Tom Haslam - (host):
Welcome to Marketing Labs. This podcast is brought to you by Marketing Labs, an expert digital marketing agency based in Nottinghamshire. If you are a business owner or marketing professional, looking for straightforward non-salesy tips and advice to help grow your business online, then this podcast is for you. Strap in because we're about to reveal the things that other agencies would rather you didn't know. Hello everyone. We are back for another episode of Marketing Labs. I'm Tom Haslam, the creative director here at Marketing Labs. Today we're going to dive into a topic that's crucial for anyone looking to boost their website's, visibility on search engines, link building to help us unravel the mysteries of this topic. We're joined by two very experienced members of the ML team Brothers, Matt Janway, the CEO Marketing Labs
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Make me feel old. Thank you.
Tom Haslam - (host):
I was going to put seasoned,
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Seasoned sound
Tom Haslam - (host):
Seasoned professionals in link building.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Yeah.
Tom Haslam - (host):
Seasoned with Cajun Spice and
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Tasty,
Tom Haslam - (host):
Tasty Map. And a second brother, the better looking. Nick ue, head of digital. How are you doing, Nick? Good, mate. How are you? What spice would you be?
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Peri maybe No old spice Old. Yeah, it's quite accurate to be
Tom Haslam - (host):
Together. These two are going to help us understand the basics of link building, which is good, its importance within SEO and share some actionable strategies that you can go away and implement today. So it's worth listening in on this one. I guess we'll get started then if you want. I'm going to ignore the first one that Nick added to the talking points because I think he's referring to something that I don't want to talk about.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Well, I've not got your notes. I've got my notes, so I
Tom Haslam - (host):
Dunno what added. Okay, so Nick added this Smirking. He was smirking typing this. While we're waiting for you, can you explain why we're removing links from a website is bad? A, which is probably a good question.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
We can explain that. Maybe we'll come onto that later. Yeah.
Tom Haslam - (host):
But what
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
About, but we can explain that.
Tom Haslam - (host):
Yeah, I think it's a good one to answer because people will, anyway, we'll come back to it. But in its simplest form and this is the task for you more than anything. I'm going to
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Struggle at this. Maybe Nick should tackle this one.
Tom Haslam - (host):
Alright, I'll come to Nick then. And then if you need to add anything, you can Nick, in its simplest form, can you explain what a link is?
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
Yes.
Tom Haslam - (host):
Okay. It's
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
A link from one page to another.
Tom Haslam - (host):
Wow.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
That is its most simplest form.
Tom Haslam - (host):
Should we leave it there and just turn the pot
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Off? I'll add a little bit, but I will be simple. So a link allows resources to be joined together. So you might have one page and you might want a user to access another page. And the way of doing that is through a link. So that might be in navigation, it might be in the text, it could be in an image, it could be a button, it could be anything. But that link from one page to another is essentially what we're talking about when in the industry we mention links. Okay.
Tom Haslam - (host):
Very simple. Everyone should understand what a link is. Can you break down the different types of links that there are? Because obviously the main ones that you described, there are all, I'm guessing internal.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Yeah, sort of. Not necessarily though. So you might have, there's obviously lots of internal links. So you can have internal links in the navigation menu. You can have them in buttons, call to actions in the context inside text, in the footer, in the sidebar, you can have lots of different types of internal links. Then there's also external links. So links from one website to another website, which is very fundamental to how the internet works. The worldwide web, every strand on that web is a link. So it's fundamental to how the internet works. But then you get different types of links as well. So you've got directives, so you've got internal links, you've got external links, but then you've got directives that tell search engines and web browsers to behave in certain ways. So without getting too complicated because there's no need on this podcast, you might have a directive for example, no follow. And what that does is it says to search engines, you don't actually need to follow this link. It's there for a different purpose. It's not there for this particular page to be voting for another particular page. So you don't need to pass any equity through the link.
