communicating trust and authority. It makes sense for links to be a Google ranking factor, but why are links so heavily weighted in Google’s search engine algorithm?

It’s actually pretty simple: money. And lots of it.

Google’s traffic comes for organic (unpaid) search, but Google makes money off advertisements (paid search).

In order to maintain the continual stream of search traffic that pays its bills, Google needs to give users a good reason to return — carefully curated organic results that exactly satisfy searcher intent. Then it sells potential “clicks” to advertisers.

User experience (UX) is at the epicenter of how Google makes money and ultimately dictates its algorithm (the method Google uses to rank websites). Without providing a good user experience, Google would risk losing some search engine traffic due to frustration and, in turn, lose money.

Refining the algorithm is how it continually improves the accuracy of the results it provides year over year. Google has found that backlink profiles are the best barometer for the value and authority of a website and its content.

Sites don’t link to just anything—they’ll link to useful, relevant, or authoritative content. The more industry-relevant sites linking to a page, the more likely that site has helpful, relevant content that will provide a good experience to the user.

A site’s link profile tells a story about how trustworthy and informative its content is. Google looks to each link as a “vote of confidence” — the more votes you have, the more likely you’ll win a first-page SERP spot.

As Search Engine Watch so eloquently put it:

“Links aren’t valuable because of Google, Google is valuable because of its use of links.”

Links are how people navigate the web; they’d be valuable with or without Google. Google just happens to be better than other search engines at measuring the worth and validity of links and translating that into a ranking algorithm.

In large part, Google’s success can be attributed to its ability to parse through the billions of links on the web, interpret them, and assign a ranking value to various websites based on them.

Delivering authoritative, helpful sites in SERPs provides a good user experience. And a good user experience means more users will frequent the site, so Google can sell more “clicks” and make more money.

The thin line between optimization and over-optimization

Google’s goal is good UX, and it can spot link manipulation from a mile away

Google doesn’t blindly accept links as an indication of valuable content. I knows there are businesses and SEO agencies who try to game the system.

Remember: Google’s goal is to provide good UX. Allowing any site — regardless of the worth of its content — to rank because it has links works against that goal. And Google continually modifies and updates its algorithm to penalize sites that don’t play by the rules.

Google is very aware of the tactics and tricks SEOs use to obtain links. Some tactics (i.e., naturally earning links through outreach campaigns and creating great content) actually help Google in its quest to provide the best search experience to its users. Other tactics (i.e., link exchanges and excessive directory links) do not.

It continually rolls out updates that penalize those sites that are manipulating ranking signals. In fact, if Google catches you breaking the rules, it will demote your rankings, either manually (someone specifically applies a penalty to your site), or automatically (because of an update to the algorithm).

These same updates actually benefit sites providing helpful information, a good UX, and earning natural links.

Here’s the takeaway:

As Google’s algorithm gets more refined, SEO will align more and more closely with “user experience optimization.” To future-proof your link-building campaign, it helps to think of SEO and UXO as one and the same. Because, soon enough, they will be.

CHAPTER TWO

The Anatomy of a "Good" Link

What types of links do I need?

The anatomy of a “good” link

Links are one of the most important SERP ranking factors. They indicate authority, relevance, and other sites’ trust in your content.

But not all links are created equal. Some links provide more value than others. For example, a link from Forbes is understandably more valuable than a link from an obscure mommy blogger. However, it goes much deeper than that.

There are many metrics you need to look at when evaluating the strength, value, and relevance of a potential backlink. Namely, we look at user experience, authority, relevance, and technical considerations.

Here’s how we (and Google) measure the value of a link:

Do your links point to important or helpful content on your site?
User experience is first and foremost. Every link you build should offer a great UX. If the reader of an article or site would think your backlink was helpful, it’s a good link. If the reader would be confused, then it’s a bad link.

Authority

Is the link from a trusted voice in your industry?
Is your backlink on a quality site? There are many measures of “authority” as it comes to websites (we prefer to look at Moz’s Domain Authority metrics), but it’s important to make sure at least a good portion of your backlinks come from middle- to high-authority sites.

Relevance to your industry? Relevance to your target audience?

Does it make sense for your company to be linked to within the context of the article or site?
Links from industry-relevant blogs and authorities carry much more value than contextually irrelevant sites or spammy links from directories (and the latter might even land you a penalty). For example, if you are a wholesale car buyer, a link from Jalopnik matters a lot more than a link from a wedding magazine.

Technical

Can Google crawl the link?
Even if one of your backlinks offers great UX, authority, and relevance, if it isn’t perfect from a technical standpoint, its value diminishes greatly.

Placement within the page
The further up on the page, the more value Google gives to the link. After all, articles usually put the most interesting stuff first—and Google gives links extra points if they’re closer to the top.
Does the link make sense in context?
If the link is surrounded by semantically relevant words, it is more valuable. Context is important because it’s a way Google can measure whether the link naturally fits into the article — or not — and weights the value of the link accordingly.
Is the page indexable?
Sites can actually de-index pages, which means Google cannot crawl these pages, and won’t be able to see or assign value to any of the links.
Anchor text
Anchor text is the text that is highlighted when there’s a hyperlink — it’s what tips you off that there’s a link in the first place. Using the right anchor text is paramount to the value of a link. For example, if you’re linking to a page about personal injury law, “car accident lawyer” anchor text is vastly more valuable than “pie recipes.” And for obvious reason.
Can the crawler “follow” the link to your site?
Links are valuable because they lead a crawler to your site and pass PageRank value from their site to yours. Some sites, however, block followers from following their links by using “nofollow” coding on the back-end of their site for every link — Inc. and HuffPost are good examples of high-profile sites that do this. “Nofollow” links offer value through “referral” traffic, but they provide little to no SEO value. You want to seek out “dofollow” links in your link-building campaigns.

Here’s what a good link actually looks like

CHAPTER THREE

How to Develop a Link Building Strategy

Where do I start?

How to develop a goal-oriented link-building strategy

Now you know why links are valuable and what a “good” link looks like. So you’re ready to start full-speed ahead on a link-building campaign, right?

Well, not quite. Link building campaigns require strategy. You can’t just blindly build links and expect results. You need to evaluate your current backlink profile, establish goals, reach out to the right publications and, of course, pace your link-building campaign so as not to tip Google off that you’re building links at all.

That’s what this whole chapter is about — how to develop the perfect, goal-oriented link-building strategy.

Let’s dive in.

Step One: Audit Your Existing Backlink Profile

Find out what opportunities exist to increase your traffic through link building

You need to know where you are right now to know where you need to go. To get the most out of any link-building campaign, you need to know where your links are coming from, which anchor texts they use, and what content is earning the most links.

Whenever we start a link-building campaign for a new client, we do a deep dive into the company’s existing backlink profile — the complete collection of links pointing toward content on its site — before building any links.

We use a myriad of tools that allow us to look at which sites are linking to you, which pages the links are pointing to, and even the estimated value of the organic traffic you receive due to the backlinks. We use Majestic SEO, Moz Open Site Explorer, and Ahrefs, among others.

When performing a backlink audit, we ask ourselves several questions, such as:

How many total backlinks do you have?
Are those links “dofollow” or “nofollow”?
How many distinct referring domains are linking to your site?
What types of sites are linking to you? What is their authority?
How diverse is your anchor text profile?
What keywords are you ranking for as a result of your backlink profile?
How does your link profile compare to your competitors?

To show you how we evaluate backlink profiles, let’s look at ESPN.com’s backlink profile using Ahref’s Site Explorer:

How many total backlinks do you have?

This is a high-level measure of the value of your backlink profile. This statistic shows how many distinct links point to your site. ESPN, as you can imagine, has millions of links pointing toward content on its site. As of this publishing, 323 million, to be exact.

Are your links “dofollow” or “nofollow”?

As we discussed in Chapter 2, there are ways for sites to block search engine crawlers from “following” a link back to your site. These links — called “nofollow” links — are significantly less valuable than their counterparts—“dofollow” links—which lead right back to your content, passing PageRank value to your website. ESPN is in a distinctly good position, with 98 percent of its backlinks being dofollow, and only 1 percent being nofollow.

How many distinct referring domains are linking to your site?

Backlinks count as “votes of confidence” in the eyes of Google. But Google doesn’t want you stuffing the ballot box, so to speak.ESPN, for example, is owned by parent company Walt Disney. In theory, ESPN could acquire thousands of backlinks from Disney’s other subsidiaries, boosting its search engine rankings. Google prevents against this method of manipulating SERP ranking signals by only counting a backlink from a domain once.That’s why it’s important to acquire links from a diverse profile of websites, rather than just establishing a strong relationship with one blog or publisher.

While ESPN may have 323 million backlinks, it only has 218,000 distinct referring domains. This makes sense because many bloggers, teams, and newspapers use ESPN as a source for photos, quotes, and statistics on a regular basis. Therefore, multiple links can be attributed to the same site. Still, each distinct referring domain only counts as one “vote.”

What types of sites are linking to you? What is their authority?

Ahrefs actually provides you with a list of all the domains linking to your site. Below is the first of 4,357 pages of linking domains. Looking through these domains gives you an idea of the types of sites currently linking to you and can allow you to spot gaps or opportunities — i.e., sites that aren’t currently linking to you that you could target in your link-building campaign.It’s also important to look at the authority of the sites that are linking to you. You want an even, natural distribution of “authority” ratings. If all your referring domains are high-authority, then Google might think your backlink profile is unnatural and penalize you. If all your referring domains are mid-authority, Google might think your backlink profile is unnatural and penalize you.

Basically, you want to have a diverse profile of referring domains because that’s natural. Some high-authority publications might link to you — but certainly not hundreds of them at once. And some low-authority mommy bloggers might link to you — but certainly not hundreds of them at once.

Link-building campaigns should provide a balance of high-, mid-, and low-authority referring domains, so the progression looks natural to Google.

ESPN is a good example. It has a lot of low-authority sites — which are easier to acquire — a couple mid-authority pages, and only a few high-authority referring domains.

How diverse is your anchor text profile?

Anchor text diversity is just as important as diversity of authority and distinct referring domains. An easy link-building mistake to make is to over-optimize anchor text.For example, if ESPN really wanted to rank for the keyword “sports news site,” and built all its links with that anchor text, then it would look very unnatural to Google. Sure, sometimes sites use keywords as anchor text. Other times, though, they link to insignificant words like “this” and “click here.”That’s why you need a diverse collection of anchor texts. Earned links hardly ever have “optimized” anchor text. Google wants you to acquire links naturally, and every link-building campaign should have natural-looking anchor text profiles.

