The Complete On-Site SEO Strategy Guide

The Complete On-Site SEO Strategy Guide

The Complete On-Site SEO Strategy Guide

Total Read Time: 9 Minutes

There are only two prods to the fork of SEO: on-site and off-site factors. On-site SEO includes everything we can work with that is on your website – the SEO we can create from your content, images, inter-page linking structure, and keywords that are directly on your website. All other factors that are off of your website are opportunities to strengthen off-site SEO factors.

In today’s article we are going to cover 5 Easy Steps to completing the on-site SEO for your website. The topics we’ll be covering today include everything.

Outline of The Process here:

1) Where to Find Your Best Keywords

2) Placing Your Keywords Strategically

3) Optimizing Your Images

4) Local Signals and Reputation Management

5) Optimizing Your Website Structure

Bonus: Your Content Strategy

Why is On-Site SEO Important?

Without proper on-site SEO, you’ll never be able to correctly tell Google what your website is about! Afterall, they are a search engine so they will be looking for the best search phrases to match your website. Optimizing your on-site SEO, for keywords that have a lot of monthly search volume, will in turn make you a better candidate for Google to show at the top of the search results for those high value search phrases – which means organic traffic for your website that turn into paying customers.

Without any further adieu, let’s get right into things:

1) Where to Find Your Best Keywords

Look up your best keywords by using any popular SEO Agency tools such as Ahrefs, Spyfu, Google Adwords Keyword Planner, ‘Keywords Everywhere’ Google Chrome Extension, SEM Rush, Mangools kw finder, Traffic Travis, or any similar keyword finding tools.

Your best keywords hands-down will be the ones with the highest monthly search volume. It’s also important to strategically pick ‘low-hanging fruit’ keywords, or those that won’t be difficult to rank for. After we have successfully found even a few of your best keywords, we can get started with your on-site SEO campaign immediately.

 

If we were looking to build a website in Las Vegas to rank for pool cleaning, we already have a couple great keyword ideas immediately by searching with the Keywords Everywhere (Google Chrome extension). As illustrated in the image above, ‘Las Vegas pool cleaners’ gets 210 searches per month.

With these newly found niche relevant keywords that have high monthly search volume (and preferably have buyers intent, or intent of action for your service), we can now build a strategy to strategically place them in your website.

Opt for finding 5-10 keywords with 50-100 searches/month or higher, we’re about to place rocket fuel on your website’s search potential!

2) Placing Your Keywords Strategically

When it comes to placing your keywords in the content of your website, including the Title/Header Tags, body text fields, encoded meta description, and website images; it is invaluable to utilize the best keywords that you found in the prior step.

 

In the image above, you will notice a pink box with an H3 tag for the “Content Marketing” section of this website. This is a great example of segmenting your content with various Header Tags, which run H1-H6 and stand for a ‘Heading Tag’. The act as a ‘Title’ for the next section of content.

These are great opportunities to include keywords that you want to rank for, and let Google know that your website is about a certain topic. An example of the ‘body text’ is the white text in the image above, or the supporting text of the Title/Tag above. Think of it like ‘Title & Subtitle’, with each of your paragraphs being supporting evidence for your topic.

Below is a great example of how to properly structure your Header Tags:

Structure your website content like this and you will be able to place your keywords in many various H1-H5 Tags as well as the supporting text below each header tag.

You only need to use the H1 tag once, H2 for large section breaks, and otherwise use H3-H5 for most of your keywords.

Use each of your main keywords in a ‘Title’ and ‘Text Body’ style. When you have many keywords that are very similar, you only need to use each keyword about 2x for Google to pick up your on-site topical relevance.

When your best keywords are: ‘pool cleaner las vegas, pool cleaners las vegas, pool cleaning las vegas, las vegas pool cleaners, pool cleaners, pool cleaning, and pool cleaner near me; you can easily see why you only need to use each keyword variation twice. We start to get a multiplying effect when they are so similar and we don’t want to over-optimize.

Once you’ve added each of your keywords twice (one time in a Header Tag and another in the text body below the Header), you’ll want to link some header tags to their inner service pages of your website. You also want to link from your inner service pages back to your home page, and to each other!

One important thing to mention here, is we do want the content to appear very natural and easy to read for our customers, and not robotic sounding.

Any time you backlink to another page with blue hyperlinked anchor text, it is an opportunity to use a keyword in the anchor text, to describe that page.

Don’t undervalue the importance of interlinking between your website pages using strong relevant keywords as anchor text to describe to Google and your customers what that page is about, those SEO points are worth a lot in the grand scheme on on-site SEO.

You can pack a lot into just those three words: ‘Pool Cleaning Service’, as illustrated in the image above.

Next we’ll need to quickly create the meta description:

Something as simple as the example above is pretty spot on. I like to add the state in there if I’m going for local, but again, utilize your best keywords and optimize for them slightly more than your other keywords.

Depending on how competitive your market is and how many pages, products, and services you want to rank for, you’ll want to repeat each of these steps for the inner pages of your website (that you want to rank).

3) Optimizing Your Images

Now that we’ve placed our keywords strategically throughout our website, we’re going to want to properly optimize the images on the website. There are tons of great opportunities to raise our search potential in the images including adding local signals, niche signals, inserting keyword variations multiple times in an image, and much more.

GeoTagging Photos:

When working on image SEO, it’s easy to take the images directly into a tool that will help you optimize the image all in one location. I use GeoImgr.com to optimize all my images quickly and effectively, including massive local signals meant to push Google My Business (GMB) Listings up the Map Pack rankings.

Leveraging Local Signals:

Using the GeoImgr Tool, we’re able to GeoTag your photos anywhere in the world. We can also quickly name and describe your image with two keyword variations maximizing relevance and passing local signals.

 

We can get pretty dangerous with this, as we can save many keyword variations in the images, and we also get the opportunity to dominate local signals:

The image above is from LocalFalcon.com and will show us our local map pack rankings among the entire city and surrounding areas that our website services.

We can see the orange and red colors are in much lower positions than where our GMB Listing address is located. Let’s work to improve these using the GeoImgr tool!

If you look closely at the image above, you will notice ‘pink stars’ located on the outskirts of the city that we service. Utilizing the GeoImgr tool, we can quickly geotarget images to those areas on the outskirts of the city to help improve our rankings in the local map pack (as shown in the Local Falcon image earlier).

After geotargeting images for local relevance, including many keyword variations, our images are fully optimized and ready to be placed on our site.

Adding Niche Relevance Signals:

When you’re creating and saving your images, make sure you have plenty of keywords that directly relate to your niche in the Image Title and Descriptions.

Upload these images to your Google My Business (GMB) page and your website to maximize your on-site SEO and place yourself in the Local Map Pack ranking box with the relevance needed to also snag the top of the organic search terms list!

4) Local Signals and Reputation Management

Now that we have our keywords strategically spread throughout various Header Tags and text body, strategically located in images, meta description, healthy interlinking between pages, with supporting unique content, there are only a few ways we can optimize from here.

If you’re focusing on local niches, you can add a NAP citation directly to your website (as illustrated by a large Franchise lead generation website below).