Tom Haslam - (host):
And I guess we talk to clients a lot about how external link building more than anything is a critical component of any SEO strategy. I can remember it being one of the first things you talked to me about when it came to SEO, but why is it so important for any SEO strategy?
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
You have to go back quite a long time actually to understand the importance of it. So when the internet was first getting going, it was a fundamental way of search engines, understanding what content exists, where they will go to a website, they would understand what's on that website and where that website links off to. So obviously, as Mike explained earlier, there's lots of internal links within a website anyway, lots of pages that serve different purposes, lots of resources that serve different purposes. So search engine will crawl that website and then understand what other, the websites are linked to that content based on how those websites link to each other. So fundamentally in this early formation, it was a collective of webpages that search engines will crawl to try and figure out what's, how can we understand this? How do we know there's similarities between this website over here and this one over here?
Unknown Speaker - (?):
And the most common way of doing that was to understand how they interlinked. And one of the benefits really of that is that websites naturally through kind of human nature, I suppose, linked to relevant pieces of content that can be expanded and developed and ideas can be formulated based on that and then linked to other ones. So it's kind of like the inception of it is how content's formed across different purposes. So with that in mind, I guess links are kind of fundamental because it's the original architecture of how the internet exists. I suppose it's slightly different to that now, but businesses and search engines have got a lot more complex since then, but it's still fundamental to how everything's archived and found.
Tom Haslam - (host):
It is funny, it's just when you say web, is that actually where Worldwide Web comes from, like cobweb's linking
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Basically? Yeah, what Nick just said there sums it up quite nicely. So you've got discovery that's I guess one of the most important factors of links. When a link is followed, it helps that page be found to be discovered. If there's no links to a new page on the internet, how on earth is somebody going to find it? A user couldn't find it. Well, neither could a search engine. So discovery is really, really important. But actually the reason it's critical is of course, part of it's that, but also because a link from one resource to another, as Nick was just saying, there a very natural and organic part of the internet is if you have a particular page that covers a specific topic, it's very natural that you would link to other sources that are very relevant for that topic. So I dunno, just for argument's sake, let's say we're talking about a topic we've been talking about today, contact sports.
Unknown Speaker - (?):
And so we're talking about the impact of contact in rugby for young children. And if you are writing about that naturally, you are going to want to cite the scientific studies that are talking about how dangerous it is and how it leads to an increase in the risk of dementia and early dementia as well. Not just dementia, but early dementia. You're going to want to link to that. So the source that did the study is a perfect place to link to. Now all of that essentially shows search engines that there's a vote between one website and another to say, here's a resource that's very relevant for this topic. I'm voting for that page. I'm saying that that page is trusted and the information it's providing is trusted. So search engines off the back of that pass equity through those links that then in turn show relevancy and ranking.
Tom Haslam - (host):
So if it's a piece of content, then like let's say a blog for example on this original website, how would the link, would it be a button or would it be in text? How would it be?
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
It's most natural in text because you can use the link itself to explain what the link is all about. So for example, I think one of the statistics on this contact study was a 50% increase in early dementia or whatever the statistic was. Well then the anchor text on the link could be contact sports for children, increased dementia risk by 50%. So it adds context to what the purpose of the link is. Generally you would probably find those kind of links in the context in the text itself, but it could be a button, it could be anything really.
Tom Haslam - (host):
How hard is it to build those links? That's what I want to know.
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
It's incredibly easy to build links, but the vast majority of links that you might want to build are probably not going to be useful for you. So it's actually very hard to generate and find content that exists or created in order to link and earn credibility from that content, I suppose. So it's much more difficult to do it well, to do it easily. You could do it could do it very, very easily, but actually it's probably not worth anything.
Tom Haslam - (host):
I guess we'll outline some tips later that people can do.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
But yeah, first and foremost though, on that note, and this is actually vital for how the internet works, those links there for users, not for search engines. Search engines will use those links as part of their discovery, as part of their ranking signals and so on. But actually they're there for users. It's just an obvious signal that search engines can also use. So links should always be natural for the user. If they're not natural for the user, then chances are they're also not natural for search engines and that includes traffic, things like that. If it's relevant and it's useful to the topic, they'll get clicked and so on.