As you can see, ESPN’s anchor text profile is vast and diverse. There are more than 41,000 keyword variations, including non-optimized keywords like “article” and “said.” This looks natural, while still including optimized keywords like “sports news.”

What keywords are you ranking for as a result of your backlink profile?

It’s also important to establish a link between your current link profile and the keywords you’re already ranking for organically. This allows you to see where you’re doing well, and where there are opportunities for you to grow your inbound traffic.You want to increase the breadth of keywords driving traffic to your site. Doing an audit of your rankings across hundreds of keywords gives you a better idea of which keywords you should focus your link-building campaign around.ESPN, for example, is currently ranking organically for about 8.1 million keywords. Of those 8.1 million, it is ranking on the first page for more than 1.4 million. It is ranking on the 2nd page for 760,000 keywords. And so on.

Building links to 1st-page keywords help maintain traffic to your site, and your position in SERPs. Building links to deeper pages—keywords for which you’re currently ranking on the 2nd, 3rd or even 15th SERP page—creates new opportunities for traffic growth.

Those lower ranking keywords are good targets to focus our link building efforts on. Oftentimes, as long as your content was created with keyword targeting in mind, its already ranking well — within the first 5 pages. It just needs a push to make it to the first page. Through a strong link-building campaign, you stand to move up to the 1st page, earning more traffic and, in turn, more money in the form of qualified leads or purchases.

For example, ESPN is ranking on the 2nd page for “PGA.” If it built more links surrounding its golf coverage, it could increase its traffic and earn more money by selling more advertising.

How does your link profile compare to your competitors?

Who are your industry competitors? Which sites are linking to them? How much traffic are those links providing to them? What topics or pages are earning the most links for others in your industry? And, most importantly, how can you use this information to bolster your own strategy?There are quite likely sites that are linking to your competitors and not you. These present opportunities for link building, as long as you have similarly helpful or relevant content worth linking to.Competitive analyses are a key step in any link building strategy. It allows you to see what others in your industry are doing to obtain links and increase SERP rankings. You can learn from their SEO successes—and their mistakes.

For example, ESPN might look to Sports Illustrated, Fox Sports, and CNN Sports for link building opportunities and ideas.

Step Two: Build The Framework

How to develop keyword-targeted content specifically for link building

You can’t build links to nothing. Before you build a single link to your site, you need to make your site worth linking to.

Let us say it again:

As Google refines its algorithm, UX and SEO are becoming one and the same. To future-proof your link building campaign, every link you build needs to provide value to the user and make sense in context.

Therefore, you need useful content on your site surrounding the keyword topics and themes for which you’d like to rank. You need to create blogs, guides, and pages — called “linkable assets” — that are uniquely valuable to your target audience.

Keyword research and content creation are the foundation of link-building campaigns. Without quality content to point links toward, link-building is an uphill battle. Think about it: editors, bloggers, and industry authorities will be exponentially more willing to link to your site if it provides value to their users or readers as well.

Creating keyword-optimized linkable assets is harder than it sounds, but the idea behind it is really pretty simple:

Analyze how your target audience thinks, talks, and searches about your industry — these are your keywords
Think about the questions your audience members might ask when they’re looking for a solution you provide — these are the topics of your linkable assets
Research which communities your target audience lives within on the internet — these are the sites to target during your link-building campaign

Once you have a foundation of uniquely useful linkable assets optimized for the keyword themes you’d like to target, you’re ready to strategize which sites you’d like to target in your link building campaign.

CHAPTER Four

Tactics for Acquiring Links

How do you get links?

A brief overview of building backlinks that will provide lasting value for your site

Once you’ve done an audit of your backlink profile and developed a strategy for your campaign, you should have a pretty good idea of the keywords you need to target, the linkable assets you need to create, and the sites you need links from.

Now you have to actually build the links. And that’s what this chapter is all about — the link-building tactics search engine marketers use to secure links that will provide lasting value for your site.

Basically, we’ll take you from a theoretical understanding of link building down to the nitty gritty of how we actually do it. This is the not-so-exciting chapter where you’ll learn that link building, like anything else of value, requires a lot of grunt work, strategic thinking, and patience.

See, just because you have a great strategy and build great content does not mean links will happen naturally. Unless you’re The New York Times of your industry, even your best content will need to be put in front of the right people — such as the editors and webmasters of industry-relevant blogs and publishers — and pitched in the right manner to obtain backlinks.

That’s why we call it link building. Just like building anything else, it requires time and effort to build links — they don’t just happen if you pay enough money or produce enough content.

There are dozens of tactics you can use to build links — some of which provide long-lasting value, some of which don’t. We’ll spare you the details, and narrow in on two of the most prevalently used tactics to earn valuable links:

Pitching uniquely valuable content to publications, blogs, and industry authorities
Connecting with your community to create linkworthy buzz

Ready to get started?

Outreach campaigns: Putting stellar content in front of important people

Robots do not link to you — real people who find your content compelling do. That’s why you need to write linkworthy content with real people in mind, and pitch it out to those industry-relevant blogs and publications that will find your content useful to their audience.

This concept is called outreach, and it’s a great way to secure high-quality links.

Here’s how it works:

Identify content gaps in your industry.

The best way to generate ideas for linkable content pieces is to look at what is already doing really well in your industry. Look at your competitors’ sites: which pages, guides, and blog posts are earning plenty of high-quality backlinks? Think about ways to explain that topic more completely, or if there’s an aspect or topic they’ve missed altogether. These are opportunities for you to create content that’s better than any of your competitors — and, therefore, inherently link-worthy.

Create valuable linkable assets.

Now that you know which topics have the potential to earn the most links, you need to create really good content surrounding those ideas. Take content in your industry that’s already earned a lot of links, and create your own piece that’s more engaging, more useful, or more thorough. That way, you know industry-relevant blogs will find your content compelling enough to warrant a link.

Form a list of sites to target.

Once you’ve created content worth linking to, you need to find people willing to link to it. Generate a list of sites that might link to you, like industry-relevant blogs, publications, and organizations. A good way to start is to look at which sites are linking to similar content from your competitors — these sites are likely to be interested in linking to your content.

Reach out to the right people—in the right way.

Everything we’ve talked about thus far has led up to this. You can have the best strategy and link-building assets around, but if you don’t get your content in front of the right people, your efforts won’t earn nearly as many links. And you need to reach out to these editors, webmasters, and owners in the right way — these are busy people, and your outreach email needs to communicate why your content is worth linking to succinctly. Otherwise, your email will end up in the trash, and your hopes for a link will be dashed.

Okay, so outreach campaigns aren’t exactly as easy as 1, 2, 3, 4 … done. In reality, they’re much more complicated — whole books could be written on how to identify content gaps, craft the perfect outreach email, or develop valuable linkable assets.

Good link-building companies approach outreach campaigns as part strategy, part art. Through experience, good SEOs learn what makes a campaign work — and what makes it flop. The only way to learn how, exactly, to execute a successful link-building campaign is by doing it.

Beyond outreach: Connecting with your community to create link-worthy buzz around your company

Outreach is a great way to earn contextually relevant links. But it is hardly the only way to earn links. You can also create link-worthy buzz surrounding your company by participating in your community.

What does “link-worthy buzz” look like? Well, it could be anything that is so exciting that others in the community — even those outside your industry — would want to link to your site.

Here are some ideas:

Sponsor a scholarship.
You could sponsor a scholarship at a local community college or high school. The school, as well as other educational websites, may want to link to your website to give you credit for the scholarship. This is a great way to get high-authority .edu and .org links.
Organize a giveaway.
Giveaways and contests are good ways to generate link-worthy buzz. All you have to do is let your community know about the deal. Once people hear about your contest, bloggers, local newspapers, and organizations might link to a page with details about the giveaway on your site to help their readers get in on the deal.
Host — or present at — an industry event.
When you host or present at an event, you not only garner real-life authority, but you also earn links from attendees and bloggers who want to talk about your event or reference your presentation. This is another strategy for earning industry-relevant links.
Donate to charity.
Charity donations and giveback programs will generate attention — and ultimately links — for your site. For example, if you donate 5 percent of every purchase to a certified charity of your customers’ choice, newspapers and bloggers will likely find it newsworthy and link to you. What’s more, you’ll probably earn more loyal customers once they hear how generous your company is.

We could — and likely will in a future blog post — go into greater detail as to the dozens of other link building tactics. But the moral of the story is this:

There is no “plug-and-chug” way to build quality links. It requires thoughtful strategy, painstaking effort, and lots and lots of patience.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Dangers of Link Building

It’s an all-too-common scenario:

You’re working with an SEO company, and its team members promise to build hundreds of quality links to your site in a matter of weeks. They promise this influx of links will skyrocket you to the top of SERP results in no time.

There’s just one problem. These promises are, quite literally, too good to be true.

They’re either lying to you, working against Google’s webmaster guidelines, or have little concept of how link building actually works. Either way, they are not the link-building partner for you.

Link building is cumbersome — at least if you want to do it right — and attaining quality links takes time. It pays to do link building right and play by Google’s rules: it may take longer, but in the end, you will see a steady increase in leads, calls, and, more to the point, paying customers. And you won’t stand the risk of losing it all due to a Google penalty or update.

What’s the cost of a Google penalty, anyway?

Doing link building the right way is tough. Naturally, some businesses will gravitate toward link-building tactics that promise quick gains. Unfortunately, these speedy wins come at a cost.

Google’s goal is to provide the best results to its users. If you’re manipulating ranking signals like links and showing up based on bought links rather than merit, you are going directly against this goal. If you’re caught participating in any type of link scheme, Google might slap you with a penalty, and your rankings will take a nosedive while your organic search traffic drops off.

Google will not compromise on this. Either the system will flag your site and automatically issue you a penalty, or it will manually demote your site in SERP rankings.

Once you receive a penalty, it can take weeks — or even months — to get back on Google’s good side. You’ll need to formally apply for reconsideration, which is a long and arduous process.

JCPenney is a cautionary tale.

In 2010, it ranked No. 1 for nearly all retail terms: dresses, area rugs, bedding, etc. It brought in $17.8 billion in revenue.

How did it experience such SEO success? Well, JCPenney’s strategy was to poke holes in Google’s algorithm, building thousands of low-value links surrounding a myriad of keywords to trick Google into ranking its site.

When Google became wise to JCPenney’s low-quality link scheme, the retail giant’s average SERP position for key queries dropped from 1.3 to 52. And a revenue drop followed. Yikes.

Obviously, JCPenney fired its SEO agency and stopped its manipulative link-building tactics. Fast forward to 2017, and its ranking well again, but it was a long, long road to get here.

