Very Frustrated SEO

[nezona]

Hi Guys,

I wake up this morning one very frustrated, tired and fed up SEO.

I have always used very traditional link building methods upto last year directory submissions, social bookmarks, article submissions and maybe a few profie links but I always up front and honest with my clients what they were getting for their buck!. and sent them reports showing all links done.

Obviously with the recent algorithm changes, I have switched my focus to content marketing (i hear you all cheering lol), however, I am stumped!. I have read everything I can get hold of to do with content marketing, registered with buzzstream for outreach opportunities and joined myblogguest just so I could understand the process a little bit more.

I have watched the whiteboard Fridays and actually have a great opportunity to get in with a site using "guest post + niche". I love writing content which is a bonus.

Okay here's my moan. Coming from a traditional SEO background and coming to content marketing late, do I ditch everything else. Is content marketing all I should be doing? or can I still do the some directory submissions (good PR moz rank only), social bookmarking (only for content marketing articles), profile linking (maybe I need to drop altogether).

Is content marketing enough to rank a client?. I look at some clients competitors links and they have 100's of links to stuff that looks unnatural.

Kind Regards

Neil

[matbennett]

Here is my trick for helping you get the balance right of "should I go for that link"? 1. Go to Google image search and search "Matt Cutts". Find a resulting image and print it out 2. Do an image search for "Rand Fishkin", print one of those out too 3. Pin both image up on the wall behind you - one looking over each shoulder 4. Continue to build links knowing they are watching you Deep down we all know what is a good link and a bad one. Beyond that we are balancing risk v reward. Your new over the shoulder friends will help you stay on the safer/cleaner side of the road if that is your intention.

[Martin_S]

I feel your pain, Neil.

My niche is quite a hard field to work with in terms of getting backlinks - our competitors have bigger budgets and have dominated almost every site out there we could possibly work with. When I do approach sites we can't compete in terms of offering the same incentives to feature our blog fodder as our competitors can.

In a bid to help with rankings, I hired a third party company to help with 'manuel' link building with the intention of using them for a few months. They got us on some terrible directories, distributed terrible press releases to equally terrible PR/Article/Whatever sites, and after a month or two I'm pretty sure their crappy methods dented our decent rankings.

Then I started offering one-off content to better blogs and things seem to be on the up.

A huge frustration is looking at one of my competitors, who rank pretty well, and seeing that they have links from the worst 'blogs'. Clearly, some dude has bought an expired domain that has a bit of historical weight and now publishes half-arsed nonsense posts (including rubbish for my competitors) and now the competition  is winning off this highly-questionable technique that Google isn't picking up on. What can I do? Slightly heart-breaking, but then again, another competitor has been doing this kind of thing - they're pretty big in the industry - and they've been nailed so, so hard. I'd hate to have been their SEO for the last few months.

Yup, I feel your pain, brother.

My advice, find some better blogs related to your field, get some rapport going with the blog owner, and get regular blogs off of that iff possible. It's seems to be working for me a bit - I supply them with the content, they publish it with a link or two, everyone wins. Steer clear of shitty directories, social bookmarking (whatever that is), and horrible Article sites.

Relevancy seems to be core - so find bloggers who're related to you and make some new friends.

Other than that, start saving and open a burger joint.

Dave

[nezona]

Just out of interest how many much content (i.e links) are you getting back each month? Are you  targeting keywords still?

[Martin_S]

After a steady drop in rankings (which I suspect to have been because of the link building company I used for 3 months - Feb/Mar/Apr - then sacked them off) I poked around for bloggers that are semi-related to my industry. In the last month, I've been using about 5/6 different ones, probably getting 10-15 links in the process. PR for these are 1-3 (but hey, who believes in PR, right?), and the domains are in 3/4 different countries I think so I'm getting spread around too.

Perhaps it's a mix of ceasing the use of the crappy link building company and then using these new blogs, it's impossible to tell. Pretty sure that the directories, article submission and 'social bookmarking' (*laughs) were bad for me because it's when that stuff starting going up that I had that horrible feeling when checking my poor rankings on Monday mornings.

And yeah, I'm still targeting the same keywords - in fact, highly-competitive ones, and seeing some encouraging results for which.

[DavidKonigsberg]

I found doing the old tactics in a really quality way mixed with content marketing works well. So instead of blog commenting on any site saying great post we now comment as the client offering value based on the post on very related sites etc. -

I feel your pain hope this helps

[RikkiD22]

Don't fully write off your 'traditional' methods yet, yes invest more time into content marketing but find a balance between the two.

The directory, social, article, commenting all still 'work' but you just need to be a bit more strict with the websites you chose to do this with (make sure they are 'good' quality sites) and if you are commenting or submitting a piece to them make sure it is of good value to their audience, isn't nonsensical and non duplicated.

That's my opinion anyway and no-one yet has convinced me that doing the 'traditional' methods of link building don't have any benefit any more or will penalise you if you take a professional and common sense approach.

[nezona]

thank you so much this is exactly what I was thinking. I mean content marketing is the way to go no doubt about it, but hey you can't write 15-20 quality blog articles, using outreach every month on say "fencing". So I am thinking:-

• PR verified Directories
• Reddit, Digg etc (for content marketing promotion too)
• 2-3 Guest Blog posts (outreach)
• My Blog Guest - Easy way to get guest blog posts but not as Good quality

Obviously volumes will depend upon the competition.

You have made my day!!!. I was seriously considering packing all this in but now I will dig my heels in instead.

Kind Regards

Neil

[RikkiD22]

Hi Neil,

Glad my response gave you some encouragement!

Whenever something changes in SEO there is always a massive over exaggeration that something is dead or no longer works but the truth normally is we have to tweak the way we work rather than revolutionise.