Tom Haslam - (host):
So if you see a blog where there's, I dunno, 50 lines of text and there's an anchor text link on every other line, for example, it's not natural as a,
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Not really, but also the context of it. If the topic is talking about injuries to children from contact sports and there's a link in there to buy Viagra, I mean it makes no sense, does it? No. And search engines realise this as
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
Well, and it is not just blogs either. Blogs obviously are a valuable resource in a lot of instances, but any website essentially is capable of sending a link somewhere. But just because it's capable of it doesn't mean that you should be doing it. It's
Tom Haslam - (host):
Not the right thing to do. You
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
See all sorts of links that are very, very spammy come from forums and that sort of stuff. They're just not worthwhile doing. And looking into
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
And search engine engines know that they ignore the vast majority of links around the internet in terms of passing equity, not for discovery. They'll still use 'em for discovery, but passing equity they generally ignore in
Tom Haslam - (host):
Terms of how trustworthy it is and it's relevant for the reader. Yeah, that makes sense. So I'm interested to learn how the role of link building has evolved over the past few years. Has it changed? I mean SEO is changing all the time as I've learned while I've been here. It's changed. God knows how many times. But can you just give a brief snapshot of that? Well,
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
20 years ago you could rank a website by creating a script that would look for forums that you didn't need to sign up to or you didn't need to approve your email to, and that you could just drop a comment into every thread with a link back to your website and you could build a hundred thousand links in a day and you could probably be ranking within a few months. Google subsequently realised how easy it was to manipulate that signal and they released the penguin algorithm back in 2008, 7, 7, 8, something like that. And the penguin algorithm specifically targeted those kind of easily manipulated link building tactics. But people used to build links in lots of different ways, hidden text. So there'd be white text on a white background, but links in there. If you installed for example, an extension, if you were on a WordPress website, you installed an extension. Lots of the extension source code if you like, included a link inside the source code to their website. Very manipulative, very shady tactics, but they were the norm around the internet. That's certainly become much less of a thing now. People are generally wising up to that. Do
Tom Haslam - (host):
People still try and do it though?
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Oh, they do. Everybody that has a website will have seen spammy comments. For example, on a blog post, you'll get an email saying, buy Viagra, it's left.
Tom Haslam - (host):
Where is this Viagra come from?
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
It's just one of the most common ones, isn't it? Fair enough. Buy Viagra has left a comment on your blog and the comment is a link, you still get it now. It is not really people, ultimately it's box, but they're programmed by people. But yeah, still happens, but it's pointless. If anything, it's going to do more harm than good.
Tom Haslam - (host):
So Google are becoming more wise to natural links and useful links. I guess it's about how useful it is and how relevant it is.
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
Yeah, semantics is massive in that I think. So in terms of the content that exists on the page, how you speak about the purpose of the content, the
Tom Haslam - (host):
Language,
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
I guess the language, yeah, making sure that it's kind of natural and human as well, as much is important and making sure that there's a genuine reason to link off from somewhere to somewhere. So like I said, it's easy to identify content where you mention a keyword, but if it's not valuable content for a user, it's probably not going to do you any benefit. There's no benefit really from a link existing on this content page, the links to your page if it's not valuable content. So that's the difficulty is finding a purpose, a piece of content that's purposeful and answers questions and does that in a way that's well returned and is trusted
Tom Haslam - (host):
Educational, educational. It's going to educate people,
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
It's got to have context, hasn't it? Yeah, it's got to make sense that there'd be a link there in the first place. But the thing is as well, I mean Google would love not to be able to rely on links. They'd love to, and I think they've been trying really hard to actually rely less on links and their actual line as a company is, don't worry about links, don't bother, don't worry about it. It's not that important anymore. We know it is. Absolutely. That's probably Google's angle on things and that's fine. That's what they want to portray publicly. They do matter still and they're really important. And the problem is Google want to be better at understanding content and they are very good, but they're not good enough. And until you can really, really understand content much better than they can now, you can't rely on links for a ranking signal.