If you look closely at the image above, you will notice ‘pink stars’ located on the outskirts of the city that we service. Utilizing the GeoImgr tool, we can quickly geotarget images to those areas on the outskirts of the city to help improve our rankings in the local map pack (as shown in the Local Falcon image earlier).

After geotargeting images for local relevance, including many keyword variations, our images are fully optimized and ready to be placed on our site.

Adding Niche Relevance Signals:

When you’re creating and saving your images, make sure you have plenty of keywords that directly relate to your niche in the Image Title and Descriptions.

Upload these images to your Google My Business (GMB) page and your website to maximize your on-site SEO and place yourself in the Local Map Pack ranking box with the relevance needed to also snag the top of the organic search terms list!

4) Local Signals and Reputation Management

Now that we have our keywords strategically spread throughout various Header Tags and text body, strategically located in images, meta description, healthy interlinking between pages, with supporting unique content, there are only a few ways we can optimize from here.

If you’re focusing on local niches, you can add a NAP citation directly to your website (as illustrated by a large Franchise lead generation website below).

When creating a Local Citation on your website, make sure the Name, Address, and Phone Number (NAP) are clearly visible in text on your website. Place the information exactly the way you have it in your GMB.

Whether you’re focusing on affiliate websites or local niche websites, it’s wise to increase the reputation of the website by adding Guarantee stickers, or other social proof that will help the conversion rate of your website.

For instance, you can install a ‘Reviews Widget’ to help obtain more reviews that can help your map pack rankings significantly. At the very least, strongly tying your website to your local business address that you have listed in GMB and many other online local directories is going to pass even more local relevance to your website, beating out the competitors.

5) Optimizing Your Website Structure

Now that we have all the pieces of the puzzle we can put them together in one neat and easy to repeat framework:

  1. Gather your ‘best’ keywords (highest search volume, lowest difficulty)
  2. Use your top 10 best keywords in Header and text body on your site
    • Utilize proper Header Structuring, add keywords when appropriate
    • Use Main Keywords in the first sentence after each subsequent Header Tag
  3. Interlink between pages from various keywords pertaining to that page
  4. Strategic Image Optimization for niche keywords and local signals
    • Strategically place images in GMB and website corresponding pages
    • Strategically geotag photo coordinates on outskirts of the city for optimal rank
  5. Add local relevance by creating a NAP citation listing on your website
  6. Add social proof and increase reputation management with reviews
  7. Focus on Conversion Rate Optimization to obtain even more clients

That’s pretty much everything on the subject of on-site SEO for local. Remember to have your phone number and customer acquisition forms readily place early on your website for easy access to your customers.

Nobody likes having to press back on your web browser because you can’t find a way to contact the business whose website you’re on.

Some Final Thoughts:

In closing, optimizing your on-site SEO shouldn’t be something scary at all. By following the detailed guidelines we’ve laid out in this strategy guide, you are on your way to being able to quickly optimize just about any site on the web.

Don’t overthink it and don’t overstress it. There is always something more you ‘can’ do, but generally, nine times out of ten, this is more than enough to properly optimize your on-site SEO.

Bonus: Your Content Strategy

Alright, I caved. Here’s another bonus on the heezy:

Your content strategy can be huge depending on the market and niche you’re in. Having hundreds of thousands of pages with detailed keyword rich content properly optimized can amass a powerhouse website baked in high Authority, Power, Relevance, and Trust signals that Google loves to see.

All the while providing valuable content that engages the users. This is invaluable to the success of your campaign. Having natural organic traffic, of those whom navigate through many of your website’s pages ultimately place you in great light with Google because they want to provide the highest value to their users and customers, the searchers.

By providing great valuable content that keeps users engaged and active on your site longer, and overall boosting everything from Trust, to Relevance, Authority, and Power – all being passed around your website similar to a wrecking ball tearing the innards of an old city building cutting right through like butter. You never know which piece of your content will get picked up – maybe snag a link from Forbes or get featured on a major news outlet. Heck, you may even have something go viral. All of this will bring more visitors, users, and traffic to your website – people who are interested in your services and who want to be your customers.

As it goes with all marketing, there are many various channels and sometimes even just having your email opt-in feature installed on your website might provide enough business for you to accomplish your revenue goals and then some. “The money’s in the follow-up”, as they say!

Please let us know if you would like any help with your SEO campaigns as we do provide full concierge done-for-you SEO services to the highest level for SEO professionals and large agencies alike.

Thanks for tuning in fam, we’ll see ya on the next one!

– IN

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How to Create SEO Audits that Sell Deals

How to Create SEO Audits that Sell Deals

How to Create SEO Audits that Sell Deals

Total Read Time: 9 Minutes

Photo Credit

Outline of The Process:

1) Need the Right Tools

2) Competitor Research and Analysis

2a) Competitor Keyword Research

2b) Competitor Backlink Profile Analysis (optional)

3) Local and On-Site SEO Audit

4) A Hint of SEO Fairy Dust

Step 1: Need the Right Tools

Ahrefs, Google Keyword Planner, Potentially SEMRush

Now before we get too far, I must let you know that this is meant to build on the training you’ve already learned from JK – if you aren’t a part of that and want to learn more, follow here and please send an inquiry.

To get started, you’re going to need the right tools. The top tool I recommend for SEO audits: Ahrefs, with SEMRush in close 2nd. With this tool, you are able to quickly analyze the top keywords for your niche and top 10 competitor’s backlink profiles with a few simple clicks. This tool will display all of the corresponding information on just two simple pages, making it easy to perform niche and keyword research quickly.

Majestic is another great tool, however you are not able to do full SEO Audits because of a lack of keyword research data. There are many other reasons that you will find in the Top SEO Tools Comparison (coming soon). An easy way to streamline your research is to use Ahrefs.

2) Competitor Research and Analysis:

2a) Competitor Keyword Research:

You’ll want to start with some of your more common keywords to get started. In this example, we’ll use dog toys and dog grooming New York City for local.

For national campaigns, start by searching: “niche + buyer intent keyword”. For example, “buy dog toys” or “dog toys for sale online” will work fine.

For local, start by searching the “niche + city” as the keyword, “dog grooming new york city” will do just fine for this example.

From here you’ll want to analyze the top Competitors along with their backlink profiles and top keywords. Ideally, we’re looking for low hanging fruit (LHF) niches and keywords. More on that in a moment.

Visit here if you’re looking for even more information on low hanging fruit niche picking (coming soon).

Hint, I try to go for a top competitor that is in both the local box and the top of organic rankings, since Google is displaying them for one of your main keywords, you already know they’ve done what Google is looking for to rank. It’s also best to grab the most relevant competitor, you will probably want to analyze two or three as well.

Now that we’ve found one of our top ranking competitors, we’re going to want to head over to Ahrefs and enter their website. You’ll see a screen like this:

Immediately we can see that the competitor has 136 referring domain names pointing 1.15k backlinks to the home page of this website.

That’s a lot of backlinks and while I usually just check the number of referring domains a competitor has, it’s still smart to make sure their backlinks are not too ‘juiced up’.