Learn from its mistakes. Link manipulation is not illegal, but it does put your site at serious risk of incurring a Google penalty like JCPenney did.

How link manipulation leads to short-term gains, long-term losses

Speaking of Google penalties:

Let’s explore how, exactly, a slipshod link-building strategy can get you one.

In order to continually provide the best UX around, Google needs to be very conscious of how SEOs can manipulate signals to rank.

Links are simply a measure of quality. At the end of the day, Google wants to provide the best content — not the content with the most links.

Google can tell “natural” links from “forced” links — and if your links don’t provide anything of value, any gains you make will be short-lived.

Quality link building vs. link manipulation

	QUALITY LINK BUILDING CAMPAIGNS	MANIPULATIVE LINK BUILDING CAMPAIGNS
WHAT	Google-approved tactics like building editorial links through creating quality content and conducting outreach campaigns	Building low-value links quickly through tactics like buying links or exchanging links. For a full list of “unapproved” tactics, look at Google’s webmaster guidelines.
GOAL	Aim to contribute value to its customers and industry. And to the internet as a whole.	Aim only to allow the site to soar in rankings
RESULTS	Slow, but long-term	Quick, but short-lived.
RISKS	Little to none	- Google penalty - A drastic drop in organic traffic - Time and money to file a reconsideration request - Cost of starting all over — this time, the right way

The only surefire way to not get a Google penalty is to do everything by the book: Build natural links over time by creating killer content and pitching it to the right people.

Work with an honest link-building agency that plays by the rules, and you’ll see major gains that won’t be taken away overnight by a Google penalty.

If you build links too quickly, over-optimize your anchor text, or the authority of the linking domains isn’t diverse enough, it will tip Google off that you are manipulating links and you might get slapped with a penalty.

CHAPTER SIX

Get the Most Out of Your Link Building Campaign

Work with Digital Strike: The honest, solution-focused SEO agency that drives results

Link building requires patience, skill, and lots of know-how. You need to work with a digital marketing partner who can to analyze your website and create a tailor-made link-building strategy. After all, every company is different, and only unique solutions can solve unique problems.

We think beyond your link-building strategy to see a comprehensive picture of how your digital marketing efforts are driving bottom-line results for your company.

That’s why we always use cold-hard data and a commitment to our clients to guide us to the end-result: growing your business.

Bespoke solutions are worth the time because, in our experience, they work.

Digital Marketing 101

studio2108 — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 16:45:40 +0000

Digital Marketing 101

Everything you ever wanted to know about PPC, SEO, and Content Marketing. It’s not voodoo magic. Arm yourself with the information you need to hold your agency accountable for results.

Overview

What You'll Learn

Let’s face it: digital marketing is complex.

But your marketing partner shouldn’t use that as an excuse to keep you in the dark as to what they’re doing and how, exactly, it will push the needle for your business.

Your digital marketing partner needs to educate you so you can understand the importance of the three main elements of digital marketing:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Content Marketing

We wrote a 6,500-word guide complete with all the information you need to make an informed decision when hiring a digital marketing agency.

In this guide, we’ll take away the curtain. We’ll teach you:

And here’s the kicker:

You don’t even have to give us your information.

If you like what you read, get in touch. If you don’t, then don’t. (But we think you’ll learn a lot either way).

So go ahead. Give the guide a read—you have nothing to lose.

Chapter ONE

SEO: An Overview

Chapter two

On-site SEO

Chapter Three

Off-site SEO

Chapter four

Local Optimization

Chapter five

Content Marketing

Chapter six

Pay-per-click (PPC)

Chapter Seven

Landing Page Optimization

CHAPTER ONE

SEO: An Overview

An overview of search engine optimization: What it is, why it’s important and how to implement it

SEO isn’t magic—it’s a strategy-driven way to attract relevant traffic to your site and drive leads.

It’s a combination of on-site content and off-site signals that indicate to Google that your content is worth displaying to its users.

Simply put, on-site SEO + off-site SEO = results. You need both components to rank organically.

What you need to know about SEO: 3 elements of any successful SEO strategy

Here’s why SEO is important: when someone comes to Google (or Yahoo or Bing) with a question, Google wants to provide the right answer. And they want to do it quickly, so the searcher doesn’t stop using their search engine.

They use an ever-changing algorithm to find, save and provide the information they think most closely aligns with what a searcher wants.

Whether the searcher is ready to buy or simply learning more about your service, you want to be visible in results.

There are hundreds of factors that affect where your site falls in search engine results. But they can all be distilled into three main components: your link profile, your knowledge of your target audiences and the quality of your content.

1. Build a robust link profile

Think about it: if you’re looking for the ”best lawyer in St. Louis,” you want to find the best. Not the worst one. Search engines look to external signals—links, mentions and reviews—on other sites to determine which sites have the most authority on a topic and the highest relevance to its users.The signal that Google takes the most seriously is your ”link profile”—the collection of links from other sites pointing back toward useful pages on your site.Google takes each inbound link as a ”vote” of confidence in the usefulness of your site’s content and the authority of your business.If a small, lesser known blogger links to you, you’ll get a couple votes. If a bigger, more well-known site links to you, you’ll get a whole bunch of votes.Google takes a holistic look at your votes to decide how reputable you are in your industry and whether to rank your pages.

2. Know your target audience really well … and talk like they do

You need to know what your audience wants, and how your product addresses those needs.What are your customer’s pain points? How do they stand to benefit from your product and service?Once you know the answers to these questions—and have content addressing them on your site—you have your customers in the palm of your hand. But you still have to make sure they find your site.But how?We do extensive keyword research to find out how your target audience talks—and searches—about your product or service.For instance, you might think you’re selling ”fitness programs,” but if your target audience almost exclusively searches for ”weight loss videos,” you won’t appear in Google search results when a customer is looking for your product.We’ll direct you toward those phrases and keywords that will get you found by your target audience, and implement them into your content strategy.

3. Create really good, useful content

Useful, well-written, user-focused content will always win out over sparse copy that screams, ”BUY, BUY, BUY!”Why?Well, first off, Google wants to solve problems and answer questions so that users continue to use their search engine.And second, the vast majority of your users aren’t ready to buy.Just give the people what they want: useful content that addresses the intent of the search.Let’s take an obvious example: Someone who searches ”buy marketing services NOW” probably has a different intent than someone who searches ”how does SEO work.”Maybe the searcher is ready to buy; maybe they aren’t. Be conscious of the intent behind the keywords you’re trying to rank for.You need to write content that addresses the needs of searchers at every stage of the buying cycle: those who don’t yet know they need your service, those who are researching your product and those who are ready to buy. Buyer behavior is changing. The digital age customer now goes through about 70-90 percent of the decision-making process before even calling you.Answer all of the questions a lead might have during the buyer’s journey, and you’ll see results in the form of rankings and new business leads.

Why the SEO company you choose matters

There are many ”tricks,” you can use to get around Google’s algorithm and appear in search results. These tricks are called ”black hat” SEO.

But Google isn’t dumb. They know when they’re being played.

And you should know: legally, Google does not have to display your site at all. Trying to trick Google can result in a penalty, meaning your site won’t be visible to searchers at all.

So if you’ve heard an SEO agency promise results that sound too good to be true, they probably are.

At Digital Strike, we don’t play games.

We’re just really good at optimizing sites and their online footprints. We want long-term results, not quick plays that get results, only to earn a penalty.

We have your best interests in mind, and will work tirelessly to make sure you see results in the form of targeted traffic to your site. Then, once they’re on the site, we’ll drive conversion.

CHAPTER TWO

On-Site SEO

ON-SITE SEO STRATEGY: GROW YOUR BOTTOM LINE BY OPTIMIZING YOUR SITE’S STRUCTURE, CONTENT, AND METADATA

In Chapter One of this guide, we talked a bit about search engine optimization, in general, to give you a big-picture idea of what it is and then defined the essential three ingredients of any successful SEO strategy.

But SEO is a topic so vast and so complex that you could literally write a book on it. So, that’s just what we did.

The next two chapters of this guide are dedicated to the two types of search engine optimization: on-site and off-site.

In this chapter, we’ll discuss on-site SEO — what it is, why it’s important, and the difference it can make in your site ranking well in Google, Bing, and other major search engines.

What Is On-Site SEO?

On-site SEO is the process of optimizing the metadata, coding, and content of a webpage to quickly communicate to Google and the other search engines the purpose, intent, and value of that webpage.

When implemented properly in conjunction with the off-site optimization techniques covered in Chapter Three, on-site SEO will help drive traffic to your site through higher rankings in search engine results and, more importantly, convert its visitors into cold, hard leads.

Generally speaking, there are three overarching aspects of effective page optimization:

Clean structure (including the navigation, URL structure, and the code that makes up the page)
Keyword-centric metadata
Informative, engaging content

Clean page and site structure — how users navigate your page — improve the overall user experience and help search engines’ robots (also referred to as crawlers) more quickly navigate and index your site’s pages, which can improve your search rankings, lower your bounce rate, and improve your conversion rates.

Metadata containing relevant keyword terms quickly communicates to Google what each of your site’s pages is about. By including target keywords in your title tag, meta description and image alt text tags, Google better understands the purpose of your pages. And, if done right, keyword-optimized meta descriptions and title tags also entice a searcher to click on your site right from within search engine results pages (SERPS).

Content, especially well-written, high-quality content, is the crux of on-site SEO. Good page content that caters to your customer’s decision-making journey — and thus answers questions and solves problems relative to your product or service — will always win over sparse content that includes an abundance of keywords for keywords’ sake.

The goal should be to frame your pages with a user-friendly structure through your content. Using popular blogging platforms like Wordpress can be a great tool to create shorter, very topical posts that directly address what’s important to your audience. There’s also a handful of tools out there that will help you to create extremely shareable, downloadable items, such as whitepapers, videos, and infographics, should be shareable because of their informational value to your site’s visitors.

Manufacturing this type of informational value to your site’s visitors through content will achieve big SEO wins for your company.

Now that we’ve covered the three main aspects of effective on-site SEO practice, let’s discuss in-depth the guiding principles that we have found comprise the overall optimization process and have seen produce great results for companies large and small.

User Experience

Does the user know what your site is about and how to use it?

We put this first because users always come before search engines.

Google will fully admit to this. As will Bing and all the rest. Show search visitors you care about your visitors, first and foremost, by creating great content that provides them with the info they’re looking for.

If you are not doing this, Google and all other search engines have little to no reason to rank your site well for important keyword searches.

