Best SEO Podcast | EWR Digital

Video Transcript

Join Matt and Chris for another thrilling episode of the Best SEO Podcast, featuring “Link Building Outside The Box: Outreach & Content Refresh” by Kerin Foster.

Chris: Hi and welcome to the SEO Podcast: Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burres, owner of eWebResults.

Matt: My name is Matt Bertram, your Backlink Badass back for round #2!

Chris: Back for round #2, Backlink Badass. Alright, so welcome to another fun-filled edition of the podcast. I’m actually trying to find my podcast notes here. They have been hidden somewhere somehow. And when I say hidden, what I mean is I have misplaced them.

Matt: I see.

Chris: And then I’m clicking into it and then now I’m finding– this is podcast number 411.

Matt: 411!

Chris: I believe we’ll be giving a lot of good information on podcast 411 and that will appropriate.

Matt: If you dial 411 you won’t get us though.

Chris: Yeah no. You will not get us even if you dial SEO411 you will still not get us.

Matt: You could dial 411*.

Chris: Yeah, after you call our number 713-592-6724, then you can dial 411 and you’ll get information. Just do it that way. As always we have a tip from our previous podcast, and our tip is–

Matt: Build interactive data for amazing links.

Chris: So we’re talking about link building today and last time. And when you build amazingly interactive data, people want to link to it. So that’s like a calculator or I don’t know, some sort of 3D graphic thing, people want to link to it. Make sure you make the data really awesome and interactive and you’ll get great links.

Matt: Absolutely.

Chris: Subscribe. Follow.

Chris & Matt: Boom!

Chris: Alright, so please remember we are filmed live here in Houston, Texas.

Matt: Yes.

Chris: And Matt and I, we are your–

Chris & Matt: Results Rebels!

Chris: I gotta jump into this review right away.

Matt: Okay.

Chris: It is of course–

Chris & Matt: 5 stars!

Chris: And it’s from Preston and he says, “I’ve been listening to the SEO Podcast for a while now. It’s fantastic! I finally reached out to eWebResults for their advice. Today I talked to Matt,” hey that’s you, “about my firm’s website. He was super helpful and generous with his time. Thank you so much! You guys are awesome!” There’s all sorts of exclamation marks in there. Punch in the face to you Preston, we really appreciate that. And I think you got some details to him today, right?

Matt: Absolutely, yeah.

Chris: Alright. We’re thinking most of you have listened to this podcast before. We love newbie. And if you’ve listened to this podcast before, you’re here for tips about SEO. Have we got a deal for you. For free, 5 Online Marketing Mistakes that Can Tank Your Business & How to Avoid them. You want that?

Matt: Yeah. I definitely want that.

Chris: They want that. Go to eWebResults.com/SEOTip and you’ll get that free download.

Matt: We’re sunsetting that soon.

Chris: Soon we’re gonna–

Matt: No, we’ll it up but we’ll add more.

Chris: Yeah. Hey, we’re covering an article today. This article is by Kerin Foster, Link Building Outside The Box: Outreach & Content Refreshing. Clearly we’re on a two-podcast series about link building.

Matt: Yes.

Chris: So that’s what we’re covering–

Matt: We are actively building links here internally as well.

Chris: Yes, so if you’ve listened to the podcast before, welcome back. If this is your first time listening to the podcast, howdy welcome to the podcast. Also, if you’ve listened you know that there is a section of the podcast based on this contest we have that we may skip, we may do it, it depends. And what it depends on is, if we get 10 shikos–

Matt: A share, a like, a follow. Did we get one?

Chris: Yeah, we got 10 shikos.

Matt: We got 10?

Chris: We got 10.

Matt: Not just 1?

Chris: Not just 1.

Matt: We got 10.

Chris: We actually got more if you sum all the platforms.

Matt: Oooh!

Chris: We got at least 10 and we got a review. I just read the review, actually I have another one to read here too.

Matt: Oh, fantastic.

