Live SEO Support 7/1/21 – 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:

[30:15] What is your suggestion for link building with a brand new site?

This is definitely one of the most common link building questions and one of the most important. We will try to give you an efficient answer: start by building some pillow links to lay the groundwork for diversification. Pillow links are very natural links that real websites acquire over time. The good thing is anyone can easily create them for free. You don’t have to purchase them. So they are a great tool to use on a low budget. Examples of pillow links include citations, niche directories, forum links, web 2.0s, audio/video links, social profiles, social signals, press releases, blog comments.

Aim for 30 to 100 pillow links in the beginning. Next, start slowly adding backlinks to your homepage only. These should be powerful authority links like niche edits, guest posts, editorial links and PBN links. Remember that it’s very natural for websites to get backlinks to their homepages, so this should be your goal in the beginning. The homepage is the “safest” page on your website. A basic example would be when an authoritative site has new or existing content (like a blog) that links to your website’s homepage (because of relevance). Use natural, diversified anchors to the homepage such as branded, URL, or generic (don’t use too many exact match anchors). In the beginning, see if you can perform outreach and acquire these backlinks without paying for them. Resort to buying them if you’re having a hard time. You should also be thinking about inner page content around this time.

So, keep adding more pillow links, authority links, and inner page content over the next few months and track the progress of your site in Ahrefs or Google Analytics. Look for whether your keyword rankings or traffic are increasing. Moreover, you want Google to understand what your inner pages are about and what your site is trying to accomplish (what kind of value it’s adding for search engine users). Hopefully, your entire website will be indexed by now. You can start being a little more aggressive/manipulative with your link building strategy once you see that your website is indexed, gaining trust, and rising in the SERPs. By aggressive, we mean adding some inner page links and using more exact match anchor text. It’s best practice to do these things after your site has been established for 1-3 months. You don’t want to get slapped with a penalty in the very beginning.

Check out these articles for more guidance: What Are Quality Backlinks and Types of Backlinks for SEO.

[49:51] Hey guys. If you had to choose one, would it be Power or Relevance. I’m in the locksmith niche and there are no relevant PBNs to buy. Should I build new relevant sites and power them up or non-relevant PBNs?

First of all, this is an excellent article for your reference.

Basically, we don’t look at Power or Relevance being better or worse than the other. They are equally important in relation to how much of the other factors exist in a backlink. For example, if a link has low relevance, then you’ll want to overcompensate with more Power (and vice versa). A more holistic approach would be to assess your existing backlink profile. What do you need more of at that moment in time? Are all your links high authority and raw power (low relevance)? Then add more relevant backlinks!

Regarding the second part of your question, we think it’s a complete waste of resources to build a new PBN that’s about locksmithing. It’s too much time, energy, and money. Instead, you can buy a home domain with existing content that can be tailored to fit locksmithing and use on-page SEO to optimize for that niche. You can even 301 the domain and redirect users to a relevant locksmithing URL.

[1:03:25] A client is in the courier industry and has each page built for specific countries. There are about 200 individual country pages. Can a few pieces of content be the same on all multiple pages? Content such as “how to pack your parcel correctly”, or “what is the average transit time.” It will prove to be very difficult to write original content for such topics given the amount of country pages.

Yes, you can get away with duplicating some modest-sized pieces of content on your landing/inner pages. It’s going to be riskier if the duplicated content is 500+ words, in which case you may want to change a few things up like the headers, formatting, keywords, and phrases. 

Ultimately, the best thing to do is individualize each landing page with unique content, but we understand how time-consuming or expensive this could get. Honestly, the safest thing to do is to slightly change up each piece of duplicated content. If you could spend 1 ½ to 2 ½ minutes to edit each duplicate content, it’ll only take you around 5 to 8 hours. Sometimes this is the cost of building out a website on a limited budget. We would hire a cheap independent contractor to perform this simple editing task. The ROI is well worth it.

[1:07:20] I have a very low budget for link building. What should I do to rank a local lead gen site?

We will say that one benefit you have going for you is that a local site doesn’t need much building out compared to a broader affiliate site. With a very low budget, you will need to create the links yourself. Pillow links are great for low budgets because they are free and anyone can quickly establish them. Citations will be very important for local lead gen sites. Niche/local directories, forum links, social profiles will also be useful for you to start out with.

If you already have enough pillow links, then you’re probably wanting to acquire more guest posts and niche edits. With a very low budget, you will need to devise an outreach plan for emailing relevant websites with an engaging and personalized proposition. The whole link building process is basically a time & money tradeoff.

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