The goal of all search engines — not just Google — is to provide its users with a good experience by giving each user the information he or she is seeking, so the logic makes perfect sense. Every search engine fulfills this goal by leveraging the content of those sites they choose to include in their search results.

When you consider this, it’s no surprise why Google incessantly pushes for and promotes the benefits of useful, high-quality content.

Search engine algorithms constantly evolve because, well, they have to. They have to in order to stay one step ahead of our ever-changing online behavior and the way we indicate our intent through search — not to mention to ward off relentless spam attempts from those who continue to try to game the system.

When you create valuable content, though, there is no need to worry about how often search engine algorithms shift.

But what, exactly, are the characteristics of content that provides your visitors with a good user experience?

According to Usability.gov, the Web’s leading resource for user experience best practices, those characteristics are as follows:

Useful: Your content should fulfill the needs of its audience
Usable: Your site must be easy to use
Desirable: Your brand identity and the design elements of your site should evoke emotion
Findable: Your content of your site should be easily located
Accessible: Your content should be easily accessible for persons with disabilities
Credible: Visitors should be able to trust your content

If you create content on your site with these characteristics in mind, search engines will notice.

Meta Tags

Can search engine easily determine what your page is about?

On-page content tells the human visitor what your site’s all about. Search engines use meta tags to accomplish this.

We’ve mentioned how search engine algorithms are getting smarter every day, but they still rely on this metadata as clues to construct an overall blueprint of what each page of your site is about.

There are many forms of metadata, but these are the four most important in terms of site performance in search engines:

Meta content type: Helps search engines decipher the character set of each page
Page title: One of several header tags, this acts as a clickable title for the page shown directly in search engine results pages
Meta description: Sits below the title in SERPs and acts as a preview of the content on a page, primarily to help improve clickthrough rate (CTR)
Viewport: This tag provides a Web browser with vital info in regards to a page’s dimensions and scaling when being viewed on a mobile device

On a side note, though technically not defined at metadata, alt tags are HTML attributes found within the code of your site’s pages that describe images to search engines. These tags, when optimized, can satisfy some of the SEO factors required for getting your site’s images to rank well in Google Images, the image search section of its results pages.

When the metadata of each page of your site is optimized properly, this complements the user experience you created through content.

These two elements combine to form a page that will be incredibly well-received by both human visitors and all search engines.

Site Structure

Is your site structured in such a way that the search engine — and user — can easily navigate it?

When someone comes to your site, that visitor should be able to quickly locate what he or she is looking for.

It’s the same with search engine crawlers; they should be able to navigate and parse through your content quickly.

This means that no page should be more than a few clicks away, regardless of where a user lands on your site.

There are two ways to go about this:

Intentional site navigation structure
Interlinking

Good site navigation establishes an easily understandable hierarchy of your website’s pages. This can be done in the form of tabs, an interlinking structure, buttons, etc.

Your navigation should be strategically structured, so anyone on your site can quickly determine your key services, products, markets, etc. This also includes any unique resources that visitors might find useful, such as blog posts, how-to guides, videos, audio clips, and whitepapers.

Internal links — links on a specific page that direct users to other, related pages of your site — are another way to aid in navigation. As site visitors skim your content, they might find a topic that piques their interest and want to learn more about it. If you have a page that explains this topic in greater detail, you should link to it.

For example, in the course of reading this guide, you may come across links embedded with the content that point to other pages of the Digital Strike site, such as our PPC services page or content marketing page.

This technique not only aids in user navigation and helps increase the amount of time each user engages your site, it helps search engine bots quickly find and index your most useful pages.

Google makes it easy for website owners and their webmasters to identify possible technical issues that could preventing it and other search engines from adequately crawling a site. We always recommend creating a free account on Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools); it’s easy to set up, and all you need to do is add a small snippet of code to the backend of your site to allow Google to perform its diagnostics.

But don’t stop there; it’s always best practice to conduct a thorough site audit or hire someone to do so. By looking at a map of your current site structure, you will more clearly see ways to improve your site’s navigation and usability.

Page Speed

Does your page load before the searcher gets frustrated?

Users of your site expect its pages to load quickly. This site speed is an integral part of the overall user experience.

Because we live in a mobile-first world, Google uses the load time of your site on mobile devices as the benchmark for how well (or poorly) your site should rank for searches on all devices.

The rule of thumb is that pages of your site should load in less than three seconds. With every additional second, the chances that a user bounces off your site — meaning, they fail to visit more than page before leaving — increase dramatically.

In fact, studies have shown that a one-second delay in load time could lead to an 11% loss in page views.

A delay of a mere second may not sound like much, but consider what it could mean for your bottom line, it takes on new meaning. Fewer visitors to your site, of course, means fewer chances at making sales. That feeble one-second delay, studies have shown, could cause conversions to plummet by as much as 7 percent.

Searchers do not want to wait. And if your site’s load time causes even the slightest delay, that sale that may have gone to you will likely go to one of your competitors.

So, how do you increase your page speed? There’s no one-size-fits-all answer, but start with using Google’s mobile speed tool, where you can calculate your site’s speed and even compare it to that of your competitors.

From there, you can incrementally increase your loading speed by concentrating on best practices, such as clean code, compressed images and browser caching.

Responsive Design

Is your site optimized for all devices: desktop, mobile, and tablet?

In 2010, only one-fourth of Internet users used a mobile device for access.

More than 10 years later, in 2020, not only does mobile Internet usage outperform that of desktops or laptops — which officially occurred for the first time in 2016 — it is suspected that more than 80% of all Web access takes place on a mobile device.

Google knows this. Which is why the world’s largest and most powerful search engine recently announced its mobile-first index. This is a fancy way of saying that it will now rank all sites based on mobile performance.

What does this mean for your site?

It means that if your site isn’t responsive on mobile devices — meaning, the design of the site allows it to conform in perfect proportion to the size of the screen of the device used to view it — you will fall behind the competition. In other words, visitors to your site should not have to use two fingers to zoom into any section to get a clearer look at text, a better view an image, or easier way to click a link.

The beauty of responsive design is that every element on a page remains intact while conforming to the screen of a visitor’s device.

Make no mistake: Responsive design is now perhaps Google’s top-ranking factor and therefore should chief among SEO best practices. In 2010, mobile-readiness was just a bonus that was nice to have.

Now, it will forever be a crucial necessity for any company’s digital marketing efforts.

Contextual, Keyword-Targeted Content

Is your content optimized for what your target audience is searching for? Does your content satisfy the intent behind the search?

This might seem obvious, but if you want your site to rank well for keyword searches related to your business, you need to write useful content about what you do (your services or products) and who you sell it to (your markets).

You also need to anticipate — and provide viable answers to — any questions your potential customer might have at any point during the decision-making cycle, from the research stage to the time of the actual purchase.

In late 2019, Google released its BERT update to emphasize this very concept to all content producers, and its impact on how content will be judged going forward cannot be ignored. Affecting more than 10% all possible searches, this groundbreaking update signals Google’s most advanced effort in closing the gap between how search engine algorithms understand searches differently from humans.

As the update stresses, you need to produce content that uses natural language, so as to concentrate more on answering questions and solving problems important to your audience — rather than tying to lace your each page with a keyword phrase X number of times.

It’s a matter of matching your content to search intent.

The search intent of the person who thinks they want your product or service is completely different from that of the person who knows they want your product or service. As such, these are two different mindsets, and you can bet that the two will hardly ever perform a Google search in the same fashion.

Content that is designed to cater to each of these unique individuals will look, sound, and read completely different. This is why keyword research is so important.

This research process identifies both those shorter phrases and longer query strings — typically referred to as long-tail keywords for their specificity — that are being used by your target markets at various along the buying cycle. You, then, tailor content around each stage of this cycle.

There are a variety of tools — Google Ads Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, SEMrush and others — that allow you to see how your audience is searching for the products and services you sell, and from these terms, you can gauge which part of the buying cycle is most appropriate for each one.

For example, the term ”what is on-page SEO” will likely be used by someone who wants to know what on-page SEO is or how it works. Compare that to someone who searches ”best SEO agency,” which is a pretty good indication of an immediate need for SEO assistance, including all of the on-site stuff discussed here.

The first searcher is looking for information, while the second searcher is looking for a service. Thus, the content that would be used to reach each one will vary greatly and should be accessible on completely different landing pages.

Just as Google Search Console is a good tool to assess the technical health of your site, an account on Google Analytics (also free) can be used to identify and gaps in your content efforts. For example, if you see that visitors are leaving a good number of your site’s after a short period time, this could mean that the content on those pages is not properly match up their intent.

Start Increasing Your Rankings By Updating Your On-Site SEO Strategy

Making sure your site is fully optimized requires a deft page-by-page approach. But don’t worry about addressing everything in one day — or even week.

CHAPTER THREE

Off-Site SEO

OFF-SITE SEO STRATEGY: A CRUCIAL PIECE TO THE DIGITAL MARKETING PUZZLE

What, exactly, is off-site search engine optimization, why is it important, and how do you execute it? We’ll take a look at all that and more in Chapter Three of our Digital Marketing 101 Guide.

But first, let’s review some of the numbers that reveal why so many business owners allocate a considerable portion of their overall marketing budgets to off-site SEO to get their websites ranked highly in Google, by far the world’s most powerful and trusted search engine.

Overview

It is estimated that Google processes more than 3.5 billion searches worldwide per day and 1.2 trillion annually.

That breaks down to more than 40,000 per second.

In the time it will take me to write this sentence, Google will have returned information for more than 300,000 searches.

These numbers are simply mind-boggling, if not borderline unbelievable.

Sometimes, we forget that Google, founded in 1998, is only a few years removed from adolescence, but in the short time since its inception, it has rapidly matured into an unrivaled behemoth.

Today, Google receives more than 90% of all online searches performed in the world, but what’s the reason for the sheer and utter dominance in the marketplace? There are, after all, other search engines.

Simple: Google provides its users with the most relevant information more consistently and in an exponentially better fashion than any other search engine in existence. As a result, the word “Google” is now more widely recognized as a verb than a brand name, used almost subconsciously to describe the everyday action of quickly retrieving desired information.

The allure of Google is so strong that website owners all over the world will go to great lengths — sometimes the wrong ones — to rank well in its search engine results pages (SERPS), because they know of the financial windfall that could await. Your target audience finding you in Google, especially consistently, means a lot of traffic, which means many opportunities for new business, which can lead to increased revenue and more sustained growth over time.

But Google has incredibly high standards, and rightfully so. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be Google; it’d be on a similar plane as any other search engine.

