Live SEO Support 5/4/22 – 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:

[8:50] If link building and content is good (but you’re not seeing any movement), do you look at technical SEO or perform a site audit?

Our initial concerns would be centered around how long you have been building backlinks to the site, how much authority they bring, and how many backlinks (or content) does it have compared to competitors. Sometimes there aren’t any technical issues to fix that would immediately improve SERP performance.

Some of the most common problems we see are anchor over-optimization, unnatural keywords, lacking content, unhealthy domain history, incomplete on-page SEO or off-page issues (particularly with link building).

We would recommend a professional site audit since there’s a range of potential issues (not necessarily technical in nature). But you can always get started with the basics of a site audit by learning how to use our favorite tools for SEO analysis.

We always enjoy doing site audits for our clients and followers (when we have time). Feel free to reach out to us through our website or in our Facebook Group, the SEO Round Table.

[14:00] Can you offer any advice on generating leads for very specialized niches? My B2B client wants targeted traffic to their website, but the site’s keywords don’t get much volume.

First of all, you don’t necessarily need high search volume to attract quality leads or reach your client’s goals. There are a variety of lead gen niches with different market sizes or average search volumes—some smaller (and more difficult) than others.

Getting your content in front of the right people should be your main concern when trying to generate leads in specialized niches.

Other than that, you should be doing a lot of the same things involved in ranking any site such as long-tail or medium-tail keywords research and link building. 

Don’t underestimate the usefulness of adding supporting/informational content about the industry, as this type of general content helps build trust with Google and presents you as a domain expert. Brand image building is often neglected as well.

Paid ads through Google Ads or Facebook Ads can be very effective too.

[26:49] How do you tell if your site is over-optimized in terms of on-page or anchor text?

The first thing we do is look at the anchor text diversity using a tool such as Ahrefs. Are there too many URL anchors or not enough branded anchors?

We pay special attention to whether exact match anchors are being used too much relative to the number of referring domains. 

Repeating unnatural anchors (e.g., non-relevant links, exact match anchor text) is the main problem with anchor text over-optimization. During a quick on-page SEO audit, for example, we look at how many unnatural keywords are on the ranking page.

We also like to see a decent proportion of authority backlinks such as guest posts or editorial links.

When looking at the main keyword, we pull up the first page search results and compare metrics such as Domain Rating, traffic, and # of referring domains.

When it comes to content, our favorite optimization tool is Surfer SEO (which we use for all of our ranked pages).

[44:08] I disavowed some spammy links many months ago, but I still don’t see any results. Why?

There may be a number of reasons why the site isn’t ranking in the SERPs after several months:

• Spammy backlinks still exist.
• Lag period to gain trust after disavowing.
• Poor content management (e.g., spun content, low word count).
• Lack of high-quality backlinks.

[56:10] Will Google crawl my whole site if I don’t use contextual links for interlinking related posts from the same category? In other words, if I show related posts with a non-contextual dofollow link.

Interlinking related posts as you described will still help with crawlability. However, we highly recommend using natural contextual links because they help to diversify anchor text, build relevance, and add value for site visitors/search users.

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