Tom Haslam - (host):
I'm just trying to think of a benchmarking thing where let's say you've got on one side a really qualified, experienced copywriter who's written a really piece, a real good piece of content that's educational, it's relevant with a couple of organic natural links to other websites. And then on the other side, you've got someone who's created a 2000 word ai, pure AI written piece of content and it's got 15 links in it to various other websites. Where do you get this balance here
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
And also mean? But it is pretty easy to see from the outside whether there's a purpose of the page and ultimately that's quite visible. So knowing that it's unnatural, if we can see it, it's pretty easy for various systems to understand that. I think the thing that's, I guess at risk most here linking out is a very good thing to do. I would actually argue that not linking out is a terrible thing to do. If you are writing about a specific topic and there's no outbound links, well who's corroborating that? What you have to say is correct. You're not really proving to your readers that you are an expert if you're not linking out. So linking out is useful. It's the context, like Nick was saying, it is the semantics of how the actual language works and how it relates to the page it's linking to and how that's relevant.
Unknown Speaker - (?):
And that's at page level as well, by the way. So I think there is a fairly common misconception about relevancy that it has to be at site level. Obviously you don't want, the site still has to be relevant of course, and the audience and the readers of that site, it has to be topical to them and they have to care what that link is and what the content is that the link is inside. But you can create relevancy inside the page as well. So that is quite important. So AI couldn't do that as good as AI is, some would argue it's not. But as good as AI is, it is nowhere near the level where it could understand that kind of context. No,
Tom Haslam - (host):
I think I want to really get into some strategies that businesses and individuals can use to implement. But just before I question that in terms of how do we know how valuable a link is, is it like, I dunno, rated on the domain that it's originated from or what? It's
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
Quite subjective really. There is no specific criteria that Google will know of how it evaluates links. So a lot of that is kind of based on your own experience. I suppose the things to look at really are how in its environment, what's the quality of the environment that it exists in. So is the website a very poor quality? Does it look spammy? Does it have lots of bad advertising on there? Does it have lots of other links to websites that are irrelevant, for example? So if you start ticking some of those boxes, you probably don't want to be there. So quality of content and quality of website is definitely a big one. Making sure that the link sits within relevant content of your own topicality. So where people are talking about something that you are relevant for, where it's detailed and where it's substantial and where it answers users' questions, that's always going to be or nearly always going to be a good link. And then there are definitely high value sites. Usually the higher value of the site to get into the more difficult it is. So as an example, the BBC might be an excellent site to get a link from, but you're probably not ever going to get one unless you do something substantial yourself. So there's those sorts of things where you can aim for a big site that's obviously going to be a more credible vote if you like to yours. But equally it's going to be much more difficult to try and earn that space.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
And that's one of the signals that search engines use. How far removed is your website away from those most trusted websites in the world like the bbc? So for example, if the BBC is linking to websites www.example.com, but then that website is linking to you, you are not as far removed away from a really trusted source. So it's like that tiered system of passing trust. Google did use to have their own scoring system called page rank. You could instal Google's toolbar in Chrome and it would tell you how much page rank a page had they removed that quite a long while back. Arguably still use it though page rank. They might not call it page rank anymore and it's likely evolved a lot since then, but they do still use it. And when that was discontinued by Google, it opened up like a chasm, a void of people in the SEO world not knowing how valuable the page might be.
Unknown Speaker - (?):
So there were a few tools that sort of tried to fill that void. Moz being one of them, they created a scoring system called domain Authority. Still the standard now most people will, when you talk about links, they'll talk about domain authority. Very much worth noting that it's just a third party metric. It's not connected to Google at all. Google don't use domain authority and domain authority is just, I guess a scoring system that tries to replicate what they think search engines are looking for. So it is actually really quite important not to look at those kinds of signals. Lots of tools have their own scoring system now and they are at best correlation there's something in it because they all use link based scoring systems, but at the same point, Google don't use them, so you can't use them rarely to determine how useful a link is.