Getting your site ranked highly in Google — and then retaining those rankings over periods of time — requires a lot of hard work. Previously, in Chapter Two of this guide, we discussed how on-page SEO — the combination of improving user experience, addressing page optimization from a technical perspective, and publishing useful, high-quality content on those pages — is one half of the very complex, overall equation.

Here, we’ll outline how the other half — unsurprisingly, referred to as off-page SEO — consists of accruing domain authority and trust in Google through acquiring quality links that point to your site from other sites around the Web.

What Is Off-Site SEO?

Boiled down to its simplest form, off-site search engine optimization refers to the actions performed separately from your website to get its pages to rank highly in the search results pages of Google and other search engines, such as Bing and Yahoo.

Think of it like this: If on-site SEO is what you say about yourself on your site, off-site SEO is what other people say about you on other sites.

Google has confirmed in the past that it evaluates roughly 200 individual signals when determining how highly and in what order site should rank. Many of these signals are either much too complex or simply don’t bear enough weight to warrant discussion here. Those very well may be for additional guides at a later time!

image credit

However, despite some compelling experiments that suggest ranking well in Google requires a delicate balance of on- and off-page work, it is typically agreed upon that of the two, work performed away from your site with the goal of building domain authority is slightly more important to achieving strong, long-lasting search engine rankings and, consequently, high levels of organic traffic.

How do you build this authority?

It starts with links, links, and more links.

The Value of Links

To be clear, there are many SEO factors at play, and so building up authority and trust in Google and other search engines isn’t just about inbound links to your site. Anyone with a computer and a shred of time can use spammy, automated software or sign up for an online directory and create a link that points to any site.

That’s not what we’re talking about. And this is why Google continually polishes its algorithm with updates like Penguin — of which there have been at least four known iterations since its initial release in 2012 — to crack down on spammy link building attempts.

A link inbound to your domain from a highly authoritative source is the dream scenario. This would be something along the lines of the Wall Street Journal linking to your site within an article, referencing the services you offer, a study you conducted, etc.

But, alas, this is not always possible, at least not consistently. And Google knows this. To the most advanced search engine in the world, “quality backlinks” is by no means a blanket term.

Google also knows that it’s completely out of your control, as a website owner, who links to your site, including any number of spammy sources. This is why Google assesses value to the links that point to your domain — sometimes referred to as link juice — on a sliding scale.

Above all else, when it comes to who is referring to your domain across the Web, Google wants to see variety. Be balanced: Too many links from high-authority sources looks suspicious, while too many from low-authority sources looks, well, bad.

More specifically, Google wants to confirm your domain is fulfilling two main criteria:

Building a well-rounded link profile
Acquiring off-site mentions for your company

Let’s cover each of these in more detail.

What’s In A Link Profile

A link profile is just as it sounds: It’s the summation of every link on the Web that points to your domain, and the overall picture this paints for Google is how they determine how much authority your domain possesses. Ultimately, this determines how well your site’s pages rank.

As we said a moment ago, the more authoritative your links, the better. Although the value (or juice) from any domain contributes to your own domain’s authority the first time that domain links to yours, one link from the Wall Street Journal is still a thousands times more potent than 100 links to your domain from tweets on Twitter.

There are three main types of links, and here, they’re listed in order of difficulty to attain:

Natural links: Given without any action on part of or involvement from the website owner
Manual links: Acquired through calculated, deliberate acts of building links
Self-created links: The low-handing fruit and border upon spam in the eyes of Google as a link building tactic

The spectrum of difficulty from top to bottom of this list ranges much more than what you might, so let’s explore how each of these types of links are acquired.

Natural Links

Natural links, by and large, are earned through awesome content that people feel compelled to share. As a result, they tend to be the most valued by Google.

Google trusts that if other sites think your content is useful enough share through linking, your site will probably be useful to their users, too. And remember, the more authoritative the source of the inbound link, the more value your domain receives.

Earning links through relevant and helpful content will help you ascend in the ranks of Google search results, potentially very quickly, and drive relevant traffic to your site. Ultimately, this leads to more revenue and growth for your company.

Manual Links

All links matter and all links count. Including those you may even request from loyal customers — or a complete stranger through an influencer marketing or social media campaign.

Still, it’s not a good idea to simply pay another site or individual for links. In fact, links that appear forced or unnatural in nature can result in a penalty from Google.

Manual links can be effective, but be wary of using the below methods in bulk:

Press releases
Guest posts (also referred to as guest blogging)
Reciprocal linking (an arrangement between two sites to link to one another)

Links should not appear unnatural or forced, nor should they be two-way. Always focus your efforts on earning one-way, inbound links to your domain.

If creating manual links is a big part of your off-site SEO strategy, remain focused on fostering brand awareness by creating great content and make sure you create the variety Google is looking for. This means asking partners to mix up dofollow with nofollow links. Be purposely random and inconsistent with your anchor text. And be cognizant manually creating links in forms other than text, such as infographics, podcasts, and more.

Lastly, ignore anyone who promises a link from a source that promises to pass PageRank to your site.

Though PageRank is an algorithm it has used for nearly two decades to determine link quality, in 2016, Google discontinued use of its PageRank meter tool from all browsers after the tool was found to have encouraged spammers to tell sell links in exchange for increases in PageRank.

Self-Created Links

As a disclaimer, we must be clear that not all self-created links are bad. In fact, as you’ll see in Chapter Four of this guide, creating listings in local directories for your business, some of which require a fee, is an excellent optimization technique to attract traffic from those in your immediate community.

What you do want to stay away from is bombarding free resources, such as blogs, forums, and the like, and quickly dropping a link to your site in the comments section — rather than taking the time to thoughtfully contribute to an ongoing discussion.

This type of laziness can set off all kinds of alarms with Google, and when/if they choose to hammer you for it, the damage, in some cases, can be irreparable.

Instead, you need to be strategic when building backlinks.Each digital marketing strategy that Digital Strike develops includes a robust, long-term link building strategy that will increase your site’s authority and drive business for your company. You need an audit of your current link profile. From there, you can target well-known bloggers, publications and sites relevant to your industry, so that Google—and your target audience—will see you as a trusted resource.

Off-Site brand mentions

When it comes to off-site SEO, achieving great search rankings doesn’t require anything but links.

On the contrary, Google looks the cases in which there’s something less than a clickable link that directs to your domain.

When bloggers, publications, social media users and other sites mention your site — even without providing you with a backlink — Google takes that as a signal that your brand is popular or useful. This is referred to as a brand mention.

Brand mentions matter less than backlinks, but are they nonetheless important as an off-page SEO ranking factor. And they can be easy to manufacture.

Here are a few ways you can generate online mentions for your brand:

Social media engagement
Participate on video channels (YouTube)
Speaking engagements
Publish high-quality content

Of these four methods, content is the most effective way of acquiring brand mentions and instilling the trust that can breed more with time.

In Chapter Five of this guide, you’ll learn how you can leverage a thoughtful content marketing strategy to acquire more brand mentions and much more.

CHAPTER Four

Local Optimization

LOCAL SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION: CAPTURING THE RIGHT AUDIENCE AT THE PERFECT TIME

In Chapters Two and Three of this digital marketing guide, we took a deep dive into how you can use best on-site and off-site SEO practices to rank well in Google’s organic listings for any search.

In this chapter, we focus exclusively on optimization techniques as they relate to increasing your site’s exposure for local searches.

You’ll notice a lot of crossover between this chapter and the previous two, but with local search marketing, we’re referring to two distinct areas of Google’s search results page:

The local Map Pack
The local organic results

The Map Pack, as its name suggests, is a section specifically designated for the listing of three local businesses. This section consists of each business’ listing information — name, address, review rating, etc. — as well as a snapshot of Google Maps that approximates how far each business is from the user’s location at the time of the search.

The local organic listings, on the other hand, are what follows below the Map Pack. This is where you’ll find many well-known directories for local businesses, such as Angie’s List and Yelp, among many others.

Ultimately, both of these areas must be considered a crucial element of any successful SEO strategy of a local business.

Before tackling the specifics of optimizing for the local search environment, let’s first explain what local search marketing is and detail why it’s so important in today’s digital marketing ecosystem and to develop a sustainable online presence.

What’s Local Search & Why Is It Important?

As Moz puts it, local search marketing is “anything you do on the Web to promote a physical business that makes face-to-face contact with its customers.”

This definition is very simplistic, but it provides a broad scope on how important it is for physical businesses to be visible in the Map Pack of popular search engines such as Google and Bing, as well as in the general organic results area.

But what empirical proof exists to illustrate how important local search really is to digital marketing success?

Consider these numbers:

More than 46% of all searches performed on Google — which, as we covered in previous chapters, number in the billions per day — are seeking local information
As many as 97% of all search engine users utilized the Web to find a local business
A vast majority (86%) of consumers rely upon the Internet to find a local business
Almost a third (29%) of all consumers search for local businesses at least once per week
More than 88% of consumers who conduct a local search on their smartphones visit or call a store within 24 hours

Those numbers are astounding, yet they still paint a perfectly believable picture of how many Web users turn to businesses within close proximity of their location when a need for a product or service arises.

And therein lies the importance of local search: When someone needs something, they don’t want to go far or wait long to get it.

This applies to restaurants, florists, auto repair shops, dentists, chiropractors, locksmiths, and many others. Google knows this. Which is why they often present users with the most applicable local businesses at or near the top of their search results.

As such, the following should be the main goal behind local search optimization: To be seen by local consumers prior to or at the time they make a purchasing decision.

What Do Results For Local Searches In Google Look Like?

Google can determine if there is local intent behind a search — or, in other words, if a searcher is looking for a local product or service to satisfy a need. Terms like “near me,” “in St. Louis,” or “closest to me” are just a few that indicate local intent.

Google displays the most relevant web pages and business listings in the results. But there are slight differences with local intent search results as compared with non-local search results.

To illustrate this point, let’s use the following example:

You’re in Miami on vacation with your friends and you’re looking for a nail salon. You might search ”best nail salons in Miami” into Google.

There’s a geo-modifier in your search, so Google instantly knows your search has local intent.

Here’s what your Google search results will look like:

As you can see, Google splits local search results into two categories: the local Map Pack and organic search results. The three results of the Map Pack appear at the top of the results, with organic search results appearing just below.

Local searches — such as ”best nail salons in Miami” — often indicate the need or want for a local business, especially when done on a smartphone. If you are searching for a nail salon in Miami or elsewhere, you want to go to a salon very soon — if not the same day.

And odds are, the business you pick will be ranked within the local Map Pack, where conversion rates, often as high as 60 percent, are significantly higher than anywhere else within Google’s organic search results.

