Live SEO Support 9/21/22 – 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:

[09:41] Is it best to start link building after six months because that is usually when you get out of the sandbox?

It’s best to start building links pretty much immediately, as soon as you have the budget. The sandbox is not set in stone. Google basically has not gotten used to your site yet—the crawlers haven’t gotten accustomed to crawling your site. The sandbox can be considered the entry point to getting access to the SERPs.

[22:02] Is it okay to start giving backlinks to an article with no traffic? The domain already has traffic, but that specific article still has 0 clicks on the SERPs.

Yes. You don’t need to wait for anything to build backlinks to your site, ever. The only reason I would hold off is if I don’t yet have a page with content on it. You can technically build backlinks to pages on your website that don’t even exist yet. Is that a best practice? Probably not; but, you could do it, and it could eventually work out just fine. Something doesn’t have to have momentum online for it to have press. You could have press that results in increased traffic to your site, be it through commercials or word-of-mouth. Also, the longer you work on your authority sites by adding anchors over time to the homepage, the less you need to work on the inner pages.

[25:35] I’m thinking of starting an English travel blog about my country. If my link-building strategy is mainly from my country’s TLD domains, do you think it can work?

It would make sense for you to get links from TLDs from English-speaking countries if you’re trying to rank in those countries. You can do outreach to English .com sites instead of just relying on TLDs from your country, or buy links from English .com sites from us.

[29:11] To improve my old articles, what should I look for? Which tools might help?

When I reoptimize old content, I look up the URL in Ahrefs and see how it’s doing for what I want it to rank for. Next, I look up the main keyword on Google itself to see whether or not the search intent has changed. Search intent changes pretty often. Then, I take the three top-rankers and pop them into Ahrefs as well and check if they have any big keywords that they’re ranking for to see if I’m missing out on anything. I’d then put those keywords into Surfer SEO to help with article content length.

[35:45] What about the quality of tier 2 links?

Google can go back two, three, or four tiers and they are making sense of the narrative you’re feeding them. If you’ve got amazing tier 1 links but tier 2 links that are all spam, in the end, the variable that’s going to get hit with the spam issue is your website. If you’re spending a lot of time and finances on a money site and gathering links for that particular site, keep it quality. If you’re doing Web 2.0s or lower-end pillow-type links, make sure they’re quality and that they have unique content. Always consider what is natural in search.

[45:35] Is it okay if we skip pillow links and only focus on guest posts and niche edits?

Pillow links aren’t “mandatory”, but we never skip pillow links on any project. They add longevity to your site. The most important pillow links are social profiles. Even Google states in their patent that they look for social profiles. If you’re just going with guest posts, niche edits, or high authority backlinks, you’re not diversifying your link profile as well as you could, and you’re missing out on a huge portion of what looks natural in the SERPs.

[52:04] How do you recover from Google’s helpful content update?

If you have a website with a bunch of garbage content on it (thin, no keyword research, etc.), your money site as a whole is going to start lagging behind because the overall quality of the site isn’t very high. Either start fleshing things out by giving the user what they want (using tools such as Surfer SEO) or start deleting old pages that don’t really matter.

[1:01:08] My competitor has a DA of 20. It has over 200 referring domains, mostly PBNs; but, his on-page is very bad. He didn’t even mention the location once in his content, and he only has one location page that is ranking #5 for the main keyword (not for the services keyword). How can I beat him? The niche is plumbing and competition is very low. Citations are ranking in the top 10.

Build links to try and outdo him. I would actually ignore what your competitor is doing and do things right: Make sure that your on-page is more fleshed out; get your citations; get a couple of new local links and authority links every month. Considering your only competition is using spam to stay on top, you can eventually beat him without even using backlinks if you do the minimum the right way.

[1:08:40] Any tips on budget management for building 30k+ backlinks, i.e. How much money should I spend on different stages in my campaign?

First of all, building 30k+ backlinks is insane. If you’re just starting out with a project, don’t prioritize the number of backlinks you can get. Instead, think about your budget for x number of months—whether it’s six months or one year—with regard to what you’re trying to achieve. Don’t just focus on your rankings, but also on your return on investment. Your budget needs to be spread out over a decent amount of time where you think you can reach profitability. In that budget, you don’t just need to think about backlinks (for example, you could get 30k+ high-quality backlinks to a small site and not yield any result whatsoever) because there are too many variables to consider if you want to rank on Google. Focus on your budget on content and on-page/off-page factors, and assume that you’re growing month-to-month.

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