Tom Haslam - (host):
Nice. I want to get into the actionable stuff that people can actually take away from this now, is there anything that you can share in terms of link building strategies that maybe businesses can go away and implement right away? You want to start?
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
Yeah, I guess simply there's lots of different ways to achieve this, but in its most simple form, it comes down to two things I suppose. Firstly, it's building relationships, speaking to your peers, speaking to other people in your own industry, speaking to journalists. So whether it might be people that are writing content, how can you help them develop content, what have you got? Whether it's business insights or data or statistics or something that's interesting that you can share with them and say, okay, well actually we've done this thing, it's really interesting. I know you write about this sort of stuff, but can we help you in any way develop a piece of news or whatever it might be and then you can link back to that sort of stuff. So that's one way, and obviously a large part of that comes down to relationship building.
Unknown Speaker - (?):
The other way really, and again is equally complex for different reasons, but it is making something of your own that is worthy of links. So earning links, making something topical, making something interesting. Again, it could be something to do with data or analysis or trends or something that's really key within your industry that you might take for granted, but other people might find really significant and interesting. Then a combination of those two things typically I think are useful because people naturally will want to link to that sort of stuff where there's something that you genuinely have something to talk about, I think is the key to natural link building at least.
Tom Haslam - (host):
Yeah, well one really good example is that one of our clients, GB Solar, they wrote a solar guide, a solar PV guide, and I think it got a link from, was it Martin Lewis or something? Yeah, that's right. So that's like a real valuable natural way of doing it. They wrote something that was really valuable and then that was voted for.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Link building is extremely important, but it's the best. SEOs now are trying to move the conversation towards link earning for the right reasons, because links naturally happen and the more you become a thought leader or a voice if you like inside your industry, the more likely people will be linking to your content. If you're creating great content, you should link building will always be a thing and it won't fizzle out anytime soon and it contributes towards everybody's link profile. But if you can earn natural links, it's an awful lot easier sometimes
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
In a way as well. That's kind of at least partly related to brand, isn't it? What does your brand say? How powerful is it? How powerful is it? Why do people want to talk about you? Why do people trust you? And if you can become renowned in whatever industry you exist in, naturally you will earn links as a part of that process.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
So you could go a little bit deeper than saying create linkable assets, earning links. So if you take that to the next level, well what kind of content could you create to do that? So you could, for example, do a study coming back to the rugby example, the group who did the research in that they'll be writing up a white paper and that white paper will get lots of back links over this next few weeks and I guarantee they'll be getting back links from Pacers like the B, B, C, the Guardian huge resources,
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
Rugby union
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Websites, things like that. Yeah, exactly, exactly. That's link earning. So they've done a study and a white paper that's a great resource, that's very linkable, but you could do other things. You can create, you can analyse statistics, you could do an opinion piece, you could do link bait. So something in the industry we call link bait is where you do something particularly to try and gather links. So I'll give you an example. Many moons ago we created some absolutely ludicrous product descriptions. And I mean ludicrous, they were so crazy, it was quite silly. But the reason we did them is to aid a link building campaign and a link earning campaign. And what happened was within I think maybe six months of doing them, we had over a hundred links pointing to those product pages. Product pages are very hard to build links to naturally.
Unknown Speaker - (?):
So Nick was talking earlier about context. When you're building links to product pages, the context is much more difficult because it's not a resource or not the same kind of resource where you might cite them and say, okay, well this guy over here is saying 50% of people would get early dementia if they, they're in context sports for example, that's easy to link to because it's a very specific statistic. A product page is much more difficult. So that was like gold dust and all of those pages, the visibility in search increased massively, subsequently changed the content. It was not great for users, but it really helped with link building campaign or link earning campaign. So you can do things like that. Another thing that I think is very much worth mentioning as well in terms of creating content is trying to do something that's a bit more unique.