No wonder why so many local businesses fight tooth and nail to get into the local listings Map Pack or on the first page of local organic listings.

But here’s the unexpected kicker: main ranking factors — relevance, prominence, and proximity — are weighted differently for the Map Pack results than they are for local organic results, so let’s go over some techniques that will effectively address both.

How To Get Ranked Highly In Local Search

Disclaimer: Before you can optimize your local listing for maximum exposure in Google or Bing, you must first create an account on either’s local listing platform, where you will create your listing from scratch.

Google’s platform is called Google Business Profile and Bing’s platform, Bing Places. Both are recommended, neither costs anything, and creating a listing typically takes no more than 10-15 minutes.

Performing well in local search results, regardless of the search engine, is comprised of three main areas: relevance, prominence, and proximity. Paying attention to these areas will help both your listing and website show up in Google’s organic results for local searches.

Let’s delve into the three individually to understand how each plays a pivotal role in the local optimization of your listing and website, specifically in Google.

Relevance

Since its inception, Google’s primary goal has been — and always will be — to provide its users with the most relevant search results possible.

Google determines how relevant your business is to a specific topic by using a number of specific signals, and these signals are evaluated across both your Google My Business listing and business website.

Local Listing Signals

Name, Address, & Phone Number (NAP): This may be elementary, but ensuring your business information always contains the current NAP of your business is vital to determining relevance
Local Category Selection: This category — of which there are 3,000 in Google — defines your business; up to 10 categories are allowed but choose the fewest possible needed to describe your core business
Business Description: Google provides you with up to 750 characters to describe your business in detail; don’t be salesy and focus on writing high-quality content that gives upfront info to your potential customers

Website Signals

Note: If you are unfamiliar with some of these terms and need assistance, we’re happy to help! Drop us a line here.

Content: Make sure the content on your site directly addresses the questions your audience has in regards to your product or service — and then provides answers to those questions
Title tags: Optimize the tag of each of your site’s pages with a keyword or keywords related to the topic of that page; this is the area of your listing that users click on to get to your site
Meta descriptions: This supplements your title tag by allowing you up to 150 characters to provide more detailed and insightful context of the topic of a page
Body tags: Often referred to by their technical names — H1, H2, or H3 tags — they are simple ways to title provide relevant descriptions to the content that they precede
Alt-text: Pairing related images with your content always helps the human visitor, but you can use alt text to give search engines a detailed idea of what an image is depicting
Internal linking: Connecting similar pages of your site through links enhances the user experience and paints you as more of an authority figure on your topic in the eyes of Google
Outbound links: Linking out from your site to sites that cover similar topics helps Google’s algorithms validate your relevancy
Schema: Microdata that can be easily added to the existing code of each webpage, Schema markup gives search engines an even richer idea of what your site is about and then presents this info directly within search results
Reviews: Reviews on a page — whether it’s a product page or location page — should be relevant to the topic of the page
URL structure: Make sure the structure of your page’s URLs reflect the page’s topic (i.e. www.plumber.com/drain-cleaning)

Prominence

Building prominence in the eyes of Google and other search engines is not necessarily a quick-fix you can accomplish by tweaking the settings of your GMB listing or website.

Prominence is all about gaining trust, and that can take time.

Here are some local listing management items to keep in mind for your listing and site that will build up trust between you and those looking for your product or service.

Local Listing Signals

Reviews: This is one of Google’s top local ranking signals, so encourage reviews whenever possible and respond to them, especially the bad ones (and there will be some)
Photos & videos: Second behind only reviews, high-quality photos and videos are the most important signal to Google in determining ranking within local search
Q&A feature: Your potential customers will need answers to questions, and this feature allows you to provide those answers — even to those that have not yet been asked online
Informational posts: GMB posts are like social media updates, and even though they have a shelf life of 7 days, they’re great for covering newsworthy topics, promoting specials, etc.
Virtual walkthrough: We imagine you’re proud of your office, so why not show it off by investing in a Google-certified virtual 360-degree walkthrough?
Messaging: As with reviews and Q&As, leveraging this text-like feature to your benefit requires a lot of customer interaction, but the more you interact, the more trust you can build

Website Signals

When it comes to site, you build trust primarily through content. Through great content comes a better reputation for your business, a higher Google E-A-T rating, and more inbound links from similar quality sources.

Note: Just an FYI, E-A-T is not an actual rating or scoring system, but it is a concept that Google uses to determine how effectively your site provides solutions to its visitors’ problems through content that conveys expertise, authority, and trustworthiness — hence the acronym.

Create 10x Content

What is 10x content? It’s content you produce for your site that’s 10 times better than that which currently ranks the highest for a given keyword.

That’s vague, at best, but here are some tangible criteria of 10x content:

Provides users with a great experience regardless of device
Must be highly engaging, interesting, and trustworthy
Differs considerably in scope and detail from all other content that fulfills the same user intent
Creates a powerful emotional response with the reader
Solves problems and answers questions with expert-level info and resources
Delivered in an unexpected and unique manner

To provide more clarity on exactly what 10x content looks and reads like, here’s a terrific list of examples.

And 10x content is not bound the restraints of what may be considered typical content. Consider this piece created a few years ago by CNN, which chronicles the paradoxical wealth gap of Silicon Valley, home to some of the country’s wealthiest counties, by using a slideshow of images accompanied by only supporting statistics and sparse commentary.

Despite being published in 2015, CNN’s story can still be found in among the top 20 results in Google for “Silicon Valley wealth gap,” demonstrating an impressive amount of staying power that has endured amid a ton of competition.

Producing that meets the 10x standards might sound a little intimidating, but if you hone the knowledge you already regarding your craft or industry, you’d be surprised how easily the ideas will flow.

Start by thinking or researching how questions or concerns your audience has evolves with time, and go from there.

And, if you need a little help with the writing, we’ll be here!

Link Equity

Acquiring links inbound to your site from authoritative sources by producing great content is thoroughly covered in Chapter 3 of this guide.

Known as a natural link, this is absolutely the best type of link you can attain because you’re not requesting it — you’re earning it.

And for this reason, producing 10x content and getting references from sources of notable authority will forever be linked (no pun intended).

Here are some ways to get quality inbound links without having to produce extraordinary content:

Guest blog posts: Contribute to the content quality of a site similar to yours and link back to your site
Fix broken links: Use software to track down any links pointing to your site that may have been deactivated and contact those site owners
Sign up for relevant directories: Create profiles on sites that contain local directories that deal specifically with your industry (Houzz, HomeAdvisor, etc.)
Update or repurpose old content: Give old content new life by updating statistics or changing the scope to make the piece more current

Proximity

According to a Moz survey on local search rankings factors conducted in 2018, proximity was among the top factors Google uses to display GMB listings for any given search. Google has since doubled down on the importance of proximity when it comes to local search, evidenced by the effects of the Google Possum 2.0 update in November of 2019.

There’s no magic pill that will allow to get around this, unless you’re able to somehow predict where searches will come from and then move your brick-and-mortar business within minutes!

Unfortunately, where your business is located in relation to where Google thinks a user is searching from is out of your control, but the good news is, there are several things you can do to make proximity work in your favor.

Here are a few of them:

Concentrate 100% on relevance & prominence: Worry about what you can control, which is doing all you can to ensure those who are within close proximity to your store will see your GMB listing at the time of a search
Cover all your bases with Bing & Yahoo: Do not forget that plenty of people still use the two other large search engines — albeit in much lower numbers — to get as much close-proximity traffic as possible
Engage with your existing customers to return: Recurring revenue with existing customers nearby is more important than getting revenue once from someone not typically in your local area
Use PPC to fill in any gaps: Google’s regard for proximity within its Google Ads platform is not nearly as restrictive, allowing you to target potential local customers within a sizeable radius around your local — or even across your entire city
Focus on content that includes crucial terms: Keyword research is an essential portion of local SEO, too. Incorporate geographical terminology throughout your content.
Acquire links from local sources:

Top Must-have Components Of Your Local Seo Strategy

As we’ve seen, there are a lot of factors to consider when developing a local SEO strategy, and it can take time to address them all.

So, in ending, let’s address only those that are the most conducive to setting you up for success.

These basics to local SEO optimization alone won’t guarantee results, but they’ll go a long way toward getting toward pushing you in the right direction:

Google My Business Listing: Can Google trust your brand?

Google needs to trust that you are who you say you are. This means making sure your NAP — business name, business address, phone number — is not only current within your GMB listing, but consistent across all online directories. It’s about thorough listing management to ensure the integrity of your business data.

Google doesn’t want its searchers to get frustrated by a phone number that doesn’t work, or an address that’s incorrect, either of which could drive users to switch to Bing or Yahoo.

Digital Strike’s team of SEO experts work with aggregator partners, such as Yext, to set up your directory listings accurately across a high volume of directors, and then regularly update your account to suppress any duplicate listings and correct any miscellaneous errors that might arise. This way, Google will feel more comfortable showing your local listing in its search results.

Reviews: Do people like or trust your brand?

Reviews matter. Search engines don’t want to display content about unpopular businesses and products.

Google, Bing, and Yahoo want to provide valuable content or solutions from reputable sources to keep their users coming back. That’s why managing your online reputation is so important to SEO.

Digital Strike can help you manage your online reputation through review-building campaigns that involve reaching out to old customers and connecting with new ones.

We know you’re going to reply to your good reviews, but as we have discussed here, it’s just as important to address the bad ones — and do so as calmly and eloquently as possible.

Engaging with customers who have any type of experience is key to sustaining a healthy brand image.

Local link building: Are other sites linking to yours?

Links are one big way search engines measure prominence and relevance.

The more sites that link to you — especially those sites important to the city where your business is located — the more trustworthy and relevant your business will seem to Google.

If local newspapers, magazines and bloggers are all talking about your business, Google uses this as a signal to display your business in its search results.

But link building, as we covered in Chapter 3 of this guide, isn’t as easy as it sounds. It requires a comprehensive strategy that considers not only the quality and quantity of links, but also the content of the article in which your business is mentioned.

Anyone can direct links to your site. But if best practices are not strictly followed, your site can be removed from Google’s index altogether. A precise and intentional strategy is key to any successful link building campaign.

We’ve developed effective strategies for a variety of businesses big and small, and we can develop a customized solution for you, too.

Staying on top of local SEO trends: Is your SEO agency keeping up with Google updates?

When it comes to Google, the only constant is change, and that includes local SEO.

Google is constantly rolling out updates to its algorithm so it better serves its searchers. Your SEO agency needs to keep abreast of these changes so you can stay ahead of your competition.

