Live SEO Support 3/10/21 – Full Episode

Welcome to another episode of Live SEO Support!

Live SEO Support is an hour-long Weekly Livestream where our founders, Nicholas Altimore and Chris Tzitzis, take questions from the audience on anything related to SEO.

It’s 100% free, and anyone can join us weekly in our Facebook Group or on Youtube.

But in case you missed us live this week, here’s the full episode:

This Week’s Archived Livestream:

Summary:

[20:45] When do you update your disavow file?

We don’t really prioritize this activity unless we’re trying to fix a messed up site through our Managed Link Building program and its link profile needs a major overhaul.

We don’t use disavow files on a regular basis. Instead, we see them as a tool to use in the worst case scenarios. For example, let’s say we notice a sharp decline in traffic/organic rankings for a client. First we will analyze the backlink/anchor text profile and see if we can improve the situation through diversification or breaking up the anchor profile.

Sometimes a very strong link profile is boosted by incoming spam which you don’t necessarily want to disavow. And the biggest risk is disavowing the wrong links. This is basically why we try not to disavow too much or make that our first choice.

[25:15] How do you rank a service website?

Let’s assume a service website is referring to a local site. The simple answer is: you rank a service website the same way as any other site.

For example, you should start by building a lot of foundational pillow links to your homepage (as well as authority links). It’s important to make these inbound links as relevant as possible. You may also have a hub page that links out to all of your service locations (or maybe it’s a product/services page).

You should then build relevant links to each of the inner pages that stem from your hub page. So if they’re location pages, you build links that are relevant to the location (or product). You can also add location-specific support pages linking back to each inner page.

Focus on getting location-relevant links and broad categorical links. Having physical addresses will get you hooked up with the Google map pack too for greater visibility in the SERPs.

[30:08] Anyone had any luck ordering GMB verification recently?

Getting a GMB (Google My Business) verification is crucial for being able to locally rank in the map pack at the top of the search page. The problem is that it’s harder to get verified these days without a real address. Demand for GMB listings is high and Google is aware of most techniques people use to game the system. Verification is not as exploitable as it used to be

The most practical advice we can give is to just find an actual address that is willing to accept a postcard from Google to complete the process and verify the listing. This may take a simple outreach campaign to find people who will work with you to achieve this goal.

[35:15] The only comments I’m getting on my blog are spam. Should I continue to block them? It looks like my blog isn’t getting read by actual users because there aren’t any real comments.

We believe that meaningful comments can only help because they add to keyword density and signal page usage activity.

With respect to managing spam, you can actually edit the comments in WordPress and remove harmful links or add relevant keywords. If you feel the spam comments are out of control, you may unfortunately have to disable all new comments to a blog post in your WordPress discussion settings.

[39:40] Is there a place you put new blog articles so they have a higher chance of being picked up and receiving backlinks?

Forums, social media, outreach campaigns. Getting articles to go viral is a powerful white-hat method of getting picked up. Find places/communities where the shared information would add value. Sites like Help A Reporter can be useful too.

[44:21] What is the best way to set up a user as an author to improve EAT (expertise, authority, trustworthiness)? I want the writer to show up as the author, with a link to my site’s author page. However, in WordPress, it asks for the writer/author’s email address. 

The email address is typically a WordPress email because an author can use their WordPress account to comment on many different blogs and WordPress will aggregate them all.

Although setting up an author can improve trustworthiness, it’s the easiest and least important thing you can do to improve EAT. You can even create a fake author with a unique persona by using a new email address. Multiple fake authors (with their own fabricated social media accounts) can be deployed to specific sites.

[49:07] I have a 5-month-old website with 4 posts. What should I do next to it?

Definitely add more posts (and backlinks). Generally speaking, you never want to stop adding content or backlinks. Even if your site was 10 months old with 8 posts, you would still want to keep adding more content. The total amount of content needed to resonate in the SERPs will depend on the competition, but it’s likely going to be more than 4 posts.

It’s also important to support your pages with relevant articles. Let’s say you have an affiliate site with 5 product pages. You will want to write several relevant posts for each page. This means you may have dozens of posts. Each page could have 3-4 posts associated with it. This is why having a website with just 4 posts overall is simply not enough in most cases.

Keep updating and growing your website.

[58:50] Where can I get a professional web design?

Upwork is a good place to find freelance web designers. We also offer WordPress site builds like lead gen sites (with possibly an option for affiliate site builds in the future).

[1:04:50] What is the price of your PBN setups?

Check out our PBN Building Service page. Our PBN builds are looking really good these days.

[1:06:36] I have a website that ranks very high on Google, but visitors aren’t converting (i.e. booking) because I think the WordPress looks ugly.

This is more of a CRO (conversion rate optimization) and design issue, rather than a ranking issue (i.e. SEO). We specialize in SEO and primarily link building.

Having said that, there’s no doubt a website needs to look clean, pretty, professional and up to par with industry competitors in order to gain the trust of visitors and drive sales.

[1:10:25] Can you give an outline of a link building campaign from start to rank?

Here’s a 4-month backlinking case study worth checking out that will provide a detailed outline of a link building campaign from start to #1 rank.

A general outline could follow something like this:

Month 1: start with pillow links (Web 2.0s, citations, directories, blog comments, social/forum profiles)

Month 2: slowly add authority links (e.g. 4-5 guest posts and niche edits) with natural anchor diversity (e.g. branded, generic) to the homepage.

Month 3: add more authority links with natural anchors to the homepage than the previous month (with some of them linking to your inner pages). Start using target keywords and money anchors.

[1:16:51] Do you guys have any rank and rent sites? What do you think of that model?

Nik: 

Yes, I’ve had some rank and rent sites for a long time. I also hate the “rank and rent” model. I thought they were a great business model at the start of my career, but I haven’t done very well with any of them.

If you’re interested in providing rank and rent sites, it’s best to find the right business owners who understand this model and know exactly what they want versus trying to rent out a site to anybody.

Moreover, it takes substantial investment to rank a site which could be better used towards affiliate marketing. Also, because it’s harder to get a verified GMB account these days, the rank and rent model may not be the easiest or best option.

[1:25:22] Is an orphan page on a strong domain for a guest post worth getting to build links to it?

Orphan pages are pages that aren’t linked to from anywhere on your website so users cannot navigate to it. It’s like a standalone URL with no backlinks.

Regardless, an affordable guest post could indeed be worth getting. Because the sitemap is crawled, a page doesn’t necessarily need to have internal links in order to rank in the SERPs. But you should try to add some internal links to increase the value of the guest post.

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