Certainty or Uncertainty of SEO / Link Building
-
Hey there
I'm new to both SEO and Seomoz. I have this personal site I've been working on SEO wise (slowly since I started learning from 0) and I have reached a point where the only missing thing for me to do is build links. However, the competitors for my site have thousands of links.
From all I've read on the web regarding SEO&LinkBuilding, including articles in this site...the old method of spamming links wherever/whenever possible is now being penalized while the practice of manual/hand-built links of higher quality and lesser quantity is rewarded.
So I went ahead and approached several linkbuilding companies and one thing that struck me was the level of uncertainty regarding the chances of getting a site to get to the first page.
I understand there's factors you cannot predict or control, such as what your competitors are doing on the SEO front...but ultimately, I'm curious as to how do you effectively gauge the possibility of getting to the top page of any keyword combination?
Especially when dealing with clients... since apparently whoever 'guarantees' you anything is a fraud or uses blackhat techniques...how do you pitch the 'uncertainty' to the client?
Likewise...how do you know if you can make it to the top page or viceversa?
Cheers
-
This is very true. Money makes the Web go round.
-
Yes, you can replicate your competitor's links provided you have sufficient resources and skills. There is no magic, well maybe a little bit.
-
German,
The site explorer tool here on SEOMoz provides the data necessary to deconstruct the quality, type and amount of links going to your competitors pages. Within a reasonable degree of error you should be able to predict where your site will rank after you generate those links.
There are lots of variables like age of incoming links and on page seo, but if you do your research - it's not magic, it's just math.
-
I can't guarantee first page rankings for my own sites. So, how can I guarantee anything to you?
-
All a matter of risk, weighed against resources. If you had sufficient resources, I could get you to #1 with 99.99% certainty. However very few businesses have the level of resource to create that level of certainty
Instead people will try do what they can with only a few thousands $$ a month and hope they get to the top one day
Most linkbuidling companies pitch based on competitive research for the number of links they think they will need to build + their track record of building those links and hitting those positions for other clients
S
-
I personally never give a guarantee of 1st page rank or #1 rank, and most people would tell you if you're paying for SEO and someone guarantees you 1st page rank or #1 rank they are lying.
The is no 'surefire' way of getting top ranks, well not for me anyways, I battle it out with my top competitors everyday for the top position and some days I win and some days I lose. The only way of dealing with clients in terms of ranking positions is your past work. I usually show my clients analytic reports of how my work has played a major contribution to sales, traffic and conversations. I also prove to them that what I'm doing is increasing their sales figures on the organic level.
Don't play the card where you say I'm going to get all your top keywords to the top, WRONG, because at the end of the day you don't need to rank #1 for the biggest keywords in your industry, you need to rank #1 for 1000s of the small 'low hanging fruit' keywords with 10%-50% conversation rates. That's the real skill and results that my clients want to see.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why are my paid vendors not showing on our links?
We pay a hefty amount to site that claim to bring in leads. ie... Cars.com, Edmunds.com, Cargurus, and I also have my dCard (digital business cards) with links to our URL. Why aren't they showing on our PA or DA? Could it be our web host? We have on;y 2 options for web hosts per Acura (a compliance thing) Please help with any thoughts or answers to this. I see many other dealers with strong links who use the same companies. Our site is http://findlayacura.com and thank you for any help. We appreciate it greatly.
Competitive Research | | ModernPallets0 -
How to approach link building/content in my weight loss coaching niche in a large scale way
Hello, I run a weight loss coaching business, bobweikel.com that is in it's early stages. I'm still working on making it graphically appealing I want to increase my number of national clients - it's coaching done over the phone or skype. I'm needing help analyzing my niche, specifically keywords, article content topics, link building tactics. I want to put a lot of time into it. Eventually I want to scale it up and hire other weight loss coaches and even SEO help. How do I get this dream going through gaining national clients online? There's not much traffic locally. I'm enough of an authority that, with enough time, I can create kickass content on the topics of weight loss and also the topic of NLP (NLP is the type of coaching I do, but it's little known) I'd like to add 5 best-of-the-web articles and a blog. Looking for advice. Would like to dream big. Tools I normally use (though I'm open to anything): OSE, Link Prospector, Excel Pivot Tables, Buzzstream, iPhone 5S video camera with tripod, youtube video embed, keyword discovery
Competitive Research | | BobGW0 -
Do unindexed pages affect SEO?
Been looking at a couple of sites recently. I've seen that they contain a couple of 'default' pages from the build process. These pages aren't of any significance to the main site and as such aren't actually linked in anywhere.
Competitive Research | | Kal-SEO
I did a site:www.example.com search on google and as expected the pages aren't indexed. Could these page be have a negative affect on SEO in the future?
Even though they aren't indexed or linked in anywhere. I look forward to you responses...0 -
Can NoFollow Links Hurt SEO Efforts?
Hi Mozzers' I've been doing some research on a few sites and found that one or two contain allot of nofollow links, can these have a negative effect on seo efforts?
Competitive Research | | Kal-SEO0 -
Link vs Subdomain Language redirect
Hi all, I'm managing a website that uses a redirect to show different languages to the users. I mean when a user access the site from any country it sees the full domain but when it access it from Italy, France or Germany it goes to domain.com/lang=FR or IT. I see that other sites use a technique to redirect to it.domain.com or fr.domain.com but I have doubts about which one is better. We do an aggressive link building strategy and we have a lot of links to the root domain across the various languages. Is it better to do the link building to the it.domain.com and fr.domain.com, depending on the language source of the link instead of the root? I'm seeing that some of our competitors are doing this but I'm afraid is going to spread the link juice across many subdomains and lose power to the root. Thanks in advance
Competitive Research | | nunob.staredition0 -
Tool to compare which links competition has but i don't?
Is there a tool that I can use that will show me a list of my competition's links that I don't have?
Competitive Research | | ballhogjoni0 -
Can i see the keywords my competitors are optimizing seo for?
Ideally, I would get a list of the keywords my competitors are targeting.
Competitive Research | | sajalsahay0 -
What is the difference between "external backlinks" & "referring domains" on Majestic SEO?
According to Majestic SEO's glossary, a "Referring domain, also known as "ref domain", is a domain from which a backlink is pointing to a page or link." Given this definition, I'm not sure what an external backlink is?
Competitive Research | | nicole.healthline0