We can also take a look to see how many links an inner page of the website is receiving. This is especially important when ranking against the inner page of a site.

This competitor has 2,700 keywords:

While in your Ahrefs Dashboard, you can easily access the competitor’s keywords and backlink profile by tapping the numbers in the highlighted boxes above.

Notice the traffic value in the blue box, that can be used to help sell a lead gen property because it shows the average PPC cost of the traffic if the displayed competitor were running Adwords.

**Please note: Ahrefs is a tool and is not always 100% accurate. For example, the ‘Traffic Value’ display usually way off but still useful nonetheless.

We will first take a quick look at the competitor’s Organic Keywords before analyzing their Backlink Report.

Click the Organic Keywords Number from the image above to open up the following screen shown in the image:

Here are the competitor’s top Keywords as underlined in black – we’ll be finding some even more amazing keywords through competitor analysis so pay close attention Willis!

Because we’re analyzing competitor difficulty now, we’re only interested in the underlined KW’s from the image above.

Follow here if you’d like to learn more about using Ahrefs tool for SEO (coming soon).

The ‘Ranking Position’ in Google is listed on the far right and the KW’s are listed in order of ‘most traffic received’ for the website we’re looking at.

It then makes sense why keywords with a lower position are receiving less traffic.

Please Note: The KD highlighted in pink (keyword difficulty) is on a scale of 0 – 100 with KW terms under a ‘KD of 20’ being generally much easier to rank for. You can see one of the keywords is over a 20 KD. We’ll stay away from that for now BUT we’ll still target it for long-term. Traffic and Position have been highlighted for relevance.

Now that we can see the average KD is around ~ 5 – 7 or so, we can take a deeper look at the difficulty of each keyword by clicking any of the underlined keywords above.

In the above image, you will notice a Keyword overview. Please notice at the top, there is an update button – you may want to go ahead and update the results.

After updating this search, I found the KD has moved up to a 6.

You’ll also notice in the Pink Box, Ahrefs gives you an estimate on how many backlinks you’ll need to land in the top 10 search results – notice – very clearly they did not say the ‘top 3’ or ‘top position’, but top 10 search results.

Finally, we are given a parent topic that you can also click and explore for other keyword ideas. More keyword ideas will populate below as underlined in black.

Alternatively, you can see on the right, a higher 22 KD requires more links to rank as shown in the highlighted pink box.

Something interesting happens when we scroll downwhile still on the same screen:

When you scroll down, you will see the top 10 search results for the keyword you are analyzing.

The first black column labeled DR stands for ‘Domain Rank’ and is a power score based on how strong the domain is including how strong it’s backlinks, number of pages, content, and a few other factors.

You will notice the DR is particularly high for Yelp and Huffington Post, more on that in a moment.

On the right in blue we can see even more amazing keyword to target for SEO, and finally, in the middle pink column, you will see how many referring domains each of the top 10 search results each competitor is receiving.

At a glance, we can quickly see the top 10 competitors do not have a lot of referring domains and that they may be an easier search term to rank for right?

! Ahref Faults ! IMPORTANT NOTES: While the KD tool is great at finding low hanging fruit keywords and niches (under a 20 KD), it does have its flaws. The two biggest hindrances are that:

1) The KD tool does not heavily take into account DR (domain rank), or put another way, a website’s authority. Websites like Huffington Post and Yelp have a lot of authority.

2) The data in Ahrefs may be outdated and not properly displaying the competitor’s full backlink profile to date.

3) You can ‘only’ rely on keywords that have the ‘city + niche’ and not just ‘niche’ keywords. You can still get ideas from Ahrefs, but double check Google’s Keyword Planner Tool to make sure the traffic amount matches up to Ahrefs.

Some Pro-Tip Final Thoughts:

1. I highly recommend searching many different competitor sites, keywords, parent topics, and keyword ideas in Ahrefs to find the best keywords and to quickly become familiarized with the process.

2. It’s also a smart idea to check Ahrefs top 10 competitor results against the real Google search result to see how accurate it is. This way, we can gauge the accuracy of the KD tool.

3. When choosing keywords to target for your client, spend much time looking for different high search / low KD keywords. Target lower KD search terms in the short-term to quickly impress your client and get them more customers while targeting higher search / high KD keywords in the long-term.

4. Also, now that we have a firm understanding of the average KD for the niche, in this case about 5 or so, we can use Google Keyword Planner tool to find Keywords that do not have the city in them.

Load the free Google Keyword Planner Tool and click the ‘LOCATIONS’ button highlighted in pink to enter your location before searching with your keyword without the city name in it.

For this example, I used dog grooming, dog groomers, and dog grooming near me:

And voila, we’ve found a TON of valuable keywords that have around a KD of 6 or slightly higher… just without the city name in it.

**Notice the low hanging fruit KW: cat grooming near me with an incredible 590 searches per month for the area of New York City.

Now that we’ve done thorough keyword research and found many Gems with HIGH search volume and LOW KD, we’re ready to analyze our competitor’s backlink portfolio.

2b)Competitor Backlink Profile Analysis (optional)

Thankfully, this part is optional because researching your competitor’s backlink profile is almost redundant thanks to the ‘KD’ (Keyword Difficulty) Tool. I still recommend go through this material to learn how and why the KD tool works.

Heading back to the very first page again, you will want to click the Referring Domains: ‘136’ in the button above in your Ahrefs dashboard.

Now we are taken to the referring domains. You can see the first referring domain, ‘bringfido.com’ has 604 DoFollow links going to the website (a Do Follow link passes along more SEO credit than a No Follow link).

We can also see the competitor has several Blogspot links (highlighted in pink) which are indicative of an SEO’s work.

This is important to note because the lowest hanging fruit niches will NOT have any signals that SEO has been performed.

We can also see relevant websites linking to our competitor Highlighted in the black box above, for example.

Pro Tip: You can scout your competitor’s websites listed in the image above and, using the Copycat Method, you can poach competitor links for your own site.

From the basic analysis above, we can see the competitor definitely has been doing SEO which will make the competition slightly tougher.

They also have relevance – we need to beat them at their own game by outperforming them in every way.

In the above image, I’ve opened the drop down of 604 links as highlighted in the blue box above. These are the 604 do follows from bringfido.com.

We can see each of these domains have very few Referring Domains so the only thing really working for the competition here is the relevance in the URL (as documented by the black boxes) and a bit of power from the link.

The final thing to note is the power that our competitor receives from the DR / UR of bringfido.com linking to them.

The DR or domain rank is pinned at a high 75, this can be easily negated by relevant Influence Links and Guest Blog Posts from high authority websites as well.

Again, the Copycat Method also works great here.

A deeper look into the “Backlinks” tab in Ahrefs shows us that some of the stronger DR backlinks are actually only press releases (as highlighted by the black box).

Again, we can actually see the number of referring domains linking to the competitor’s backlinks sites (bringfido.com, dogfriendly.com, intuit.com, etc), is actually very low and not that competitive.

The competitor can be easily beat by doing everything they’ve done and more. Influence obviously helps in place of powerful, relevant links.