Chris: So what we’ll do is we’re gonna skip how you can leave us a review and the ways you can connect with us on the various platforms, until the end of the podcast. That way we can get to the meat a little bit faster. If you want a free website analysis, what you should do is you should go to eWebResults.com and click the button that says Free Website Analysis.

Matt: Okay. Yeah, that’s pretty self-explanatory, huh?

Chris: Pretty awesome. In fact, that’s how Preston ended up with a conversation with Matt.

Matt: Wooo!

Chris: Yup, filled out the Free Website Analysis Form. Well I don’t have any news today. What I do have is another review. This review is from Mark S, he’s from Santa Clara, California. He submitted it on Yelp, which all he had to do was go to eWebResults.com/Yelp, I slid that in there. And this review is of course–

Chris & Matt: 5 stars!

Chris: It says, “Have just started listening to their podcast. Amazing information that has already helped my business. Just requested a website analysis and hopefully I can work directly with them in the future. Keep it up and you have a huge fan from California.” Punch in the face to you Mark, absolutely.

Matt: So Chris I wanna change the contest this week.

Chris: Okay, okay.

Matt: Like last week we’re talking about Trustpilot.

Chris: Trustpilot, okay. So the target for the review is Trustpilot.

Matt: Yes, it’s Trustpilot.

Chris: And we’re gonna honor our obligation. We won’t tell you that you just go to eWebResults.com/Trust, we’ll tell you that at the end so you know how to leave us a review. Alright, I don’t have any news. I don’t know if you have any news? Anything amazing went on?

Matt: A bridge fell in Florida.

Chris: Oh yeah.

Matt: I mean that’s crazy.

Chris: So it’s like your engineering skills have to be pretty bad if you can’t support the weight of people, right? There are bridges that run for years, hundreds of years, supporting cars and trucks, and like even at the Houston Airport there’s overpasses that support planes. This was just carrying people, our hearts and thoughts go to the people who did not survive that. So that is our depressing news for the day. Let’s get into the meat of the podcast. That was the potatoes. Again the meat is care of by Kerin Foster, Link Building Outside The Box: Outreach & Content Refresh. Did you wanna take lead on some of this? I took notes.

Matt: Yeah, sure. Do you want me read it?

Chris: Let me answer your question by saying Number 1, ‘cause there’s 6 Link Building Outside the Box: Outreach & Content Refreshing that we’re gonna go over today.

Matt: Well, so I mean I don’t know, with content in general– I mean we talked about it before, you gotta find like link-worthy content.

Chris: Yes.

Matt: Right? So you gotta find content that’s worth someone actually linking to you. You can’t just now generate a bunch of links without having quality content. I mean you can, but it’s getting a lot more difficult. We’ll go through some of those strategies, but really that’s the crux of what you have to do. And so when you create a calculator, or you create some kind of contest, or a scholarship, or anything, like is it link-worthy? Like there’s probably a couple checkpoints we could go through on like an evaluation of, do you feel that other people would share this content?

Chris: Right.

Matt: Right? And so if you’re writing a lot of content for SEO purposes, okay great but is the user experience there? Because Google’s even talked about a couple times, moving away from links. Okay? And so you wanna create something that’s gonna be shared on it’s own, not just for links but things that will create links. We talked about skyscraping content, really high-quality content or pillar content. You could repurpose a lot of maybe old blog posts and stuff like that into an ebook or you know, some kind of pillar content. So there’s a lot of different things that you could do with your content. I mean, we can just kind of jump right into it and I’ll add stuff as we go through it.

Chris: Okay.

Matt: But yeah.

Chris: Excellent. So like the point you made is that many links need to be surrounded by context – link content that keeps in context. So if you’ve just got links in random places, they’re not gonna– Google’s not gonna give any value. So that’s really important. He says, and this is interesting ‘cause in the past link building– and we’re talking a while ago, but in the past link building was just about the links. And really the phrase, Content is King didn’t apply to the process of link building, now it does. More so than ever. And so he gives a couple ideas, guests posts of course are flying into the hands of prospects. Link bait is being created by the ton, and that would be calculator or some other data–

Matt: Well, there’s a lot of automated stuff too. Yeah.