Unknown Speaker - (?):
So could be controversial, could be something else. There's a website, and I can't think for my life of me what website it is, but effectively they've been damaged by recent Google algorithm updates, but they've very particularly gone by the book. They've done everything that Google has recommended they do. And actually when you look at their website and read their content, it is superb. There is no better content. Nobody is outranking them because their content is better than them, and yet they've been hit by an algorithm update. It was the helpful content update ironically. And they wrote quite a controversial piece basically saying, what do you want us to do Google? We've done everything by the book. Our content is better than everybody. We've had it verified that it's better than everyone else's. And that got lots of backlinks because it's quite controversial. It sort of went viral, made the news.
Unknown Speaker - (?):
The irony of that, by the way, is when you search for the title of that content, Reddit outranks them even though it's their content. And this shows you that I was talking earlier about actually Google a very good understanding how authorit of a website is based on links. Very good. They're not that good at understanding content. Why would Reddit outrank the original publisher? And it's because of their link equity. It's a bigger website, it's more authoritative. So that's a great way as well. Being controversial is a great way. I've got one more because I think it's quite important, and this is much easier for everybody listening to do, is we all in business have relationships lean on those relationships. It sounds silly, but your lawyer, your accountant, your window cleaner, like who provides your company cars, who does your electricity, who do you rent from?
Unknown Speaker - (?):
All of those things. They lack a little bit of relevancy, but there are ways you can make those connections relevant. For example, you could create a new page on their website with a testimonial about your working relationship. You can talk about what you do and about how your partner enabled you to do that better, which creates some context and semantically links it a bit better. They're not perfect, but it's a great place to start because you've already got a relationship with these people and it also benefits them. So you could do it in the form of a testimonial. For example, if somebody said, marketing labs are amazing, and they gave us two or three sentences to say, this is what you guys are so good at, if we put that on our website and said, this company over here has said this about us and we link back to them that it's a useful link, but there's things like that that can be done that are less technically challenging, let's say.
Tom Haslam - (host):
Nice. There's a few things there to take away. I'll summarise at the end for you all. What about pitfalls? How can people avoid making mistakes for, let's call it improper link building? What do we think on that?
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
Yeah, I think we've mentioned a few of the main ones really earlier on. So if a website looks spammy, it is spammy, it's probably is, yeah, value. There's obvious cues there. When you are looking and browsing on those websites, would you trust them? Would you trust your personal data to be on that website or pass that over to them? If the answer to that is no, you don't want to really associate with them, that's like a big tick if you answer that one really. I think the other stuff comes down to relevancy, contacts and building a relationship with them. There were lots of other things to look for, but the main stuff really is kind of is the content quality? Is it readable? Is it legible? Does it make sense? Does it answer people's questions? And then are there any big red flags in terms of bad ads and bad actors that may exist on that site?
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
And a big one as well to just throw in the mix there is buying links. Even now, a lot of people still buy links. I overhear conversations all the time online. I say overhear, I oversee conversations if you like, lurk, where you could build a real relationship with a journalist that might be writing a piece of content on a very particular website. And I've seen it where people will say, oh, but I could buy a link from that website for under quid. That's not the same as a journalist writing a piece of content that's specifically linking to even it might be on the same domain. That's not really the point. Buying links generally should be avoided at all costs. What I will say is buying links is not working with a link building partner, working with a link building partner is building links, buying links is paying for a link on a website, very different things. And if search engines suspect that websites are selling links, that website is not really going to be too useful to get a link from. No chances are they'll be removed from the index pretty quickly.