Some Pro-Tip Final Thoughts:

1. Thankfully, researching your competitor’s backlink and referring domain profile is almost redundant because of how well the KD Tool works.

2. That being said, being able to quickly skim through your competitor’s backlink profiles will give you confidence when auditing a potential client website, and also insight to disavowing spammy links.

3. With this, you can now show your prospects, not only how difficult it will be to rank, but why it will be difficult to rank and you can adjust cost appropriately.

3) Local and On-Site SEO Audit

On-Site Outline:

1. Main KWs on Page 2x each 2. 1,000 Words Fresh KW Rich Content 3. Headers, Meta, and KW Insertion 4. Interlinking of Pages, SEO Architectural Overview 5. Spam is 2008

When you’re doing an On-Site SEO Audit, there are really only a few things to consider.

What ever you do, just make sure you put each of your main keywords on the page you are trying to rank, two times per main kw. You may have 5 or 20 main keywords, just get them on the page you want to rank two times, each.

You will want nice fresh content that has not been duplicated on any published website to the tune of about 1,000 words on the home page and circa 500+ per (inner) page you want to rank. Make sure your content is keyword rich from the KW research we did above!

You’ll also want to make sure your Header Tags (H1 / H2 tags) are a good mix between natural headings and matching the main KW’s for your niche and area. There’s no need to overdo this, but you want your biggest keywords in those headers. View the following example:

Your H1 / H2 = Main KW / Secondary KW or vice versa with NATURAL HEADINGS as well. Meta Description: Main KW + Secondary KW + City, State.

Example: “Dog Groomers | Dog Grooming Services in New York City, NY”

And finally, in more competitive niches, you’ll want to analyze how pages interlink to one another and how the navigation flows through to each site. If you’re running on WordPress, add your local schema markup.

Notice the local information highlighted in the pink boxes below, including Business Address and Hours of Operation are listed on the page that is ranking.

**If you do not want to show this information but still want the SEO credit, put it in the footer or low on the page and make it the same color as the background. Also make sure to add it to your schema markup.

If you’re uncertain how your meta description should look, here is an example of the competitions:

As shown in the image above, you can find the meta data by hovering your mouse over the tab in the browser.

Since we already found our main KW’s earlier by searching our competitor, we know which keywords to add to the page we want to rank:

IMPORTANT NOTE: Ahrefs shows more dependable data for ‘CITY + KW’ variations as opposed to keywords without the ‘city’ in it. I only search ‘KW’ phrases with no city in Google’s Keyword Planner Tool because the data from Ahrefs is inaccurate for kw’s without the city in them.

You will want to make sure each of your TARGET KW ‘s is on the page you are trying to rank 2x each. You can see here the competitor does not have many of the main KW’s on their page:

You can use this feature by pressing ‘CTR + F’ on your keyboard to bring up the “Find” feature.

From here we can quickly see, which keywords to add to our client site and areas our competitors are weak.

When adding your keywords, don’t try to stuff them in. Spam is not worth the trouble or risk. You can easily place your main keywords in the content contextually as it relates to your website.

4) A Hint of SEO Fairy Dust

Putting together the pieces of the puzzle

Now that we have all the pieces of the puzzle, we can create the full picture for ourselves and our clients.

We’ve determined the average KD to be about 5 and the search volume is well into the thousands for multiple keywords.

We’ve seen that the competitor is doing SEO (Blogspots, etc) and is ranking by relevance from the backlinks. They are also receiving very minimal power from minimally strong website backlinks pointing to them.

We know the competitor is using Blogspots, local citations, relevant niche Influence type sites, and at least one press release for their off-site SEO. Minimal social signals from popular social media websites always help too.

When it comes to their on-site SEO, we know the competitor has local ranking factors along with KW rich meta description and H1 / H2 tags.

We know the competitor is weak when it comes to power rich backlinks, on-site KW rich content, and right now they have weak Blogspot links.

This means we can easily beat them by having KW rich content on the page we’re trying to rank. Also, it would be a good idea to match all the SEO they have done, including Press Release and some Link Copycats, along with hyper local directory listing citations, and of course out-power them by using Influence websites. This alone will be able to rank you on the 1st page of Google, no problem.

Don’t forget to check site age and GMB age. There are some more advanced auditing tactics we’ll be able to get to in future articles together.

Perform this in presentation form (the same way it’s presented in the video training attached to this article) to engage your clients and show them the strategy that will be able to get the results they’re looking for.

Nice Moves SEO Pro! 

You just  ‘d Your SEO Skill 

They say getting started is the hardest part and you just finished.

Now perform live SEO audits or outline the details you find in Ahrefs to show clients how you will be getting them results!

You can now perform highly qualified SEO audits in 5 minutes or less.

Here’s a bonus too, this competitor is also weak in KW rich anchor text:

Meaning, we can beat them out by having our main KW’s as our ‘exact match anchor text’ on our Influence websites for even more relevant powerful backlink juice boostin’.

More on that topic, in another article.

That’s all for now!

– Mr. One Click, signing out

Please Share YOUR Thoughts in the Comments Below!

1. How will implementing SEO Audits with this strategy allow you to make more sales?

2. How will implementing the things you’ve learned help improve your SEO audits?

3. Who are 3 HOT potential clients you could send an SEO Audit to right now to help push a deal towards a sale?

If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to use the chat box feature on our site or contact us at any time.

If you need Influence, please feel free to check out our various packages!

Training Video:

The SEO Playbook for Social Media Marketing Agencies

The SEO Playbook for Social Media Marketing Agencies

The SEO Playbook for Social Media Marketing Agencies

Learn how to sell SEO contracts and entirely outsource the SEO work

Total Read Time: 11 Minutes

Photo Credit

SEO and social media marketing are so closely intertwined that if you already have a Facebook Business Page and a website for your client, then you already have some SEO.

If you currently run a digital marketing or social media marketing agency and want to learn how to get paid for SEO contracts without having to do the SEO work (so that you’re just collecting checks), then look no further, your chariot has arrived.

Outline of The Process here:

1) The Basics of SEO
2) How to Pitch & Sell SEO Contracts
3) How to Fulfill Client SEO Work

Why is selling SEO contracts a big deal?

The great thing about selling SEO contracts is that you can massively increase your bottom line. If you’re already providing customers with social media marketing, offering SEO is very sensible investment and any business owner who wants more customers will quickly understand the importance of being found on the internet. Organic traffic from the search engines is one of the highest quality traffic sources and should be a part of any company’s marketing plan.

1) The Basics of SEO

What is SEO? Search engine optimization is the process of optimizing your website so that it can be easily found on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. This drives more users, traffic, and visitors to your website, that you can then turn into customers.

The primary focus of SEO is around content, keywords, and backlinks. Keywords are the search terms that people use to find your product or service online.

Some examples of keywords include: ‘San Diego best restaurants’ which gets 1,300 searches each month. If your client has a dog walking company in San Diego, you might target some keyword search terms like ‘dog walker in San Diego’ or ‘dog walker near me’.

There are a thousands of different ways to search for something online. In SEO, we want to be strategic and cherry pick the best keywords, the ones that a lot of people are searching for each month.