Chris: Broken link building, that’s where you create content to replace an expired link on another domain. We’ll talk about that. That’s now gaining a lot of popularity. And then– you know, we talk about how content is king, right? It’s certainly king in terms of SEO. Now we’re talking about link building, content is king but–

Matt: Oh, distribution’s queen.

Chris: Distribution Queen. And who wears the pants? The queen always the pants with him.

Matt: Well you know, I mean posting the forums was a big thing.

Chris: Right, right. And commenting on blogs or whatever.

Matt: Yeah, and commenting and it’s no-follow links for the most part, but you’re still directing quality traffic back to you if you give a reasonably good comment, right?

Chris: Right, right.

Matt: Like before it was just like, Blah, blah, blah.

Chris: Or a link.

Matt: Make a Ton of Money Click Here, you know you see those all over the place. But yeah, it’s just kind of changing and it’s– I think a lot of what we’re doing in here internally, is you can’t replace the human element in outreach, okay?

Chris: Yeah, no. There’s no automation tool for that, yeah.

Matt: I mean there is, but it’s just getting–

Chris: It doesn’t work, yeah.

Matt: Like we get emails all the time of people that want to build a website for us from India like everyday. And talking to a lot of people, they don’t even see that stuff anymore. They don’t even consider that like a real company. And so that’s a lot– there’s so much noise, people are zoning it out. But you pick up the phone, you call somebody and you talk to them, like that doesn’t happen all the time.

Chris: So it comes back, and it’s happening less and less, right?

Matt: People want to replace it, people don’t want to talk to people. It’s weird in the social world.

Chris: Yeah, yeah, in the online social world not in the actual we-should-be-social world.

Matt: No, I think in the real world. Like no one talks to anybody anymore, they would rather talk through Facebook. They don’t even know– kids don’t even know how to communicate anymore, you know?

Chris: Yup. Alright so Number 2. So this is interesting ‘cause it is about the outreach, right? So if you’re creating the good content, you want people to link to it, you still gotta reach out to people. It talks about, “Link building outreach, or prospecting, is also being damaged by weak, spammy attempts at reaching webmasters.” Right? So people are just throwing like the one sentences and, “I have articles for you. Contact me for them.” Right?

Matt: Oh well, so if you’re gonna build a good outreach, you wanna connect with them in some way, talk about a relevant topic. Do a little bit of research and don’t just use kind of the templates. Now like Pitchbox or BuzzStream are two of the better ones that you can use to find lists and do the outreach, but you still wanna have kind of maybe automated email drip to follow up with them, but you wanna do some research, you wanna customize it where you don’t just hit 1,000 people and try to fix a broken link or something.

Chris: Right, yeah absolutely.

Matt: It’s a real time consuming process.

Chris: It talks about, “Successful outreach does not happen when you remember–” it only happens, “when you remember that you’re writing to add value to another website or company, not just yours.”

Matt: I like that.

Chris: Right? So we talk about providing a good experience to the Google user, Google will like you. It’s also providing a good experience to the person whom you’re trying to get the link from, and that person will look favorably upon you. Now, “How to Be Successful with Personalized Outreach.” Talked a little bit about this. There’s kind of three steps. “Pitch. But don’t pitch hard.”

Matt: Yeah.

Chris: Right, so that hard pitch, “I’m here ‘cause I want a link and you can link to this. And it’s my article it’s the best article ever.” Like that’s just not gonna work, it’s gonna– Spend time reading posts that are on their site, reading some of their blogs, reading some of their content.

Matt: Yes, yes, yes.

Chris: Use the information that you find when you spend that time and use them as good talking points when you’re reaching out to them.

Matt: So we’ve doing a lot of prospecting lately for who we’re reaching out to and things like that. Building maybe a Top 20 list or a Top 50 list of influencers in your space. I was actually looking up your Klout score the other day.

Chris: Yeah? Is it good?

Matt: Yeah, it’s pretty good.

Chris: Oh wow, okay.

Matt: Yeah, 25.

