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
-
Purpose of Putting "/collections" in URL String
I'm noticing that on many of my competitor's eCommerce sites, the URL for every subcategory of products is preceded by "website.com/collections/subcategory" rather than "website.com/maincategory/subcategory" Can anyone tell me why this is, and if it is beneficial to SEO to have URL strings designs this way?
Competitive Research | | acubine0 -
# of links and how it impacts ranking
Hi everyone I was running a competitor analysis in Moz Pro of my site and 3 competitors that are ranked above me. One of the things I noticed is that my # of total links is very high compared to 2 of my competitors(please see attachment). Other seo tools are telling me the same. This is mainly due to a few affiliate sites that have us in their footer. I was wondering if this could impact our ranking if some of these sites have very low domain authority and have thousands of backlinks to our site? I am looking into starting the disavowing process. Walau
Competitive Research | | wdsguy0 -
Would sharing the same IP address with competitors in the same market hurt SEO?
I work for the Chevy dealership in New York who is trying to rank against other Chevy dealerships in the same area. All the dealerships, including my client, are using the same Chevy endorsed CMS (Cobalt). I just noticed that all of these competitors, including my client, are using the SAME IP address. Would it be beneficial to SEO if we were to ditch the Cobalt platform and choose another one that gave us a unique IP address? Have any of you run into this before? Any help would be appreciated.
Competitive Research | | tjkirgin0 -
What's the difference between 'external links' and 'linking domains to this domain' in my report?
I'm looking at a competitor analysis report. The number provided for 'external links' is 150. The number for 'external links to this domain' is 4860 and 'linking domains to this domain' is 232. What are the differences between these numbers?
Competitive Research | | lthompsonon0 -
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 -
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 -
Use of competitive kw search software for KW discovery for SEO
I use traditional methods for keyword discovery, but occured to me that perhaps competitive keyword software should be applied to competitor's sites for further possibilitites. Any opinions or experience using this strategy? I know it used primarily for PPC, but value for SEO KW discovery? Any personal recommendations on which programs considered most effective? Thanks. Alan
Competitive Research | | ahw0 -
How to select appropriate keywords to optimize for SEO?
I have an e-learning website called www.graduatetestprep.com and we provide university students preparation for the GRE examination. This is an entrance exam required for admittance to graduate school across the US. I was wondering what is the best way to find the best keywords focus on to optimize on google and the other search engines. I feel I can't use "on-page" on pro-dashboard properly unless I have the right keywords to focus on. Thanks
Competitive Research | | anuraag0