There are a number of online tools you can use to find the best keywords for your customer. The Keywords Everywhere tool is available in the Google Chrome Store and is free to use. Google Adword’s Keyword Planner tool is another great place to look up keywords.

Don’t overstress keyword research because at One Click Influence we can take care of all the SEO work for you. That being said, keyword research will come in handy when pitching to clients.

The other important element in SEO is backlinks. To keep it simple, a backlink is when a website makes a reference or mention of your website, ‘linking back’ to your website.

For example, if Forbes wrote an article about your website and ‘linked back’ to your website (as with the blue highlighted text in the image above). This, in turn, would create a ‘backlink’ (or mention) to your website.

NaturaLawn.com received a backlink from Forbes in the example image above.

Why are backlinks important?

We pointed 10 Influence Links to this website and it massively moved up many keyword positions onto the 1st page (as documented by the highlighted column above). The 11th position of Google is the 1st spot on the 2nd page. These keywords are now in reach of organic search traffic and it will continue to increase even more over time.

Having backlinks is an important part of SEO because each backlink acts like a ‘vote’ for your website. An easy way to think about SEO is that, the more backlinks, or votes, that your website has, the better candidate it is to be placed at the top of the search engines.

Not all backlinks are created equal however. Google looks down on ‘spammy websites’ and ‘backlink farms’ and a bad backlink can actually hurt your website’s rankings.

The great thing about backlinks is you really only need to ‘outdo’ your competitor. If they have backlinks from YouTube videos, YellowPages, Google My Business, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, then you should too.

You can also grab as many high quality backlinks as needed from One Click Influence, as we do offer Link Rentals and article postings on authority websites in all industries.

Ahrefs and SEMRush are great tools you can use to quickly find your competitor’s backlinks. They have a free version and also a paid version.

Now that you know what Keywords and Backlinks are, you can use them to create proposals and pitches for your social media marketing clients.

2) How to Pitch & Sell SEO Contracts

Creating pitches, proposals, and contracts for SEO clients is almost the same process as selling SMM, paid ads, or any other form of digital marketing.
If you don’t have any customers to sell SEO contracts to, you can make Facebook posts asking if your friends know of any good businesses in the area. Or you can make a post stating you’ll give $100 or $250 to anyone who refers you a business owner that signs a contract with you.

Think about your HOT and WARM markets. People you already know and work with, or people who want to work with you are in your HOT market.

Referrals, business introductions, and ‘friends of friends’ are your WARM market. Everyone else who doesn’t know you yet, but could use your services, is in your COLD market. It is going to be much easier to sell to your HOT and WARM market.

Start writing a list of all the people who are in your hot and warm markets that can use SEO. Once you have your list and have identified prospects, it’s time to start an outreach campaign.

Follow the Prospect Selling Sequence by taking your list and reaching out to them. The more personal you can make it, the better. Start by reaching out to your hot list and ‘catching up’. Be it by messenger, call, text, or email, work to build rapport right off the bat. Don’t pitch inboxes, make it personal.

Building rapport is huge in sales, and every touchpoint with your client gives them an impression of you and your services (along with liking bias working in your favor). Set up a time that works for both of you.

When it comes to pre-qualifying, you will want to make sure your prospect is someone who may need your services. Small companies, local business owners, and agency professionals will definitely benefit from being found online.

Here are some great ways to schedule a call or in person meeting:

“I have something exciting to speak with you about, do you have a time for a quick call?”

“How is Wednesday at 1pm PST or would Thursday at 3pm PST work better for you?”

If you already have monthly or weekly calls with clients, bring up the exciting new opportunity of being able to offer SEO to your client.
You can use any of our testimonials as proof to show your client the results of SEO.

It’s also a great idea to download a screen video capture tool to record a quick video of you looking up their best keywords and their competitor backlinks profiles. This way, you can show them how and why their competitors are doing better, and provide them a solution.

You can very quickly show them how the competitor has more backlinks, which backlinks you can ‘copy’, and provide value to your prospect by showing them ‘quick fixes’ they can make on their websites themselves.

The goal with the screen-capture video is to provide value and show how you will be able to get them results by using past proof (utilize One Click for that!) and analyzing their competitors. You can quickly build a blueprint and a road map for their SEO campaign to help make the sale.

Once you have your meeting scheduled, it’s time to propose your services. Make sure you have everything you need (a proposal and contract) to close your prospect on the day of your call or in person meeting.

Provide value by using the tools above to do some competitor analysis and show them different keywords and backlinks. When it comes to pricing SEO contracts, you can do a lot of damage with even a smaller retainer of $500-$750 per month, but definitely aim higher for $1,000-$3,000+ per month retainers as these are very normal prices for SEO work.

You can always start with a higher amount and close with them at a lower amount. The customer can always start a sort of ‘trial’ run with you, and increase the budget after 1-3 months. With a good set of backlinks like the 10 Pack of Influence Links, it’s very easy to get results for your clients in this timeframe.

Even if the client wants to trial with you at $500 per month to start, that’s $401 revenue bottom line in your pocket if you start out with just a 10 Pack of Influence Links. These 10 premium blog article backlinks are very heavily weighted and will be able to easily push keywords up the search engines.

Make your offer to the prospect and find out where they’re at mentally in the sales process. Look for ‘buyer’s questions’ from your prospect. These come up in the form of “what’s the cost?” or “how does it work?” questions. They should seem interested.

Dig for information early on so that you can pitch effectively. Start with questions like “what’s your budget?” or “how many new customers would like each month?”. This will help you gauge how quickly they want to grow, how much they’re able to spend, and which package will work best for them.

The structure for your meeting should be a discovery phase where you ask a lot of questions to see if you’re a good fit for each other and to ensure that your solution supports their needs. Once you’ve identified a good fit for your services, start to dig in deeper and find out their pain points and what results they would like to see.

From their pain points, you can determine what solution will work best for them. The goal then is to show how you can move them from their current pain (lack of customers) to a place of pleasure (plenty of customers).

Once you’ve identified why your services would be a good fit for them, it’s time to make an offer based on their exact wants and needs. You’ll be able to unearth these by asking your prospect a lot of questions, and showing them some examples of your solutions.

From a customers pain points, you can also kill objections. If they say they need to talk to their partner or it’s too much money, remind them of their pain points and that they need these services. Ask them “what would your partner say? They’d probably say yes, right?”.

If they object with “it’s too much money”, or ask you “what is the cost”, flip-the-script back on them with the response: “How much is it costing you to not be ranked on Google right now!?”. Responses like this are, not only playful and diffusing of tension, but also get them to think two things.

One: they’ll think you’re amazing at sales and even start to like you more. Two: They’ll realize you’re right. They are losing a ton of money by not being found online, and they do need your services.

Offer a solution to your client based on his or her needs. If they have a small budget, they will most likely not get your most expensive package!

Work with your client, not against them. Above is an example of a pricing table you can take with you into your meetings. You can get all of these services and more from One Click Influence (if needed!).

It is wise to give your client different options when making a sale. If you only give them one price, then the option is YES or NO. If you give multiple offers with pricing, as with the Pricing Table example above, the option is Bronze, Silver, or Gold.