Chris: Out of 25 I assume?

Matt: Out of 100, but I mean Obama is at 99 and a lot of people in that [00:12:41] [Indiscernible] are right there at like the 50 or more marker. But for not even doing anything or trying to hit outreach, just by being in the industry and everything that you’re doing you’re–

Chris: 25.

Matt: 25, yeah.

Chris: Well, that’s cool.

Matt: Yeah.

Chris: I’m gonna get a t-shirt. We should get a t-shirt made up for that.

Matt: Okay.

Chris: My Klout is 25 bitches. And it just went down. Alright so we got–

Matt: You just offended some people.

Chris: Yeah. “Find some common ground,” right? So it’s not just, “Hey, read our content.” And this is not in the context of read their content and share with them, kind of give feedback of some of that content and what you liked about the content. But choose link partners wisely, right? Expect that a webmaster has heard a lot of boring pitches. We’re in a creative industry, get creative with your outreach, right? And again that’s where you’re talking about, the human element has to stay in it because it’s gonna be most successful when somebody’s reading an article and like, “I love the way you incorporate basketball analogies into your SEO strategies,” and that’s gonna resonate with whoever does that, and you’re more likely to get a backlink.

Matt: Well I mean, that works across all industries.

Chris: Right.

Matt: I mean, remember when Aaron applied for a job here.

Chris: Right. Oh yeah, yeah.

Matt: He didn’t even come to the meeting, he showed up in full-on boxing gear.

Chris: Yeah.

Matt: That stands out.

Chris: Yup, with the mouthpiece

Matt: With the mouthpiece, with gloves.

Chris: Punch in the face.

Matt: Punch in the face. Like he stood out as a marketer than anybody else following the typical process. So I’m not saying break out of the code ‘cause we’re Results Rebels, but I mean I can tell you that you gotta differentiate yourself in some way and that disruption marketing is more important than ever to get in front of prospects. But I mean that cascades across everything because we’re hit with so many marketing messages and advertising message on a daily basis, we just zone it out, you know?

Chris: So what’s kinda cool about that story of Aaron showing up with boxing gear, is the creativity that when into that– showing up at our office with the boxing gear, with the punch in the face gear, it’s cool to see that kind of manifesting in the campaigns that he works on, seriously.

Matt: No, absolutely. If you wanna see a picture, go to our Facebook page, it’s on there. It’s pretty funny. We came over like, “Who is this guy?” It was awesome.

Chris: Alright and then the last piece to a successful outreach is, “ Have something of value. In the end, if you’re just trying to secure a link for the sake of the link, and not offering the website something that can be fun or useful, you probably won’t get very far.” Right? So that’s just how it goes. Alright Number 4. Again we’re covering Link Building Outside the Box: Outreach & Content Refreshing. So, “The Value of Updating Content.” We talk about content on a regular basis, often content gets–

Matt: There’s decay.

Chris: Yeah.

Matt: There’s a lot of decay online.

Chris: I head K, and I’m like, “I don’t know where this is going,” but decay makes sense, yeah.

Matt: No, the decay, like the Wayback Machine is trying to document everything, but the internet is like a living organism and links go bad, and websites go down, and you know. And people don’t update this stuff. I mean, content’s just constantly being generated and Google’s really looking for quality and making sure that this site’s relevant or it’s pointing to good links.

Chris: So this strategy, broken link building, right? A website that was out there unknowingly and in many cases linking to content on the web, and maybe that content got deleted or it got moved. And it didn’t get a proper 301 redirect or whatever, now it’s a broken link. And if you think about if you’re approaching the SEO person for that website, and they’re just not aware of it yet, and you bring it to their attention and they believe what we constantly say, provide a good experience to the Google user– well if it’s a broken link on that page, that’s not a good experience to the Google user. Google’s not happy that– and there’s a reason in WordPress that it’ll actually draw a line through– you gotta have the right feature turned on, but it’ll draw a line through a link that’s broken.

Matt: Yeah.