Tom Haslam - (host):
There's a few things there to look out for. And then finally, just to sort of wrap up, it's been interesting subject to talk about what can businesses do to measure success of their link building efforts. Are there any tools or anything simply that we can just give people
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
Search console? Tom is probably the best one. It's a snippet of code and you want to validate that and put that on your website. That'll give you lots of information that Google provide or Bing will provide for you and tell you how your website's performing. And obviously over time you'll start to understand actually what keywords are working well. And then there's not necessarily a tool that will tell you exactly that this link here has helped you produce X amount of keyword gains or whatever like that. But what you can do is then start to see the signs of that activity as you start to do more of it potentially, or you earn more valuable links, you'll start to see the number of keywords growing, the positions of those keywords increasing. Then obviously the competitive nature of those keywords. In theory, you'll start to achieve more, earn more clicks, impressions as well. And then obviously depending on the website that you have, you might then get more ad revenue, you might get more conversions or inquiries or whatever it is that your business does. But essentially what you're looking to do really is over time, what does the performance of your website look like? How many keywords are you ranking for? Is your net widening and actually are you becoming more competitive? And a lot of that will be down to the association of the links that you've earned.
Tom Haslam - (host):
Nice.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
I think as well, it is probably worthwhile mentioning now that there's a very strong correlation between velocity of incoming links and sustainable visibility for your keywords in search. Whether it's correlation or causation is hard to say, but there's a lot of data to suggest actually velocity is a thing. So what that means ultimately is being consistent with incoming links. Don't
Tom Haslam - (host):
Just build a couple and then leave it eight months and
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Exactly go back. Now arguably those links will still add value, just it might be causation, but it looks, the data looks pretty strong actually. The velocity is quite important and it does make sense. I've never seen this in a patent or anything like that. But if you were to imagine that you are Adidas and you've got a new football boot coming out in the buildup to that launch, naturally people will be talking about the football boot. So there'll be links coming from communities, from football websites, from sponsors, from news, and then what will happen is as that football boot is released, those incoming links will plateau, but then three or four months after it's been released, all of that hype will die down. So fewer links will be coming to the page. If search engines aren't using that as a signal. I'd be a little bit surprised myself because it's pretty odd.
Unknown Speaker - (?):
It shows relevancy in topicality and trends and it'd be useful data to determine whether something is relevant or not. But also the velocity backs it up. On the counter of that coin though is it could well be that websites that are more visible naturally will have more regular and consistent links coming in because their content is more visible. When someone's searching for someone to link to, they're searching for some confirmation bias or a statistic or they Google that and the people that are visible are more likely to then receive that link. So it could be a correlation, but certainly velocity appears to be very important.
Tom Haslam - (host):
Nice. So just to wrap up, then we've got building useful content or writing useful content yourself and try and earn links. Reach out to your people who you work with or any relationships that you've got, suppliers, things like that. See if you can get links from them. Build new relationships. Yeah,
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Get involved in the community that's not involved in the community we spoke about, but if you help out local charities and local sports clubs and it is great for social activity, which isn't necessarily that relevant for links, but you can lean on that to get local papers involved and media and journalists and if you can get editorial stuff, you can get links in those. It's all just positive brand activity that over time that then might help you win awards. And again, you get a link from an awards website and so on. So yeah, produce good content, try to get stats, try to get white papers, build those relationships and yeah, try to get in the news.
Tom Haslam - (host):
Easy said and done, but a good start anyway. So thank you both for being on. It's okay. Enjoyed it. We'll see you next time.
Unknown Speaker - (?):
And that wraps up today's episode. Huge. Thank you to Matt and Nick for sharing their insights on that. Today we've covered the very basics to be fair of what links are and their pivotal role within SEL, the different types of links that you can get and some actionable tips for you to try and take away. Remember, link building, it's a bit of a marathon, it is not a sprint, so it does require a bit of patience, persistence, and obviously ethical practises to see the best results. But for more tips and discussions on the ever evolving world of digital marketing, be sure to stay tuned on Marketing Blobs. Don't forget to subscribe to our podcast on your favourite platform and until next time, keep things digital. I don't know why I said that. And be happy.