Pricing tables will help increase your sales and your revenue. If the client has a small budget but still wants the $750 package from you, then give them an option to get the $750 for a discounted $500 per month (only if it will really help make the sale).

The real trick here is to lead a discount with a question, example: “Hey John, if there was any way I was able to lower the price, would you be able to move forward today” is a great way to lead a question to get the sale.

If they say “yes” then that means they just agreed to moving forward with you today if you lower the price!

This also works inversely. You can ‘sweeten the deal’ and throw some bonus items on top of their order, OR give them a variation of the gold package, at the silver pricing. Be creative, work with the client, close the deal.

Don’t be deterred if you’re unable to close the deal in that meeting. Try with all your might as if your life depended on it, to close the deal. But, in some cases, it really is just bad timing or the prospect is not a good fit for you.

By getting pre-qualified prospects (who are interested in your services) in front of you via phone or in person, it’s only a matter of time before someone takes you up on a deal. From here on out, it’s on to the easy part.

3) How to Fulfill Client SEO Work

Okay! Now that you know how to sell SEO contracts, let’s cover how to fulfill the clients SEO work and get them results. You can head over to One Click Influence to speak with an SEO Rep immediately, and to check out a wide range of SEO services that will be used to rank your customer’s site.

You can outsource all of the following work directly to us or use this guide to get started on SEO for your client.

How SEO works

To effectively rank your client, you’re going to need the right Keywords, Content, and Backlinks. If content is king, then backlinks are queen – and keywords are what make the magic happen.

There are different types of SEO, including: local, affiliate, ecommerce, national, regional, and niche focused SEO. Each requires a slightly different strategy, but the general concept remains the same.

This is why it’s highly recommended to speak with an SEO Rep over at One Click Influence to help walk you through the entire process (and also fulfill all the SEO work for you, if you wish).

You want to have unique, fresh content on your website that isn’t copied or posted anywhere else online. The more content you have, the better (remember, we want to outdo our competitors in every way) and it should be content that is rich with your main keywords that have a high monthly search volume.

You also want to have niche relevant and authority backlinks from authority websites in your industry. If you’re in the health niche, you should be receiving backlinks from health related websites. Again, we want to have equal to or more quality backlinks than our competitors.

Make sure your keywords are well spread throughout the various pages that you want to rank, on your website. You’ll also want to use them in descriptions, blurbs, and links back to your site from other websites.

How to have One Click do it for you

Now that you know how SEO works, you can order packages to start getting more customers and traffic from organic search results online.

A 10 Pack of Influence Links will get you 10 high quality backlinks embedded in 500 words of quality, niche relevant content. These articles will be placed on ten different authority websites. It’s one of the most valuable packages offered, and can do some serious damage for your client, right out the gates. Check it out here.

These niche relevant links are placed on the homepage of a network of authority blogs specifically built to boost your websites search presence online. Check out some of the results that thousands of others have seen by using our link service, here on the testimonials page.

It is always recommended that you speak with an expert to make sure your campaign is on track! We have support readily available on One Click Influence by live messenger and call appointments so that you’re never left hanging.

We also have SEO Reps ready to help look at your campaign with you, at a moments notice.

You can hire a Dedicated SEO Rep from One Click to help you build a proper campaign, get SEO consulting, learn SEO, or to help you outsource all of the SEO work and make sure your campaign is on track. We offer one-time sessions or you can meet on a bi-weekly and monthly basis.

The Dedicated SEO Rep packages come with quality backlinks, and everything you need to rank your website online. It’s how you can get constant interactive support on your SEO campaign, while working alongside an expert and the best part is it’s extremely affordable and specifically MADE for people who own Social Media Marketing Agencies and want to outsource SEO work.

With an SEO Rep willing to help you step-by-step, and proven strategies ready to launch at scale, you have everything you need to rank your website online with One Click Influence. You can talk to someone right now by heading over to the One Click website.

If you need help with anything, you can easily get immediate support by messaging Ingrid on Facebook.

Final Thoughts

Selling SEO contracts through your Social Media Marketing Agency is a very quick and effective way to increase your monthly revenue. With the done for you solutions available at One Click, you can easily outsource all of the SEO work and know that it’s in the hands of experts who’ve done this a thousand times over. You’ll receive white-label reports that you can forward to your client, and then you’re done.

What would happen if you sold ten $1,000 per month SEO contracts to ten of your current clients today? You’d be able to keep roughly 80% of that as pure profit margin, directly to your bottom line. And as their results increase, you can start to charge even higher rates.

Using this guide, you can now easily pitch to anyone who could benefit from being found online and guarantee the fulfillment of their SEO work.

We look forward to speaking with you in greater detail about your SEO campaigns. Reach out to one of our team members to get started right now!

Your Ultimate SEO Playbook

Your Ultimate SEO Playbook

Your Ultimate SEO Playbook

“Master Guide for SEO Strategy”

Total Read Time: 12 Minutes

Photo Credit

How does massive organic traffic sound? Great, right?

Search engine optimization (SEO), is the art and science of ranking on the first page of Google, and I have your playbook for success right here.

There’s a lot that goes into a comprehensive SEO strategy, and to be honest, it’s enough to make your head spin when you’re first starting out.

As you read through this guide, keep in mind that SEO can be simplified into two key principles:

  1. Create killer content: On-page SEO is everything that happens on your site. It might seem complicated at first, but it really comes down to creating user-friendly content that provides value to your readers.
  2. Make a website worth linking to: Off-page SEO relates to the trust and reputation you build. If you create quality content, you should naturally earn links from high-authority sites, and Google will reward you for it.

You see, SEO isn’t that confusing after all…

Ranking on the first page of Google is as simple as giving your audience the best experience possible, and this SEO playbook shows you how.

Without further adieu, here’s everything you need to know about owning the top of the SERPs (search engine results pages):

Outline of The Process here:

Part One: On-Page SEO

1) Readability = Scannability: The Science of Page Flow
2) Long Content Rules!
3) Killing It with Keywords
4) Headings and Subheading Tags
5) Outbound Links
6) Internal Links
7) Image Optimization
8) Social Share Buttons
9) Site Speed
10) Responsive Designs
11) SEO-Friendly URLs
12) Anchor Text (Internal Links)
13) On-Page Time
14) Meta Descriptions
15) Site Indexing

Part Two: Off-Page SEO

1) SSL Security
2) Understanding Link Juice
3) Link Relevancy
4) High-Authority vs. Low-Authority Sites
5) Links from Trustworthy Sites
6) What’s More Important, Site Relevancy or Site Authority?
7) Number of Links on the Linking Page
8) Anchor Text Distribution (Backlinks)
9) Guest Posting the Right Way
10) Social Shares
11) Good Ol’Fashioned Customer Service
12) Forums, Discussion Boards, and Facebook Groups

On-Page SEO: How to Be the King of Quality Content

The SEO throne is yours if you choose to take it, and quality content is your best weapon. When it comes down to it, the goal of SEO is to replicate what would naturally occur by creating the the most helpful website on the web.

Obviously, the simplest way to do this is by building an amazing site in the first place.