Chris: Right? It’s so important to get that right. So if you’re reaching out to somebody who’s got that content with a link that’s broken, then you’re in good shape. He says the steps are simple, “Reach out to the webmaster and let them know that there’s a broken link, provide them with a link to some content on your site that could replace the broken link.” By the way, if you’re not sure where to start, there’s a guy named Garrett French, he created a tool called Broken Link Finder.

Matt: Screaming Frog.

Chris: Screaming Frog has that as well. Alright Number 5, “What About Content Refreshing?” So I think it’s a very true statement, “Nobody in their right mind likes to be wrong,” yeah, “especially when the credibility of their content is at stake.” Right? Absolutely, so he gives this example– well, I’m gonna shift this over into our example, right?

Matt: Okay.

Chris: So imagine there’s a Top 10 SEO Podcast list.

Matt: Ah.

Chris: And imagine it’s from 2009 and as is the case in a lot of podcasts – and you know, it’s certainly true in the SEO world – podcast that were around in 2009 aren’t around in 2018, and so that list could use use a refresh. So you could go through and let’s say it’s a Top 10, and remind the actual author of that content, “Hey, here’s the current Top 10. Why don’t you refresh your content?” And you’re providing the data, “Please just link back to me,” or you’re provide that list yourself.

Matt: So one of the things kind of in that vein but a little bit different is you can set up Google Alerts or you can do it in Hootsuite to hear what people are saying, like as a listening tool to find out what people are saying about you. Also you can scan different websites to find where you’re mentioned, and if you don’t have a link to you, or it’s an old link, or it’s a different podcast host, or whatever, you can get it changed.

Chris: Yeah, get it updated.

Matt: Yeah.

Chris: I feel like we went through this recently. Yeah, so that’s just an example of you know, maybe it’s a little bit outdated content and so you can go back in there and give them a content refresh, and by providing that, you give them the incentive. That’s where you can start that relationship. So it may be like you provide that, and they link to it, and then maybe after that you give them the phone call. Right? So now you’ve made contact, “Hey, that’s cool of you to put that list together, what other kind of things–? Are there ways we could work together? Please link to me.”

Matt: So yeah. No, I agree. And I think too, one of the things that I’m seeing a lot of for a lot of different websites that we’re getting, is people have been making blogs for a long time and lot of these blogs are outdated. And you’re careful to not lose the SEO benefit from the article, but you can refresh those links, there’s a siloing strategy, you can link them together, you can point them to a higher quality content that we want visibility on. There’s a lot of link building that you can do actually on-site that people a lot times forget about. They always focus on the off-site stuff, so just something to think about.

Chris: Yeah, the thing that you– you’re right, the link building that you have the most control over is on your own site. So spend that time on your own site making sure that that’s right. And remember, if you’ve got really old articles, it may have been the best practice at that time or at least the best thought, to not link out to high-quality content, right? Because an outbound link was used to believe took away from your link juice. The reality is that it’s just providing a good experience to the Google user so maybe it’s worth going back and visiting that really old content and looking for opportunities to actually link out from that content.

Matt: Yeah, I mean I’ve seen most old blogs have just maybe 1 link or 2 links, and really Google wants to see the 6 to 10 links and a mixture–

Chris: Well depending on link of article, I mean that’s an important factor.

Matt: Yeah. Well yeah, but also internal versus external and like just the guidelines have kind of changed, you know? So you might wanna go look at it and say, “Hey, I got a ton of stuff here that might be valuable.” And you gotta also remember if there’s no links and there’s no kind of sitemap to what you’re doing, you wanna organize it in a way that Google understands the value of these.

Chris: The structure.

Matt: The structure, and that can impact your results quite a bit.

Chris: Absolutely, absolutely. Alright, so Number 6, this is “In the Mix or Competitive Analysis.” And you alluded to this a little bit, but you can view the back– go in and view the backlinks of your competitors, right?

Matt: Oh yeah.

Chris: So you got a competitor, where are they linking? And then you can assess where they’re linking if that’s someplace you wanna link, maybe. They don’t have good links and you’re not interested in them, but maybe there’s one or two that– you know, if they got them and they didn’t do it through some great relationship, maybe it’d be very easy for you to get that link as well.

