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
-
What are some good SEO tactics to defend our position against an upcoming competition in a near monopolistic market?
I'm doing SEO for a medium sized client whose area of business is targeting a very niche audience, in an almost monopolistic market. We're currently in top 3 ranks in our head terms. However, market research has indicated the threat from an upcoming competitor. The competitor is relatively larger and is well established in other countries. Is there something I could do from my end to defend/maintain our current position?
Competitive Research | | iQuanti0 -
Why such a difference in external followed links details?
I love using seomoz and have done for a few years. I am no SEO expert, but like to think I can get away with making out I know what I'm on about! I use opensiteexplorer regualrly and usually enjoy delving deeper into it's metrics, but one thing is bothering me (before I start with this, please forgive me if I am missing something obvious - you may have to point it out in your answer!) So I run a comparison of a few sites and pay attention to the external followed links section. On checking this number at root domain level, company A has 12,666 external followed links. So I want to dig a little deeper as to the qulaity of those links and click along to the inbound links tab, here I select the following: "followed & 301" > "only external" > "all links to this root domain" > leaving the results ungrouped Downloading this table I only have results for 3,416 links - why such a big difference to the previous 12,666 or am I missing something here? Would just like a bit of clarification 🙂
Competitive Research | | iThinkMedia0 -
Only 4 Internal Followed Links
Hello , i compared our (www.bighunter.net) and competitor pages. Only 4 internal Followed Links are in result page . I don't understand why Thanks for any answer
Competitive Research | | lbecarelli0 -
In my competitive campigans have less ranking and points according to your analysis, how can i form external links or large links ???
in my competitive campigans have less ranking and points according to your analysis, how can i form external links or large links ???
Competitive Research | | bullionguru0 -
Free SEO tools appearing in SERPS for a site
Hi there, I've just taken over a site and it doesn't have a huge amount of shelfspace on the SERPs for it's brand name. Looking at the results that are there are a lot of free SEO tools that are coming up. They haven't had an SEO before so it's not coming from their side. There's such a lot of them I was wondering if anyone had come across this before - is it simply a competitor looking at the seo, could it be one of the seo analytics packages using free sites or is there anything else to be aware of. I can start knocking the sites down the SERPs but just wondering if anyone has a good solution for this. thanks Shiv
Competitive Research | | Shivvyt0 -
Is there a way to establish how old a link to a site is?
I wonder if anyone has any insight on the above question.
Competitive Research | | InTouchMarketing560 -
Online checkers for Anchor Links ?
Okay, we are looking for online tools to check our backlinks, and anchor links top domains, etc. OSE is not working for us, because looks like , it gets updated in some months. We are looking for something, which can drag the statistics in fw hours and show up. Let me know.
Competitive Research | | qubesys0 -
Multiple links from Dmoz/Google directories worldwide
I came across www.soundandvision.com and did a Link Analysis on them.... http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/www.soundandvision.com/a!links I noticed that the top links they have are from Google directories or Google IP's. How has this happened? I am listed in Dmoz in the UK does this mean I have automatically appeared around the world. Dmoz is pretty strict about rejecting links how can a company be listed so much? Is this a good practise? Cheers
Competitive Research | | JohnW-UK1