Google’s algorithms reward sites that provide an incredible user experience (UX), so as long as you do that, you should be golden.

Here’s how to create outstanding on-page SEO:

1) Readability = Scannability: The Science of Page Flow

Do you even flow bro?

There’s no denying it ̶ page flow is a big deal.

Most people scan articles rather than reading them word-for-word, and poor page flow sends visitors fleeing faster than you can say “lost revenue.”

What’s nuts is that most people decide whether or not to stay on your page within the first second of arriving.

Talk about snap judgements!

First impressions matter, and the formatting of your written content, a.k.a. page flow, is a major factor.

Here are the 7 commandments of page flow:

  1. Lots of bullet points
  2. Bold and italics
  3. Each “paragraph” should be no more than 3-4 lines long
  4. Break the text up with images, charts, and graphs
  5. Follow the “inverted mountain” rule of sentence length:

    “Blah blah blah.
    Blah blah blah blah blah blah.
    Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
    Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
    Blah blah blah blah blah blah.
    Blah blah.”

  6. Use a heading or subheading at least every few hundred words
  7. Use bucket brigades to excite the reader about what’s coming later on in the article: “…but more on this later…”

With these page flow commandments, readers will be able to easily navigate your content and quickly find what they’re looking for.

2) Long Content Rules!

Short content is so 2008.

It’s the future people, and the days of 500-word articles that rank are far behind us, a distant memory, a whisper in the wind.

Nowadays, if you want your content to have a shot at breaking the first page of Google, it needs to be at least 1,000 – 1,500 words long, and that’s the bare minimum.

The only sites that get away with shorter content are super-sites with established authority and mega link juice.

More words means more space for keywords and longer on-page time, but more on this later…

(Hey! I did a bucket brigade!)

3) Killing It with Keywords

Back in the goldrush days of SEO, you could stuff as many keywords into your content as you wanted.

Today, the best keyword strategy is to use keywords naturally.

That’s it.

If you have a WordPress website, you can use the Yoast SEO plugin to make sure you aren’t overusing or underusing certain words.

Keep It Natural with LSI Keywords

LSI stands for “Latent Semantic Indexing,” which is just a fancy way of saying “use plenty of synonyms for your target keywords.”

Google’s algorithms want you to write for humans, not for crawlers, and great writers always mix it up with different synonyms.

Rank Faster with Long Tail Keywords

Long tail keywords are what we call “low-hanging fruit” in the SEO game.

They refer to keyword phrases that have less competition and lower search volume.

Targeting long tail keywords will help you rank faster because high-authority sites tend to target more profitable keywords, leaving the long tail keywords ripe for the picking.

Long tail keywords tend to be three-word phrases or longer, but they can include shorter phrases too.

The name “long tail” actually comes from where the keyword falls on the Search Demand Curve, not from the lengths of the keywords themselves.

4) Headings and Subheading Tags

Tagging your headings and subheadings is a must.

Google scans your headings first, and tagged headings help them determine what your content is about.

Make sure that the title of your article is set as the H1, although most themes set this automatically.

You’ll have to tag the actual body text headings yourself, though.

Set the main headings as H2s and the subheadings as H3, H4, H5, and H6, respectively.

When it comes to page flow, there’s really no reason to go beyond H4.

I mean seriously, do you need a subheading of a subheading of a subheading?

Nah. Keep it simple. Keep it scannable.

5) Outbound Links

Outbound links go from your site to another site.

Studies show that pages with relevant outbound links rank better than pages without relevant outbound links.

The keyword here is “relevant.”

Only link to pages that provide real value to the reader within the context of your article.

Remember, all good SEO decisions should improve UX ̶ it’s the golden rule of crushing it online.

One final note on outbound links: never link to low-quality sites. Outbound DOFOLLOW links to sketchy sites can end up hurting your rankings, but more on this later…

(Dang, I’m getting good at this bucket brigade thing).

6) Internal Links

Google likes it when you weave your posts together with relevant internal links, so each post should have at least 2-3 of them.

There are several different theories regarding the ideal internal link structure, but if you keep your links useful and relevant, you should be fine.

Internal DOFOLLOW links spread link juice throughout your website.

We’ll discuss DOFOLLOW and NOFOLLOW links more when we cover off-page SEO.

For now, just know that linking to other useful posts is good for SEO.

7) Image Optimization

Optimize your images with keywords!

Google likes it when you accurately describe your images with words.

It helps them catalogue the images and to describe them to visually impaired users.

When you upload an image, make sure the file name includes the target keyword and that the keyword is part of the image’s Alt Text.

Oh yeah, and you’ll get bonus points for geo-targeting the Local Data for local niche sites!

8) Social Share Buttons

Using social share buttons for Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn can have an indirect effect on rankings.

Social signals aren’t a direct ranking factor for Google, but the extra exposure can be great for traffic.

The more people that engage with your content, the higher you’ll rise in the SERPs.

9) Site Speed

Most people have the attention span of an ant, and it’s only getting worse.

If your pages don’t load lightning fast, you’re going to flounder in the rankings.

Your site should take no longer than 3 seconds to load, but you should shoot for less than a second if you want your bounce rate to stay low.

What’s a bounce rate? How often people immediately leave your site.

Here are 3 ways to increase site speed and reduce bounce rate:

  1. Use a CDN (content delivery network) like Cloudflare to increase page load times by as much as 50%. CDNs use geographically closer servers to provide faster delivery.
  2. Compress your image files with a plugin like WP Smush Pro.
  3. Upgrade to faster hosting. Discount hosting services like Bluehost and HostGator are fine when you’re just getting started, but if you want to compete with the big dogs, you should consider a faster host like WP Engine.

10) Responsive Designs

A few years ago, the internet reached a pivotal tipping point: over 50% of searches now happens on mobile devices. In response to this trend, Google favors mobile-friendly (responsive) websites.

Nearly all WordPress themes claim to have responsive designs, but some are better than others.

Always read objective reviews and find out for yourself.

Go with a design that has great reviews and excellent customer support.

That way you’ll have help with any problems that arise.

If you already have a site up and running, ask an expert to make sure that it’s as mobile-friendly as possible.

11) SEO-Friendly URLs

Short URLs rank better than long, messy ones.

On the same note, your URLs should always look clean and contain the main keyword you’re targeting.

In WordPress, you can format your permalinks (URLs) to contain the publishing date of the post, random numbers and letters, a few other terrible options, or the title your article.

I suggest using the title of your article for your permalink structure.

If you don’t like the URL that WordPress automatically generates, you can always customize it before hitting “PUBLISH.”

12) Anchor Text (Internal Links)

Anchor text is the text you use to link to other pages.

Here are the golden rules of internal anchor text optimization:

  • Avoid linking with too many keyword-rich anchors.
  • Keep anchors intuitive and useful to the reader.
  • Don’t overuse branded anchor text.

Google doesn’t like it when sites try to boost their rankings by over-branding anchor text and stuffing keywords, and they’re quick to penalize any sites that do.

In the off-page SEO section, I’ll go deeper into ideal anchor text distribution.

13) On-Page Time

When people linger on your page, Google takes it as a sign that they found what they were looking for and that they’re stoked about your content.

