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:
Watch This Week’s Full Live Stream:
Live Stream Summary:
[06:27] (site audit) Some of my competitors above me have ZERO backlinks or trash backlinks, and they’re on page 1 for my target keyword. They don’t even have a blog. All they have is time (3+ years online). I have much more content, 50+ backlinks listed in my link report, from niche relevant sites (other photographers, makeup artists, photographer profiles/directories), and I’m stuck on page 5. I’m destroying the competition in every way I know how. I even got listed in the same articles as they did “top 10 photographers” on Peerspace and Wedding Rule. It must be because my website is only three months old. Sandbox?
It’s a small site without much content. Your article titles are not really based on keyword research, and you have very long-tail permalinks. Your blog posts are a little thin, and inner linking is lacking. Including an address and phone number would be useful. Off-page, your anchors look natural. Your backlinks are decent. Keep doing what you’re doing, but stick to homepage natural anchors for the time being, and citations if you haven’t been doing them.
[18:17] Do you recommend any specific link-building service? How do you analyze the number of links needed to get to the top 3 spots (keeping in mind the high volatility these days)?
We recommend Sirlinksalot’s link-building service. The bread-and-butter of link-building is guest posts and link insertions (niche edits). To analyze the number of links to get to the top 3 spots, go into Ahrefs, look up your top 3 competitors, and see how many referring domains they have, mainly on the domain level.
[23:56) How do you outrank sites like Medium and LinkedIn? Our content is great and used to be in the top 3, but now these sites dominate based simply on authority.
Every SERP is different, so you need to look at commonalities between these SERPs. Whenever we experience high-volatility time periods, we see big players shift out or shifted in between smaller websites. It depends on your budget as well as how much you want to spend. Also, worry less about Medium and LinkedIn and more about Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Target, etc.
[26:34] How do you guys do keyword research?
Competitor analysis via Ahrefs is our number one strategy. Scrape every article they’ve done on your target subject, and you’ve got a great starting point. Ahrefs Keyword Explorer is also a great strategy. Semrush has a similar tool, but Ahrefs is our go-to. Keywords Everywhere is great for SERP-based research and finding easier-to-access keywords, especially if you don’t have the money for Ahrefs.
[34:06] Surfer is too expensive for new SEOs. Can you suggest some alternatives?
POP by Kyle Roof is cheaper. Use the discount code THESIRLINKSALOT to get 15% off your subscription. ZimmWriter is another choice, and it has a few AI writing tools and features.
[41:12] How many backlinks should I create daily to stay healthy with Google?
There’s no one answer to that. Links are good, and content is good. There is no amount of each that you need to build to stay healthy. It’s just that the more you build, the more powerful you get. Focus instead on your budget and how many links you can sustainably build with that budget. Focus on quality over quantity: Build good links over time.
[45:53] I have a keyword that I would like to rank with a fresh domain with around 45% keyword difficulty. My initial thoughts are finding a very high DA expired domain within 10k USD and doing a 301 redirect to my fresh site. Is there anything that I would have to look after when doing link-building and 301? Should I start link-building once the site is indexed properly? And how soon should I start after the website is indexed properly?
You don’t need to wait for any indexation to start building backlinks. If you’re buying an expired domain, you want to wait until it starts indexing on Google again before 301’ing. But 10k for an expired domain is expensive. You could just buy a solid aged domain. Start small and learn how to manage an SEO campaign before spending that much money because that amount doesn’t guarantee success even if you knew what you were doing.
[54:31] If you have an expired domain which, for instance, is a history website about Greece, do you think it’s feasible to 301 this into a magazine website and build a page about Greek history content?
We don’t like redirecting an entire domain to a single page on a website. This could only work if you were an SEO company that just bought AnswerThePublic and is 301ing all of its tools onto a page of your website.