Matt: Well you know, chambers of commerce, and stuff like that. But now people are starting to mask links. So if you’re using some of these tools, you can’t always find some of the things that people are doing out there.

Chris: Yup.

Matt: You know? But it is a good way in a non-competitive industry to see where the competitors have links and then go after those same links, or get on those resource pages, or review sites, or you know, whatever. 10 Best Podcasts, that sort of things.

Chris: Yeah. Alright, so that’s our article. That’s Kerin Foster, she wrote this great article, punch in the face to her. Hey, we didn’t cover this at the beginning, so if you are in a position now and you have some sort of device that you can tweet from, why don’t you tweet #SEOPodcast, this is Podcast #411. You can say [00:22:14] [Gettin?] 411. @BestSEOPodcast, @eWebResults and @KerinPatrice. So that’s K-E-R-I-N-P-A-T-R-I-C-E, that is Kerin’s Twitter handle. Punch in the face to you Terin, really, really–

Matt: Yes, I liked it.

Chris: Excuse me Kerin. Really good article on Ze link building. We like ze link building. Alright so, what we will do now is kind of describe– now we’re at the end of the podcast, we finished the meat. Here’s how you can connect with us ‘cause in our contest we do need 10 shikos: share, like or follow. So you can connect with us at I don’t know, Facebook.com/

Matt: eWebResults

Chris: Twitter.com/

Matt: eWebResults

Chris: Instagram.com/

Matt: eWebResults

Chris: LinkedIn.com/Company/

Matt: eWeb – are you ready?

Chris: Yeah, I’m ready.

Matt: Results!

Chris: And then YouTube, you can connect eWebResults.com/

Matt: YouTube! Got that right!

Chris: And we are pushing reviews now. We were pushing them on Yelp, punch in the face to all you guys who left us a review on Yelp.

Matt: Yes, thank you.

Chris: Now go to our Trustpilot listing. The only review there is left by me. We’d like to change that, just go to eWebResults.com/

Chris & Matt: Trust.

Chris: Or Trustpilot, either one of those will take you there. I think Trustpilot works. Trust works for sure, so use that one. We do ask, if you liked this podcast go ahead and tell three people about it, we really–

Matt: Or just share it.

Chris: Just share it.

Matt: Share it on social media.

Chris: Yeah, yeah. If you are looking to grow your business with the largest, simplest marketing tool on the planet.

Matt: The internet.

Chris: The internet.

Matt: I don’t know what that was.

Chris: Then go ahead and– universal symbol for the internet. Call eWebResults for increased revenue in your business, our phone number is 713-592-6724. If you have a referral – that’s somebody who’s interested in internet marketing or geofencing.

Matt: Oooh.

Chris: Or IP targeting.

Matt: Oooh.

Chris: Where you can really get ads into people who aren’t interested– or you know should be interested in what you offering. You send them to us, when they pay their bill, we pay you.

Matt: Or a charity.

Chris: Or a charity. That is our referral program. We were filmed live here at 5999, West 34th Street, Suite 106, Houston, Texas, 77092. Again Matt and I are your–

Chris & Matt: Results Rebels!

Chris: The transcript and video of this podcast is available on our website. Video, audio and transcript. eWebResults.com, you can find it there. We are the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes. We have more than 1 million downloads of our podcast.

Matt: Fantastic.

Chris: Punch in the face to you guys for making this. It is a good thing, just to clarify. It is a good thing. For making us the most popular podcast, we wanna give you a warm punch in the face.

Matt: Wake up. It’s a wake up.

Chris: Wake up punch in the face.

Matt: It’s a wake up. Wake up marketing.

Chris: Thank you, thank y’all, thank you. Thank you over there, and you over there oversees and in that country.

Matt: Yes. Yeah, we’re international.

Chris: Downloaded in more than 100 different countries. Thank you. Until the next podcast my name is Chris Burres.

Matt: My name is Matt Bertram.

Chris: Bye bye for now.

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