Here are some tips for increasing on-page time:

  • Quickly address the reader’s main pain points.
  • Create scannable, easy-to-navigate content.
  • Embed videos. People like spacing out to a good vid.
  • Use quizzes. People love ‘em.

14) Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions are short, 160-word descriptions that explain what your article is about in the search results.

Google will automatically use the first 160 words of your article as the meta description if you don’t create your own.

PRO TIP: Always write your own meta description with target keywords to boost rankings and increase click-through rates.

15) Site Indexing

Regularly submit a sitemap to Google so that they know what your site looks like in real time.

WordPress plugins like Yoast SEO and Jetpack can automatically submit sitemaps for you at regular intervals.

The more current, the better.

Off-Page SEO: How to Gain Trust and Earn Quality Backlinks

Off-page SEO is the other half of the ranking riddle, and it’s important to have it dialed in.

In order to strengthen your off-page SEO, you’ll need to improve the perception of your site’s popularity with users and other sites.

The main metric that Google uses to determine authority and trustworthiness is the authority and relevancy of your backlinks (the links pointing at your site).

Let’s take a closer look at how you can beef up your off-page SEO and boost your organic search traffic.

1) SSL Security

You know that little padlock symbol that’s almost always to the left of the URL in your browser?

That padlock is proof of an SSL certificate.

It assures visitors that the personal information they submit will be encrypted and protected from hackers.

Having an SSL security certificate is a minor but mandatory part of off-page SEO. Many hosting services offer free SSL certificates if you don’t want to pay for a higher-grade one.

2) Understanding Link Juice

Link juice, a.k.a. ranking power, gets passed to your site when other sites link to yours, and links from high-authority, relevant sites are the most powerful.

There are two types of links: DOFOLLOW and NOFOLLOW.

DOFOLLOW links pass on link juice and act as a positive vote for your site.

NOFOLLOW links do not pass on link juice and do not act as a positive vote for your site.

3) Link Relevancy

DOFOLLOW links from relevant sites share more link juice than links from unrelated sites.

This is because Google assumes that a website in a related niche is the best judge of how good your content is.

At the same time, users navigating from related content are more likely to find yours useful.

4) High-Authority vs. Low-Authority Sites

Well-established, high-authority sites tend to pass on more link juice than weak sites.

SEO tools like…

  • Moz
  • Ahrefs
  • SpyFu
  • SEMRush

…have their own ranking systems for domain authority (DA) and page authority (PA).

On Moz’s scale of domain authority, a DA of at least 30 is considered very strong. Moz has a free browser plugin called Moz Bar that allows you to quickly know the domain authority any site.

Keep in mind that these ranking systems are fairly arbitrary and should be taken with a grain of salt.

Always use multiple SEO tools to get an accurate idea of the strength and quality of a site.

As a general rule, sites that are at least several years old and see a lot of traffic are more link-worthy than new sites with little traffic.

5) Links from Trustworthy Sites

Anytime link juice is passed from one site to another, the fate of both sites becomes intertwined.

If one of you gets penalized by Google, you can both drop in the rankings.

That’s why it’s so important to be careful who you give DOFOLLOW links to and to monitor who gives DOFOLLOW links to you.

When you find untrustworthy sites linking to yours, disavow them by reporting them to Google.

6) What’s More Important, Site Relevancy or Site Authority?

It used to be that site authority was more important than site relevancy, but that’s no longer the case.

Links from relevant sites with medium authority pass on more link juice than links from irrelevant sites with higher authority.

With that said, there are always exceptions to every rule.

Sites with incredibly high domain and page authority can still pass on a ton of link juice, even if they aren’t directly related to your industry.

7) Number of Links on the Linking Page

The total number of links on the linking page affects how much link juice gets passed on to your site because each page as a limited amount of link juice to pass on.

The more DOFOLLOW links on a page, the smaller your piece of link juice becomes.

An easy way to picture this is imagine link juice as a pie and each link on the page is a slice of that pie. The more slices you have, the smaller each slice becomes, and the less link juice you get.

8) Anchor Text Distribution (Backlinks)

Too many sites have abused anchor text optimization, and now Google doesn’t hesitate to penalize sites that have an unnatural anchor text distribution.

An unnatural ratio of anchor text can destroy your rankings if you get caught.

Here’s what a natural link profile looks like according to SEMRush:

  1. Branded Anchor text: 40%
  2. Unique/Other anchor text: 25%
  3. Naked link anchor: 15%
  4. Brand + keyword anchor: 5%
  5. Partial match anchor text: 5%
  6. Generic anchor text: 1-5%
  7. Long tail anchor text: 2-4%
  8. Exact Match Anchors: Less Than 1%

It’s best to consult with an SEO expert before optimizing your anchor text to avoid getting penalized by Google, but if you want to try it yourself, here’s a few tips for playing it safe:

  • Use natural anchor text with branded and naked URLs
  • Always keep anchor text relevant and helpful.
  • For the most part, avoid keyword-rich anchors.

Anchor text distribution will always be somewhat of a guessing game, but by following these general rules you can improve your rankings while minimizing your chance of a Google penalty.

Use SEO tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs to analyze your link profile and make sure it stays natural.

9) Guest Posting the Right Way

Writing content for other sites is one of the more popular ways to earn DOFOLLOW backlinks to your site, but just like with anchor text distribution, you’re going to need to be careful.

Too many sites have flagrantly abused paid guest posting and now Google monitors it closely.

The best way to protect yourself is to write only for high-authority, relevant websites, and to make sure that your content always provides real value to readers.

10) Social Shares

Although social shares aren’t a direct ranking factor for Google, they’re still an excellent sign of quality content.

There’s a strong correlation between high social shares and high organic search traffic. This has less to do with the share count itself and more to do with the extra traffic that gets sent your way.

The more traffic your article sees, the more likely Google will be to push it to the top of the front page.

Plus, widely-shared content inevitably earns more backlinks.

The more site owners that see your article, the greater the chances are that someone will link to it.

PRO TIP: Build connections with social media influencers to gain more exposure and increase shares.

11) Good Ol’Fashioned Customer Service

Never forget the power of exceptional customer service.

When you go above and beyond for your customers, the news of your awesomeness will spread.

The primary goal of off-page SEO should always be to build brand loyalty by leaving a positive impression.

Bad customer service can be a nightmare for your reputation and your organic traffic.

On the flipside, killer customer service can help you crush it with off-page SEO.

12) Forums, Discussion Boards, and Facebook Groups

Find out where your audience hangs out online and establish a presence there.

Leave helpful comments and suggestions to people’s problems without asking for anything in return. You’ll inevitably catch the eyes of your target audience and expand your network.

The goal of this strategy isn’t necessarily to gain more links.

Instead, it’s to get noticed as a knowledgeable source of advice in your niche.

Final Thoughts

I know that’s a lot of information to take in, but just remember that SEO always comes down to building trust with quality content.

If you hit this out of the park, then the rest should happen with a lot less effort.

As always, we’re here to help. Our team at One Click would be stoked to tailor an SEO game plan just for you.

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