Digital Strike’s local SEO team works hard, day-in and day-out, to thoroughly test what works and what doesn’t. Plus, we’re pretty passionate about local SEO, so constantly reading and learning about changes in the local space will always be a crucial part of our overall local listings management process.

We are constantly re-thinking how we approach local because, otherwise, we — and our clients — would be left behind. We’ll constantly update our partners and clients with new tactics, strategies and tricks we’ve found through our extensive research about and passion for local SEO.

CHAPTER FIVE

Content Marketing

Strategic content marketing: The fuel behind any effective SEO campaign

How a comprehensive content strategy can generate business and amplify SEO

Useful, well-written content pieces are the lifeblood that makes SEO work. No SEO campaign can reach its full potential without killer content that converts.

Think about it: even if your SEO campaign draws millions of website visitors a month, no one will convert into a lead if your content isn’t helpful.

Likewise, even the best content won’t convert if it never gets seen—good, white hat SEO tactics and paid search marketing boost the reach of your blogs, pages and premium content pieces.

And, because customers are making 70 to 90 percent of their buying decisions through online research before ever contacting your sales people, you cannot afford not to be absent from search engine results when they begin asking questions online about your services.

In the golden days of marketing, you could address a prospect’s questions through mass media marketing or a sales call and close the deal.

No longer. Content marketing is the new sales process.

A prospect’s questions are being asked and answered online long before you even know the lead exists. You need to have SEO-optimized content pieces armed and ready to answer your prospect’s question at the right time.

If you aren’t there to satisfy the intent of every search a potential lead is making, they will become your content-marketing-savvy competitor’s customer.

Creating a content strategy that answers your client’s questions and wins their business

The overwhelming majority of your website visitors aren’t ready to buy. You’re making a mistake if all the content on your site screams, ”BUY!”

You need a customized content strategy that addresses all the questions your ideal buyer might have from awareness to consideration to purchase—and everything in between—that will eventually make your future clients comfortable making a buying decision with your business.

Here’s what our content strategy process looks like:

It all starts with a meeting

In order to determine how to best go about achieving your business goals through a content marketing strategy, we have to, well, know your goals.We’ll schedule a meeting to learn more about your company’s vision, brand, target audience and business goals.Only then can we begin developing a strategy that will help push the needle for your company.

Auditing the content you already have

We believe in the old adage: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.If you have content that’s already working for you, there’s no need to change it. We’ll do a deep dive into what’s working, what’s not and where the holes are.

Develop a content gap analysis

If there are questions that people are asking—and you’re not answering—we’ll note that in our formal content gap analysis. Our strategy will be built upon bolstering the weak spots and building upon what’s already performing well.

Learn how your audience talks about your industry, services and products

The essence of any good content strategy is writing directly to your audience’s pain points, questions and desires. To do this, you need to know your ideal buyers better than they know themselves. How? It’s simple: research how they talk—and search—about your business, services and understand the key drivers that lead to a purchasing decision. You need to know the questions they’re asking before they know about your product or solution, while they’re researching their options and after they’ve decided to make the purchase. And you need to know which keyword phrases they’re using to ask these questions, so you’ll be present in search engine results as the answer. Once we know which questions your audience is asking—and how they’re asking them—we can develop a data-backed keyword list that will serve as the basis of our strategy. From there, we can determine the intent behind each search—information, product or service specifications, etc.—and write content that will satisfy that intent.

Creating a custom strategy based on your goals

No company is the same, and no two of our content strategies are identical. We don’t take a one-size-fits-all approach to content strategies—we’ll get to the root of your target audience’s pain points, and address them through well-researched blogs, guides and pages. A good content strategy serves to hold the prospect’s hand and push them further along in the buying cycle. Useful, helpful content gives prospects the nudge they need to advance from researcher to lead to paying customer. Sometimes, our strategy starts with building a sitemap that addresses your key services and markets. Other times—such as when you have a good site already—this strategy will mostly include informational blogs and premium lead generation content pieces to fill the gaps and drive conversions. We’ll tailor our strategy to your needs, goals and audience.

Content strategy execution (aka, writing)

Only once we have the destination (your goals) and the map (our strategy), we’ll sit down to write. We’re really good about getting in the head of your target buyer, knowing their objections, concerns and questions—and addressing all of them. At Digital Strike, we operate by the belief that content marketing campaigns should achieve results. So we write content that works. After all, strategies are worthless if the execution is slipshod. We obsess over sentences, lose sleep over calls to action and, most importantly, write content that turns searchers into paying customers.

CHAPTER SIX

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

How PPC helps you get quick wins for your business

Most of what we’ve already talked about—organic search engine marketing—is a long-term play.

We build authority for your site over time through link building, content creation and citation building, and eventually you start ranking for the keywords you want.

Pay per click advertising helps you get quick wins, supplementing your long-term organic SEO and content strategy.

PPC also helps promote limited-time campaigns, win competitive industry keywords, and increase the reach of your organic SEO efforts.

It’s pay to play: you bid on the keywords you want, and you will appear in the search results.

Pay per click (PPC) advertising: An intention-based marketing strategy

PPC is the only digital marketing tool that will produce immediate results. And it isn’t disruptive.

Someone has a need: let’s say they want to order a pizza. They might Google ’pizza near me.’ If you bid on pizza-related keywords, you’ll appear in the results.

You’re giving them what they want: pizza. You’re getting what you want: a pizza order.

Everybody’s happy.

Essentially, pay per click advertising allows you to target based on intention.

Your ad appears at the right time (someone wants your service) in the right place (the top of the search results). And, just like that, you have an engagement, sale or lead.

Lesser known types of PPC advertising

PPC advertising doesn’t just occur in search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Cost per click can also refer to social media advertising on platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Social media advertising allows you to put your message in front of your target audience and track engagements (clicks, people reached, social interactions) over time.

Sounds easy enough, but advertising on social media requires intentional strategy about who you’re targeting, how much you’re paying per interaction and whether each campaign is driving results in the form of website traffic, lead conversions and sales.

You can’t simply ”set it and forget it.” Our team of paid advertising strategists has spent years perfecting their campaign strategy.

They know how to make sure your ad gets in front of the right audience, and that it converts.

And, because we provide you with a transparent results dashboard at the end of each month, you’ll know exactly how well our campaigns perform. You’ll remain in the loop from the start of the campaign until the end.

4 components of a successful PPC campaign

When it comes to PPC, our main goal is to drive leads and increase profit for your business.

We optimize so that your campaign attracts many clicks, and that those clicks convert to leads and sales.

We’ll tell you the whole story: where your money is being spent, where leads are falling off in the conversion process, what keywords are converting at the highest rates. We’ll even tell you when our initial strategy needs to change.

The digital world moves quickly.

You need a team that understands the PPC world inside and out and can modify your PPC strategy as the digital space changes. Plus, your company’s PPC team should be dedicated to continually optimizing your campaign.

Our team will send you a report every month detailing every success—and failure—and how we plan to make your campaign more efficient in the future.

Here’s what you can expect with a Digital Strike PPC campaign:

Goal-driven campaign build

Your PPC campaign should be focused on a goal, whether it’s increasing calls, whitepaper downloads, newsletter signups or getting more people into your store. Digital Strike’s team of PPC experts will build a campaign with your business goal in mind. We’ll choose keywords that indicate the searcher is looking to buy into what you’re selling, and we’ll write ads that showcase the value of your service.

Landing pages that convert

Once a searcher clicks on your ad, they’ll be taken to a landing page on your site. This landing page should urge the searcher to do something such as call you, download a white paper or request a free consultation. We track these engagements and report it to you at the end of every month. Using the initial and lifetime value of your average customer, we’ll let you know how much you’re making off your PPC campaign.

Transparent and consistent reporting

PPC is about results. You need to know whether the campaign is driving leads, and how much every engagement is costing you. We’ll give you a comprehensive summary of your campaign every month. In the report, we’ll tell you what’s going well—and what’s not. If something isn’t working, we’ll come to you with a plan to fix it. At Digital Strike, we’re problem solvers. PPC isn’t one-size-fits-all, and we’re constantly adapting keywords, spend and build to make sure you’re spending your budget efficiently and meeting your lead goals.

And the secret ingredient … Ongoing campaign management

To quote Mike Tyson, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.Everything might be perfect in the Excel sheet, but if the initial plan isn’t working your PPC management team needs to be able to adapt quickly.Maybe lots of paid traffic is coming to your site, but no one is converting into a lead. Maybe too few people are clicking on the ad. Maybe some keywords are converting at a higher rate than others. Maybe the cost per click is too much. At the end of the day, the goal of any PPC campaign is to drive leads for your business for as little money as possible. Our PPC managers will draw on their vast experience in paid search to make sure your business’ campaign is successful. Each month our team of PPC experts will go through your campaign and find ways to spend your budget more efficiently. They’ll get rid of keywords that aren’t converting. They’ll look at which ads were performing the best, and focus media spend on those.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Landing Page Optimization

HOW THE RIGHT LANDING PAGE IS CRUCIAL TO CONVERTING SITE TRAFFIC.

Let’s talk about landing pages.

Even better, let’s talk about landing pages that do what they are supposed to do … convert.

Any good landing page converts the traffic it receives. And yet, too often we see that website owners send traffic to general pages of their site that are not strategically designed and optimized to generate conversions.

As a result, they end up pulling their hair out trying to pin down why their sites don’t produce new sales opportunities.

Your site’s landing pages should be created with a focus on allowing visitors to accomplish a singular goal. This goal, after all, is the reason why they decided to visit in the first place.

Not executing on this singular focus and direction could be the difference between a business that consistently identifies and acquires new customers and one that struggles mightily to do both.

In this chapter of our Digital Marketing 101 guide, we’ll show you how to put yourself on the right side of that equation.

But first…

Let’s cover some of the basics.

What is a landing page?

By definition alone, a landing page is nothing more than what it sounds: a page upon which a visitor lands when arriving at your site.

If a page resides on your site and it loads properly – technically, it qualifies as a landing page – but this info is not the reason you’re here.

You want the goods. And if your site’s landing pages are going to deliver the goods for your business, they better do the following:

Cover a singular focus, topic, product, or service
Target the right audience via a specific marketing campaign (PPC, email, etc.)
Provide visitors with two core options: convert as a lead or leave
Allow visitors to commit desired action quickly and easily

This is not an end-all, be-all list.

Obvious points of concern — such as whether your pages are optimized for mobile devices, load quickly, etc. — have been purposely omitted. Vital technical aspects of your site can be found in Chapter Two of this guide.

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss how landing pages — when structured properly — can be utilized as the epicenter of your marketing efforts to ensure you’re getting the most out of the visits your site receives.

Especially when you are paying for this traffic. When viewed through this lens, the discussion regarding what an effective landing page actually looks like and what it should achieve starts to take on a much more intriguing and exciting twist.

Why you need effective landing pages

Effective landing pages breed growth within your organization.

Landing pages that convert traffic allow you to do the following:

Acquire new customers
Generate recurring revenue from past customers
Create new or build existing email lists
Maximize ROI on advertising dollars

A website without landing pages that convert traffic may as well be a brochure – countless pages of pretty pictures and a lot of words that most of us won’t read – they encourage more exploration and less focus on a singular goal.

This is aimless wandering mixed with information overload, and studies have shown that these factors combine to form one of the major factors why people leave websites without committing any action.

Ultimately, brochures await a slow death at or near the bottom of a stack of other mailers to be forgotten on the coffee table or kitchen counter.

A similar fate awaits your site unless you take the steps to build out pages that contain the elements needed to convert someone from a visitor into a potential lead or customer.

Case Study:

Landing Page Optimization Increases Our Client's Engagement Rate By More Than 500%

The good news is, most of these elements may already be, in some shape or form, on some of your website’s pages.

Even if they are not, implementing them is not as difficult as you might think.

The key is, putting yourself in the shoes of your target audience.

Once you’re able to do this effectively, you’ll be able to clearly visualize what they will need to accomplish their, and your, desired goal upon arriving at your site.

Key elements of every effective landing page

Every great landing page contains certain elements that are required for success.

Exactly how these elements are executed can vary from website to website and business to business, but their mandatory existence is non-negotiable

If your landing pages are going to convert visitors into leads, they need the following elements:

Your unique selling proposition (USP)
A clear, unmistakable offer
The benefits of your offer
Social proof
A strong call-to-action (CTA)

As we go through each of these elements in more detail, you’ll start to see a patchwork develop that can be applied to a large amount of landing pages across your site.

Let’s go a little deeper into each of theses five elements:

1. Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

Your USP is the benefit, the experience, the solution, etc. that you — and you only — are able to provide your visitors.

It’s the cross-section between what you do better than anyone else and what your customer wants.

Your USP is not a tangible product or service, rather, it’s the unique way in which your company can improve the lives of your customers.

We all hear or see famous USPs every day without realizing it.

For TOMS, the popular shoe retailer, its USP is not a stylish and affordable men’s or women’s shoe; it’s the promise that a pair of shoes will be donated to someone in need for every pair that is sold.

Dollar Shave Club’s USP is not necessarily a blade for men that outperforms that of Gillette; it’s the personal experience and inherent convenience that comes with receiving new blades at your door through a recurring delivery service.

The USP is where you address questions like “Why should I buy from you?” or “What makes you better than everyone else?”

Of these five elements, this is undoubtedly the hardest to implement, and most business owners have not considered their true USP until they are forced to do so.

Even more, identifying your USP can and probably will take time and research.

That said, if you are able to temporarily remove yourself from your role and, instead, define a singular benefit that your product or service provides your customers, nailing down your USP becomes easier.

2. Special offer

The offer you make to visitors of your site is the sales-oriented crystallization of your USP.

It’s there to give your visitors that little push, to motivate them to take advantage of and experience your USP.

Your offer is what makes your visitors raise an eyebrow. It puts them on notice and entices them to make their way down the page, where they’ll encounter the other elements.

If you’re a plumber, your USP may be that you’re able to reduce customers’ water bills, and your offer might be a free water softener with every repair.

If you sell software, your USP could be that you increase workflow by 50% while reducing operational costs, and your offer might be free setup assistance or a year’s worth of 24/7 support.

Whatever your offer — and you don’t necessarily need to give away the farm — make sure it’s unmistakably clear to whomever is reading it.

There can be no confusion, or else you run the risk of your message being convoluted, at which point you lose the ability to navigate your visitor down the path that leads to a desired action.

Need help promoting your unique brand?

3. Benefits of your offer

Because the Web offers up so much choice, every visitor to your site will want to know what’s in it for them, regardless of their unique situation and, in some cases, despite a high level of urgency in their search.

Again, why should they choose you over one of your competitors?

To clearly communicate the answer to them, it’s imperative that you do something that may seem a little odd at first: Do NOT talk about your company’s product or service.

Let that sink in a little…

To best communicate how your product or service will address your visitors’ needs, you must refrain from talking about your product or service.

This is a process known as building a story brand, introduced to the mainstream by marketer Donald Miller.

In short, consumers all want to be the heroes of our own stories, no matter how small or minute the victory may be.

You, the brand, must act as a guide in facilitating this victory by providing an appropriate product or service.

In order for this victory to be achieved, the visitor on your site must feel as if he or she is the one playing the role of the hero.

The copy of your landing page and, more specifically, your offer needs to reflect this type of thinking.

Rather than saying your service equipment uses only the most advanced technology, speak directly to the visitor by detailing exactly how this technology will improve their lives, allowing them to assume the hero role.

In the case of the plumber, even though his water softener may contain components that no other softener can match, the idea is to speak directly to the visitor by telling them that they can use the softener to reduce soap/shampoo consumption and benefit from softer skin and healthier hair.

4. Social Proof

This is the part where you say, “But don’t take our word for it…”

No matter how sound your USP, attractive your offer, and substantial its benefits, visitors to your site will still relish seeing that others in their identical situation have improved their lives by using your product or service.

It’s no coincidence as to why product reviews take up so much room on Amazon.

In fact, a study conducted in 2017 found that 93 percent of consumers say online reviews have an impact on a purchasing decision.

You don’t need to be Amazon, but you do need to allocate a section of your landing pages for reviews and testimonials from past or current customers.

This could even be key excerpts from extensive case studies you’re created that detail how your services have helped another company excel in a number of areas.

If possible, be specific. Provide concrete, verifiable numbers that stand out and carry weight.

If your software increased the productivity of Company X by 300%, say so.

Doing so will go much further than a generic review from someone who says your “company is the best!”

5. Call-to-action

The CTA is the culmination of everything we have discussed so far.

It is meaningless without the other four elements, but it is also the reason why those four exist.

Your CTA is the goal you want each landing page visitor to achieve.

It can take many forms, but generally a strong, effective CTA contains most, if not all, of the following characteristics:

Uses action words
Creates urgency and/or scarcity
Minimizes risk Emphasizes on value
Generates curiosity
Avoids friction words
Cements benefits and social proof

Maybe your CTA is to download a whitepaper, watch a video, fill out a quote form, place a phone call, or sign up for a newsletter.

Ask yourself – “what is the exact business objective I want to achieve” – when creating the landing page.

When you can identify the explicit action each visitor to the page must take to allow you to accomplish this objective, that becomes your CTA.

There is no written rule, per se, for the exact look of your CTA or how many times it must appear on your landing page but oftentimes, your CTA will be in the shape of a button or form that allows your visitor to perform your desired action.

Keep in mind, though, studies have shown that your business’ industry may determine the color of your CTA button.

Always be aware of how much information you’re collecting in your CTA forms.

Visitors can easily be turned off by long forms, those that contain more than seven fields, so you should only ask for info you absolutely need.

Above all, make sure your CTA stands out from all other elements on the page, and that you make it crystal clear what you want the visitor to do.

The visitor’s opportunity to complete this action should be accessible at various points on the page, so as to acknowledge the fact that not every visitor will come to your page with the same level of intent or commitment.

The visitor that won’t answer your CTA until the bottom of the landing page is every bit as important as the one that doesn’t need to scroll at all — and vice versa.

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An effective landing page in action

Up to this point, we have discussed at length the best practices involved with creating effective landing pages.

Now, let’s take a look at a real-life example of a successful landing page and the difference it can make.

A&J Mobility

A respected member of the National Mobility Equipment Dealers Association (NMEDA), A&J Mobility boasts five locations throughout Wisconsin as the state’s leading dealer of wheelchair accessible vans and other mobility equipment.

Thanks in part to a very favorable reputation, traditional media had worked well for the dealership in the past, but management also knew that a considerable number of competitors were pulling ahead in the arms race thanks to digital marketing — particularly paid advertising on Google.

A&J wanted a piece of the pie, and they wanted to acquire these new leads online at a very low average cost.

Early struggles lead to landing page redesign

New Google Ads campaigns were activated in mid-June 2019. Over the next six weeks, they accrued more than several thousand dollars in click costs, but results were stagnant.

The overall conversion rate was only 1.5% — well below the industry average — and we were spending roughly $220 per conversion.

Exasperated, both parties agreed that something further had to be done.

Up to this time, traffic had been sent to the main inventory page of the A&J site. This particular page contained all the info you could ever want about every vehicle in the dealership’s inventory, but it was largely void of many of the main landing page ingredients needed for advertising success and favorable ROI.

Our next goal had become clear: We needed to design an entirely new landing page.

This new landing page would contain the following key elements:

Main section that lists A&J’s USP (freedom for those who with disabilities)
The main offer (a call with a specialist to customize a van)
The benefits of the offer (getting a van that addresses unique customer needs)
A section filled with testimonials from previous customers
Strong and clear CTA form/button

PPC engagement rate grows by 530%

Once the new landing page was published and implemented, it did not take long to see returns.

The switchover in landing pages was made to start August. The results, nearly immediate, spoke for themselves over the final five months of 2019:

During the last five months of the year, not only did the average number of engagements — defined as either a phone call to a dealership location or a form submission to schedule a call with a mobility specialist — increase dramatically, but the dealership received them well below the average cost we had targeted back at the outset.

By the end of 2019, the numbers were staggering:

Increased average number of monthly engagements by 209%
Increased overall engagement rate by 530%
Reduced overall cost per engagement by 74%

A&J has continued to benefit from the engagements produced by the new landing page.

Through the first two months of 2020, the rate of engagement has exceeded that of the final five months of 2019.

The right landing page matters.

If you create the right pudding, you’ll see the proof, perhaps right away.

Summary

By definition, a landing page can be any ol’ webpage.

But a properly optimized landing page — one that successfully incorporates your USP, offer, offer benefits, social proof, and strong CTA — can make all the difference.

Anything less amounts to nothing more than a traffic net, so don’t leave anything to chance.

Of course, not every visitor to your site will do what you want them to do; this is an unavoidable fact.

But, as we have seen, with some understanding of what ingredients characterize every successful landing page, you’ll be able to give your site’s visitors what they need to engage your brand, increase your sales, and grow your company.